The Road (33 page)

PART TWO: The War, the Shoah

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an ancient and peaceful town
: Vasily Grossman,
Sobranie sochinenii
, (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998) vol. 3, p. 203.

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defenders of Stalingrad
: A. Bocharov,
Vasily Grossman
(Moscow: Sovetsky pisatel', 1990), 112.

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one of their comrades in arms
: John and Carol Garrard,
The Bones of Berdichev
(New York: The Free Press, 1996), 162. See also Yekaterina Korotkova, “Yanvarskiye kanikuly,”
Raduga
(May–June 2009): 142.

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until they were in tatters
: Frank Ellis,
Vasiliy Grossman
(Oxford: Berg, 1994), 48. There are similar accounts by people who first read Grossman’s articles in Leningrad during the Siege [Bocharov, 132].

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his own experience of the battle
: E-mail from Jochen Hellbeck, May 5, 2008.

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whom we had nicknamed Zhuchka
: Korotkova, 144. Zhuchka is a name given to dogs—and to women seen as garrulous or bad-tempered.

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ready to talk to him
: See David Ortenberg,
Letopistsy pobedy
(Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), 42–55, especially 51–53.

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the required article
: see Yekaterina Korotkova, “O moyom ottse,”
Sel'skaya molodyozh'
(March 1993): 49.

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in September 1941
: The genocide of European Jews began when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Four special SS formations known as Einsatzgruppen (a typically Nazi euphemism meaning “special task force”) advanced with the forward units of the Wehrmacht. Their task was to combat what Hitler called “Judaeo-Bolshevism” by murdering Jews, Communist Party officials, and Red Army political commissars. Along with local collaborators, the Einsatzgruppen rounded up Jews, drove them to nearby ravines, swamps, and forests, and shot them dead. There were two main waves of these massacres: August to December 1941, and the summer of 1942. Approximately two million Jews were murdered. Mordecai Altshuler writes that “the Nazi authorities viewed the annihilation of the Jews within the USSR’s original boundaries with particular urgency, since they regarded them as the mainstay of the Bolshevik regime.” [Mordecai Altshuler, “The Unique Features of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union,” in
Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union
, Yaacov Ro'i, ed. (Ilford, UK: Frank Cass, 1995), 175.]

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unpublished until 1988
: The original text was first published in the journal
Vek
(Riga, 1988–89); until then the only Russian text available was a back-translation from Yiddish of the portion—a little less than half—that had been published in
Eynikayt
.

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long after Grossman’s death
: The Russian text was first published in the 1980 (Jerusalem) edition of
The Black Book
. Much of the article is included, in English translation, in
A Writer at War
. Earlier historians have unwittingly exaggerated the number of Jews shot outside Berdichev. Dieter Pohl, in “The Murder of Ukraine’s Jews under German Military Administration and in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine,” states that 4,144 Jews were murdered, mostly in Berdichev, on September 4, and that, in the early hours of September 15, around 12,000 Jews from the Berdichev ghetto were shot at the airport outside the town [in Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, eds.,
The Shoah in Ukraine
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 35].

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a very small hardback book
: A copy of this may have been given to the Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. Bocharov states that a very small number of copies of
The Black Book
(which includes “The Hell of Treblinka”) were in fact printed, and that it was one of these that was given to the Soviet prosecutor, but we have been unable to find confirmation for this [Bocharov, 162].

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not to be published
: See Yitzhak Arad,
The Holocaust in the Soviet Union
(Lincoln and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2009), 543. The complete Russian text of
The Black Book
was published in Israel in 1980, in Kiev in 1991, and in Vilnius in 1993. A separate volume,
The Unknown Black Book
(
Neizvestnaya chornaya kniga
), containing not only material from
The Black Book
but also material previously rejected for censorship reasons, was published in Moscow in 1993 and in the United States in 2008.

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to render my novel safe
: Fyodor Guber,
Pamyat'i pis'ma
(Moscow: Probel, 2007), 64. “Render safe” is our translation of
obezopasit'
. Grossman’s reply was “
Boris Nikolaevich, ya ne khochu obezopasit'svoi roman
.”

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he should give Einstein
: Semyon Lipkin,
Kvadriga
(Moscow: Knizhny Sad, 1997), 533.

*
“
...through Publishing Houses
”: A fifteen-page document in which Grossman, evidently anticipating difficulties from the beginning, records all his official conversations, letters, and meetings to do with the novel [RGALI, fond 1710, opis' 2, ed. khr., 1].

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instigation of Stalin himself
: Bocharov, 84. Korotkova remembers her father saying, “Stalin has a very particular attitude toward me. He does not send me to the camps, but he never awards me prizes.” That Grossman’s two previous novels should have incurred Stalin’s disapproval is not surprising.
Stepan Kolchugin
is largely about the generation of Old Bolsheviks that Stalin was to destroy in the Purges of 1937, and Grossman had publicly announced his intention to devote much of the novel’s (never-written) fourth volume to the Comintern, the internationalist organization that Stalin marginalized in the late 1930s and finally dissolved in 1943. According to Lipkin, Stalin referred to this novel about a young revolutionary as “Menshevik” [Lipkin, 520]; Lipkin does not explain how he knew Stalin’s opinion, but he might have heard it secondhand, perhaps from a writer such as Fadeyev who moved in higher circles. Grossman’s earlier
The People Immortal
is about the encirclement of a Soviet military unit. There were many such encirclements during the first months of the war, some involving the death or capture of hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers. In 1942 it was possible to write about such catastrophes; after the Soviet victories of early 1943, however, they became a taboo subject.

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anything else I have written
: Guber, 67; and RGALI, fond 1710, opis' 2, ed. khr., 8.

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in October 1951
: Guber, 67.

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new suggestions for the title
: These included “On the Volga,” “Soviet People,” and “During a People’s War” [RGALI, fond 1710, opis' 2, ed. khr., 1]. The earlier title “Stalingrad” had been abandoned after Sholokhov’s indignant, and anti-Semitic, response to Tvardovsky when the latter tried to enlist his support: “
Whom
have you entrusted to write about Stalingrad? Are you in your right mind?” [Lipkin, 534.]

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in
Literaturnaya gazeta
: Natalya Gromova,
Raspad
(Moscow: Ellis Lak, 2009), 337.

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for a Stalin Prize
: Anna Berzer,
Proshchanie
(Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 151.

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he was feeling badly sick
: Lipkin, 543–44; see also Gromova, 346–50.

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one timid gesture of protest
: Vasily Grossman,
Life and Fate
(London: Vintage, 2006), 656.

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anti-Soviet essence of the book
: In late 1952
For a Just Cause
was also accepted by Sovetsky pisatel', the publishing house which, in 1956, brought out what, according to Lipkin, Grossman considered the most complete version of the novel [Lipkin, 153 and 164]. Guber, however, has said that Grossman did further revisions for the edition published by Sovetsky pisatel' in 1964 (and republished in 1989). The State Military Publishing House (Gosudarstvennoe voennoe izdatel'stvo) was often referred to either as Voenizdat or Voengiz
.

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from Russian villagers
: Bocharov, 107.

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a number of European languages
: “The Hell of Treblinka” was translated into English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian, and Yiddish in 1945, and into Polish and Slovenian in 1946. There may have been other translations. Grossman’s article was also published in tandem with other accounts: with Simonov’s report on Majdanek, in German, in 1945; and with Jankiel Wiernik’s testimony, in Yiddish, in Buenos Aries in 1946.

"The Old Man”

First published in
Red Star (February 8, 1942).

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Kamyshevakha!
: Velika Kamyshevakha (Great Kamyshevakha) is a large village in the province of Kharkov.

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makhorka
: The very coarsest, strongest tobacco.

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Poltava
: Peter the Great’s victory over Sweden at the Battle of Poltava (1709) marked Russia’s emergence as a great power.

"The Old Teacher”

Written in 1943; first published in Znamya (July and August 1943).

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the Black Hundreds
: A nationalist—and violently anti-Semitic—movement in early-twentieth-century Russia.

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Zhitomir
: A town in western Ukraine, sixteen miles from Berdichev. On September 19, 1941, 3,145 Jews were shot just outside the town [Pohl, 35].

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Vinnitsa
: An industrial town in central Ukraine. About half the population of 60,000 were Jews. The police chief might have been supervising preparations for a bunker being built there for Hitler’s easternmost headquarters, Werwolf, and he might have been playing a role in massacres of Jews. Around 15,000 Jews were massacred in Vinnitsa on September 19–20, 1941 [Pohl, 37], and there was a second massacre in April 1942. Hitler first flew to Werwolf in mid-July 1942 and remained there until October; he was also there during February and March 1943. In early summer 1943, the SS invited international forensic experts to observe as they exhumed 9,432 victims of NKVD Purges from 1937 and 1938. Whether Grossman was aware of this is unknown. The exhumation took place around the time that he was writing “The Old Teacher,” though the story is set a year earlier, in the summer of 1942.

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“Was? Was?”
: “What? What?”

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aber er ist Jud
: “Here, a good doctor—but he is a Jew.”

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block warden
: In most of the Reich and the occupied territories, a block warden was a low-level Nazi Party organizer. Here Grossman imagines the Germans as making do with whatever collaborators they could find.

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my campfire shines
: A popular Russian song about friendship. The words are by the poet Arkady Polonsky (1819–98).

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to nach Haus or for to spazier
: Going home or going for a walk.

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when it comes down to it, are essential
: Becker is, of course, referring to the use of gas. Mobile vans were first used to gas large numbers of Jews in the Polish town of Chelmno, where at least 150,000 Jews were murdered between December 1941 and the summer of 1944. Nazi officials of every rank employed similar euphemisms with regard to the Shoah; transportation to the death camps, for example, was referred to as “resettlement.” The Final Solution is, of course, itself a euphemism. Claude Lanzmann has observed that the extermination of the Jews was “a nameless crime, which the Nazi assassins themselves dared not name, as if by doing so they would have made it impossible to enact.” [Claude Lanzmann,
Shoah
(Eureka, 1985), page 53 of the booklet accompanying the 2007 DVD of the film.]

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greatly slows down the work
: Probably an inaccuracy. According to Altshuler, “Most of the mass killing of the Jews in the Soviet Union was accomplished by machine gun...The Einsatzgruppen units, trained and prepared for this type of assignment, almost always took charge of the mass killings.” Altshuler continues, “Apparently, the reaction of most of the local population to the mass killings varied from joy at their fate, through indifference, to passive identification with the victims. All these feelings, contradictory as they might be, could be experienced by the same people in different situations and at different times.” [Altshuler, 176–77.]

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ten percent always drop out
: Christopher Browning [
Ordinary Men
(London: Penguin, 2001)], gives a similar figure, stating that around 10 to 20 percent of the members of a German police battalion involved in shootings and deportations to Treblinka accepted offers to be transferred to other work. Often, however, the composition of killing squads was arbitrary; soldiers were chosen at random, and they could not refuse.

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nervous strain
: There was concern among the higher echelons of both the Wehrmacht and the SS about the effect of the massacres on those who carried them out. It was this, in part, that lay behind the decision to move to the use of gas chambers. In late summer 1941, an SS Obergruppenführer (a rank equivalent to lieutenant general) said to Himmler, after they had watched a hundred Jews being shot on the outskirts of Minsk, “
Reichsführer
, those were only a hundred...Look at the eyes of the men in this commando, how deeply shaken they are. These men are finished [
fertig
] for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages?” [Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European Jews
(Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967), 218–19 and 646.]

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at such a sad moment
: There were, of course, unabashed sadists among the Gestapo and the SS, but there were also officers who liked to philosophize about what they were accomplishing on behalf of humanity.

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running up from one side
: After the war Grossman adapted this story for the stage. In the play, Kulish resists with still greater determination, his son becomes a partisan, and he himself joins Voronenko in throwing grenades at the commandant’s office [Bocharov, 153]. In 1947 Grossman’s play was turned down by the Vakhtangov Theatre. Grossman then hoped that it could be produced in Yiddish. The famous Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels agreed to play Rosenthal, but the production was canceled. In 1948 Mikhoels was murdered, at Stalin’s instigation, while on a visit to Minsk. His death was disguised as an accident. Mikhoels had said to Grossman and Lipkin, who had accompanied him to the Belorussian Station, “I’m certain I’ll play the part of the teacher. It’ll be my last role.” Lipkin’s account continues, “And so he never played his last role. Or rather he did play it, but not on the stage. Like the hero of Grossman’s play, he was killed by murderers. He was knocked down by a lorry on a dark Minsk night. He was killed by the same forces that killed Rosenthal.” [Lipkin, 592–93.]