The Story of Cats and Maus

â??A quest for ersatz verisimilitude might have pulled me further away from essential actuality as I tried to reconstruct it,â? muses the author of a seminal work of literature about the Holocaust. In a lengthy interview that has just been published, he reveals that his source material included thousands of hours of interviews; a shelf of books in Polish, Yiddish, and Ukrainian; detailed maps of the death camps; and even manuals of shoe repair. No element of the concentration-camp universe has escaped his attention: Confronted by a historian who disputes his depiction of the toilets at Auschwitz, he gleefully points out that he is referring to the lesser-known Auschwitz I, which had actual plumbing, rather than the more notorious Auschwitz II (Birkenau), with only rows of planks over open pits. â??Maybe as a way of getting past my own aversion I tried to see Auschwitz as clearly as I could,â? he says. â??It was a way of forcing myself and others to look at it.â?