- Person
- Vasily Grossman
- Lived
- 1905–1964
- Field
- Novelist & war correspondent
- From
- Soviet
The story
By 1944 Vasily Grossman had spent three years at the front as a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. He had already seen the mass graves of Jewish communities in Ukraine, including in his home town of Berdichev, where his mother had been murdered in 1941. As a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, he took part in the inspection of the Nazi camps at Majdanek and Treblinka as the Red Army advanced into Poland.
Treblinka had been a Nazi extermination camp. After a revolt and breakout by Jewish prisoners, the SS had razed it to the ground, so little physical trace of its operation was left. Grossman described the earth of the site still giving up crushed bones, teeth, scraps of paper and clothing, as if refusing to keep its awful secret.
He interviewed former prisoners who had escaped, villagers who had lived within earshot and even captured guards, protecting the identities of the survivors, and he drew on material already published. From this he pieced together how the camp had worked, from the arrival of the transports to the gas chambers. His essay The Hell of Treblinka appeared in the literary journal Znamya in November 1944. The Claremont Review of Books calls it the first account in any language of the full horror of the death camps.
The essay was distributed at the Nuremberg trials as evidence for the prosecution. Its estimate of three million victims was far too high, the result of an error in calculating how many trains could arrive each day; historians now put the number at between 750,000 and 880,000. But its picture of the machinery of mass murder brought the reality of the Holocaust to readers when much of the world still did not grasp it.
The experience never left Grossman. His later novel Life and Fate follows a Jewish doctor, Sofya Levinton, on a transport to a death camp, where she chooses to stay with an orphaned boy rather than save herself. The Hell of Treblinka is available in English today in the collection The Road.
Why it matters
Grossman's Treblinka report helped expose the Nazi extermination camps to the world and served as evidence in bringing their perpetrators to justice.
About Vasily Grossman
Red Army correspondent who wrote one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp, then the novel Life and Fate, so dangerous to the Soviet state that the KGB “arrested” the manuscript.
More about Vasily Grossman
- Vasily Grossman reported from the front for over 1,000 daysRejected for combat, Vasily Grossman became a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda and spent more than 1,000 days at the front, from Moscow and Stalingrad to Berlin.
- Vasily Grossman helped compile The Black BookWith Ilya Ehrenburg, Vasily Grossman helped compile The Black Book, a documentary record of the Nazi murder of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union.
- Vasily Grossman bore witness to the Ukrainian famineIn his late novel Everything Flows, Vasily Grossman condemned the Soviet state and wrote of peasants effectively sentenced to death by starvation, a classic testimony to the Holodomor.
- Vasily Grossman asked Khrushchev for 'freedom for my book'After the KGB confiscated Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman wrote to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, insisting he was 'requesting freedom for my book'.
- Friends saved Vasily Grossman's 'arrested' Life and FateAfter the KGB seized Life and Fate, copies kept by friends survived. Andrei Sakharov photographed pages and Vladimir Voinovich smuggled the film abroad; it was published in 1980.
- Vasily Grossman's brave letter freed his wife in the TerrorIn 1937 Vasily Grossman became guardian of his wife Olga's two sons and wrote to NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov on her behalf. A friend called it great bravery. Olga was released.
Sources
- Vasily Grossman Wikipedia
- Heroic Witness Claremont Review of Books
- The Black Book of Soviet Jewry Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.