The Road (36 page)

*
destroy the gravestones
: Grossman seems to have added this paragraph later. Though not in the manuscript, nor in any Soviet publications, it is included in the Russian text of
The Black Book
[available at http://jhistory.nfurman.com/shoa/grossman005.htm]. Grossman’s account is confirmed by Willenberg: “Kurt Franz ordered the foremen to go to the storeroom and procure two rabbinical black suits and a couple of black hats with pompoms on them. Two prisoners were equipped with whips and ordered to don this get-up...alarm clocks dangled from their necks on strings. They were called the
Scheisskommando—
the Shit Detail.” [Willenberg, 117.]

*
vile beasts, SS beasts
: Compare: “The great majority of Germans among the Treblinka personnel were young men aged 26–30, mostly married and with small children. They considered themselves special human beings, who had been given a difficult and responsible mission by the
Führer.
SS men debated with Engineer Galewski, the ‘camp elder’...about the superiority of the German race...about their sophisticated culture and the coming new order in Europe. They forced prisoners to organize choirs and orchestras, to dance, play football and box. Their commanders felt compassion for them in their hard service and they often sent them to Germany on leave. The German camp staff were concerned about their own well-being, and constantly worked on improving their living conditions. They tried to keep their barracks looking nice, by planting and tending flower gardens.” [Chrostowski, 41; see also Willenberg, 114–15.]

*
like a timid complaint
: Auerbach describes the road as being surfaced with “a weird mixture of coals and ashes from the pyres where the corpses of the inmates were cremated.” [In Donat, 70.] Auerbach may be mistaken about the coal, which is not mentioned in any other account.

*
120 to 130 kilos of ash
: A large part of the ashes was returned to the grave pits. Alternate layers of sand and ashes were covered by a two-meter layer of sand [Rajchman].

*
flash by in a single moment
: As noted, the
Totenjuden—
the Jews working and living in the extermination area—in fact numbered about 200. The “little happiness” they were supposed to hope for was a bullet in the back of the head—a quick death.

*
for an uprising
: The camp was divided into three zones: the living area (
Wohnlager
), the reception area (
Auffanglager
), and the extermination area (
Totenlager
). The living and reception areas were known as the Lower Camp, the extermination area as the Upper Camp. An organizing committee was formed in the Lower Camp in late February or early March 1943; an organizing committee was formed by the
Totenjuden
in the Upper Camp in late May or early June.

*
hid them in secret places
: Most of the various sources for the history of the uprising indicate that the armory was opened with the help of a key that the prisoners had copied. It also seems that the weapons were probably taken from the storeroom only on the afternoon of the uprising.

*
to provide the escapees with money
: The prisoners whose job it was to sort through the clothes and belongings of the dead often found money and valuables. It was not difficult to hide some of this away.

*
the secret remained a secret
: All the slightly different versions of this story agree that the Scharführer entered the barrack unexpectedly, taking Doctor Chorazycki by surprise, that Chorazycki took poison, and that Kurt Franz was enraged by the failure of another prisoner-doctor to save Chorazycki’s life.

*
with a revolver shot
: The uprising began thirty minutes earlier than intended. Afraid that the commander of the Lower Camp had gotten wind of their plans, one of the conspirators shot him. The uprising thus began before the conspirators had finished removing weapons from the armory and distributing them.

*
the moment of revenge
: Much of this, sadly, is exaggerated. For all their heroism—Sereny justly refers to the uprising as “one of the most heroic efforts of the war-time years in East or West” [Sereny, 236]—the rebels failed to capture any watchtowers. Nor did they kill any SS, although they did kill twelve to fifteen Wachmänner. Several barracks were burned down, but the camp received three more transports that month. The last of these—the last of all the transports to Treblinka—arrived on August 19. Around three hundred prisoners escaped during the uprising, but two-thirds of these were quickly recaptured or killed.

*
Sashko Pechersky
: On being first taken to Sobibor, Pechersky said, “How many circles of hell were there in Dante’s
Inferno
? It seems there were nine. How many have already passed? Being surrounded, being captured, camps in Vyazma, Smolensk, Borisov, Minsk...And finally I am here. What’s next?” [
Argumenty i fakty
(August 10, 2008).] For more than a year after escaping from Sobibor, Pechersky fought as a partisan. But when the Red Army liberated Belorussia, he and his fellow partisans—like most Red Army soldiers ever taken prisoner by the Germans—were conscripted into the special penal battalions for suspected traitors that were used as cannon fodder and for clearing minefields. Pechersky survived this too, was promoted to the rank of captain, and even received a medal for bravery. Appalled by Pechersky’s account of Sobibor, his battalion commander risked his own life, contravening regulations by sending Pechersky to Moscow to testify to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. “Uprising in Sobibor,” compiled by Pavel Antokolsky and Venyamin Kaverin on the basis of Pechersky’s testimony, was published in
Znamya
in April 1945; it was also included in the unpublished
Black Book
. In 1948, Pechersky was dismissed from his job as a theater administrator and arrested; only after Stalin’s death in 1953 and mounting international pressure on his behalf was he released. Pechersky died in 1990, never having received any medal or award for his heroism at Sobibor. In 2007 a small memorial plaque was placed on the side of the building where he had lived.

*
the blood of the innocent
: As if unable to believe how few SS there were in the camps, Grossman again exaggerates the numbers.

*
farewell to the ashes of their fellows
: In “A Year in Treblinka,” Wiernik writes that, during the minutes just before the uprising, “We silently bade farewell to the spot where the ashes of our brethren were buried.” [In Donat, 187.]

*
with guns in their hands
: These last two sentences are present in the manuscript but omitted from all published versions.

*
it too was burned down
: The Ukrainian’s surname was Strebel [Arad, 373].

*
earth as unsteady as the sea
: Franz Suchomel has said that when he first came to Treblinka in August 1942, “The ground undulated like waves because of the gas...Bear in mind, the graves were maybe eighteen, twenty feet deep, all crammed with bodies! A thin layer of sand, and the heat. You see?” [Lanzmann, 46.] Grossman, however, was in Treblinka in September 1944, more than a year after the corpses had been burned. The instability he describes may have had other causes. The ground was sandy, and the vast grave pits may not have been packed down firmly enough. We also know that local peasants had been digging up the ground in search of valuables that the Germans had failed to recover.

*
any human being can endure
: It is clear from the manuscript that this is the original conclusion, and that the remaining paragraphs were added later.

*
any uncommon expenditure
: Sereny quotes Glazar: “This is something, you know, the world has never understood; how perfect the machine was. It was only lack of transport because of the Germans’ war requirements that prevented them from dealing with far vaster numbers than they did; Treblinka alone could have dealt with the 6,000,000 Jews and more besides. Given adequate rail transport, the German extermination camps in Poland could have killed all the Poles, Russians and other East Europeans the Nazis planned eventually to kill.” [Sereny, 214.]

*
entire population of the earth
: The previous three and a half paragraphs, from “to commit mass murder” to “entire population of the earth,” were omitted from all published versions of this article. It is not known who was responsible for this omission.

"The Sistine Madonna”

Written in 1955; first published in Znamya (May 1989).

*
the Kishinyov pogrom
: This pogrom in April 1903, in the city now known as Chişinău (the capital of Moldova), was instrumental in convincing tens of thousands of Russian Jews to emigrate.

*
Przemyśl and Verdun
: In 1914–15, the Russians besieged Austrian forces in the fortress of Przemyśl (now in southeastern Poland) for 133 days; a soldier in
Stepan Kolchugin
says to a comrade that the shell holes there have become lakes of blood because no more blood can be absorbed by the earth. The battle of Verdun, fought between the French and German armies, lasted for most of 1916 and resulted in more than 250,000 deaths.

*
The Sistine Chapel
: Raphael’s painting is known as
The
Sistine Madonna
not because it ever hung in the Sistine Chapel but because it includes a portrayal of Pope Sixtus II, who was martyred in AD 258. This error does not, of course, invalidate Grossman’s juxtaposition of one of the most sublime, and one of the most infernal, moments of Western civilization. Pope Sixtus’s robe is decorated with the stations of the cross; this, perhaps, led Grossman to see the baby Jesus as going forward “to meet his fate.”

*
the Horst Wessel song
: A marching song written by Hans-Horst Wessel (1907–30), a Nazi activist killed during a brawl with a group of Communists. This song became the Nazi Party’s anthem.

*
Moabit prison
: The Gestapo used this Berlin prison as a detention center.

*
to the sands of Kazakhstan:
The mother and son have evidently been arrested as kulaks (supposedly exploitative peasants) and are now being deported.

*
in Konotop, at the station
: Konotop is a city in northern Ukraine. Grossman was seeing his mother off on a train to Odessa. He described this incident in 1930, in a letter to his father.

*
one place of exile to another
: Stalin was exiled to eastern Siberia several times. In 1903 he was sent to the village of Novaya Uda, in the province of Irkutsk. He arrived there on November 17, 1903, but escaped on January 5, 1903. In July 1913 he was exiled to Turukhansk, and in early March 1914 he was transferred to the small village of Kureika, north of the Arctic Circle.

PART THREE: Late Stories

*
usually considered his masterpiece
: The relationship between the two novels is hard to define.
Life and Fate
has been referred to as “a sequel” or “a semi-sequel” to
For a Just Cause
; it is also sometimes called the second half of a dilogy.

*
growing into a deeper feeling
: Nikita Zabolotsky,
The Life of Zabolotsky
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994), 321; see also 323–24 and 336.

*
the text he submitted
: Fyodor Guber,
Pamyat'i pis'ma
(Moscow: Probel, 2007), 99.

*
Lyolya Klestova
: Most published sources refer to this woman as Lyolya Dominikina. Korotkova has explained the origin of this confusion: she remembers Lyolya Klestova as one of the four people—along with herself, Zabolotskaya, and Grossman—who attended the funeral of Grossman’s father in 1956. Some time after Grossman’s death, Zabolotskaya told Korotkova that it was Klestova who had preserved the manuscript of
Life and Fate
in a locked suitcase under her bed in a communal apartment. Critics and journalists writing about Grossman knew from Zabolotskaya and Korotkova that the manuscript had been preserved by a woman called “Lyolya” but they confused this Lyolya with another Lyolya, the niece (or possibly daughter from a previous marriage) of a family friend by the name of Dominika, who had at one time been married to Grossman’s father. In his letters, however, Grossman refers to this other Lyolya not as “Lyolya Dominikina” but as “Dominika’s Lyolya” (
Dominikina Lyolya
). No one by the name of Lyolya Dominikina ever existed. Symbolically, however, it seems appropriate that the preservation of Grossman’s manuscript should be ascribed to a mythical figure. See also Yekaterina Korotkova, “O moyom ottse,”
Sel´skaya molodyozh´
(March 1993): 48.

*
ever considered so dangerous
: The OGPU confiscated two copies of the manuscript of
The Heart of a Dog
from Mikhail Bulgakov’s flat in May 1926; two years later, however, these were returned. A comparison of the authorities’ treatment of
Life and Fate
with their treatment of
Doctor Zhivago
is revealing. Pasternak showed
Doctor Zhivago
to friends and editors and even trusted the manuscript to the Soviet postal service; his offense lay not in writing the novel but in publishing it abroad.

*
with Lipkin and Klestova
: Before his death Grossman arranged for Klestova to give her copy to another old friend, Vyacheslav Loboda, who lived in a town about 150 kilometers from Moscow. In 1988 Loboda’s widow gave this copy to Guber and it was used to correct textual lacunae before the republication in Moscow of the text established by Yefim Etkind and Shimon Markish.

*
his vegetable garden
: Tatiana Menaker, “Posvyashchayetsya Vasiliyu Grossmanu,”
Narod moy
18, 30 (September 2007).

*
His walk became a shuffle
: Semyon Lipkin,
Kvadriga
(Moscow: Knizhny Sad, 1997), 582.