Treblinka

Chil Rajchman's Treblinka is Holocaust-writing pure and simple. Rajchman not only survived but escaped Treblinka, and - while still in hiding, while the war was still going on and Jews were still being killed - immediately began to write down his reminiscences. They would not be published until after he died in 2004.

The details, if unfamiliar in their specificity (Treblinka, unlike the Auschwitz complex or the camps inside Germany, was not a facility that more than a handful of inmates survived), are familiar in terms of the scale of the atrocity, the obscenity of the methods and the inability of language to quite compass either. In some ways, this is the most upsetting document about the slaughter of the European Jews that I've ever come across: there's no moral enquiry, no reference to a world outside the time and place of killing (Rajchman doesn't even trouble to mention his life before the train to the camp) - only a flat, dry record of how the extermination camp worked, by one of a tiny group of survivors.

This is material that demands at least a minimum of contextualisation, if only to soften the blow. Hence Solon Beinfeld's excellent translation from the Yiddish is complemented by an elegantly understated introduction by academic Samuel Moyn, and appended by another account of Treblinka: that of Russian war reporter and dissident novelist Vasily Grossman. Grossman's famous article, written in short order after his visit as a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, is an essential counterweight to Rajchman's shatteringly uninflected prose, and is - if such a thing can exist - a masterpiece in the literature of atrocity. Although obviously a product of its time and context, in a few short pages it sees more deeply into the nature of the offence than many of the thousands of books since written on the subject.

What else to say? This book won't be a bestseller, although it should probably be on every school syllabus, and it might not hurt to hand it out in bulk at English Defence League protests. It's worth reading, once, and then never again.