"The book that revealed to the world the existence and horrors of the death camps."

Vasyli GROSSMAN

L'enfer de Treblinka

Name: Vasyli GROSSMAN • [The Hell of Treblinka] • L'enfer de Treblinka • 1945
SKU: 87862
Availability: Discontinued

[The Hell of Treblinka]

B. Arthaud|Grenoble • Paris 1945|12.90 x 18.80 cm|relié

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⬨ 87862

Extremely rare first edition of the French translation, one of 50 copies on vélin à la forme, the only deluxe issue. Peculiar false statement of 4th edition on the cover, which turns out to be printed on the entire run and common to almost all titles published by Arthaud that year.
Red half shagreen binding, spine with five raised bands outlined with gilt dotted lines and twice framed in gilt, decorative patterned paper boards, first cover preserved, fuchsia marbled endpapers, speckled top edge.
Minor foxing to the cover, otherwise a very nice uncut copy.
We enclose, in original wrappers as issued, the second French edition of the translation, printed in 1966 by the same publisher, complete with its publisher's wraparound band: “The book that revealed to the world the existence and horrors of the death camps. A harrowing document”.

L'Enfer de Treblinka [The Hell of Treblinka] is one of the first two works to reveal the inner workings of Nazi extermination camps, written following the discovery of Sobibor, Majdanek, and Treblinka. Initially published in the Russian magazine Znamja in 1944, it was translated into French in 1945. The first Russian book editions (1945-1946) were heavily censored by the Soviet authorities, notably removing the word “evrej” (“Jew”) and replacing it with “mirnoe naselenie” (“civilian population”).
The French edition is thus the first edition in book form of the original text.

Benjamin Arthaud, a traditional publisher of regionalist works in Grenoble, published numerous patriotic accounts and testimonies of resistance fighters from 1941 onwards, all with small print runs which rarely appear on the market today. L'Enfer de Treblinka, like its 1966 reprint has become impossible to find, even on ordinary paper. Our deluxe copy was given to Paul Verneyras, a key figure in the early French Resistance, who helped develop the Libération-Nord movement alongside Gaston Tessier. In 1945, he was elected deputy of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, a political party emerging from the Resistance, under the leadership of General de Gaulle.

The famous Raczyński pamphlet report ‘The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland' published in 1943 still only refers to the extermination camps in three cautious sentences, reflecting uncertain echoes of an inconceivable reality. “As far as is known, the trains were despatched to three localities - Tremblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, to what the reports describe as “Extermination camps.” [...] It is reported that on arrival in camp the survivors were stripped naked and killed by various means, including poison gas and electrocution. The dead were interred in mass graves dug by machinery.”
Only one other documented account of Treblinka predates Grossman's book: Une année à Treblinka [A Year in Treblinka] by Jankiel Wiernik, who escaped during the August 2, 1943 revolt. Wiernik's account, written and printed in secret in Polish in 1944 a few months before Grossman's, was translated into English and published in New York in 1945. At the time, no other survivor testimonies of Treblinka (where 750,000 Jews were murdered, with only 57 survivors) had yet been published. The manuscript of Abraham Krzepicki remained buried until 1950; Oscar Strawczynski's account was not solicited until 1959; Richard Glazar could not find a publisher, Chil Rajchman never even sought one, Samuel Willenberg wrote his memoirs in 1945 but was only published in 1986. Mieczyslaw Chodzko published articles from 1944 onwards, but his memoirs, written immediately, were not published until the 21st century.

After the discovery of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945 and the liberation of the other camps, other survivors also wrote in the days following their return from captivity, notably Marc Klein on Auschwitz I and Rajsko, Suzanne Birnbaum and Robert Levy on Auschwitz II Birkenau and Robert Waitz on Auschwitz III Monowitz. However, none of these essential testimonies were published at the time.
The first major publications were David Rousset's L'Univers concentrationnaire in 1946, Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo and Robert Antelme's L'espèce humaine in 1947. Of these, only Primo Levi's account concerns death camps—Rousset and Antelme focused on Buchenwald, a concentration camp primarily for political prisoners and resistance members. Like its illustrious successors, Grossman's book went largely unnoticed in France, still reeling from the trauma of the state's collaboration in the deportation of French Jews. However, A Year in Treblinka was ignored in the United States. Grossman's book, written before the discovery of Auschwitz, is nevertheless the earliest and one of the most important accounts of the functioning of the extermination camps. It became an essential document at the Nuremberg trials. Subsequently becoming a reference, this essay by the author of Life and Fate was later published in 50 foreign editions.
Supported by the testimonies of survivors, notably Wiernik but also six other escapees from Treblinka who wandered in the neighboring forest for almost a year until the arrival of the Russian army, Grossman's account is scientifically rigorous:

“Each new gas chamber was seven meters wide and eight long, 56 sq.m. in all. The area of all the new chambers totaled 560 sq.m. and the three old chambers. which continued to operate when there were smaller groups to be wiped out, brought the total lethal floor space of the Treblinka death factory up to 635 sq.m. From 400 to 600 were herded into each gas chamber at a time, which means that working at capacity the ten new chambers destroyed 4,000 to 6.000 lives at once.” (tr. Elizabeth Donnelly and Rose Prokofiev, The Hell of Treblinka, Moscow, 1946)

and perfectly honest :

“I asked many people what the Germans did with all the hair [...] None could answer this question. According to the written testimony of one Kon, however, the hair was used by the navy to fill mattresses, to make hawsers for submarines and for other similar purposes. It seems to me that this testimony requires additional confirmation”

In fact, Grossman is not a survivor of Treblinka, but the first outside witness to give an account not only of what he saw, but above all of a history erased by the Nazis which had to be uncovered. Unlike Buchenwald or Auschwitz, Treblinka was completely dismantled by the Nazis in August 1943, then “camouflaged” as a farm and fields of colorful lupins.

“We arrived at the Treblinka camp early in September, thirteen months after the day of the uprising. For thirteen months the slaughterhouse had been in operation, For thirteen months the Germans had endeavored to hide the traces of its work.”

The attempt to conceal the genocide began at the start of 1943. As Grossman relates, the digging of large cremation pits was accompanied by the exhumation of the victims to remove all traces of the crime:

“At the end of the winter of 1945 Himmler came to Treblinka escorted by a group of important Gestapo officials. (...) The order was to proceed immediately to burn all the buried corpses. every single one of them. and to carry the ashes and residue out of the camp and strew them over the fields and roads. [...] Moreover, the freshly killed victims were not to be buried, but burned at once.”

Simultaneously with the acceleration of Operation Reinhard (Nazi code name for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” in Poland), the Nazis also sought to eliminate all evidence, making it difficult to estimate the number of victims, establish responsibility, and even fully comprehend the nature of the crimes. To counter this plan and at the instigation of Albert Einstein, Vassili Grossman and Ilya Ehrenbourg began to compile the “black book” (Чëрная Книгаv) of the Nazi massacres in the summer of 1943 by actively collecting documents and testimonies. This early and rigorous effort of remembrance was made possible by their positions as frontline war correspondents with the Soviet army. Yet, despite already knowing about pogroms and deportations, they still had no concrete knowledge of the extermination operations occurring in the camps only known through rare testimonies of escapees. When Grossman arrived at Treblinka, he knew of the death camps only through survivor accounts, which he could now corroborate with the remaining traces at the site. He then grasped the full extent of the industrial extermination system:

“The earth ejects crushed bones, teeth, bits of paper and clothing: it refuses to keep its awful secret. These things emerge from the unhealed wounds in the earth”

Initially intended to be used in court, the writing of the Black Book faced numerous obstacles, censorship, prohibition, travesty, pushing Ehrenbourg to resign. Only through Grossman's determination was it partially published in the United States in 1946, though banned in the Soviet Union. Grossman's part, The Hell of Treblinka was the only one to be distributed in the form of a brochure to the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. During the trial, the genocide – a new term, not used by the prosecution – was only marginally addressed on 29 November 1945. In 1947: When Now Begins, Elisabeth Asbrink wrote that in the reports published by the international press during the Nuremberg trial, “the name Auschwitz hardly appears”. Nor is there a word about the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps where a million Polish Jews perished. “Some aspects of historical reality remain unspoken,” she writes. “What is not said before the judges disappears.” She continues: “This is how memories are constructed and how nations shape the images they want of themselves. Gaps in memory take root.” (cf. Nuremberg, le procès raté des criminels nazis, France Culture). The true trial of Treblinka did not begin until October 12, 1964.
Several political reasons have been cited for the hesitancy of post-war justice to fully prosecute the genocide's full scope. However, the public's astonishment facing an extraordinary and partly unintelligible reality must also be taken into account. Even Vassili Grossman, who was undoubtedly among the most informed on Nazi crimes thanks to his collection of testimonies and archives, remained like most Europeans somewhat cautious about testimonies whose horror undoubtedly seemed excessive. The discovery of the remains at Treblinka was therefore essential to the full realization of the unimaginable scale of the event:

“Hair gleaming like burnished copper, the soft lovely hair of a young girl trampled into the ground [...] These are evidently the contents of one, but only one, of the sacks of hair the Germans had neglected to ship off. Then it is all true! The last wild hope that it might be a ghastly nightmare has gone!”

Grossman here shows an involuntary reluctance to believe the terrible stories he had been told, and only the objective observation of the place confirms the truth. This inability to listen to survivors, combined with their difficulty in articulating their experiences affected the entire population. This can be seen in particular in the attempts of the newspapers to provide information that they themselves do not grasp. A testimony published in L'Humanité on August 24, 1944 reveals this struggle: “Dear friends, What can I say? I have so much to tell, things so extraordinary that you would not believe them. And besides, I cannot find the words to say them to you; you have to have lived through them and seen them to believe them. […] You will say that one must be crazy to believe such things! I tell you, people have witnessed these massacres, and they can be believed. […] My pen carries me away, and so I write […]. My letter is confused, I ramble, my thoughts are jumbled, and yet, I cannot write 'everything' to you—it would take tons of paper.” The article is begins by an extract from the poem by François la Colère [Louis Aragon's pseudonym], Le Musée Grévin, the only literary text to have mentioned Auschwitz until then and the only reference for the journalist who thinks that the letter comes from one of the women mentioned in Aragon's poem (although it is written using masculine pronouns). Literature was thus quickly called upon to rescue the impossible story of the Shoah 'where the movement of Meaning has been damaged', as Maurice Blanchot will write. First testimonies from Auschwitz were also collected by the novelist Benjamin Kavérine. Moreover, in a period of patriotic emphasis and a long tradition of outrageous propaganda, denouncing the specific horror of the camps was a real challenge in addition to being difficult to conceive. The raw reality seemed exaggerated and caused distancing. Grossman was the first to take on the impossible task of making an unheard truth comprehensible. He understood the necessity to prepare the reader, to allow him to accept the story before revealing the truth to him. Much like Arthur Rimbaud's The Sleeper in the Valley, Grossman begins his narrative with a landscape description:

“The land is bare but for a few patches of moss and an occasional sickly pine. Now and then a jackdaw or a bright-combed hoopoe wings past, but no bird stops to build its nest here”

Similarly, Primo Levi would later begin If This Is a Man with an account of his naive attempts at resistance. For Grossman, however, the description of the
landscape is not merely a poetic entry. This landscape is the result of a deliberate Nazi's intention to disguise the crime:

“Lupins were sown over the site of the camp, and a certain Streben built himself a little house there. […] We enter the camp, we tread the soil of Treblinka. The lupin pods burst open at the slightest touch, with a faint tinkling; millions of seeds spill onto the ground.”

Grossman uses numerous literary techniques in this unique work that blends rigorous analysis with empathetic subjectivity – culminating in the Dantean metaphor of the title, which Imre Kertész would later challenge, asserting that hell does not exist but the gas chambers did. And yet, it is only by stepping beyond the realm of reality that the true nature of the camps can be conveyed, regardless of how rigorous the analytical narrative may be:

“Today the witnesses have spoken, the very stones and earth have cried aloud. And now, before the conscience of the whole world, before the eyes of all mankind. we can reconstruct step by step a picture of the Treblinka hell, compared to which Dante's inferno was a harmless satanic frolic.”

More than a description, Grossman's work is above all an urgent investigation to establish the full extent of Nazi crimes reconstructed from destroyed elements at risk of disappearing entirely. He was therefore forced to calculate the number of victims based on the size of gas chambers, as well as the time needed to evacuate the dead, the frequency of the trains and the number of wagons over “the 13 months” (in reality 11 and a half months) of extermination at Treblinka. Paradoxically, his miscalculation was used by Holocaust deniers. In reality, his overestimation—if one dares to call the effort to determine the number of victims an “overestimation”—of three million victims was the first step in a long historical endeavor that would take nearly half a century to complete. Using topographical analysis and eyewitness testimonies, Grossman meticulously reconstructed the tragic chronology from the arrival of trains to the scattering of human ashes in the fields surrounding the camp. By virtue of its precocity, thorough documentation, and forensic analysis of the crime scene, The Hell of Treblinka would become a crucial foundation for the historical reconstruction of the Holocaust.
Unlike the texts of the survivors, Grossman's gaze is that of the reader confronted with the need to think the unthinkable and avoid the rejection of the collective conscience:

“It is painful even to read about all this. The reader must believe me when I say that it is even more painful to write about it, 'Why write then?' someone might say. 'What is the use of recalling all this?' It is the duty of a writer to tell the truth however grueling, and the duty of the reader to learn the truth. To turn aside, or to close one's eyes to the truth is to insult the memory of the dead.”

Despite writing on the spot without critical distance, Grossman is the first to address numerous existential questions that will continue to inspire sociological, psychological, political, legal and ethical reflection to this day.
Thus the question of the supposed passivity of the victims, which became the subject of violent discussions after Hannah Arendt's book on the Eichmann trial:

“But some mysterious, irresistible force impelled them to hurry forward in silence without asking questions or turning round, impelled them toward the opening in the sixmeter barbed-wire fence camouflaged with pine boughs […] Cry for help? What was the use with all these SS men and guards armed with Tommy guns, hand grenades and pistols? Power was in their hands. Theirs the tanks and aircraft, the land, the towns, theirs the sky, the railways, the laws, the newspapers and the radio. The whole world was silent, crushed and enslaved by the brown-shirted gang which had seized power”.

Far from merely stating the facts, Grossman analyzes the psychological mechanisms the executioners used to paralyze their victims:

“Running headlong into the abyss! We have learned, through the cruel experience of these past years, that when stripped naked, man loses all will to resist and ceases to fight against fate; along with his clothes, he has lost his instinct for life and accepts what happens to him as inevitable. Even those in whom life once burned brightly become passive.”

But Grossman is already careful to moderate this impression of passive acceptance, and he details numerous individual acts of courage, including the heroic uprising of the Sonderkommandos, who “did not wish to flee without first destroying Treblinka.”
Twenty years before Hannah Arendt's concept of “the banality of evil”, Grossman already preemptively counters her arguments:

“It must be noted here that these creatures were by no means robots who mechanically carried out the wishes of others. All witnesses speak of a trait common to all of them, namely, a fondness for theoretical argument, a predilection for philosophizing. All of them had a weakness for delivering speeches to the doomed people, for boasting in front of their victims and explaining the “lofty” meaning and “importance” for the future of what was being done in Treblinka.”

Grossman was already anticipating the primary argument of the defense at the Nuremberg Trials: denial of individual responsibility. At a time when Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertész, Charlotte Delbo, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Robert Antelme, Jorge Semprún, and David Rousset were still behind the barbed wires of Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Buchenwald, Grossman—who was not himself a survivor—offered an essential testimony, one that would lay the foundation for some of the most powerful works to come:

“The beasts and the philosophy of the beasts foreshadowed the end of Europe, the end of the world: the people remained people. They did not accept the morals and laws of fascism, fighting with all the means at their disposal against them, fighting with their death as human beings.”

“All of them entered the abyss bearing the noblest title that exists—the title of 'human being,' which the bloodthirsty pack of Hitlers and Himmlers could never strip from them. Yes, on the monument of each of them, history will inscribe as their epitaph: 'Here lies a Man'.”

Written in the urgency of the moment under the weight of an emotion from which he would never fully recover - Grossman remained isolated and silent for days after returning to Moscow - this fundamental work, “the pinnacle of Grossman's work as a war reporter”, became a central part of The Black Book, and later, of his masterpiece Life and Fate, where a revised version of The Hell of Treblinka appears in chapters 41 to 48 of the second part.

However, the most significant contribution of this work is not its denunciation of the crime, its essential testimony, its scientific rigor, its literary quality, nor even its intellectual acuity, but rather its prophetic lucidity and deeply humanistic conclusion – truly extraordinary given the circumstances of its writing, just after the author learned of his mother's death in the Berdychiv massacre:

“The lupine pods pop open, the tiny peas beat a faint tatloo as though a myriad of tiny bells were really ringing a funeral dirge deep down under the ground. And it seems the heart must surely burst under the weight of sorrow, grief and pain that is beyond human endurance.

Scientists, sociologists, criminologists, psychiatrists and philosophers are puzzling over this phenomenon. What is it – innate or hereditary, is it the result of upbringing, environment, external influences, is it predetermined by history or is it the criminal will of the leaders? What is it, how did it come to pass? The embryonic traits of the race theory which sounded so comical when expounded by second-rate pseudo-professors or the puny provincial theoreticians of last century Germany, the contempt of the German philistine for the Russian, the Pole, the Jew, the French, the British, the Greek and the Czech, the whole of this cheap and tawdry German superiority over the rest of mankind that was good-naturedly laughed off by journalists and humorists, was suddenly in the course of a few years transformed from mere childish babble into a deadly menace to mankind, a menace to life and freedom and became the source of incredible and unparalleled suffering, bloodshed and crime. There is definite food for thought here.
Wars like the present are terrible indeed. Rivers of innocent blood have been spilled by the Germans. But today it is not enough to speak of the responsibility of Germany for what has happened. Today we must speak of the responsibility of all nations and of every citizen in the world for the future.
Every man and woman today is in duty bound to his conscience, to his son and his mother, to his country and to mankind to examine his heart and conscience and reply to the question: what is it that gave rise to racism, what can be done in order that Nazism, Hitlerism may never rise again, either on this or the other side of the ocean, never unto eternity.
The imperialist idea of national, race, or any other exceptionalism led the Hitlerites logically to Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, Oswiecim and Treblinka.
We must remember that racism, fascism will emerge from this war not only with bitter recollections of defeat but also with sweet memories of the ease with which it is possible to slaughter millions of defenseless people.
This must be solemnly borne in mind by all who value honor, liberty and the life of all nations, of all mankind.”

One of 50 copies on vélin à la forme, the only deluxe edition of “the book that revealed to the world the existence and horrors of the death camps”.

Provenance: Paul Verneyras who joined the Resistance in 1940, active member of the Libération-Nord movement, then Mouvement Républicain Populaire municipal councilor for the 6th sector of Paris in 1945-1947.