Bearing Witness: The War, the Shoah and the Legacy of Vasily Grossman
February 21, 2011 by Maxim D Shrayer
And once again, a feeling of superstitious terror took hold of the enemy: Were the ones attacking them people, could they be mortal?’ In a slightly modified form, these and other words from Vasily Grossman’s essay ‘The Direction of the Main Strike’ (1942) are engraved on Mamaev Kurgan memorial on a hill overlooking Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. Grossman’s words refer to the shock of Nazi forces as they faced the heroism of Soviet soldiers fighting under Stalin’s order: ‘Not a step back’.The Soviet victory at Stalingrad turned the tide of World War II, but it could not stop the Shoah. When the Soviet troops, Grossman embedded with them, came to the death camps in Poland in the summer of 1944, most of the Jews of Europe had been annihilated.
The Jewish-Russian writer and political thinker Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) is not identified as the source of the seething words carved out on the Stalingrad memorial. Grossman’s deletion—words ‘popular’ author ‘unknown’,— constitutes much more than a double twist of black Soviet humour. According to John and Carol Garrard, Grossman’s dedicated biographers, the absence of Grossman’s name on the Stalingrad memorial is an ‘open wound’ on the writer’s legacy. Fifty-nine year old Vasily Grossman died in Moscow of stomach cancer, devastated by the Soviet efforts to erase him from history. His novel Life and Fate, a comparative indictment of Stalinism and Hitlerism, had been ‘arrested’ by the KGB in 1961, leaving him free to die of illness and grief during the headiest years of the Thaw. ‘They strangled me in the back alley’, Grossman had said to Boris Yampolsky, author of the novel Country Fair (1940), a lament for Jewish life in the former Pale. Ironically, some of Grossman’s loyal official supporters were the ageing generals he had interviewed at Stalingrad, who understood his love for the ‘holy Red Army’ and the extent to which it had bolstered the war effort. In orchestrating Grossman’s literary death, the regime was symbolically murdering the legacy of the people’s war against Hitler while also pogromising the Soviet memory of the Shoah.
