More than seven decades after the Red Army threw open the gates of Auschwitz, the literature of the Holocaust has grown so voluminous and varied that we might assume there are no further tales to tell. If memoirists like Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski and Liana Millu have failed to exhaust that particular vein, readers can always turn to a huge corpus of secondary material, including such strapping volumes as “The Holocaust Encyclopedia.” Surely at this stage, there is little left to surprise them.

Wrong! “Deviation,” an autobiographical novel by the Italian writer and critic Luce D’Eramo, is a case in point. The author spent time in both a German labor camp in Frankfurt, run by the industrial giant IG Farben, and in Dachau, the very first concentration camp built by the Nazis. Her description of the horrors she encountered in these places is vivid but not especially novel. What is shocking is that she volunteered for both ordeals.