"The Earth Does Not Want to Keep Secrets": Vasily Grossman and Rachel Auerbach in the Fields of Treblinka

Abstract: This article examines two pioneering texts written by Jewish authors who developed an early material-environmental approach to the death camp of Treblinka: Vasily Grossman (1944) and Rachel Auerbach (1947). Both writers visited Treblinka immediately after the war and found themselves compelled to solicit the assistance of nonhuman testimony—the natural environment, everyday objects and human remains—which they transformed into witnesses to a new species of crimes. The article investigates how their treatment of human remains, everyday objects and the natural environment converged and diverged and how their texts may offer possible solutions to ethical and theoretical dilemmas raised by contemporary material and forensic approaches to the Holocaust.