- Person
- Vasily Grossman
- Lived
- 1905–1964
- Field
- Novelist & war correspondent
- From
- Soviet
The story
By the mid-1930s Vasily Grossman was an established writer in Moscow. He had published two collections of stories and a novel, and in 1937 he was accepted into the privileged Union of Writers. In 1935 he had begun a relationship with Olga Guber, the wife of his friend, the writer Boris Guber, and in May 1936, a few days after her divorce, he and Olga married. She had two young sons from her first marriage.
In 1937, at the height of Stalin's Great Purge, Boris Guber was arrested. Soon afterwards Olga was arrested too, accused of failing to denounce her previous husband as an enemy of the people, even though she had left him long before his arrest. In those years the families of the arrested were often swept up as well, and children could be taken to state orphanages.
Grossman acted quickly to protect them. He had himself registered as the official guardian of Olga's two sons, saving them from being sent to orphanages. He then wrote directly to Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, the secret police, who was overseeing the mass arrests and executions. Grossman pointed out that Olga was now his wife, not Guber's, and argued that she should not be held responsible for a man from whom she had separated long before his arrest.
Writing such a letter was extremely dangerous, since it drew the attention of the secret police to the writer himself. Grossman's friend, the poet Semyon Lipkin, said that in 1937 only a very brave man would have dared to write a letter like that to the state's chief executioner. Astonishingly, the appeal succeeded, and Olga was released.
Grossman's courage in standing up for his family, at a time when most people kept silent out of fear, foreshadowed the moral independence of his later writing. Decades later he would show the same nerve in appealing to Nikita Khrushchev to free his confiscated novel Life and Fate, and the experience of the Terror runs through that book and through Everything Flows.
Why it matters
Grossman's letter freed his wife from the Soviet prison system and protected two children, an act of personal courage under one of history's most brutal regimes.
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 wrote one of the first death-camp reportsVasily Grossman's 1944 essay 'The Hell of Treblinka' was among the first accounts of a Nazi death camp and was used as prosecution evidence at the Nuremberg trials.
Sources
- Vasily Grossman Wikipedia
- Heroic Witness Claremont Review of Books
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.