War Grossman Soviet
Vasily Grossman's masterpiece Life and Fate is rated by many as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. Among its admirers is Antony Beaver, the bestselling author of Stalingrad and Berlin. A Writer at War is based on the notebooks in which Grossman gathered his raw material. It depicts as never before the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front and the lives and deaths of infantrymen, tank drivers, pilots, snipers and civilians alike. Grossman participated in the assembly of the Black Book, a project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to document the crimes of the Holocaust. The post-war suppression of the Black Book by the Soviet state shook him to the core, and he began to question his own loyal support of the Soviet regime. First the censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the specifically anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role of Ukrainians who worked with the Nazis as police. Then, in 1948, the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely. Deemed unfit for service when the Germans invaded in 1941, Grossman became a special correspondent for Red Star, the Red Army newspaper. Remarkably, he spent three of the following four years at the front observing with a writer's eye the most pitiless fighting ever known.
Grossman witnessed almost all the major events on the Eastern Front: the appalling defeats and desperate retreats of 1941, the defense of Moscow and fighting in the Ukraine. In August 1942 he was posted to Stalingrad where he remained during four months of brutal street-fighting. He was present at the battle of Kursk, the largest tank engagement in history, and, as the Red Army advanced, he reached Berdichev where his worst fears for his mother and other relations were confirmed. A Jew himself, he undertook the faithful recording of Holocaust atrocities as their extent dawned. His supremely powerful report 'The Hell of Treblinka' was used in evidence at the Nuremberg tribunal. A Writer at War offers the one outstanding eye-witness account of the war on the Eastern Front and perhaps the best descriptions ever of what Grossman called 'the ruthless truth of war'. When the German army sped across the Soviet border in June 1941 in a double-cross that left the more-than-adequately forewarned Stalin shocked and a few of his most prominent generals conveniently scapegoated and summarily shot, Vasily Grossman, too, was caught unawares. The Ukrainian novelist was fat, brainy, and Jewish, credentials that were more counter than revolutionary and that earned him a yet at the nearest recruiting station. He was, it turns out, fortunate just to have had the opportunity.
Stalin's purges rendered such a character ripe for the Gulag. "It was a miracle that he survived," the authors remark dryly. A miracle he survived the Gulag, but what about the war? After all, this was before the invasion, before Grossman eventually signed on with the Red Army newspaper and logged a thousand days at the front, before the prolonged horrors of Stalingrad and Kursk, before Majdanek, before Treblinka, before Berdichev, where the SS shot Grossman's elderly mother and tossed her into a trench. If giggly Vasily was raised in a famine-plagued country where "parents crazed by hunger ate their own children," he finally came of age in a world where a son couldn't save his mom. A Writer at War is an important book because it provides a piercing look into the author of Life and Fate, a 1960 novel about the siege of Stalingrad and an undisputed masterpiece of 20th-century Russian literature. But, perhaps more importantly, it's important for the necessary emphasis it places on the barbarity of the Eastern Front. We Americans know or care little about this part of the Second World War. It exists for us as a vague threat hurled by Colonel Klink at Sergeant Schultz, not as the venue for perhaps the bloodiest battle in human history. We have always been taught that Omaha Beach is where the war turned, where so many brave GIs fell that Spielberg was forced to make a film. In last year's The War Complex: World War II in Our Time, Marianna Torgovnick asks her readers to estimate Allied and American losses on D-Day. A hundred thousand? Fifty thousand? Try 3,581. By contrast, more than three-quarters of a million Soviets fell at Stalingrad and many more Germans than that. Torgovnick is quick to add that it's not a contest; it's just that, for reasons both cultural and political, D-Day looms much larger in our imagination. Grossman's account of the war comes from censored stories he wrote for Krasnaya Zvedzda, the official Red Army newspaper, as well as letters to his wife and parents, and uncensored notes that he concealed from Communist Party authorities. These sources are skillfully threaded together by clean and consistently understated prose from the editors, who periodically explain, fact check, or contextualize Grossman without ever getting in his way.
A Writer at War is also important because it reminds us that Grossman bore powerful witness to the Holocaust. In particular, he wrote about Treblinka, a camp he visited shortly after its liberation by the Red Army. He found only about 40 survivors there, huddled and hiding in the surrounding pine forests, and he immediately began interviewing them all. Approximately 800,000 Jews had been gassed and burned at Treblinka in the previous year, an operation presided over by a mere 25 SS men and about a hundred of their Ukrainian flunkies. How was such a thing possible logistically, never mind morally? Providing the answer to one, if not both, Grossman's essay, "The Hell Called Treblinka," is a far more detailed explanation than the average reader may be prepared for. "Now we know the whole story . . ." he wrote.
"We know about death from starvation, about the swollen people who were taken outside the barbed wire on wheelbarrows and shot." Grossman's words are all the more powerful for their irony in the wake of David Irving's recent conviction on charges of Holocaust denial. He spares no detail, even describing the men assigned to sweep up the camp square after the "heaps of letters, photographs of new-born babies, brothers, fiancés, and yellowed wedding announcements" had been gathered, sorted, and trashed. His psychological insights, meanwhile, are devastating: "When stripped," he notes, "a person immediately loses the . . . instinct to live and one accepts one's destiny like a fate.
A person who used to have an intransigent thirst for life becomes passive and indifferent." It is a wonder that Grossman himself does not get lost in such a book, overwhelmed by the enormity of the events he lived and wrote about. Instead, he gently reminds us of how unlikely it is that he should ever have survived Stalin; how unlikely it is that a man who walked with a cane and wore round, college-professor spectacles should so quickly toughen up and turn into what the Russians called a frontovik, or front-line soldier; how unlikely it is that a Jew, even a non-observant one, should be able to so easily insinuate himself into the lives of peasants and generals alike. At one point during the siege of Stalingrad, grossman even coaxed his divisional commander, a battle-hardened and reserved Siberian, to talk with him for six uninterrupted hours. It is through stories like this that Grossman becomes a man we grow to know and care about over the course of this patchwork volume.
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