East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

by Philippe Sands

In August, the Russian journalist Vasily Grossman, writing for the Red Army magazine, described what they came across in an article titled ‘The Hell of Treblinka’. How could this happen? Grossman asked. ‘Was it something organic? Was it a matter of heredity, upbringing, environment or external conditions? Was it a matter of historical fate, or the criminality of the German leaders?’

‘The community of nations has in the past claimed and successfully asserted the right to intercede on behalf of the violated rights of man trampled upon by the State in a manner calculated to shock the moral sense of mankind.’

Vasily Grossman’s article ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ offered another account, immediate and brutal. ‘We tread the earth of Treblinka,’ he wrote, ‘casting up fragments of bone, teeth, sheets of paper, clothes, things of all kinds. The earth does not want to keep secrets.’