That's interesting; I read "Survival in Auschwitz" several years ago. It certainly was depressing, but I never for a moment thought of not finishing it. Years ago (in my early thirties?) I read "
An Interrupted Life" by Etty Hillesum. It's a diary of a woman in her twenties in Holland. She wrote a lot of it in the Westerbork transit camp, prior to her transfer to Auschwitz and the end of the diary, and her fatalism was very depressing to me at the time. Now that I am older and have seen more of life (and studied war more extensively) I am more fatalistic myself, and probably would find her embrace of martyrdom less disturbing.
But McCarthy's relentless desciptions of everything from mass murder to bubbling brooks, with no subjective commentary, make me sick. I shudder to think of the Holocaust book he would write. But if he has such a wide readership, maybe it would expose this piece of history to those who had no access to it before.