The author is a Ucranian and Judeo-Russian engineer who spends his time writing. At the beginning of the Second World War he becomes a war correspondent for the red army in several important battles (Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, Berlin) and will be one of the first ones to document an extermination camp. The author is the first reporter to write about the horrors of Treblinka. It is important to note that the author narrates with the data he had at the time. Treblinka was destroyed by the SS a year after the arrival of the Russians to the extermination camp. The author recounts several testimonies of the camp’s ordinary life: from the transfer by the German army of Jews from the occupied countries, being the majority of them from the Warsaw Jewish ghetto; the descent at the “railway station” to select them and their immediate death at the gas chambers followed by the burial of the bodies, although later on there were crematoriums.
The author’s account is horrifying because he shows exactly what happened with the prisoners. The camp was an extermination one, that is why the average life span of a prisoner was an hour and a half. Grossman mentions in two occasions that Pope Pius XII was not “too inclined to do something”: as we mentioned above, the author writes with the data he has at hand, among that Eugenio Pacelli’s constant effort as Apostolic Nuncio in 1937 and later on as Pius XII, taking into account that the text reflects the way of thinking of the communist army at that time.
R.H.A. (Spain, 2016)