Another Green World by Grant Richard

Author:Grant, Richard [Grant, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

LUBLINLAND

3 NOVEMBER 1944

The place was not what Butler had expected. It was not, after all, a fetid and smoldering city of the dead. For months now, since the Red Army slugged its way onto Polish soil, Butler had been horribly titillated by reports of a so-called Nazi death camp near Lublin, an old university town whose chief distinction heretofore had been its exceptional concentration of Catholic churches, said to be the greatest in Central Europe. That changed at the end of July when Konstantin Simonov, sometime novelist, landed a sensational story in Pravda about a facility known as KZ-Majdanek, where—so he claimed— upward of one million Jews had been “exterminated”: poisoned by gas, then burned in industrial-scale crematoria. Similar reports came thick and fast from all the Soviet papers. Red Star ran a shot of two captured SS guards taken shortly before their execution, standing in a vegetable garden among enormous heads of lettuce, grown, the caption explained, in a mixture of manure and the ashes of murdered Jews.

It was a pornography of evil. The public was mesmerized. Butler as well. Yet the Western press made next to nothing of the whole affair, deeming it, apparently, something cooked up by Soviet propagandists. Red meat for the masses. Well, who knew? Butler, however—who knew something about propaganda and its reigning auteurs—believed the stories to be true, more or less. True enough.

In mid-August, Marshal Rokossovsky—indignant that the word of his officers should be doubted—had invited a select pool of Western correspondents to tour the site. They were chosen for “credibility,” which is to say the likelihood their stories would run in leading periodicals, especially in America. Butler's widely known pro-Red leanings ruled him out. But a few weeks later, on a rare visit to Moscow, he bumped into Alexander Werth, the Sunday Times man, at the bar of the Hotel Lux, that grubby mecca of expatriates on Gorki Street.

Werth, an Oxbridge Fabian sort, was still miffed that the BBC had refused to run his Majdanek piece. “And it was good stuff,” he grumbled, “exclusive stuff. Spent several days there. Spoke to the local Poles. Not just Party types. They all knew what the camp was for. Hell, it was barely two kilometers outside town. When the wind was in the east, the whole place stank of it. One little boy showed me the shoes he was wearing—good as new, he was quite proud of them—that he'd nicked, you see, from a big clothing dump the Germans ran on, wait for this, Chopin Street, don't you love that? Shoes off the feet of some poor Zhid, undoubtedly. Must have been from one of the last batches to be liquidated, otherwise they would've been sized and boxed up and shipped off to the Reich. But the Poles, they're quick to grab that sort of stuff, soon as the Germans clear out, and who can blame them? They've had a bad war.”

Werth had been drinking for a while; Butler let him talk. During a pause

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