In the last week of July 1944 units of the Red Army’s 1st Byelorussian Front overran the abandoned site of an SS Death Camp known as Treblinka – more

precisely the Germans called it Treblinka II. Treblinka I was a labour camp for people that were not to be exterminated on arrival.

Vasily Grossman, a non-practising Jew, was with these Red Army units. He is the outstanding Russian novelist of the 20th Century. He served throughout

the whole war, known to us as World War II but to the Russians as the Great Patriotic War, as a journalist on the Krasnaya Zvedzda (The Red Star).

It was the official newspaper of the Red Army. But it was also read widely in the Soviet Union by a people anxious to know what was happening in the war.

When the Russians arrived at Treblinka II they found forty survivors from the Camp. The Camp had been shut down in August 1943. There was no-one who could get eye-witnesses to tell their story like Vasily Grossman could. He immediately interviewed the survivors to learn what they could tell him about what had happened here when it was operating. One mystery that puzzled him was how 800,000 Jews could have been exterminated in a camp which only had an SS staff of 25 men. He found the shocking answer to that question.

He called his account of Treblinka “The Hell Called Treblinka”. It was later quoted to the Nuremburg International Military Tribunal that tried the top Nazis for war crimes. What I am about to tell you from this article is the most shocking thing that I have ever read. You may prefer not to continue listening. It’s a story that needs to be told for the new generations that do not believe or understand the depths that human beings descended to during the time that this Death Camp operated. It’s a story that people of the generation born during or after the war have probably never heard before as well – it is nothing like what happened at Auschwitz – it is much more shocking.

Tag words: Vasily Grossman; Treblinka; Death Camp; Warsaw Ghetto; Sukhomil; Zepf;