A lost novel from 1943 predicted the Holocaust. Now, it has been recovered.

[Stubble]

https://www.jta.org/2026/04/03/culture/ ... -recovered

Torberg recorded his image of a German concentration camp in “Mein ist die Rache,” or “Vengeance is Mine,” a novel published in 1943. It was one of the earliest pieces of fiction about the Holocaust, written while the Final Solution was being carried out and decades before the capitalized “Holocaust” entered common parlance.

Well ain't that something...

[Eye of Zyclone]

Earlier than that, there was Konrad Heiden's 1939 book The New Inqusition.





And there was also the novella The Little Candle, which was written by the Zionist activist Ben Hecht and first published in June 1939.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction :

A Book of Miracles also contains "The Little Candle", a Near Future tale which may be the first (and perhaps the only significant) example of Holocaust Fiction in the form of Prediction, through its description of a carefully executed "great International Pogrom" ("The extirpating of Jews had been carefully planned"), during which Nazi Germany exterminates 500,000 Jews, with millions more deported and facing death.

https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hecht_ben

The Little Candle

The Little Candle is a near future science fiction short story[1] or novella[1]: 110  by American writer Ben Hecht, first published in his collection A Book of Miracles (June 1939). It is notable for its prediction that in the near future Nazi Germany would carry out a pogrom of Jews of then-unprecedented proportions.[2] It is considered one of the earliest works of the Holocaust fiction [de] genre.

Plot
The story describes a near future during which Nazi Germany carries out a carefully planned "International Pogrom", in which half a million Jews would perish.[1]: 110, 128 [2] Hecht portrays the pogrom as happening overnight in Germany, Italy, Romania and Poland.

Reception and analysis
Contemporary reviews of the story have been described as "dismissive"[2] and calling the story "outlandish".[4] However, later writers described the work as an "eerie prediction",[5]: 140  "an uncanny, horrifyingly vivid prophecy of the catastrophe that was about to come" and "prefigur[ing] the imminent genocide".[1]

John Clute and John Eggeling in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction called it the "first (and perhaps the only significant) example" of prediction in the Holocaust fiction [de] genre.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Candle

Ben Hecht

Ben Hecht (February 28, 1894[1][2] – April 18, 1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist.

Hecht became an active Zionist after meeting Peter Bergson, who came to the United States near the start of World War II. Motivated by what became the Holocaust Hecht wrote articles and plays, such as We Will Never Die in 1943 and A Flag is Born in 1946.[4] Thereafter, he wrote many screenplays anonymously to avoid a British boycott of his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The boycott was a response to Hecht's active support of paramilitary action against British Mandate for Palestine forces, during which time a Zionist force's supply ship to Palestine was named the S.S. Ben Hecht (nl)(he).

Hecht "took on a ten-year commitment to publicize the atrocities befalling his own religious minority, the Jews of Europe, and the quest for survivors to find a permanent home in the Middle East".[49] In 1943, during the midst of the Holocaust, he predicted, in a widely published article in Reader's Digest magazine,

Of these 6,000,000 Jews [of Europe], almost a third have already been massacred by Germans, Romanians, and Hungarians, and the most conservative of scorekeepers estimate that before the war ends, at least another third will have been done to death.[53]

Following the war, Hecht openly supported the Jewish insurgency in Palestine, a campaign of violence being waged by underground Zionist groups (the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi) in Palestine. Hecht was a member of the Bergson Group, an Irgun front group in the United States run by Peter Bergson, which was active in raising money for the Irgun's activities and disseminating Irgun propaganda.

Thanks to his fundraising, speeches, and jawboning, Sternlicht writes,

"Ben Hecht did more to help Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, and to ensure the survival of the nascent state of Israel, than any other American Jew in the twentieth century". As much as anything, it was the abiding love of his Jewish parents and Rose Hecht that motivated the writer to become arguably "the most effective propagandist the Jewish state ever had. In 1964, at Hecht's funeral service at Temple Rodeph Shalom in New York City, among the eulogists was Menachem Begin." [7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Hecht

Hillel Kook

Hillel Kook (July 1915 –18 August 2001), also known as Peter Bergson, was a Revisionist Zionist activist and politician.

Kook led the Irgun's efforts in the United States during World War II and the Holocaust in order to promote Zionism, attempting thereby to save the abandoned Jews of Europe.

Early life
Hillel Kook was born in Kriukai in the Russian Empire (today in Lithuania) in 1915, the son of Rabbi Dov Kook, the younger brother of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine. In 1924, his family immigrated to Palestine, where his father became the first Chief Rabbi of Afula.

Activism in the United States
While in America, Kook led a group of Irgun activists under the pseudonym "Peter Bergson". The name "Bergson Group" or "Bergsonites" eventually became used to refer to all the members of Kook's immediate circle. The Bergson Group was composed of a hard-core cadre of ten Irgun activists from Europe, America and Palestine, including Aryeh Ben-Eliezer, Yitzhak Ben-Ami, Alexander Rafaeli, Shmuel Merlin, and Eri Jabotinsky. The Bergson Group was closely involved with various Jewish and Zionist advocacy groups, such as the American Friends for a Jewish Palestine and the Organizing Committee of Illegal Immigration. The group also founded some separate initiatives of its own, specifically the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, whose goal was the formation of an Allied fighting force of stateless and Palestinian Jews. Some credit the later formation of the Jewish Brigade, a British unit of Palestinian Jews, with Kook's activism. Two American members of the Bergson Group were author and screenwriter Ben Hecht and cartoonist Arthur Szyk.

Initially the Bergson Group largely limited its activities to Irgun fundraising and various propaganda campaigns. The outbreak of World War II saw a dramatic transformation in the group's focus. As information about the Holocaust began to reach the United States, Kook and his fellow activists became more involved in trying to raise awareness about the fate of the Jews in Europe. On March 9, 1943, the Group produced a huge pageant in Madison Square Garden written by Ben Hecht, titled "We Will Never Die", memorializing the 2,000,000 European Jews who had already been murdered. Forty thousand people saw the pageant that first night, and it went on to play in five other major cities including Washington, D.C., where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, six Supreme Court Justices, and some 300 senators and congressmen watched it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_Kook

[Stubble]

EoZ, you rock! Excellent post Sir.

[Eye of Zyclone]

EoZ, you rock! Excellent post Sir.

Thank you, Stubble. Glad you liked my post.

[Stubble]

Dude, all of your posts are bangers.

[Eye of Zyclone]

Dude, all of your posts are bangers.

So I'll have to try to keep up the good work, it seems...