The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman

by John Garrard, Carol Garrard

Born a Russian Jew and an ardent patriot of the Soviet motherland, Vasily Grossman rationalized away the Stalinist horror of his time as he chronicled the Red Army's westward sweep during World War II, becoming the Soviet Army's premier wartime correspondent. It was not until he discovered 30,000 victims were massacred by Nazi forces in his hometown of Berdichev - including his own mother - that he confronted his own Jewishness and the genocidal horror of the Holocaust. Determined to tell the story of Soviet complicity with the Nazi extermination of Russian Jewry, Grossman was labeled an enemy of the state by both Stalin and Khrushchev - barely escaping Stalin's death squads - and his exposes were suppressed and buried deep within the Communist Party's archives. For nearly thirty years Grossman's writings - including a fictional treatment of the Berdichev massacre in his novel Life and Fateremained hidden from the world, little known outside of a small circle of Russian dissidents. Finally published in the late 1980s, they provided crucial ammunition to those fighting to overthrow the Soviet regime in 1991. Now, drawing on archival materials that have become available only since the collapse of the Soviet Union, John Garrard and Carol Garrard have written an eloquent biography of Vasily Grossman. More than just a vivid portrait of a writer's life in a totalitarian, anti-Semitic state, The Bones of Berdichev provides new evidence concerning the origins of the Holocaust itself. The authors show how the Holocaust began not in the ghettos and death camps of Poland, but on Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, with the knowledge and cooperation of many Soviet citizens who aided and profited from the murder of their Jewish neighbors. The Soviet authorities in turn suppressed those actions - providing chilling evidence to support Grossman's conclusion that the two formerly warring German and Soviet totalitarian states were in fact mirror images of each other.

Genres: Biography, Russia, History, Nonfiction, World War II, 20th Century, Soviet Union

437 pages, Hardcover

First published March 6, 1996

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've run out of Vasily Grossman writing that has been translated into English (as far as I know), yet am still obsessed with his work. So I've moved into biographies. This one was published in 1996 and draws upon archival evidence that had become available with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is both an account of Vasily Grossman's life and a history of how the Holocaust began. The Garrards advance the thesis that the start of the Holocaust can be traced to Ukraine, where the co-operation of the population enabled the Nazis' industrialised mass-murder. They argue that the mass shootings of Jews which preceded the use of gas chambers could not have been trialled elsewhere in occupied Europe.

One such mass shooting of tens of thousands of Jewish people took place in Berdichev; Vasily Grossman's mother was among those murdered. I did not previously realise how much of his own experience he put into Viktor Shtrum's loss of his own mother and guilt about not saving her in Life and Fate. Like Shtrum, Grossman did not invite his mother to come and live with him as his wife didn't want him to. Unlike Shtrum, Grossman never received a letter from his vanished mother telling him what happened. The fictional letter is based upon his investigation into the Berdichev massacre after the Red Army retook the town. The title of this biography is fitting, as it revolves around Berdichev and the killing of tens of thousands of Jews there, both as a pivotal moment in the Nazi genocide and in Grossman's life:

Grossman certainly came to understand that broad Ukrainian collaboration had been an integral cog in the German machinery of murder. But he also knew that the whole subject of collaboration was verboten. Grossman faced the insoluble problem of writing a documentary account of the murder of 30,000 people by two dozen members of a German Einsatzkommando without explaining who aided and abetted. Given that he was determined to publish at least some morsel of the truth with the Soviet Union, he had to compromise. His normal technique was simply omission of awkward facts, not the slightest hint of covering up or distorting them. The result is yawning holes in the narrative of 'The Murder of the Jews in Berdichev', which is dated as being completed in 1944. For example, he mentions the October 30th 1941 shooting of the skilled workers kept alive to serve the Germans (and the Ukrainians) but omits the salient point that it was Ukrainians, not Germans, who pulled the trigger.

There are a great many deeply moving moments in the book, but one of the most powerful is the authors' visit to the site of the Berdichev massacre. When The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman was published, the mass grave hadn't been exhumed beyond the first layer of corpses (which the Soviet investigation used to estimate how many had been killed). So the true number of Jews who were killed and their identities remained unknown in the mid-1990s and quite possibly are still unknown now. There is a chilling appendix with a 'Partial list of Jews Shot to Death by Germans During the Occupation of Berdichev (1941-1944)', including names and ages.

The account of Grossman's struggles to get his work into print is fascinating. In addition to Life and Fate being arrested, he struggled to get other works published or reissued after the Second World War. It seems likely that Stalin's death saved Grossman's life as an anti-Semitic purge was gathering momentum in 1953, but his writing remained suppressed during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras as well. Among the translated documents in the appendices are letters Grossman wrote to Stalin (about Stalingrad) and Khrushchev (about Life and Fate), both arguing that his novels should be published. The letter to Khrushchev is much longer and more personal, concluding with the following paragraph:

There is no sense, no truth in the present situation, whereby I am physically free, but my book, to which I gave my life, remains in jail. After all, I wrote the book; I have not renounced it, and will never do so. Twelve years have passed since I began writing this book. I still think, as I did when writing it, that I spoke the truth. I wrote the book out of love and pity for ordinary people, out of my belief in them. I ask you to release my book.

Needless to say, this appeal was unsuccessful. Another extraordinary document in the appendices is an account Grossman wrote of a 1962 meeting with Mikhail Suslov, described in the book as 'the party boss for ideological matters'. From memory, he recounts Suslov's rationale for suppressing Life and Fate, which Suslov admits he hasn't read. This provides a striking insight into Soviet censorship:

You examine Soviet life from an absolutely non-Soviet viewpoint, you cast doubt upon everything. We are not concerned when someone speaks about the dark pages of our life, as long as they do it from a Soviet viewpoint. If we accept what you say, then it is impossible to understand how we won the war. According to you, we should never have won. It is impossible to understand why we won. The party and the people would not forgive us if we published your book. That would only increase the loss of life.

I found The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman highly compelling, very well-written, and adept at balancing its individual and broader historical narratives. The archival and personal interviews material provides rich insights. It whetted my appetite for more biographical writing about Grossman, such as a more recent book I intend to track down: Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century.

I've been thinking about why I'm currently so obsessed with Grossman's writing. Apart from the fact that he's a writer of genius, I think it's because he saw hope within bleak darkness. If there is one overriding theme in his work, it is that war, genocide, violence, and inhumanity do not make life worthless; life is still beautiful and precious. Indeed, it is vital for to grasp that all life is beautiful and precious, in order to fully understand the tragedy of war, genocide, violence, and inhumanity. We may not be living amid a world war right now, but the global pandemic, environmental breakdown, rising authoritarianism, neo-fascism, persecution, and inequality make it very difficult not to fear the future. Vanishingly few writers can write with equal conviction of how horrific brutalities happen and of why humanity is nonetheless not doomed. What other authors had the courage to face a genocide that killed millions including his own mother, to report an apocalyptic war from the front lines, to write truthfully under a repressive totalitarian regime, and to never be crushed by despair. Perhaps paradoxically, I try to avoid despairing of the future by reading about the past.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is so little out there about Vasily Grossman that I was really happy to get my hands on this, and was not wholly disappointed. It gave quite a lot of insight to his work and life, especially in the later period of his life. The first part, up to the mid thirties was not so helpful and should be read critically. Grossman was a strong supporter of the revolution at the beginning, so there is an important story about his journey from supporter to critic of the establishment, but, possibly due to the lack of source material, that story never surfaces. The Authors tell their story of the period, and I guess we are left to connect the dots to Grossman, but the dots don’t necessarily connect. When writing of the early twenties, they write that the Bolsheviks came to the farms and were unwilling to pay ‘a fair price’ for the crops. Was this what Grossman thought or theirs? No evidence is offered. In the early thirties when Grossman started getting articles published, they point out that the articles reflected establishment thinking, but explained this by saying they were most likely written that way to ensure he got a passport or some other reason. No support for that view is given. As you read, you get the feeling that Grossman is toeing the party line, but we really aren’t given any evidence of that. There is little doubt where Grossman’s sympathies lie from the mid thirties onwards. From that period on we have more source material, and the book is interesting and informative. It is certainly worth reading.

[Federico · Rating 4 out of 5]

Consigliato a tutti coloro che vogliono avvicinarsi a questo autore, avere la possibilità di leggerlo prima di imbattersi nei suoi romanzi vuol dire apprezzarli al 100%. Io purtroppo sono venuto a conoscenza di questo testo biografico in ritardo, comunque una lettura di spessore.

[Steve Middendorf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Garrards’ Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman reads like a guide to the book Stalingrad, explaining Grossman’s work, his personal investment in the war and representations of his life through the characters in his book. It also explains, as if we didn’t know, how the Germans handled the Jews which were over-run by the front line. What I didn’t know was how the Germans handled Ukrainian and Russian prisoners of war, captured in their millions in the early stages of the conflict. Ukrainian soldiers were released immediately and many became “Polizei” for the Germans assisting with the annihilation of the Jews and policing captured territory. Russian soldiers were left to starve to death. I assume this explains for us in 2022 Russia’s language and her emotional investment in denazification of Ukraine.

One might think that this book would act as a spoiler (or a Sparks Notes) in the reading of Stalingrad or Life and Fate. I’ve now read 200 pages of Stalingrad. It takes nothing away from Grossman’s words, nothing could. I feel like it adds needed perspective and mental organisation for understanding and enjoying the complex set of characters in Stalingrad. It is very well written.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will be of most interest to those who already know the incredibly courageous Vasili Grossman's great novels, "Life and Time" and "Forever Flowing." Having finished those, I found everything about this book to be useful, from the deep background in Russian history to Grossman's struggles with Soviet literary hacks and censors. Unlike Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, he did not allow his mastepiece to be smuggled out to the West for publication. "Life and Fate" was not published until the USSR was near collapse, and this is why it is so little known compared to the works of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. However, I find "Life and Fate" to be even more powerful in its depiction of the battle of Stalingrad, the beginnings of the holocaust in the Ukraine and the oppressiveness of daily life under Stalin. He was one of the first writers to expressly equate Stalin and Hitler as mirror images, an awareness forced on him by Stalin's deliberate concealment of Hitler's murder of the Jews. In addition, Grossman's incomplete but great last novel, "Forever Flowing," was one of the first and still one of the most vivid descriptions of the Hololomor, the manmade famine Stalin inflicted on Ukraine in the 1930s.

Netflix recently acquired the 2012 Russian mini-series of "Life and Fate" and despite its shortcomings, will hopefully bring Grossman new readers.

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this immediately upon finishing Vasily Grossman's epical Life and Fate. It fit perfectly with a deep illumination of both details of Grossman's biography and of the combined terror of both Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, the twin plagues of the Twentieth Century. Truly the perfect companion to the novel.

Annotations for The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman by John Garrard; Carol Garrard

Yellow:
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

our wolfhound century [the quote from Russian poet and Stalinist victim Osip Mandelstam which features in Life and Fate more than once]

(February 11, 2019 5:32 PM)
Yellow:
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

(February 11, 2019 5:33 PM)
Yellow:
Prologue: BERDICHEV

An investigation of the circumstances shows conclusively that the genocide could not have been carried out nearly so quickly or efficiently without widespread Ukrainian collaboration (or indeed without cooperation from the Wehrmacht).

(February 11, 2019 9:58 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 1: THE TSAR'S STEPCHILDREN ENTER THE PROMISED LAND

The Jews in Russia, deemed to have no inalienable rights, would have to dance for favors from an autocrat. In place of inherent rights, such as those extolled in the French Revolution's “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” the tsarist dynasty committed itself to an atavistic trinity, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationalism,” though the precise formulation would have to wait for fifty years

(February 11, 2019 10:27 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 1: THE TSAR'S STEPCHILDREN ENTER THE PROMISED LAND

German antisemitism arose in the late nineteenth century as a direct result of nationalist extremism and a determination among conservatives to blame Jews for the political liberalism that had in fact been initially imposed on German principalities by Napoleon.

(February 13, 2019 12:39 AM)
Yellow:
Chapter 1: THE TSAR'S STEPCHILDREN ENTER THE PROMISED LAND

The new religion of Bolshevism soon established a theocracy of scientific atheism that abhorred not only Orthodoxy but Judaism and even the “faith” of Russian literature.

(February 13, 2019 12:40 AM)
Yellow:
Chapter 1: THE TSAR'S STEPCHILDREN ENTER THE PROMISED LAND

The dates overlap—and this is a clue to the chaos of the period—as one horrifying event bleeds into the next. The gods seemed to have let loose Furies upon the earth. Ukraine was trampled and laid waste by units from the White Army, the Red Army, the Ukrainian nationalist army led by Petlyura, Polish forces, a German puppet army, and marauding bands such as the anarchists.

(February 13, 2019 12:59 AM)
Yellow:
Chapter 1: THE TSAR'S STEPCHILDREN ENTER THE PROMISED LAND

According to a Soviet estimate, which may well be too low, at least 150,000 Jews in Ukraine were murdered in 1919–1920

(February 13, 2019 1:00 AM)
Yellow:
Chapter 1: THE TSAR'S STEPCHILDREN ENTER THE PROMISED LAND

Although by now the tsarist government had been liquidated, the Ukrainians turned on the Jews of their own accord. Indeed, the pogroms in 1919–1920 prefigure, in a blind and bestial fashion, the organized hatred of the Nazis, thus taking their place in the tragic progress of European antisemitism from the late nineteenth century in both Germany and Russia

(February 13, 2019 1:01 AM)
Yellow:
Chapter 2: FALSE STARTS

He felt nostalgic about abandoning science as a career for the rest of his life and always followed scientific advances. These feelings probably led him to make Victor Shtrum, the hero of Life and Fate, a nuclear physicist.

(February 13, 2019 5:27 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 2: FALSE STARTS

Reading his correspondence for a citizen's awareness of the momentous changes occurring in the Kremlin during the late 1920s is about as productive as reading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice for information about the Napoleonic wars.

(February 13, 2019 5:29 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 3: WALKING A TIGHTROPE

Gorky was prepared to defend Grossman, at least partially, against the extremely serious charge of being counterrevolutionary—just about as serious as being charged with “anti-Americanism” during the McCarthy witchhunts of the early 1950s.

(February 14, 2019 11:23 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 3: WALKING A TIGHTROPE

The fact that Grossman entered literature as an associate of the outlawed Perevaltsy is critical to an understanding of his work in the 1930s and his attitude toward the Stalinist literary environment. Like his new patrons, he naturally opposed socialist realism, but he did so only sotto voce. Thus he managed to survive the systematic destruction of all former members of the Pereval in the Great Terror

(February 14, 2019 11:41 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 3: WALKING A TIGHTROPE

Yalta was the Soviet Union's Riviera. Its location on a peninsula enclosed by the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov creates a microclimate warm enough to grow soft fruits.

(February 15, 2019 12:03 AM)
Yellow:
Chapter 4: FREE AT LAST

It may well be in the notebooks that the seed for Grossman's startling comparison (at least for a Soviet writer) of the virtual identity between Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Russia was planted.

(February 16, 2019 3:26 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 4: FREE AT LAST

The worst times of the war were paradoxically the best of times for Grossman. He believed that the spirit of Stalingrad, a spirit of camaraderie and freedom for the soldiers, cancelled out all the horrors of the 1930s.

(February 16, 2019 3:45 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 4: FREE AT LAST

And his famous lines on the spirit of the city in truth represented his own feelings: “Stalingrad lives

(February 16, 2019 3:46 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 4: FREE AT LAST

and will continue to live. It is impossible to break the will of the people for freedom” (Red Star, September 5, 1942)

(February 16, 2019 3:46 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 4: FREE AT LAST

Grossman wrote that “faith in one another knit together the entire Stalingrad front from Commander-in-Chief to soldiers in the rank and file.”60 Out of this faith, wrote Grossman, came a freedom that “engendered the victory,” but he could never have guessed that this freedom would turn out to be no more than a means to an end, not an end in itself.

(February 16, 2019 3:54 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 4: FREE AT LAST

For 100 days he and the soldiers of the Red Army had inhabited the capital of the country of “Freedom.” Now Stalingrad was just the burned-out ruins of a shattered city. The Stalingrad spirit was born in the absence of the daily betrayal that tarnished life in the Soviet Union. What mattered was what kind of soldier you were, not whether you were a Russian, a Ukrainian, or a Jew.

(February 16, 2019 3:55 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 5: BACK TO BERDICHEV

this story, offers a key to the vast and rapid scope of the Holocaust in occupied Ukraine: the broad collaboration of Ukrainians in the murder of their Jewish neighbors.

(February 18, 2019 12:26 AM)
Yellow:
Chapter 5: BACK TO BERDICHEV

the Soviet myth-making machinery had managed to suppress any hint that the victims were Jews or the collaborators Ukrainian.

(February 18, 2019 12:43 AM)
Yellow:
Chapter 6: SPEAKING FOR THOSE WHO LIE IN THE EARTH

What was so subversive about a war novel set in and around the great Soviet victory at Stalingrad? The simplest way to answer this question is not to offer an assessment of the novel today but to look at what members of editorial boards and outside readers said about it, and at the same time to evaluate the objections they raised.

(February 19, 2019 1:42 AM)
Yellow:
Chapter 7: WAR AND FREEDOM

The story Grossman was determined to tell revolved around his central conclusion that the two great totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Soviet, were not opposites but mirror images of each other. Grossman was the first Soviet writer, or historian, to perceive this basic truth and state it in print.

(February 19, 2019 4:31 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 7: WAR AND FREEDOM

the resurrection of the emotionally charged word rodina for the new socialist motherland in 1934 laid the foundations for the appearance during World War II of a Soviet version of German National Socialism (Naziism) grounded in Russian nationality, the Russian language, and Russian culture.

(February 19, 2019 4:33 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 7: WAR AND FREEDOM

Life and Fate illustrates that state-sponsored Russian nationalism could lead to results very similar to German National Socialism.

(February 19, 2019 4:33 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 7: WAR AND FREEDOM

Thus Grossman perceived that the two opposites intersected at the point where each state treated Jews. The Nazis had carried out the Holocaust during the war. After the war, the Soviet regime suppressed the truth about it, then began its own antisemitic campaign.

(February 19, 2019 4:35 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 7: WAR AND FREEDOM

In addition to the sensitive issue of broad collaboration with the Nazis, Grossman's fictionalized account of the great triumph at Stalingrad was bound to challenge what had become the major national myth of the postwar period. The victory at Stalingrad had a hypnotic appeal for the Russian people. For ten years, the Soviet media had extolled Stalin as the architect of the Soviet victory. A legend had been created, and most Soviet people believed it. However, Grossman had been at or near the front line throughout the war. Out of his notebooks and his superb memory he would bring to life a different story—one that spoke not only of superb courage but also of cold-blooded betrayal.

(February 19, 2019 4:36 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 7: WAR AND FREEDOM

Grossman assumed that his readers—and we should not forget that he wrote for a Soviet audience—were already familiar with both the chief protagonists and the broad historical framework of the story he was about to tell.

(February 19, 2019 4:37 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 7: WAR AND FREEDOM

Grossman's narrator embeds digressions and essays in the work that discuss the Hungarian revolt of 1956 (linked in his mind with Babadzhanyan, whose courage in World War II he had celebrated, but whom he now condemned privately for crushing Hungarian liberty). He also discusses the world's response to atomic energy. The novel thus contains Grossman's mature analysis of the Stalinist system and a prophecy for its future, and at the same time a deeply personal examination of his own life and his identity as a Russian Jew.

(February 19, 2019 4:42 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 7: WAR AND FREEDOM

In this sense Life and Fate is a deeply moral work, for Grossman examines his own behavior with extraordinary self-awareness and honesty

(February 19, 2019 4:42 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 7: WAR AND FREEDOM

In his novel Grossman thus borrows from existentialist thought in turning the traditional relationship between human beings and destiny on its head: we may not be masters of our own fate, but each of us must master our own soul

(February 19, 2019 4:44 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 8: BURIED ALIVE

Poor Grossman was reduced to seeking solace in being called a son of a bitch instead of an asshole by a bunch of self-serving hacks.

(February 19, 2019 5:28 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 8: BURIED ALIVE

We feel terror at departing life not because of any fear of the unknown, according to Grossman, but because we do not want to lose all the beauty we have seen and enjoyed

(February 19, 2019 5:54 PM)
Yellow:
Chapter 9: LAZARUS

The time of Hitler arrived; a wolfish century. It was a time when people lived like wolves, and wolves lived like people.”

(February 20, 2019 1:55 AM)
Yellow:
Chapter 9: LAZARUS

All we can say before the judgment of both the past and the future is that there never was a more terrible time than that in which we lived and that we did not allow what is human in humanity to perish.” He closes on a more positive note: “As we look at The Sistine Madonna we can preserve the belief that life and freedom are one, the belief that there is nothing higher than what is human in humanity. May this belief live forever and triumph.”

(February 20, 2019 1:59 AM)
Yellow:
Chapter 9: LAZARUS

Grossman's experience is compelling—and consoling—because he reassures us that no matter what, the human species endures and the survivors continue to live as human beings. This is his great theme.

(February 20, 2019 2:00 AM)
Yellow:
Epilogue: THE BONES OF BERDICHEV

the Soviet authorities actually completed Himmler's dream of secrecy. Here perhaps is the most vivid proof of Grossman's claim that the two totalitarian regimes were mirror images of each other. Even before the war was over, the Soviet government began to suppress evidence of the Holocaust; even the documentary material produced by its own Extraordinary Commission on Nazi Atrocities was hidden in restricted archives.

(February 20, 2019 2:10 AM)

[Insurrecto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impresionante ensayo sobre la figura de Vasili Grossman, escritor ruso de origen judío, cuya obra cumbre Vida y destino estableció el paralelismo entre los dos totalitarismos que asolaron Europa en el siglo XX.

Es el primero que desentrañó la inhumanidad de los "perros-lobo" que crearon las ideologías.

Él "un verdadero ser humano", que siempre había vivido como un ruso, recupera su identidad judía por el dolor que le causa el asesinato de su madre en lo que es la primera gran acción del holocausto.

Hombre sin práctica religiosa ni fe es, sin embargo, un hombre que tiene fe en la libertad y la justicia.

Su obra no puede entenderse sin conocer los avatares de su vida.

[Glenda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Y sí. Katia se fue para no volver nunca más. Los sobrevivientes que volvieron regresaron a una vida cambiada para siempre. La casa, sus calles, los amores, la vida... todo cambió con la guerra. Katia -siendo una de la tribu de los Asra- fue de las que mueren cuando aman...

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched and written, but a grim subject. The story of a Russian author who during the Soviet period tried to tell the truth about World War II and the Holocaust on Russian soil.

[Cecilia Briceno · Rating 5 out of 5]

La vida y el destino de Vasili Grossman

Denso ensayo que permite comprender la obra literaria de Grossman y valorarlo como el mas grande escritor ruso del sxx.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author did a very good job on interpreting Grossman. The only criticism I have of the book is that the author seemed to think that no one in the West knows much about WWII or the Soviet Union and spent inordinate amounts of time explaining things like the Holocaust and the war on the Eastern Front. I don't think anyone reading about Vasily Grossman would be totally unfamiliar with the subjects and found these portions of the book tedious and annoying.

[Sol Misolmi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aunque la longitud asuste y los nombres, sobrenombres y patronímicos pueden tornar la lectura un tanto confusa, vale la pena internarse en este vívido testimonio de la batalla de Stalingrado.
algunos tiempos de la narración son extraños (tal vez no estuviera terminado cuando se sacóde Rusia?), hay fragmentos que ejemplifican lo que es escribir bien:

1) Llamó al timbre. La puerta se abrió y apareció Yevguenia Nikolayevna. La veía ante sí sin ver el pañuelo blanco en sus cabellos, ni el vestido negro, ni sus ojos, ni su cara. in sus manos, ni sus hombros... Eracomo si no lavieracon los ojos, sino con el corazón. Ella lanzó un grito de sorpresa, pero no dio unos pasas hacia atrás, como suelen hacerlo las personas cuando las sacude unhecho inesperado..
El la saludó, ella le respondió algo.
Caminó hacia ella con los ojos cerrados. Se sentía felizdevivir, pero al mismo tiempo, estaba dispuesto a moriren el acto. El calor de la mujer le acariciaba. Y de pronto descubrió que pa asaborear aquella sensación desconocida, esas sensación de felicidad que no había conocido antes, no hacía falta la vista, ni las palabras ni los pensamientos.
Ella le preguntó algo y él respondió, siguiéndola por el pasillo oscuro y cogiéndole lamano como si fuera un niño que temiera perderse en medio de la multitud.
Realmente, lo que se dijeron no importa.

2) El teniente Peter Bach habia ido a parar al hospital a causa de una herida de bala en el hombro. La herida no era grave, y los camaradas que lo habian acompanado en el furgon sanitario le felicitaron por su buena suerte.
Con una sensacion de felicidad suprema y al mismo tiempo gimiendo de dolor, Bach se levanto, sostenido por un enfermero, para ir a tomar un bano.
El placer que sintio al entrar en el agua fue enorme.
- Mejor que en las trincheras? -pregunto el enfermero, y deseando decir algo agradable al herido, anadio-: Cuando le den el alta, seguro que todo estara en orden por alli.
Y apunto con la mano en direccion al lugar de donde llegaba un estampido regular, continuo.
- Hace poco que esta aqui? -pregunto Bach.
El enfermero froto la espalda del teniente con una esponja y luego respondio:
- Que es lo que le hace pensar eso?
- A nadie piensa que la guerra vaya a terminar pronto. M contrario, creen que va para largo.
El enfermero miro al oficial desnudo en la banera. Bach recordo que el personal de los hospitales tenia instrucciones de informar sobre las opiniones de los heridos, y las palabras que el acababa de pronunciar ponian de manifiesto su escepticismo respecto al poder de las fuerzas armadas.
Sin embargo repitio con total claridad:
- Si, enfermero, de momento nadie sabe como acabara todo esto.
Por que habia repetido aquellas palabras tan peligrosas? Solo un hombre que vive en un imperio totalitario puede entenderlo. Las habia repetido porque le enfurecia el miedo que habia sentido al pronunciarlas la primera vez. Las habia repetido como mecanismo de autodefensa, para enganar con su despreocupacion a su presunto delator.
Luego, para borrar la mala impresion que pudiera haberle causado, declaro:
- Probablemente nunca, ni siquiera en el comienzo de la guerra, ha habido semejante concentracion de fuerzas. Creame, enfermero.
Asqueado por la esterilidad de aquel juego inutil y complejo, se entrego a un divertimento infantil, tratando de encerrar en su puno el agua tibia y jabonosa que salia disparada bien contra el borde de la banera, bien contra su propio rostro.
- El principio del lanzallamas -explico al enfermero.
La enfermera le pregunto a Bach si necesitaba que le acompanara a su habitacion.
- No, ire yo solo -respondio.
- No tendra que permanecer mucho tiempo en el hospital -anadio ella con voz reconfortante.
- Bien, ya comenzaba a aburrirme.
La mujer sonrio.
Evidentemente, la enfermera se habia formado su propia opinion de los heridos a partir de los articulos que habia leido en la prensa, donde escritores y periodistas relataban historias de soldados convalecientes que huian a hurtadillas de los hospitales para reincorporarse a sus queridos batallones y regimientos, movidos por un deseo imperioso de disparar contra el enemigo; de lo contrario, su vida no tenia sentido.
De no ser por los apellidos es difícil determinar si se habla del ejército ruso o del alemán. Aunque esta idea es prácticamente la tesis que sostiene el libro y por ello se halla diseminada por todas partes, nunca como en este fragmento queda tan patente.

3) Poco después de la guerra se encontró en los archivos de la Gestapo de Munich un expediente
relacionado con la investigación de una organización clandestina en un campo de concentración de
la Alemania occidental. El documento que cerraba el expediente informaba que la sentencia contra
los miembros de dicha organización había sido ejecutada. Los cuerpos de los prisioneros habían
sido quemados en un homo crematorio. El primer nombre de la lista era el de Mostovskói.
Vasili Grossman V i d a y d e s t i n o 327
El estudio de los documentos no permitió establecer el nombre del provocateur que traicionó a
sus camaradas. Probablemente fue ejecutado por la Gestapo junto a aquellos a los que había
denunciado.
El final de toda una serie de personajes, que además estaban tramando un levantamiento, sorprende por lo anticlimático y abrupto. Recuerda mucho al final del Diario de Ana Frank.

[John Stults · Rating 5 out of 5]

very interesting thought provoking book.

Tells the life of Vasily Grossman and in the process details the life of the average red army soldier, the antisemitism that marked Russia and the Ukraine and most importantly the Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis on the killing of the Jews in the Ukraine.
A good book I highly recommend it.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a later edition of this book, published by Pen and Sword Military in 2012. For the most part it was an excellent biography and I recommend it. There are some small historical errors regarding the Russo-German war, but nothing catastrophic.

[Silvia Ara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente!

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never Undemanding of Ourselves

Wednesday 1 August 2012

Vasily Grossman represents an inspiring figure of engagement, and old fashioned Russian insistence on telling the truth and standing for justice. He had his flaws and his guilt to overcome, for his younger years when he was playing it safe, and going along.

And then there is the Nazi barbarism against the Jews, the Ukrainian collaboration against the Jews, and the Soviet anti-Semitic policies. Grossman discovered his Jewishness, “thanks to” the Nazis and Soviets. Raised on the European and humanist classics, he had thought of himself as a Russian.

Here’s the Russian (Jewish?) fervent belief in the power of the word: Life and Fate was to be imprisoned for 250 years, it was so dangerous to the state. A literary dissident, Grossman sends me back to War and Peace, not a book to read, but one to meditate on, as he evidently did during the street-fighting in the battle at Stalingrad.

Norman Finkelstein stressed courage in his brief examination of the Mahatma, so I quote Gandhi here: “It does not mean meek submission to the will of the evil-doer, but it means putting one’s whole soul against the will of the tyrant.” Grossman had the courage to write the truth and not falter.

Also more broadly, this is part of my history, as my grandmother’s family fled Russia early in the 20th century, and here’s the historical context: “From 1881 to 1905, no fewer than 115 new pieces of anti-Jewish legislation were made the law of the land. They caused as much bitterness and hostility, and lost human potential as did the Jim Crows laws in the American south at the same time. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled the country altogether, others joined revolutionary groups; pogroms caused great destruction and loss of life.”

A few passages from the Garrards’ book—

Grossman: “It seems to me that, in the cruel and terrible time in which our generation has been condemned to live on this earth, we must never make peace with evil. We must never become indifferent to others or undemanding of ourselves.” 171

He had distanced himself from the shtetl Jews of Berdichev. Now the Holocaust would force him to reconsider his Jewish background and decide how he should respond to his mother’s murder and to the massacre of all the other Jews of Ukraine. 176

Already Grossman’s guilt about his mother’s capture was tinged by a terrible fear that that the Soviet government was determined to erase the Jewishness of the genocide and with it the memory of his own mother’s death. 226

Goya would have had to live a thousand years to paint all the horrors committed by German troops against civilians in the Soviet Union. 241

His books testify to the achievements of a human being who went through the fires of hell and emerged with his soul intact. Few who saw what he saw and felt what he felt were able to make sense of their experiences. Grossman did, and in the most generous fashion possible: he conveyed his message and his struggle to his compatriots in Russia and to us, wherever we live. Still alive in his books, Grossman calls upon us to take up the burden of history and to make sure that the tragedies of the “wolfhound century” are never permitted to return and haunt our descendants. 345

[Seth J. Vogelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting review of Vassily Grossman's life, but I wondered who the writers believed their audience was. At times, the descriptions of the war and the Holocaust, or Ukrainian anti-Semitism, seemed a bit simplistic. However, as a pioneering work on the subject, they covered many of the points I was interested in reviewing.

[Melania · Rating 2 out of 5]

VASILI GROSSMAN - Viata si destin

Capodopera sa, romanul Viaţă şi destin, împleteşte momentele cheie ale bătăliei Stalingradului cu destinele mai multor ruşi şi viziunile lor asupra războiului şi totalitarismului.

[Jill Shaw Ruddock · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading this book, I wanted to know more about the man, the author. This biography does an outstanding job providing valuable insight inside the life of one of the greatest writers of his time. I highly recommend this book.

[Jean Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that adds depth to the reading of the work of Vasily Grossman

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good intro to author and German Soviet WWII Eastern front background. Ready for Life and Fate.

[Gaia Gilardengo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una biografia appassionante e completa. Lettura consigliatissima per chi vuole avvicinarsi alla figura di Grossman e conoscere meglio la Russia e l'Urss in un secolo complesso come il Novecento.

[Devin]

douglas murray rec

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of this is needed.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let's call it a 2.75. Read this immediately after reading Grossman's novels "Life & Fate" and "Forever Flowing" and then "A Writer At War: Vasily Grossman With The Red Army 1941-1945," the Antony Beevor work built from/on Grossman's WWII journalism and personal notebooks. Seemed to make sense to read this book to round out my knowledge of Grossman. This was interesting but not terribly memorable. The emphasis in the book was on Grossman's efforts to write the truth about murders of Jews.