The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 51

and Scroll
2
Returning to Grossman’s experience
with the advancing Red Army,
the Soviets discovered massacres in
the Ukraine and Poland by summer
1944—but it was later when they found
“even more ghastly revelations.” Majdanek,
a work camp-turned-extermination
camp and the first to be discovered
by the Red Army, was liberated 11
and deemed an appropriate case study
for Soviet propaganda “since many
non-Jewish Poles and Russian prisoners”
had suffered there. No specific
mention of Jewish suffering was made,
playing right into the authorities’ ideological
and propagandist agenda. 12
Historian Richard Overy states: “They
found around 1,000 sick, emaciated
prisoners. The Jewish inmates had been
taken westward on one of the hundreds
of death marches. Most of those who
remained were Soviet prisoners of war
.... Maidanek [sic] was given wide publicity
among the troops. By the time the
Red Army reached Belzec, Sobibor and
Treblinka, those camps had been obliterated
by the German authorities, the
land ploughed [sic] under and farmed
once again.” 13 The fact that the Soviets
found their own people imprisoned and
the remains of this camp were intact
underscores the sloppiness by the Germans
in fully erasing this camp (which
was just like the other three death
camps) and the opportunity was seized
by Soviet authorities to carefully use it
to their advantage.
Around the same time, Soviet
troops discovered Treblinka farther
north. Separated into two camps—Treblinka
I for the forced labor of prisoners
and Treblinka II for the extermination