“Too gruesome to be fully taken in”: Konstantin Simonov's “The Extermination Camp” as Holocaust Literature

Abstract

Konstantin Simonov's article about Majdanek, entitled “The Extermination Camp” and published in Krasnaia zvezda on August 10, 11, and 12, 1944, has typically been dismissed as irrelevant to our understanding of the Holocaust, due to its downplaying of the extent of Jewish victims. However, a detailed analysis of Simonov's article shows it to constitute not only the first but also a worthwhile attempt to grasp the unprecedented and unthinkable nature of the camps. It does so by consciously insisting on the position of the journalist as an immediate eyewitness, rather than as an ideologically authoritative interpreter, as was the Soviet norm. This enables Simonov to attempt to conceptualize the distinct nature of the extermination camp, as opposed to the concentration camp, to describe the gas chambers, intimating the experience of the victims, and to treat the enormous piles of footwear as a form of silent testimony as to the identity and number of the dead. In each case these are errors, but largely understandable and a function of the article's merits as a significant step in the process by which humanity first confronted the inconceivable reality of the Holocaust. In common with most wartime Soviet representations of what we have come to know as the Holocaust, Simonov's “Extermination Camp” is marred by a failure to convey the distinct nature and scale of Jewish victimhood, so that a deeper knowledge of this report enables a firmer sense of the still greater achievement of Vasilii Grossman's The Hell of Treblinka.