Knowledge of horrors (From The Oxford Times)
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Knowledge of horrors
9:55am Thursday 19th July 2012 in Letters
Sir – There is perhaps one aspect of your review (July 5) of Antony Beevor’s The Second World War that needs some clarification. The Vasily Grossman quote given could not have been written by Grossman ‘after witnessing the horrors of the Treblinka death camp’. The Treblinka extermination camp was destroyed in the late summer of 1943 (see also Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust). The Red Army occupied the area in which Treblinka was located in late July 1944.
According to Beevor, Grossman’s knowledge of the horrors of Treblinka was gained by sitting in on Red Army interrogations of camp guards and survivors from the work camp adjacent to the extermination camp.
G. Leeson , Cowley
