Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [65]
Vasily Grossman (1905–64) is often called the Leo Tolstoy of twentieth-century Russian literature for his novel Life and Fate. The nearly one-thousand-page epic depicts life during and after World War II on the Eastern Front, under German occupation, in the Nazi concentration camps, in the Soviet Gulag, and in the Soviet era. Because of Grossman’s denunciation of Soviet totalitarianism and of the anti-Semitism of the Soviet population that fell under the German occupation, the Communist regime banished his book’s publication in the early 1960s and made Grossman an effective dissident. The book’s manuscript was smuggled out of the USSR and first translated and published in French in 1980. The Russian version came to light only in Mikhail Gorbachev’s era.
Grossman started his writing career before World War II, but it was his four years as a war correspondent and his consequent research on crimes against humanity that allowed him to witness and gather the material for the book. While Grossman was engaged as a volunteer for the Red Army, his mother was trapped in July 1941 by the advancing Nazi troops in their native Ukrainian town of Berdichev. Herded into the ghetto, she was shot, along with tens of thousands of other Jews, in the town several weeks later.
In Life and Fate, the main hero, Victor—nicknamed Vityenka—receives a letter from his mother, a physician trapped in the ghetto. She describes what she believes will be the last days of her life, because she’s sure she’ll be killed. Here is an excerpt describing her leaving her apartment for the ghetto and how she has been abandoned by almost everybody—with the exception of a yard-dog and one man who continued to treat her as a human being.
An announcement was soon made about the resettlement of the Jews. We were each to be permitted to take 15 kilograms of belongings. Little yellow notices were hung up on the walls of houses: “All occupants are required to move to the area of the Old Town by not later than 6.00 p.m. on 15 July, 1941. Anyone remaining will be shot.”
And so, Vityenka, I got ready. I took a pillow, some bedclothes, the cup you once gave me, a spoon, a knife and two forks. Do we really need so very much? I took a few medical instruments. I took your letters; the photographs of my late mother and Uncle David, and the one of you with your father; a volume of Pushkin; Lettres de mon moulin; the volume of Maupassant with Une vie; a small dictionary… I took some Chekhov—the volume with “A Boring Story” and “The Bishop”—and that was that, I’d filled my basket. How many letters I must have written to you under that roof, how many hours I must have cried at night—yes, now I can tell you just how lonely I’ve been.
I said goodbye to the house and garden. I sat for a few minutes under the tree. I said goodbye to the neighbors. Some people are very strange. Two women began arguing in front of me about which of them would have my chairs, and which my writing-desk. I said goodbye and they both began to cry. I asked the Basankos to tell you everything in more detail if you ever come and ask about me after the war. They promised. I was very moved by the mongrel, Tobik—she was particularly affectionate towards me that last evening.
If you do come, feed her in return for her kindness towards an old Yid.
When I’d got everything ready and was wondering how I’d be able to carry my basket to the Old Town, a patient of mine suddenly appeared, a gloomy and—so I had always thought—rather callous man called Shchukin. He picked up my belongings, gave me 300 rubles and said he’d come once a week to the fence and give me some bread. He works at the printing-house—they didn’t want him at the front because of his eye trouble. He was a patient of mine before the war. If I’d been asked to list all the people I knew with pure, sensitive souls, I might have given dozens of names—but certainly not his. Do you know, Vityenka, after he came, I began to feel once more that I was a human being—it wasn’t only the yard-dog that still treated me as though