Changes

The odds of anyone surviving it for almost a year to tell the tale are ridiculous. Chil Rajchman went there packed in a train with perhaps twelve thousand others. If anything, the Nazis wanted to give breakfast to five of them - those they employed to shave the heads of the females brought there to be gassed. Stifling summer heat, disease, vicious winters, and being beaten black and blue throughout a twelve-hour day of hard labour should have prevented anyone lasting long. But various jobs, building up to that of ripping gold teeth from the mouths of freshly slaughtered people, were Rajchman's occupation, and beyond all hope, he was able to live to tell the tale, when so damned few could.

Compare and contrast then, if you are so inclined, with the second half of this book, Vasily Grossman's reportage. Long before VE Day, the Soviets had reached Treblinka's ruins, and Grossman's job was to write back a report showing the incorruptible evil of the Nazis and what they committed at Treblinka, and the virtue of the Red Army. It is both almost as matter-of-fact as Rajchman, and yet so much more poetic. ''And all these thousands, all these tens and hundreds of thousands of people, of frightened, questioning eyes, all these young and old faces, all these dark- and fair-haired beauties, these bald and hunch-backed old men and these timid adolescents - all were caught up in a single flood, a flood that swallowed up reason, and splendid human science, and maidenly love, and childish wonder, and the coughing of the old, and the human heart.''