“A MAN WHO HAS SEEN WHAT I HAVE SEEN CANNOT HOLD HIS PEACE”: VERY SCARCE 1944 LONDON PRINTING OF DEATH FACTORY NEAR LUBLIN

(HOLOCAUST) SIMONOV, Konstantin. The Death Factory Near Lublin. London: Daily Worker League, [1944]. Slim octavo, original photographic paper wrappers, staple bound as issued; pp. 32.

Scarce 1944 publication of Soviet writer Simonov’s shattering eyewitness report on the Red Army’s discovery of the Nazi death camp at Maidanek, this scarce pamphlet containing the complete London printing of his Lublin Annhilation Camp, issued earlier the same year in two parts by the Soviet Embassy—“Many of the symbols of the Holocaust have their beginning here”—with nine-full-page black-and-white photogravures, in original wrappers.

In late July 1944, the Red Army liberated the town of Lublin and its suburb of Maidanek, where they stumbled upon a large German concentration camp. “On August 29, the Soviet Embassy in Washington published the first installment of a long, two-piece article by Konstantin Simonov entitled Lublin Annihilation Camp. The article began with a statement that was to be repeated almost literally by dozens of journalists as they reported, in the nine months that followed… ‘What I am now about to relate is too enormous and too gruesome to be fully conceived… But a man who has seen what I have cannot hold his peace and cannot wait to speak… In the second part of his report, published a few days later, Simonov reported on the crematoria with their five ovens…. The sight that shocked Simonov most was a large shed filled with shoes. ‘There may be a million, there may be more… One day after the Soviet Embassy in Washington published the first installment of Simonov’s account of Maidanek, the American public found confirmation in the New York Times” in an article by Bill Lawrence. “‘Many of the symbols of the Holocaust have their beginning here” (Pelt, Case for Auschwitz, 154-8). BBC journalist Alexander Werth would recall that when he “sent the BBC a detailed report on Maidanek in August 1944, they refused to use it; they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt, and it was not till the discovery in the west of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen that they were convinced that Maidanek and Auschwitz were also genuine… [Maidanek] brought into sharper focus than anything else done the real nature, scope and consequence of the Nazi regime… The effect of Maidanek was to be enormous” (Russia at War). This scarce edition of Simonov’s Death Factory Near Lublin, published the same year in London, contains both parts of his shattering report issued in Washington that August-September. An award-winning Soviet poet, dramatist and novelist, Simonov was a correspondent serving on the front in WWII for the Soviet newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. “While a war correspondent Simonov also began his major novels dealing with the war,” among them Comrad in Arms (1952), Days and Nights (1943-4) and The Living and the Dead (1959-71). (Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature, 419-20). With nine full-page black-and-white photogravures (including rear wrapper).

Interior generally fresh, slight edge-wear, tiny bit of damptstaining to fragile original wrappers. A most important work in extremely good condition.