That summer, waiting for the book to be published, he was buoyed by a decisive turn in the war. Moving westward at speed, at the end of July the Red Army had taken Lemberg, Żółkiew, and Wołkowysk. En route, it uncovered terrible atrocities. 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
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