Written soon after the Soviet Army liberated eastern Ukraine from German occupation in mid-1943, the original manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s essay ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ was thought to have been lost after the Second World War. It first appeared in 1990 in the short-lived journal Vek, and is translated here into English for the first time. ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ is a powerful and historically significant essay: one of the earliest public statements about the mass murder of Jews in 1941 and 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine, it is also one of the first attempts in any language to systematically explain the ideological and material motives behind the genocide that Grossman calls the ‘greatest crime ever committed in history.’ ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ was initially rejected for publication in 1943 by the military newspaper Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda), where Grossman had earned a huge following from his reports of the Soviet Army’s harrowing defense and stunning victory at Stalingrad. The essay was then translated into Yiddish and published in the weekly paper of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Unity (Einikayt). It was published in two abridged sections and then discontinued. The Yiddish translation remained the only extant version of the essay after 1943, and was back-translated into Russian in 1985. In 1990, the original Russian manuscript (near three times the length of the back-translation) surfaced from Grossman’s estate and was published in Vek. The recovery of ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ in its original form allows us to trace the origins and development of Grossman’s historical, commemorative and literary writing about the ‘catastrophe’ (as the Shoah was known in Russian). Grossman expanded upon and modified many of the ideas in this essay in later writings, including ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ (used as documentary evidence of Nazi war crimes at the Nuremburg Trials in 1945), as well as his editorial work on the monumental anthology The Black Book, and his two greatest novels, For a Just Cause and Life and Fate. ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ also provides unique insight into Grossman’s initial reaction to the genocide as a Soviet Jew; in it he expresses both his pride in socialist principles and Soviet military power, and his desire to publicize and explain the exceptional nature of Jewish victimization at the hands of the Nazis, whose genocide had claimed the life of his own mother in the western Ukrainian city of his birth, Berdichev.

Polly Zavadivker

Ukraine Without Jews

When our forces enter the villages of Left-bank Ukraine under a volley of fire and the din of hand grenades, domestic geese rise up into the air. Flapping their enormous white wings, they circle above peasant huts, above lakes covered in water lilies, above fields and gardens.

There is something worrisome and strange in the heavy, arduous flight, and the sharp, alarming and sorrowful cries of these domestic birds. It is as if they are calling the soldiers of the Red Army to witness heartbreaking and frightening images of life, as if they are rejoicing at the arrival of our forces, simultaneously weeping with joy and lamenting, screaming of great losses, and of the tears and blood that have aged and salted the soil of Ukraine.

There is a long list of Ukrainian towns and villages where I found myself while working as a special correspondent for the paper Red Star. I was in Satrobel’sk, Svatov, Muntsisk, Tsapuika, Voroshilovgrad, Krasnodon, Ostro, Iasotin, Borispol, Baturin…I was in hundreds of villages, farms, settlements, and fishing outposts on the shores of the Desna and Dnieper, in steppe farms encircled by pastures, in solitary little tar houses existing in a constant shadow of huge pine forests, and in beautiful hamlets whose thatched roofs are hidden beneath canopies of fruit trees.

If one was to gather into a single place all of the stories and images that I witnessed during those days and months in Ukraine, it would amount to a horrifying book about colossal injustice: forced labor and secret beatings, children deported to Germany, burnt houses and looted warehouses, evictions onto squares and streets, pits where those suspected of having sympathy for or connections with partisans were shot, humiliations and mockery, vulgar cursing and bribes, drunken and erratic behavior, and the bestial depravity of reckless, criminal people in whose hands rested the fate, life, integrity and property of many millions of Ukrainian people for two long years. There is no home in a single Ukrainian town or village where you will not hear bitter and evil words about the Germans, no home where tears have not flowed during these past two years; no home where people do not curse German fascism; no home without an orphan or widow. These tears and curses flow like streams to an immense river of collective grief and fury; day and night, its troubles and pain roar beneath a Ukrainian sky that has been darkened by the smoke of raging fires.

There are also villages in Ukraine where one doesn’t hear any crying or see tear-filled eyes, villages that are ruled by silence and peace. I visited a village like this on two occasions—the first time on 26 September, and again on 17 October in 1943. This village, Kozary, lies on the ancient Kievan highway between Nezhiny and Kozelets.  I visited Kozary once during the day, and another time on a heavy autumn night. On both occasions silence and peace ruled over Kozary—the peace and silence of death.  The Germans burnt seven hundred and fifty homes here before Easter, and seven hundred and fifty families were burnt alive in these homes. No one, not a single child or old woman emerged from the flames. In this manner the Germans punished a village for having sheltered partisans.  Tall, dusty weeds had sprouted from the ashes. Wells were filled with sand and gardens were covered in wild grass.  A withered flower could be glimpsed among the weeds.  There is no one in Kozary with whom one can mourn, no one to talk to, no one to cry to. Silence and peace hang over dead bodies buried in homes that have been reduced to rubble and covered with weeds. This silence is more horrifying than tears and curses; it is a silence more terrifying than moans and piercing lamentation.

And it occurred to me that just as Kozary is silent, so too are the Jews in Ukraine silent. In Ukraine there are no Jews. Nowhere—not in Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, not in Iagotin. You will not see the black, tear-filled eyes of a little girl, you will not hear the sorrowful drawling voice of an old woman, you will not glimpse the swarthy face of a hungry child in a single city or a single one of hundreds of thousands of shtetls.

Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered.  Murdered are elderly artisans, well-known masters of trades: tailors, hatmakers, shoemakers, tinsmiths, jewelers, housepainters, furriers, bookbinders; murdered are workers: porters, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, furnace workers, locksmiths; murdered are wagon drivers, tractor drivers, chauffeurs, cabinet makers; murdered are millers, bakers, pastry chefs, cooks; murdered are doctors, therapists, dentists, surgeons, gynecologists; murdered are experts in bacteriology and biochemistry, directors of university clinics, teachers of history, algebra, trigonometry; murdered are lecturers, department assistants, candidates and doctors of science; murdered are engineers, metallurgists, bridge builders, architects, ship builders; murdered are pavers, agronomists, field-crop growers, land surveyors; murdered are accountants, bookkeepers, store merchants, suppliers, managers, secretaries, night guards; murdered are teachers, dressmakers; murdered are grandmothers who could mend stockings and bake delicious bread, who could cook chicken soup and make strudel with walnuts and apples; and murdered are grandmothers who didn’t know how to do anything except love their children and grandchildren; murdered are women who were faithful to their husbands, and murdered are frivolous women; murdered are beautiful young women, serious students and happy schoolgirls; murdered are girls who were unattractive and foolish; murdered are hunchbacks; murdered are singers; murdered are blind people; murdered are deaf and mute people; murdered are violinists and pianists; murdered are threeyear-old and two-year-old children; murdered are eightyyear-old elders who had cataracts in their dimmed eyes, cold transparent fingers and quiet, rustling voices like parchment; murdered are crying newborns who were greedily sucking at their mothers’ breasts until their final moments. All are murdered, many hundreds of thousands, millions of people.

This is not the death of individuals at war who had weapons in their hands and had left behind their home, family, fields, songs, books, customs and folktales. This is the murder of a people, the murder of homes, entire families, books, faith, the murder of the tree of life; this is the death of roots, and not branches or leaves; it is the murder of a people’s body and soul, the murder of life that toiled for generations to create thousands of intelligent, talented artisans and intellectuals. This is the murder of a people’s morals, customs and anecdotes passed from fathers to sons; this is the murder of memories, sad songs, and epic tales of good and bad times; it is the destruction of family homes and of burial grounds. This is the death of a people who had lived beside Ukrainian people for centuries, laboring, sinning, performing acts of kindness, and dying alongside them on one and the same earth.

There are descriptions of Jews in the works of all of our great writers who have depicted life in Ukraine—Gogol, Chekhov, Korolenko, and Gorky. How could it be otherwise? Who among us born and raised in Ukraine did not from their earliest years absorb a living portrait of Jewish people in the cities, shtetls and villages of Ukraine?  Remember Sabbath days when elders walked with their prayer shawls beneath poplar trees on quiet spring nights; remember old men standing on corners carrying on sly and clever conversations among themselves; remember self-important shtetl shoemakers, sitting on rickety stools in front of the rickety doors of their shops; remember naive, humorous signs hanging above the locksmith, hat-maker and tailor shops; remember bearded wagon drivers showered in bags of wheat flour tied up in their aprons; remember old ladies in dresses offering you candies and apples; curly-haired, black-eyed children running in the dusty streets, their curls and eyes sparkling next to the pale hair and eyes of their Ukrainian counterparts and mingling like flowers generously scattered upon the rich, soft Ukrainian soil. Our grandfathers lived here; our mothers, and the mothers of our sons were born here.  So much sweat and so many tears have been shed here that no one could think to call the Jew a stranger, or say that he is alien to this land.

I travelled and walked this land from the northern Donets to the Dnieper, from Voroshilovgrad in the Donbass to Chernigov on the Desna; I have walked along the Dnieper and looked out at Kiev. And during all this time, I met one single Jew. This was Lieutenant Shloyme Shmilevich Kipershtein. He fell into German entrapment in September of 1941 near the city Iagotin. His wife Vasilina Grigorievna Sokur, a Christian, had tried to pass him off as a Moldavian. The Gestapo brought her in for interrogation several times and came to her home two different times suspecting that her husband was a Jew, but she insisted that her husband’s name was Stepan, and his family name Novak. I met him, spoke with him, spent an entire evening listening to his stories, and all of us—Kipershtein, his wife, his fellow Christian neighbors, and I marveled at the fact that Kipershtein is alive and has not been killed. I did not meet any other Jews in Ukraine. Acquaintances told me that they had seen one Jew in Kharkov and one in Kursk; the writer Ilya Ehrenburg told me that he had met a Jewish female partisan somewhere in southern Ukraine. But that is all.

Where is the Jewish people? Who will ask the twentieth century’s Cain that dreadful question: where are the Jewish people who once lived in Ukraine? Where are hundreds of thousands of elderly people and children? Where are millions of people who three years ago toiled and lived on this earth in peaceful friendship with Ukrainians?

The people have been murdered, trampled in the earth.  It is neither meaningful nor possible to list the names of every victim, for all of them are equally innocent and must be counted, regardless of whether they were famous and world-renown scholars, or whether they were unknown, barely literate women living in quiet shtetls far from any railroads. Why name some of the victims but remain silent about others? But it is impossible to list an entire people by name. There is no sense in, and no possibility of naming all the places where Jews were murdered in great numbers during the fall of 1941 and summer of 1942. These executions took place in every large and small city and in every shtetl. The only thing that must be said is that if there were 100 Jews living in a small town, then 100 Jews were slaughtered, nowhere a single person less. If 55,000 Jews lived in a city, then in that city 55,000 Jews were killed, and never a single person less. These massacres, we must understand, were carried out according to finely detailed lists, lists that did not overlook hundred-year old elders or newborn babies. These lists ensured the death of every last Jew in Ukraine.

I travelled and walked this land from the northern Donets to the Dnieper, from Voroshilovgrad in the Donbass to Chernigov on the Desna; I have walked along the Dnieper and looked out at Kiev. And during all this time, I met one single Jew.

We must remember that mass murder was carried out uniformly, according to strict and elaborate instructions in which provisions were made for how to murder a person who was too senile to walk, and one who hadn’t yet left his mother’s arms or taken his first steps. It was announced in hundreds of towns that Jews would be sent to ghettos and were required to gather fifteen kilograms of baggage; and in hundreds of towns, they were then led to the outskirts and murdered with the latest automatic weapons.  Even now, even a year or two after the event, people who happened to see these executions still weep and lose their ability to speak upon recounting the images of horror and madness to which they became witnesses.

It is impossible to recount the names of all the colonels, generals, majors, captains, and lieutenants in the German army who assisted the Gestapo by organizing the execution of a people. It is impossible to recount the names of all the soldiers, lance-corporals, senior lancecorporals, non-commissioned officers, security guards and policemen who carried out this murder.

How is this murder different from the hundreds and thousands of people that the Germans executed elsewhere in fascist-occupied Europe? There is a difference, and it lies in the fact that the fascists execute French, Dutch, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian and Czech people for violating fascist rules and laws—hiding a switchblade or an old revolver, accidentally uttering an angry word, a young man refusing to abandon his elderly parents for a German labor camp, or offering a sip of water to a partisan. But the Germans execute the Jews only because of the fact that they are Jews. In their view, Jews have no right to be alive. To be a Jew is the greatest transgression, a crime that can be punished only by death. That is why all the Jews in Ukraine were murdered, and that is why they were killed in many countries in Europe. The majority of those killed were old women, the elderly, sick people and children. The reason for this is that able-bodied men, women and youth were able to retreat along with the Red Army and are now either fighting in its ranks or working on its behalf. Those who stayed behind in Ukraine did not have the strength to leave. It was these people—old people, sick people and children—whom the Germans killed in cold blood, annihilating all of them to a man.

As long as humanity has existed on earth, there has never been a murder of innocent and defenseless people as organized, massive, and as cruel as this one. This is the greatest crime ever committed in history, and history has known many crimes; it is written with blood. This is a matter of the murder of an entire people, the slaughter of millions of defenseless children, women and elders.  The Jews of Ukraine are no more.

Human consciousness is built in such an unfortunate, though perhaps also fortunate way that when people read or hear about a tragedy that has claimed millions of peoples’ lives, they are simply incapable of understanding the horrifying profundity of what took place. This limitation is a fortunate attribute of human consciousness because it protects people from moral suffering and insanity. This limit of human knowledge is equally terrible because it enables people to be lenient, superficial and morally passive.  But in this era, it seems to me, the life of individuals and entire peoples has been devalued, and the value of personal freedom has been trampled under the boot of Germanfascist dogma—and it is precisely now, as never before, that demands for moral purity and righteousness must be raised to unattainable heights, both with respect to our individual lives and to the State. It is not only Europe, but in fact all of humanity that stands on the threshold of extinction.  This immense earth has been transformed into a wasteland, thousands of its great cities have been blown up and burned down. The world war has taken millions of people who like animals live in pits and trenches, and flung them backwards to prehistoric times. H.G. Wells’ most dismal fantasies about imminent global catastrophe seem like harmless folktales in comparison to present-day reality.

This seething, amoral force came from National-Socialist Germany.

It was born from a sense of German racial exclusivity, from the deep and heartfelt conviction held by contemporary Germans that they are the chosen people; that their happiness, tranquility and security are the only sacred things on earth. This is an ideology of exclusivity, of suspicion and indifference to the suffering of other nations, and of sentimental pathos for one’s own people.  This consciousness is the scourge of present day humanity, and it was aroused in Germany. It has led her down a path of bloody crimes, and it shall bring her to the precipice of cruel defeat.

Do Hitler and the German fascist leaders all truly believe that Jews are Germany’s foremost enemies, or that their annihilation is necessary for Germany’s happiness? Of course not. These people consciously produced this bloody propaganda.

In our times, the equality of all people constitutes the highest moral principle of humanity.  Racism is the exact opposite of this principle.  People will ask me, ‘are the Germans a nation of murderers and criminals, then?’

No! For we believe in the great principle of equality of the world’s peoples. We know that the German people have not only produced Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Rozenberg; not just the Hohenzollern and Krupp dynasties; not only Stennes and Guderian, Ley and Ribbentrop, Horst Wessel and Nietzsche. This is the same people who produced Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Feurbach, Marx, Engels, and the great martyr Liebnekht. It produced the enlightened wisdom and pure soul of August Bebel, and has borne thousands of proletarian fighters, hundreds of humane and modest social and scholarly activists, and many kind women and sincere old workers.  When the war is over, will we tell the German people, ‘You are murderers: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’?  Will we avenge the murder of a people by killing another?

No. Democracy’s victory will not only be a victory of weapons. There will be a true victory when the dark force of racism is finally reduced to ashes. Germans will understand that the idea of racial exceptionalism is a criminal and false one, and that their happiness and peace are not the only sacred things in the world. This victor will endure because of the mighty power of weapons, which will force the Germans to always know that all people are equally entitled to life on earth. The raised sword is answered with the language of the sword. This is the sacred logic and morality of contemporary war.  But today we are still at war, and Hitler’s obedient murderous gang, fascist Germany, is spilling innocent blood.

I had the chance to talk to dozens of German POWs.  Our conversations took place amidst the smoky ruins of devastated cities and villages. We talked about mass murder, about executions of Ukrainian and Russian populations, and about the complete destruction of the Jewish people, and I did not once detect in them a sense of humiliation, despair, or desire to disavow the disgraceful crimes associated with the name of Germany. With extraordinary naivet., all of them espoused the view that ‘crimes against humanity’ are not really crimes because their purpose is to benefit Germany. These soldiers could explain every act in terms of its instrumental value, and many of them said that the execution of the Jewish people had in fact turned out to be useless, and that mass murder and the burning of hundreds and thousands of villages had not brought Germany the advantages that had been expected from these measures. It is from this point of view that they judged the massive crimes committed by Germany.

Why did National-Socialist Germany become the executioner of the Jewish people? I want to raise this particular question not only because I myself am a Jew, and not only because those closest to me were victims of fascist bloodshed.

The treatment of Jews expressed contemporary fascist German ideology and tactics in their crudest and most complete and final form. The Germans did not commit such bestial, inhumane violence, lacking all traces of humanity, against any other people on earth. For fascism, hatred for the Jews became paramount; it was the fuel for its fire. Anti-Semitism became the universal weapon of fascism.

The significance of anti-Semitism lies in the fact that a war against Jewry is a formula suited to the war that Germany wanted to wage against the world. Given present circumstances, Jews do not have their own state, and are scattered across all parts of the world. One finds Jews among American capitalists, English social activists, Russian communists, and French anarcho-syndicalists.  This is very convenient for a state and people that have raised the black flag of war against all states and all peoples of the world. By selecting the Jews as victims of its demagogy, National-Socialism freed its hand against every nation and social class. It was able to declare war both on Marxism and the new structure of Russian society, and on plutocratic England, America and France; in a word, it was able to declare war against the world. This choice of victims constituted the first decision made by the criminal, jingoist National-Socialists.

Anti-Semitism has always been the banner, weapon and wool used by reactionaries to blindfold the masses.  It has always been an opiate in dark times when ruling minorities sought to deceive the masses, and deflect the righteous anger of the oppressed. National-Socialism came to power in Germany during a period when reaction had gripped every stratum and class within German society.  Reactionary politics won out in Germany after its defeat in the imperialist war of 1914. Blinded by national egoism, every strata of German society had invested different hopes in an eventual victory. But the war failed to resolve the conflicts of the modern capitalist world, and the Treaty of Versailles proved equally unable to resolve them. The solution to these conflicts lies in the great and sacred principles of brotherhood and equality of all peoples; it lies in the eradication of imperialistic conflict between states, the elimination of class structure in society, and in the creation of a collective means of production and a just distribution of goods.

But to its own misfortune, humanity did not have the strength to complete this task.

At that point, National-Socialism led onto the executioner’s block a universal and eternal, tried and true, defenseless and therefore desirable enemy: the Jew. With no law and no army to defend him, the Jew is an optimal target for the wrath of a weak underdog.

‘You fear proletarian revolution,’ the Nazis told Germany’s capitalists, ‘you fear communism, which is a hundred times more frightening to you than the Versailles Treaty. We too fear the proletarian revolution. Let us unite against the Jews. They are, after all, the eternal origin oftrouble and bloody rebellion; it is they who as orators and authors of revolutionary books inflame and agitate the masses; they who created the idea of class struggle and proletarian revolution!’

To the toiling German masses the Nazis said, ‘You suffer the consequences of the Versailles Treaty; you are hungry and out of work. The heavy burden of reparations has fallen on your weary backs. But just look at whose hands turn the wheel—it is the hands of Jewish tycoons, Jewish bankers, kings without crowns in America, France and England. Your enemies are our enemies; come, and let us fight together.’

Addressing the German intelligentsia, the Nazis said ‘You are humiliated, your ideals have been shattered. No one needs your talents or knowledge. You, salt of the earth, are doomed to become waiters and taxi drivers. Don’t you see the cold and merciless eyes of world Jewry gazing at you like a fog encircling Germany? Let us fight on behalf of our national honor and trampled earth, let us together extinguish the decaying world of Jewry.’

Having reached this dead end, Germany blindly followed National-Socialism. It was pushed onto this path by defeat and reaction. But not by these things alone, no.  Germany had been prepared for this path over the centuries by a culture of national and political egoism. Germany had never lost faith in the strength of its clenched fist to knock the world flat. It had always continued to believe in the sanctity of righteous war, and regarded the strategic plans of its military as its highest social ethic. And so, ten years ago Germany finally became wedded to National-Socialism. The explosive interaction of historical factors and a reactionary atmosphere became the second reason why National-Socialism felt compelled to choose the Jewish people as victims of its criminal demagogy.

And the final reason: fascism is profoundly opposed to the idea of equality among nations, of the brotherhood and unity of all peoples of the world. The foundational principle of fascism, after all, is a belief in the master German race.  Fascism therefore decided to construct a great ladder of forced labor of nations. It resolved to poison each nation against all others: to place the Dutch and Danes on the highest rungs of the ladder of punishment in order to show them that they are better off than the Norwegians and French; to poison the French with an awareness of the petty privileges they have over the Czechs and Greeks; to place the Serbs further down, and appease them with the fact that Ukrainians and Belorussians stand below them on the bottom rungs. And finally, fascism resolved to frighten this whole entire colony of peoples, its ladder of oppression, with the horrible abyss of non-existence it had prepared for the Jewish people.

But for fascism it was not enough to scare the Ukrainians with the destruction of the Jewish people, or to placate their fear with the notion that they had at least been granted existence on the ladder of forced labor. Fascism hoped for more than this; it hoped to infect Ukrainians with hatred for the Jews and to deceive them by spreading the idea that Jews were to blame for all the poverty, misfortune and burdens that had devastated Ukraine.  The principle to divide and conquer, and to poison enslaved and doomed nations with hatred for one another was the third factor that compelled Adolf Hitler to embark on a bloody provocation, and to lead millions of defenseless women, elderly people and children to the executioner’s block.

Do Hitler and the German fascist leaders all truly believe that Jews are Germany’s foremost enemies, or that their annihilation is necessary for Germany’s happiness?  Of course not. These people consciously produced this bloody propaganda. They are unprincipled by the very fact of their existence, and people without principles do not possess and are not capable of possessing any beliefs.  Their actions are guided solely by temporary circumstances and pragmatism. While I may disagree with President Roosevelt on several issues, I am absolutely certain that regardless of how much circumstances might change, Roosevelt’s principles would remain the same.  There is infinitely greater integrity, honesty and room for partnership in this persistence of values (even regarding matters where there are great differences of opinion), than there is in the conformism, deceit, and sudden shifts of sham ideology that constitutes the extremes of German National-Socialism.

At this point I wish to express some ideas about the inner essence of anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism exists in every country in the world and has existed throughout human history. It can be found even in contemporary democratic states. Its character changes in different times and places, of course.  Anti-Semitism in England and anti-Semitism in tsarist Russia are not the same thing. Its appearance depends on reactionary forces, such as deceitful attempts of ruling powers to explain and ameliorate social and ideological discontent. Anti-Semitism is a paradigmatic conflict with no solution. The period of post-revolutionary reaction in Russia between 1905 and 1911 has become known for bloody Jewish pogroms and charges of ritual murder. But the great Russian Revolution was a period of history that did not know anti-Semitism. Here I am speaking of state anti-Semitism, that is, of the willful incitement of anti-Semitism by a government apparatus.

In addition to state anti-Semitism, there is also so-called ‘ideological’ anti-Semitism. Ideological anti-Semitism is a phenomenon born of a physiological need to explain human and global problems by examining them in a looking glass rather a mirror. One finds ideological anti-Semites primarily among educated people. When the great Dostoevsky blamed the Jews for impoverishing the masses in Russia’s borderlands, he merely substituted the invisible and mysterious historical process that had produced bourgeois, feudal Russian society with the idea that Jewish commercial circles had supposedly invaded Russia.  Mid-nineteenth century Russia experienced an intense growth in capitalist relations. Petty buyers and sellers, small factory owners, and contractors began to appear everywhere, destroying the old means of production to benefit themselves, and ruining idyllic relations between feudal lords and their serfs.

Anti-Semitism became the universal weapon of fascism….A war against Jewry is a formula suited to the war that Germany wanted to wage against the world.

Dostoevsky saw the new relations, but he did not, or perhaps could not see the new qualities and types of Russian people—the plundering buyers, merciless leasers, and greedy factory owners—who accompanied them. He did not sense that Russian people had changed at all, and this meant that some other people who were not Russians had introduced the new qualities into life. These were the Jews: people who had no love for the system of Russian patriarchy, and no connection to the soil; people who were driven only by a hunger for profit, and who regarded the toiling masses with cold indifference. Dostoevsky saw these features in the Jewish merchant and developed a profound hatred for him. But the one thing he failed to understand was that by looking at the Jewish trader, Jewish leaser, and Jewish middle-man, he was only gazing at a mirror that showed him a magnified image of the new Russian bourgeoisie, frantically evolving in hundreds and thousands of Russian villages, provincial cities, capitals and far-flung hamlets.

This phenomenon has repeated itself throughout all of Jewish history. The medieval Spanish inquisition that burned Jews at the stake did not grasp the fact that it held up the Jews as a mirror of its own rigid intolerance, orthodoxy and backwards prejudice; that by burning Jews, it was contending with flaws that had grown up inside its own heart. When Russian reactionary thinkers perceived the Jews as the source of a revolutionary epidemic, they did not and perhaps could not know that they were seeing a reflection of a Russia that was unconsciously birthing a revolution in thousands of its factories, plants and mines, and in its universities and army barracks. Ideological anti-Semitism cannot and does not want to understand this.  One can put it this way: ‘Tell me what you blame on the Jews, and I will tell you what you are guilty of yourself.’

What did the Nazis blame on the Jews?  They accused them of the seven deadly sins. The paradoxical, remarkable thing is that the portrait that the Nazis painted of Jews—their supposedly fanatical racism, thirst for global power, hunger to enslave and recklessly rule over humankind—was in fact a self-portrait. By endowing Jews with the traits, flaws and criminal intentions that were raging in their very own hearts, National-Socialism fatefully repeated what previous anti-Semites had done throughout the ages.

The Germans are now being expelled from Ukraine.  Every day the glorious, weary earth is being liberated, as if a flood of muddy, filthy German hatred is receding and in its wake, bread is once again beginning to rise, hunched black trees, bushes and forests are straightening themselves out, and the sun and wind are drying out soil that is soaked with blood and tears. People are speaking in normal voices again and looking at the world with open eyes. Millions of people have been freed from slavery.

Ukraine was one of the fascists’ most important prizes. Its discussions about Ukraine had begun as early as 1933. And now, it is in the process of losing—it has already lost—Ukraine. Fascism failed to understand (how could it possibly understand?) the strength of our people’s resistance, their great spirit and undying sense of human worth. Fascism did not understand the power of the Soviet system! A system that endured trials of adversity in the Revolution, Civil War and period of great construction.  Fascism misunderstood and underestimated the friendship of nations among the peoples of the Soviet Union, and crudely dismissed the Union as a ‘geographic concept.’ Fascism was incapable of fathoming that the Soviet Union is the noble, triumphant and courageous soul of liberated humanity.

Fascism did not gauge the strength of our Red Army; its powerful reserves, courage, technical power. It failed to see that this army is immortal, that its generals, soldiers, tanks, guns and planes are the creations of an immortal people. With its boorish, small and primitive mind fascism attempted to change the march of history. German fascism understood nothing and was mistaken in everything.

By endowing Jews with the traits, flaws and criminal intentions that were raging in their very own hearts, National-Socialism fatefully repeated what previous anti-Semites had done throughout the ages.

The Germans failed to deceive Ukraine because its people cannot be deceived. The senseless and horrifying murder of elders, women and children transformed Ukraine into a nightmare. In Ukrainian towns and villages, people speak with profound empathy for the victims, and with repulsive hatred for the butchers who committed a mass murder of Jews in the fall of 1941 and summer of 1942.

Khristia Chuniak, a forty year old peasant from the village Krasilovka, in the Brovary district of Kiev oblast, described to me how the Germans led a Jewish doctor named Feldman to be executed in Brovary. This Feldman was an old bachelor who had adopted two Christian boys and was loved by everyone. A group of weeping and lamenting peasants went to appeal to the German commanding officer so that he would spare Feldman’s life.  The women’s tears moved the commander, and he agreed.  This was in the fall of 1941. Feldman continued to live and work as a doctor in Brovary, and he was executed in the spring of 1943. Khristia Chuniak described how the old man had to dig his own grave; apparently he had to die alone, for by the spring of 1943 there were no longer any living Jews. As she came to the end of the story, she sobbed and openly wept. The sorrow-filled words of this simple story expressed with astonishing clarity Ukraine’s relationship to its murdered Jewry.

No one believed the fascist propaganda that Jews were preparing to enslave Ukraine and take over the world.  Ukrainians were familiar with Jews after generations of working, growing old and dying beside them on the same earth, and working people have always been free and estranged from anti-Semitism in all of its forms. Towns with large Jewish populations like Berdichev had never even known anti-Semitism. Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and Jews always lived and worked together in friendship in these towns.

And so a great people, simple and wise, figured out the eternal tragedy of the Jewish people, and understood something that many educated reactionaries could not: they understood the inner essence of anti-Semitism. The people knew that the Germans were themselves guilty of whatever crimes they had blamed on the Jews, that the concepts of world domination, bloody racism, suspicion, and hatred had been imported by the fascists themselves.  The people knew who had tormented, humiliated and robbed them; they understood why the Germans shouted day and night about the criminal Juden. Once they understood this, they bowed their heads in sympathy and grief for the executed Jews, and with silent contempt, they clenched their teeth and glared at the Nazis.

The people understood the inner essence of fascist anti-Semitism, and with their simple and wise vision, they saw through a mirror of lies and looked deep into the eyes of the butchers of modern humanity. This is how they defeated the goal of National-Socialism, a goal that led Germany to put an entire people on the executioner’s block, and commit a crime unprecedented in all of human history.

In gullies and deep ravines, in anti-tank ditches of sand and clay, under heavy black soil, and in swamps and pits, there lie hastily flung bodies of professors and workers, doctors and students, old people and children.

No sound of tears or moaning; no sight of faces drawn from suffering. Jews are silent with the dreadful silence of the village Kozary on the old highway to Kiev.  The wind carries sand onto enormous common graves.  Grass has grown on the fields of death. Tall poplar trees flutter above the earth, like dark flags folded in a sign of mourning.

Silence and peace.

Oh, if the murdered people could be revived for an instant, if the ground above Babi Iar in Kiev or Ostraia Mogila in Voroshilovgrad could be lifted, if a penetrating cry came forth from hundreds and thousands of lips covered in soil, then the Universe would shudder.

The Yiddish version ‘Ukraina on yidn’ appeared in Einikayt on 25 November 1943 and 2 December 1943; for the Russian back-translation from the Yiddish, see ‘Ukraina bez evreev,’ trans. Rokhl Baumvol’, in Vasilii Grossman, Na evreiski temi, ed. Shimon Markish ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliya, 1985) vol.2:333-340. The complete Russian version of ‘Ukraina bez evreev’ on which the present translation is based may be found in VEK: Vestnik Evreiskoi Kultury, no. 4 (Riga, 1990): 1-8

Published with the kind permission of the Grossman Estate, courtesy of Andrew Nurnberg Associates Ltd

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.

Born Iosif Grossman but accustomed to being called Vasya (diminutive of Vasily), Grossman adopted the emblematic Jewish-Russian pen name ‘Vasily Grossman’. His first novel, Glück Auf!, a Soviet Germinal devoid of desire or violence, is stronger and less formulaic than his next novel Stepan Kolchugin (1937-1940), a story of a working class youth’s path to Bolshevism. His early prose of the 1930s is a search for his own voice, via the styles and artistic devices of other Soviet writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Perhaps Grossman’s greatest inspiration was Chekhov (he would title one of his Stalingrad essays ‘Through Chekhov’s Eyes’; the essay zoomed in on the experience of the famous sniper Anatoly Chekhov). To write in a form that resisted pathos and narrative closure would remain a lifelong aim, even as a Tolstoyan novelistic ambition pulsed in his temples. These early works gave little indication of the authorial voice Grossman would acquire in 1941 at the war front reporting from the trenches, gathering his material directly from the fighting soldiers. There is courage and sacrifice in his wartime articles, but there is also humour and tenderness; despite being a time of personal trauma the war against Nazism was also, for Grossman, a time of glory—literary, civic, and military. For him and many other Jewish soldiers, including poets and novelists serving as military journalists, this was a war with double the cause and double the commitment. (In the notebooks, Grossman recorded a comment by a Jewish commanding officer that ‘in a war like this Jews should be fighting like fanatics’).

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I was sixteen when I first met the poet Yehuda Amichai. It was the summer after my junior year of high school. I was still the star of the film of my life, then, and a soundtrack followed me wherever I went. If I’d met Amichai at another moment — even a year earlier, when I was too little formed to be so radically changed; or a year later, when I was already well into my solidification — it’s unlikely that I’d be writing about him now. Or writing at all.
I was traveling across Israel that summer, on a program intended to foster a generation of young Jewish leaders. We saw sights, smoked a fair amount of pot, played a fair amount of the Jewish version of basketball (characterized by a lot of arguing over esoteric rules), and endeavored to couple.
In the course of the summer, we met with an eclectic cast of Israeli figures: politicians, artists, activists, archeologists, soldiers, kibbutzniks and theologians. Our summer’s final meeting was with Amichai. It’s hard to imagine why he agreed to spend time with us. Perhaps the fellowship was paying him. Perhaps it was a personal debt he owed to one of the organizers. Perhaps he actually bought into the premise of the thing, and genuinely believed — as we never could, thank God — that we were Future Jewish Leaders, that his words might redirect us, if only by a few thousandths of a degree, toward some version of Jewish Leadership that he found palatable or even inspiring.
I had never heard of Amichai before that day, and by that point in August had had my fill of imparted wisdom. We were herded into a small, humid classroom: a grid of plastic seats with metal legs and wood veneer, chipboard desks for righties. I was sitting beside a young woman, R, with whom I’d been frustratingly trying to mate all summer. I don’t know to what extent that frustration — that life-affirming, joy-denying, self-making-and-destroying frustration — influenced Amichai’s impact on me, but I doubt that afternoon would have been so important to me if I’d entered the room contented.
I’ve kept exactly one diary in my life, and that only because it was one of the conditions of the Israel program. The diary began on July 6 with these words: ‘I am on a plane heading for Israel. I am sitting next to R. She is beautiful and extremely amiable.’
Four days later, on July 10, I wrote, ‘Last night, R and I talked together on a hill overlooking the Old City. It became clear after a short period of time that we had a lot, in fact almost everything, in common. She is fantastic. I feel 100% comfortable talking to her about almost everything, from our families to music to God. I sincerely hope that our friendship doesn’t end with the summer.’
On July 14, eight days after meeting her, I wrote: ‘R had a minor asthma attack today. We sat next to each other on the bus and I asked her if she didn’t, hypothetically, have a boyfriend, would we be lovers? She thought so, as did I. I won’t pursue it. Maybe I should get my head shaved as some sort of metaphor for this relationship.’
The afternoon of July 29, shortly before meeting Amichai, I came back to the dorms and opened my journal to write in it. I found the following: ‘Dear Jonathan, Don’t worry, I didn’t read your journal. I am sixteen going on seventeen. I hear you on the stairs and I can’t write any more.’
What does it mean to tell someone you haven’t read his journal? That you were tempted to read it, but chose not to? That the thought never crossed your mind, but because journals are so potentially nuclear, you want to set his mind at ease? That in fact you read it, of course you did, but by saying you didn’t, you and he can continue with a charade of mutual ignorance?
She hadn’t read my journal. I was in love with her precisely because she was the kind of person who would not read a journal whose pages were sure to be filled with statements of love for her. Which meant I was never able to state that love to her, because I couldn’t do it in life.
An hour after walking out of that meeting with Amichai, I could remember very little of what he said. Ten years later, I can remember — or feel that I can remember — virtually every word. Impressions usually work in the other direction — they diminish with time. Memory always seems to. Nietzsche said that everything we have words for is already dead. To follow this path, the people we speak to become the coffins for our words. This feels true most of the time. But Amichai was a great exception in my life. I became a greenhouse for his words.
I’ve returned to many, many things he said that afternoon, but one has stood out: ‘I wish there were two more commandments. The eleventh would be: don’t change. The twelfth would be: change.’ (In an only slightly altered form, it wound up in my first novel.) We were sixteen going on seventeen, and he was asking us to always stay sixteen, to always be so frustrated, so unsatisfied, romantic, angered by boredom, inspired by uncertainty, demanding, disappointed and unrealistic. And at the same time to become men and women. That afternoon has changed and stayed the same for me, remained still like a city in a snow globe, while also moving with me into my present, through my fingers and onto this page.

II.

The second time I met Yehuda Amichai was in my sophomore year of college. I was twenty, a long four years older than when we first met. He had come to Princeton to give a reading. In anticipation of his visit, I made a small, sculptural gift for him out of a snow globe I’d emptied and refilled as a kind of surreal diorama. I intercepted him in the hallway, reminded him of our first meeting in Jerusalem, told him how much his words had come to mean to me, and presented him with the gift.
He took the box and nodded. I don’t know what I was expecting, but that wasn’t enough.
‘You can open it now,’ I said.
He removed the tissue paper from the box, and the snow globe from the paper. After examining it from all sides, he said what I thought was a very earnest ‘Thank you.’ And then he put it back in the box.
What was I expecting? I didn’t know. Perhaps if I’d developed a clear image of how I wanted him to respond, I would have been able to dismiss it as preposterous. Instead, I was left with the feeling that he didn’t sufficiently appreciate my appreciation, that the gift hadn’t meant anything to him. He turned and walked away.
At the reading, he spoke with great beauty, and at great length, about nothing in particular. (And not that it matters, but he didn’t repeat a single thing I’d heard in Israel.) I remember the buzz as people left the room. We had witnessed something special, something life-changing and contagious. I can only imagine that many went home to write or have sex.
Among the dozen poems he read that afternoon was, ‘A Man Doesn’t Have Time,’ the poem I had used as my yearbook page upon graduating high school halfway between our two meetings. It’s an argument against Ecclesiastes: we don’t have time for every purpose and so must, in the same moments, laugh and cry, hate and forgive, remember and forget, throw stones and gather them together.
A man doesn’t have time. The easy (and not incorrect) interpretation is that life is short, and so we must pack our experiences tightly, often one atop another. We shouldn’t expect the seams to hold.
But I like to think he also meant something different, more nuanced. Man doesn’t have time because he exists outside of it, changing and unchanging, always returning to his past and engaging with his future. We were never 16 going on 17. We were 16 going on 16, and 3, and 77. In 2000, 5 years after I gave him the snow globe, Amichai died at 76 years old. There was still one more meeting ahead of us.

III.

My first son was born on January 25, 2006. The following January, my family moved to Berlin for four months. While there, I gave a phone interview to an Israeli journalist, on the occasion of the Hebrew translation of my second novel. As we were getting off the phone, she said, ‘I almost forgot. One more thing. Do you know any Israeli literature?’ Among the writers I mentioned was Amichai. And for whatever reason, I then told the story of the snow globe I’d given him. It was the first time I’d mentioned it to anyone, as it felt so unimportant, and there was something embarrassing about the imbalance of regard. I’d spent hours making the thing, and rehearsed what I wanted to tell him. He received it with a nod, and for all I knew, proceeded to toss it in a garbage can.
A few weeks later, I received this e-mail:

Dear Jonathan,
Please let me introduce myself: my name is Hana Amichai and I am Yehuda Amichai’s widow. I read your interview in the Israeli paper Maariv, and was very moved by your words on Amichai. I wanted to tell you that he brought home your glass object, saying he got it in one of his readings. My children liked it and got hold of it. I do not know where it is now.
Thank you,
Hana Amichai

Two years after that, I returned to Israel, this time as a professional writer participating in a literature festival. My wife and I spent an afternoon with Hana at her home in Jerusalem. We ate almond-stuffed dates in her living room, drank cappuccino from her new machine, had the history of our view of the Old City explained to us, heard the story of Amichai’s death. I kept thinking some version of, Why didn’t I know then what I know now?
Why didn’t I write him letters? Why didn’t I insist on another meeting, which could have been done easily enough. (I’ve since heard of a number of people who got to spend time with him this way.)
Why didn’t I realize that he wasn’t going to live forever?
Because I was too young? Because he did live forever?
R, who is one of my closest friends, wrote me the following in 2004, ten years after I met her on the plane to Israel: ‘But still, I find myself not quite happy, but invigorated, realizing that while I might not leave the world a better place, I am, everyday committed to acting like I can. This fills me with a bigger-than-myself swelling, the swelling that has been keeping me up at night: the world never seems to get dark enough for me to sleep easily these days.’
Did Amichai meet with us that afternoon because he wanted to leave the world a better place? Is it ridiculous even to wonder such things? What motivated his writing? Why did he meet with us that afternoon in Israel?

My first son is named Sasha, after my wife’s grandmother. In a few weeks he will be three years old. One week ago today, my second son was born. We named him Cy Amichai Foer — Cy for my wife’s grandfather, Amichai for the poet. A good friend of ours, who was a good friend of the poet’s, sent us a book of Amichai’s, which Amichai had inscribed to him: ‘For Leon / with love, Amichai.’ Below this inscription our friend wrote: ‘For Amichai / with love, Leon.’ I’ve never encountered a more powerful expression of the declension of life, the generational giving and taking, the reading and writing of each other that has no beginning or end, yet is all the time beginning and ending. The book’s title is Time.

The Snow Globe is reprinted from Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, edited by Elizabeth Benedict (Free Press/Simon & Schuster). Copyright (c) 2009 by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Jonathan Safran Foer is appearing at Jewish Book Week 2010. www.jewishbookweek.com

Thomas was an English-speaking European, born in Sri Lanka. His parents had a penchant for Eastern meditation. His mother was a Spanish artist, who had a disconcerting habit of  leaving the table in the middle of a meal to stand on her head in a corner. His father was a Swedish architect, who would go out for a short walk and forget to return for several days. Unsurprisingly, Thomas too was an unconventional character. From the mid-1950s he was studying civil engineering at the Federal Institute of  Technology in Zurich. When he decided to apply for permanent residence in Switzerland he began his CV with the words: ‘My father and mother met on an adventurous journey to India.’ I warned him that this would not predispose the Swiss authorities in his favour, but he insisted and was duly turned down.

I was born in Transylvania, a territory that has been shunted to and fro between Hungary and Romania as long as I can remember. When one of my daughters mentioned this at her English school, the teacher corrected her: ‘Transylvania exists only in horror films.’ In fact there was enough real horror, and for the Jews the worst came in the last year of World War II, in March 1944, when German troops invaded Hungary to prevent it defecting to the Allies. They were accompanied by Adolf Eichmann, and within two months half a million Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. I was lucky enough to be rescued from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and taken to Switzerland with nearly 1,700 others, thanks to a deal between Eichmann and a Jewish leader called Rezsö Kasztner, who was later wrongly accused of collaboration and assassinated in Israel. In the mid-1950s I started studying English and German at the University of Zurich.

As foreigners surrounded by Swiss people, Thomas and I spent a lot of time together. Thomas had a gift for coining phrases. When I suffered a setback of some sort he comforted me with a cheerful ‘Never mind, things are never as bad as they’re going to be.’ To deter time wasters, his door carried a notice: ‘If you have nothing to do, don’t do it here’.

One day we were taking my dog Simon for a walk along the lake. Simon came from a village called Reinach. From his father, a Dachshund, and  his mother, an Appenzeller mountain bitch, he had inherited a long body, short legs and floppy ears that almost touched the ground. People in the street  often stopped to ask me what breed he was. When I truthfully answered that he was a mongrel, they walked on with their nose in the air. On this occasion a fat gentleman with six fat children in his wake asked the usual question in a particularly patronising tone. Before I could answer, Thomas said: ‘He’s a Reinach Retriever.’ The fat gentleman raised a pedagogic finger: ‘Have a good look, children. This is a typical Reinach Retriever.’ As they waddled away, Thomas remarked: ‘I never could stand pompous people.’

After finishing my studies I worked as sub-editor of a news agency. Most of the stories I had to edit were routine stuff about road accidents, petty thefts and the meetings of the local male choir, although at times there was a flurry of excitement about world events such as the kidnap of Eichmann by Israelis in Argentina. But eventually I got tired of the irregular hours and the callous treatment of human tragedies. I became a schoolteacher and continued to write some articles on the side.  When I felt restless again, I offered my services to a number of American universities and received a single offer from the Deep South, which I regretfully declined as I was asked to educate students in the right Christian spirit. Then, in 1963, I was offered a job at the new University of Sussex. I came to Brighton for one year and am still here. Given my history, it seems ironic that I ended up as a professor of German. But my commitment was to a German language and literature that the Nazis had not managed to poison with their hateful ideology.

Thomas also completed his degree — with some difficulty, as we shall see — and started looking for a job. Having developed an interest in computing, he presented himself at one of the large IT companies and was promptly offered a position with a salary far beyond what I could ever hope to earn as a teacher and occasional journalist. The interviewers were surprised when he told them that he would accept only half the salary, but by the time he added that he wanted to work only half the normal hours they were so dazzled by his blarney that they agreed. I should add that around 1960 neither computers nor part-time work were as common as today. Thomas was nothing if not innovative. 

About the time I came to Sussex Thomas went to America and we lost touch. A few days ago I was surfing the Internet when a name brought him and his final-year project back to me with a jolt.

The task Thomas had been set for the project was to design a shopping mall. The examiner, as I said, had turned out to be the professor he disliked most. With some misgivings he submitted a plan showing shops, a cafe, a restaurant, a moving staircase and various other items. Some weeks later he was summoned to the professor.

After keeping him waiting in the corridor for an hour the professor rejected the plan, as it did not include any public conveniences. Thomas was irritated by his tone, but submitted a new one, having added two small squares with a stylised drawing of a man in one and of a woman in the other. He did not bother to provide detailed specifications, as he had for everything else.

Once more Thomas was kept waiting in the corridor. Even more arrogantly than before, the  professor rejected the plan because the dimensions of the conveniences had not been calculated in the proper scientific manner. Thomas saw the professor’s point, but objected to the tone. ‘Who does he think he is, Adolf Hitler?’ he growled as he redrew the plan. Now he included many figures indicating the exact width, length, height, cubic capacity and other properties of the conveniences. He attached a statistical table with estimates of how many shoppers would use the conveniences, and how much time they would spend in them. For one user he allowed an extra forty minutes, with a footnote to the effect that this customer liked to read his newspaper in the lavatory.

The result was a third wait in the corridor and an explosion of fury on the part of the professor, who declared that he had never been so insulted in his life. How did Thomas dare to make fun of a distinguished academic? Was Thomas devoid of any respect for his superiors? Did Thomas realise how lucky he was to be protected by some pussyfooting Swiss rules from punishment for his insubordination? Finally he tore up the plan and promised to make sure that Thomas never got a degree.

This time Thomas realised he had gone too far. For all his hatred of authority he wanted his degree. He appealed to the Dean, who advised him to send the professor a fulsome letter of apology. I helped Thomas write it, suggesting phrases like ‘momentary aberration’, ‘profound regret’ and ‘highest respect’; on reflection I withdrew ‘to err is human, to forgive divine’ and ‘the quality of mercy is not strained’. The Dean forwarded the letter, in his turn pleading for leniency. The professor grudgingly passed the project with the lowest available mark and Thomas obtained his degree.

It was nearly half a century later that I saw those reports on the Internet and realised that the professor who had almost failed Thomas in Switzerland was in fact a German war criminal.

I always knew that the Swiss had sheltered many prominent refugees from racial or political persecution, but had also turned thousands of Jews away from their borders to perish at the hands of the Nazis. I have long been aware of what I owe the Swiss for granting me and some 1,670 other Jews from Hungary asylum four months before the collapse of the Third Reich. But I have only recently learned that some 500 German Nazis, Italian fascists and Vichy French also escaped to Switzerland after the war. And that one of these was the professor.

The professor was born in Berlin in 1914. From 1940 to 1945 he served in the Wehrmacht on both the eastern and western fronts. In 1950 he was appointed to a chair at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. As head of the Institute of Local, Regional and Country Planning, he acted as advisor to many major European cities. One newspaper called him ‘Europe’s number 1 traffic planner.’ Thomas called him an arrogant bully with no sense of  humour.

The professor had occupied his elevated position for nearly a decade, when one of his former subordinates reported him as a war criminal. It took the German police two years to arrest him at Frankfurt airport, but in August 1961 he was finally put in the dock in Stuttgart. A journalist’s account of his self-confident posture, his impenetrable expression, his brusque speech and his deliberately late appearance in court seemed to confirm Thomas’s descriptions.

The prosecutor claimed that in August 1944, when the professor was a first lieutenant in charge of a Wehrmacht company in retreat before the Allies, he had 31 Italian forced labourers shot by two camouflaged machine guns as they were having a rest in a field near Avignon. There had been no trial and no military necessity. Twenty-six Italians had died and 5 escaped, gravely wounded.

The professor resorted to the time-honoured expedient of passing the buck. He asserted that the Italians had threatened to go over to the French resistance and that he had been ordered to forestall such a mutiny by any means at his disposal. He explained that he had not been personally present at the shooting, but had only forwarded the order and received a report after the event. He voiced his ‘disgust’ at the use of hidden machine guns: if he had not been away at the time, there would have been ‘a proper military execution’. It would appear that shopping malls were not the only things he liked to be proper.

In 1963 the professor resigned from the Federal Institute in Zurich, but the trial continued.  When his former superior officers testified that they had neither received nor given any orders involving summary execution, his chances looked bleak. But when it came to confirming the charges against him, none of the men he had commanded remembered anything — possibly on the advice of his counsel, who had successfully defended several  important Wehrmacht figures before him.

In 1966 the prosecutor abruptly changed tack. Having spent six years accusing the professor of murder, he suddenly switched his case to manslaughter and recommended that the proceedings be closed under the statute of limitations, a statute that was applicable to manslaughter but not to murder. The professor was immediately released. I do not know how he spent the rest of his life, but he died in Santo Domingo in 1985.

At the end of the trial the presiding judge had remarked: ‘This decision does not condemn the accused. But neither does it certify his innocence.’ Whatever the technicalities, in my eyes, the professor who tried to ruin the future of a young student to avenge a slight impertinence got away with mass murder.

From my earliest days I have had the sense that Jews embody the distillation of what it is to be human. As if being Jewish were somehow a more extreme version of being human. Perhaps this sense I have is heightened by Jewish history with its unmatched defiance of the dual imperatives of time and place. For me, being Jewish embodies the triumph of ideas over events and the persistence of hope against overwhelming odds. As a student in South Africa I came across Two Concepts of Liberty by Isaiah Berlin. When I saw and heard him in Oxford later, I believed, and I still believe, that he was the greatest exponent of a broadly liberal, pluralist politics there has ever been. What he saw, and I think this must be inseparable from his Jewishness, is that fixed credos and closed systems of belief invariably lead to disaster. No one is the sole proprietor of knowledge. In his words ‘there is no incorrigible proposition.’ He understood that freedom is not an absolute: it cannot be guaranteed by subscribing to one political system. To my immense relief he confirmed that there are essentially only two freedoms; the first he called ‘freedom from’ which is the freedom to be left alone as far as possible to do what your inclinations tell you — essentially liberalism — and the other, very dangerous kind of freedom, is ‘freedom to’ which means that you achieve freedom only by total surrender to a state or closed system of belief. In South Africa we who were opposed to the apartheid state were supposed to want the alternative of Marxism, the path chosen by the ANC. It seemed madness to reject apartheid in favour of another absurd belief system, which had all the characteristics of a secular religion. Berlin’s simple distinction of freedoms shone a cool light of hope and truth upon the dark chaos of apartheid.
Berlin was fond of Kant’s saying ‘out of the timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved’.
Perhaps romantically, but understandably, he attributed many of his values to England. He understood that respect for others and tolerating dissent is better than pride and a sense of national mission; that liberty may be incompatible with, and better than, too much efficiency: that pluralism and untidiness are, to those who value freedom, better than the rigorous imposition of all-embracing systems, no matter how rational and disinterested, better than the rule of majorities against which there is no appeal.
When in his last years a Polish academic asked Berlin about the meaning of life he replied, ‘All I can say is that anyone who thinks there is a script or a libretto for life is seriously deluded. Life has no meaning…’ What he meant was that life entailed making the most of the here and now, rather than delaying gratification for an afterlife, or a communist utopia, or a fascist heaven. One of his favourite sayings was from Alexander Herzen: Where is the song before it is sung? ‘Nowhere, is the answer,’ said Berlin. ‘One creates the song by singing it, by composing it. So, too, life is created by those who live it step by step.’ I took this as the title of my novel, because it seemed to encapsulate exactly the differences between Berlin and his Oxford friend, Adam von Trott, which forms the basis of my story.
Berlin’s personal history — born in German-speaking Riga, emigration to Britain with his parents, a swift rise through British academia to become the first ever Jewish fellow of All Souls College — all this gave him a perhaps exaggerated respect for the liberal aspects of British life, while his close understanding of Germany and Russia, informed by wide reading in both languages, made him aware of the extreme danger facing the world. The leader, in the German version of romanticism, is the demiurge; this god-like creature is exclusively a product of the Germanic race, so creating two classes of humanity — men proper, who have access to these higher worlds, and inferior people with inferior cultures.Berlin saw that this was something wholly new in history. Von Trott, on the other hand, was raised with the concept of a national destiny and the German romanticism which turned so vicious. Berlin’s distrust of his friend arose not from the thought Trott was a closet Nazi, but because he saw that Trott had ideas about Geist and the inevitable destination of history, both of which were anathema to him; from an early age he understood where they could lead, and he recognised that they were present in both Communism and Fascism. I think this is what Berlin had in mind when he said that Von Trott was not really ‘one of us or on our side’, that Von Trott was primarily a German nationalist and that it was possible to be against Hitler for the wrong reasons. Von Trott’s friend, Col Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, rightly considered a hero, had some very anti-democratic plans for Germany had the Bomb Plot succeeded. With his two brothers he was a devotee of the sinister cultist poet, Stefan George, whose poetry was the apotheosis of extreme German romanticism. George was courted by the Nazis when they came to power and after his death in 1934 his devotees tended his grave and held candle-lit poetry readings. Incidentally, Von Trott’s family have been adamantly opposed to my novel, as if my task as a novelist should have been to applaud everything Von Trott did, rather than explore the moral issues that divided two friends.
Later I was to discover that there were other aspects of Berlin’s personality and belief that were supremely charming. Since my book appeared  many of his friends have discussed him with me, so much so that I feel as if I, too, knew him. I wish, as we wannabe Jews say. Berlin’s friends speak of his excitable conversation, and the swooping nature of his vowels. He loved gossip and music, and understood that we cannot live in an entirely rational world. Love, music, poetry, friendship are none of them susceptible to logic. When he was listening to music, his head would be bowed and his concentration absolute. When he was gossiping, he was a bubbling fountain.
But behind his inexhaustibly charming self, lay a steely mind. I don’t wish to over-dramatise my own philosophical torments as a young man, but from the moment I read Berlin for the first time I felt liberated. Above all, this was because he loathed abstractions about people and society. In his famous lecture Fathers and Sons, he spoke of Turgenev, but in fact he could have been writing about himself:

He shared their hatred of every form of enslavement, injustice and brutality, but unlike some among them he could not rest comfortably in any doctrine or ideological system. All that was general, abstract, absolute, repelled him: his visions remained delicate, sharp, concrete, and incurably realistic. Hegelianism, right-wing and left-wing, which he had imbibed as a student in Berlin; materialism, Socialism, positivism, about which his friends ceaselessly argued, populism, collectivism, the Russian village commune idealized by those Russian socialists whom the ignominious collapse of the left in Europe in 1848 had bitterly disappointed and disillusioned – these came to seem mere abstractions to him, substitutes for reality, in which many believed and few ever tried to live, doctrines which life with its uneven surface and irregular shapes of real human character and activity, would surely resist and shatter if ever a serious effort were made to translate them into practice.

So as a human being and a political philosopher, as a student of life and history and of ideas, but most particularly as a human being, Berlin is my greatest hero.

Justin Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung won the London Jewish Cultural Centre’s 2008 Award for literature.

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