Recently I was made aware of an obscure ‘Holocaust’ claim made by famous jewish Soviet propagandist - and colleague of the infamous Ilya Ehrenberg – Vasily Grossman in his notebooks from his time as a Soviet propagandist and apologist for Stalin during the Second World War by a follower of mine on X called @L_Shekelcohen.
Having checked it – as is my want – I am happy to report it is a genuine bit of ‘Holocaust Nonsense’ as we read in Grossman’s ‘A Writer at War’ that:
‘Treblinka near Warsaw. The extermination camp for Jews. There was a chamber with moving knives, it was in a basement, under a banya. The bodies were cut into pieces and then burned. There were mountains of ashes, twenty to twenty-five metres high.’ (1)
Now this is pretty unequivocal as claims go because while Grossman was a propagandist one would have expected this claim not to have made it into the English edition and translation of Grossman’s notebooks offered by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova or to have at least been annotated as an obviously ludicrous one, but no it isn’t even graced with a corrective footnote as one would expect.
Instead, it is just left in the text of Grossman’s notebooks by Beevor and Vinogradova as if it could be remotely true when it is clearly is nothing more than a good example of the absolutely ludicrous nature of ‘Holocaust’ claims before they were heavily sanitized by mainstream historians from the early 1960s onwards.
Now for the record a ‘banya’ is a Russian term for a sauna so Grossman is here claiming that Treblinka had a sauna – it to the best of my knowledge did not – and that the ‘chamber of moving knives’ was below it.
Well… you’ve got to give Grossman marks for ludicrous creativity in his anti-German atrocity propaganda now: don’t you?
References
(1) Vasily Grossman, 2007, ‘A Writer at War: A Soviet journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945’, 1st Edition, Vintage: New York, p. 267