(Thank you for Felix Purat’s review
of Stalingrad.)
There will be a little redudacancy between this post and my first post.
Grossman was a truth-teller from the heart of 20th Century darkness. However. more often than not, he couldn’t write important truths about what he was witnessing first-hand.
Grossman lived through decades of the Soviet regime’s savage repression of intellectual and cultural life. The Soviet government took poetry seriously. If it didn’t like your poetry, it killed you. And in the 1930s, a Soviet citizen could be executed for possessing the wrong book.
During his brutal 1937-‘38 Purge – his Great Terror – Stalin killed 40,000 of his senior military officers, thus destroying his entire military leadership. He killed every Bolshevik leader who’d been there with Lenin in 1917. So little surprise he killed a great writer like Isaac Babel and a great theater director like Vsevolod Meyerhold.
It is really with Grossman’s writing about the Holocaust that we find his truth-telling at its most free.
The Holocaust began in the Soviet Union. It began in his own nation: Ukraine. And it began in his hometown: Berdichev.
Evidence suggests that it was in Spring 1941 that Hitler decided to exterminate all Jews in Nazi-occupied territory. The Nazis thought of Berdichev, west of Kiev, as a center of Jewish thought and culture, and so they began with this town of 60,000 people, half of whom were Jewish.
The Nazis wanted to prove to themselves that they could kill and bury 20,000 Jews per day. Berdichev as their test-run. They managed to kill 10,000 in Berdichev on September 5, 1941, and 20,000 more in about 48 hours from September 14 to 16. On September 29 and 30, they massacred 34,000 Jews near Kiev, and would eventually bury 100,000 Jews in the ravines of Babi Yar. The Nazis declared Ukraine free of Jews by the end of 1942.
In 1943, the Soviets are retaking Ukraine and Grossman is traveling across the country with the army. He encounters one mass grave after another. In November, after the Soviets retake Kiev, he encounters the mass graves of Babi Yar; none of his relatives in Kiev are still alive. In Odessa he encounters the mass graves for another 100,000.
It will be a decade before term “Holocaust” catches on. But Vasily Grossman step us and becomes the world’s first chronicler and journalist of the Holocaust.
And so Grossman walks through the aftermath of the Holocaust and interviews eyewitnesses. He documents it. He writes accounts of it. He sums it up for the world:
“There are no Jews in Ukraine. Nowhere – in none of the cities, hundreds of towns, or thousands of villages. Nowhere will you see the tear-filled eyes of a young girl. Nowhere will you hear the sad voice of an old woman. Nowhere will you see the swarthy-skinned little face of a hungry baby. All is silence. Everything is still. An entire people has been murdered.”
The Soviets retake Berdichev in January 1944. Eyewitnesses tell him the stories. One victim on September 15, 1941, was his mother. In one of those pits, mounded over, lay his mother’s body,
Grossman moved on with the Red Army. He was there as the Soviets began to liberate Nazi death camps.
In July 1944, he reached the Majdanek extermination camps near Lublin, Poland. Here he saw the shoes of tens of thousands of children. In August, he arrived at Treblinka, east of Warsaw. It was already razed to the ground, with nothing left but powdered bone and ash.
800,000 people had died here. “This is the biggest crime in history,” Grossman declared.
He witnessed the interrogations of dozens of captured Nazis. “Not once have I observed remorse, horror, despair, the desire to renounce the shameful crimes.”
Grossman was there when Soviet investigators interrogated a captured Ukrainian executioner:
“How many people did you gas each day?”
“Nine hundred, I think. Up to a thousand, two hundred.”
“How did you spend your time afterwards?”
“We sang songs.”
“What songs, for example.”
“O Tannenbaum, O Tannebaum.”
Upon hearing this, Grossman jumped out of the bunker. He stood in a cold wind, and tears were pouring from underneath his glasses.
In November 1944 came publication of Grossman’s article, “The Hell of Treblinka”. The piece is many things at once: eyewitness statements, investigative journalism, historical essay, philosophical essay, and a requiem to the victims. It is the first full account of a Nazi death camp and it is beautifully written, emotionally powerful, and moving.
Grossman declares that he is presenting the evidence of Treblinka “before the eyes of humanity, before the conscience of the whole world”. He traces the experience of the typical victim from arrival of the train till his or her last moments in the gas chamber.
Then he reaches the peak of his testimony:
“Dead are the violinists and pianists. Dead are the 80-year-old men with cataracts in hazy eyes. Dead are the three-year-olds and two-year-olds. Dead are the noisy newly born . . .
“This is the murder of a people, murder of a house, of a family, of books, of faith. This is the murder of the tree of life. this is the death of roots. This is the murder of a people’s soul and body – murder of great skillful experience created generation after generation, by thousands of clever and talented craftsmen and intellectuals.
“This is the murder of a people’s morality, of customs, humorous stories, passed on from grandfathers to their sons. This is the murder of memories, of a sad song, of people’s poetry about a merry and bitter life.
“This is the destruction of a hearth, of cemeteries. This is the death of a people, which lived for centuries, worked, sinned, and did good deeds, and was dying on the same land.”
Grossman moved onto Berlin, arriving with Soviet troops. He saw the half-burnt corpse of the generator of Nazi culture, Joseph Goebbels.
He entered the private office of Adolph Hitler. He looked at a globe, books, papers, letters, and Hitler’s document seals – “The Fuhrer has confirmed”, “The Fuhrer has agreed” – scattered across the floor amid bits of smashed plaster and stucco. He visualized “discussions when Hitler and Goebbels sat at this table, amusing themselves with Himmler’s stories about Poland, drenched in blood.”
And Grossman declared to the man standing next to him, “Evil is overthrown”
Next up: my fellow Substack writer Felix Purat’s review of Grossman’s Life and Fate. I think that Life and Fate is a better novel than Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Indeed, I declare Life and Fate to be the best novel ever written in the entire history of the human race. Next, we’ll find out if Felix agrees.