He is the son of Kadmi Cohen (1892–1944), a French lawyer and writer who died at the concentration camp of Gleiwitz.

In 1952 he was adopted, together with his sister Josée Steiner and elder brother Olivier Cohen-Steiner by his mother's second husband, a physician.

It is written in a third person almost-omniscient way, as the author tries to tie the behavioral conditioning used on the Jews to the narrative perspective of those who endured the violent human experiment.

Following outrage among French, Jewish and foreign academics,[4] Steiner agreed to republish his book (which became a bestseller),[5] by presenting it as a fictional account of the Treblinka extermination camp operation.

"[8] Professor Samuel Moyn in his Treblinka Affair explained that Steiner claimed to direct his non-fiction novel at the "problem" of the Jews' complicity in a manner reminiscent of parts of Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews or Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.