Alexandra Popoff on Vasily Grossman & Holocaust Remembrance

The Learning Curve Alexandra Popoff

[00:00:00] Albert Cheng: Well, hello everybody, and welcome to a special edition, a special episode of the Learning Curve podcast. Today’s January 27th. And in case you didn’t know, January 27th is actually International Holocaust Remembrance Day. And so doing a special episode today, and I’m joined for this episode with my co host Jason Bedrick from the Heritage Foundation. Hey, Jason, good to have you on.

[00:00:48] Jason Bedrick: Thanks for having me.

[00:00:49] Albert Cheng: Exciting episode we got coming up. We’re going to have Alexander Popoff, who is a biographer and author of Vassily Grossman and the Soviet Century. And we’re going to talk about Vassily Grossman, who was, if I’m not mistaken, the first to write about the death camps during World War II.

[00:01:07] Jason Bedrick: Yes, that’s right. So, the death camps were liberated 80 years ago this year, and so there are fewer and fewer survivors left to remind us of what happened. And so we’ll be hearing about Vassily Grossman, who was one of The first journalist, he was Jewish, he was one of the first journalists to enter the death camps and to record what happened.

[00:01:33] And as an act of remembrance, this is very important. There is a ritual in Judaism called Yizkor, which means remembrance, that we recite on certain special occasions to remember all of the dead. And there are Our special prayers for those who were killed in, you know, massacres of the Jewish people, from the destruction of the temple, to the crusades, to the holocaust.

[00:01:59] This is more than just history, it’s memory. As a matter of fact, Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, the late, great, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, On the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the death camps wrote that there is no Hebrew word for history in the Tanakh, the Tanakh being the Jewish Bible and modern Hebrew had to borrow one, Historia, but the word Zachor, remember, occurs no fewer than 169 times in the Hebrew Bible.

[00:02:27] The difference between them is this history is someone else’s story. Memory is my story and history. We recall what happened. Through memory, we identify with what happened so that it becomes a part of us and who we are, right? So, you know, he concludes saying that history is the story of the past that’s dead, but memory is the story of the future.

[00:02:46] This is, in other words, the act of remembering reminds us who we are and it’s not just about what happened before. This is supposed to inform how we live and how, as a society, we move forward.

[00:03:02] Albert Cheng: Well said, uh, you know, late Jonathan Sacks, always full of wisdom and definitely miss hearing him these days. So thanks for sharing that, Jason, and really looking forward to this.

[00:03:12] I mean, look, you and I know that, you know, issues of anti Semitism are really popping up quite a bit of late here in the U. S., certainly on our college campuses, but certainly worldwide as well. We’re seeing more of this kind of stuff. And so to your point, About remembering what happened and letting that shape us and guide us in terms of how we live tomorrow.

[00:03:32] And the next day after that, I think this is a perfect opportunity to do that during the show. So let me introduce Alexandra Popoff. Alexandra Popoff is a former Moscow journalist and Alfred Friendly Press Partners Fellow. She is the author of several literary biographies, including her latest book, Ayn Rand, and the award winning Vassily Grossman and Sofia Tolstoy.

[00:03:57] Her book, The Wives, became a Wall Street Journal Best Nonfiction Title for 2012. Vassily Grossman and the Soviet Century won the 2019 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biography, University of Saskatchewan Nonfiction Award. Became a finalist in the 2019 National Jewish Book Awards biography category and was long listed for the 2019 Cunnhill History Prize.

[00:04:23] Popoff has written for the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, National Post, The Globe, and Mail, Literary Hub, Tablet Magazine, and Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Canada. So, Alexandra, welcome to the show. It’s a real pleasure to have you on. Thanks for joining us.

[00:04:40] Jason Bedrick: As we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it’s appropriate that we discuss Vasili Grossman, who was a 20th century Jewish writer and journalist in the Soviet Union.

[00:04:51] As I mentioned before, he was among the first to document the atrocities of the Nazi death camps, in addition to writing first hand accounts of key World War II battles. Some of his major literary works were actually censored by the Soviet Union, which deemed them anti Soviet. So, would you give us a brief overview of Grossman’s enduring historical importance?

[00:05:13] Alexandra Popoff: Grossman’s works Offering sight into the 20th century calamities, from Stalin’s terror famine to the Second World War and the Holocaust. Today, volumes are written about these tragedies, but Grossman managed to powerfully imprint them on our collective memory. Had he only produced The Hell of Treblinka in 1944, this single work would have established his historical legacy.

[00:05:42] And many people still remember him for this work alone, although he was an early chronicler of the Holocaust. He became among the first to define its unprecedented nature, most powerfully in the hell of Treblinka, but also in Ukraine without Jews, and in life and fate. Writing almost simultaneously with Hannah Arendt and independently from her, he revealed the essence of totalitarian systems, depicted their total control over individuals, the use of propaganda, indoctrination, and terror in Nazi Germany and in Stalin’s Russia.

[00:06:26] In Philip Sand’s book, There is the author’s conversation with Saul Lemkin, a nephew of Raphael Lemkin, the famous Polish Jewish lawyer, who in 1944 coined the term genocide and later worked with the American team to prepare the Nuremberg trials. In this book, Saul Lemkin asks the author, what’s the name of that famous journalist, the one who wrote Life and Fate?

[00:07:00] Vasily Grossman. That’s it. He’s the one who wrote about Treblinka. I read it and thought of my grandparents. Rafael Lemkin’s family lost 49 relatives during the Holocaust, and Grossman lost his mother in September 1941 during a mass execution of Jews in his native Berdichev.

[00:07:26] Albert Cheng: Wow, thanks for sharing that overview, Ms. Popoff. So let’s get into some more details and start at the very beginning. You just mentioned Grossman’s hometown, Berdychiv, Ukraine, which was within the Russian Empire at the time, and he was born into a Jewish family. He studied chemical engineering at Moscow State University, and in one of his first short stories, in the town of Berdychiv, it drew encouragement from lots of celebrated Russian authors.

[00:07:52] So, could you tell us more about his family background, his education, and just the larger context that contributed to his literary career?

[00:08:02] Alexandra Popoff: Grossman was born in 1905 in Berdichev, which is a predominantly Jewish town, and was raised by a disabled mother. His parents divorced when he was still a baby. And this made him sensitive to apply to the most vulnerable.

[00:08:19] The theme of the mother and child is prominent in his works. His story in the town of Berdichev, which made him famous overnight, is about a woman commissar who gives birth in Berdichev during the Russian Civil War. His brilliant essay, The Sistine Madonna, Written in late life, also pictures the fate of a mother and child, but in the epoch of fascism and Stalinism.

[00:08:47] Grossman’s writings stand out not only for the important subject matter, but for their humanity. Grossman was in his early teens when he witnessed the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. Berdichev, like other cities and towns in Ukraine, changed hands many times. So, as a teenager, Grossman witnessed this violence and destruction.

[00:09:13] The story in the town of Berdichev, produced in 1934, stood out from the many contemporary writings about the Civil War. And it still has the power to affect us, because Grossman doesn’t take sides in the conflict between the Reds and the anti Bolsheviks. He introduces all human values and tells a story from the perspective of a woman commissar who is to give birth in a Jewish household.

[00:09:45] The focus of the story is the miracle of creating new life in the midst of death and destruction. Grossman’s father, a chemical engineer, was also an important influence. They connected in Kiev, where Grossman studied in high school, and later in Moscow, where he was a university student studying chemistry and physics.

[00:10:10] Physics and natural scientists interested him since age 14, allowing to create the character of a nuclear physicist, Viktor Shchum, in Life and Fate. Upon completing university, he followed in his father’s footsteps. His father inspected coal mines, and Grossman began working in the hottest and most dangerous coal mine in the Donbass, where high concentration of methane and coal dust was responsible for sudden explosions.

[00:10:43] And he wrote about that in his first novel. Called, which translates from a German as happy lifting. Roseman did not stay very long. He developed a lung condition, but his experience in coal mines was his introduction to being in a war zone or in a place close to a war zone. Also, traveling through the dam passing in the early 1930s allowed him to learn about Ukraine’s famine.

[00:11:14] In Sistine Madonna, he makes an unforgettable portrayal of a starving woman he met there at the train station.

[00:11:23] Jason Bedrick: You talked about Grossman’s relationship with his father. The war took his mother. This war affected Grossman very personally. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, His mother was trapped in his home city of Pridichev and murdered together with about 20, 000 to 30, 000 other Jews who had not yet evacuated.

[00:11:45] Grossman became a war correspondent with the popular Red Army newspaper, Red Star. He covered several major battles, including Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. So what can you tell us about Grossman’s journalism during World War II?

[00:12:02] Alexandra Popoff: As a war correspondent, Grossman had an opportunity to get a full picture of a war on the Eastern Front.

[00:12:10] It was transferred from one front to another, which is why he was able to report on major battles. Unlike most correspondents, he obtained information first hand rather than At the front headquarters, he interviewed fighter pilots, tank troops, infantry, snipers, generals, civilians, was present during interrogations of captured Nazis.

[00:12:37] Later, he used this material from his wartime notebooks for his novels. He read divisional war diaries and copied down reports concerning the mood in the troops, stories of soldiers in penal battalions, stories of desertion, and so on. All of this information was otherwise inaccessible. When present during interrogations of German prisoners of war, he was learning about Nazi ideology.

[00:13:08] He learned. of Hitler’s order to take not a step back from the captured territory. A point of comparison with Stalin’s order of July 28, 1942, not one step back. All this information would enter his wartime notebooks and later inform him when he wrote his notes. This information allowed him to realize that in the eyes of both dictators, human life had no value.

[00:13:39] And in the summer 1941, he witnessed terrible swift retreat of Soviet troops. Soviet total unpreparedness for war, all this information that he entered in his notebooks later became unpublishable because that placed responsibility on Stalin, and it was prohibited to discuss Soviet unpreparedness for war because Stalin conducted military purges on the eve of World War II and was chiefly responsible for the tragedy of 1941 when millions of civilians and soldiers were killed.

[00:14:26] A taken prisoner in his first novel about the war, the people immortal. We came out in 1942 and became a Soviet classic. Grossman predicted the defeat of fascism and contemplated a version of the Nuremberg trials. He wrote that they will come when the Tribunal of the Great Nations will begin. Its hearing.

[00:14:53] In 1942, he covered the Battle of Stalingrad, the key battle of World War II, and as he wrote in his Stalingrad Sketches, In order to write about the Stalingrad battle, one needs to be there among those who are fighting in the ruins. So he traveled over the ice of the Volga River, crossing into the other shore, in order to interview the defenders.

[00:15:26] His Stalingrad sketches became unique and gave him national fame. In spring 1943, he traveled through the recently liberated towns of eastern Ukraine, and that’s when he was learning about the fate of Jewish populations there. He was among the first to write about the Holocaust by bullets. His story, The Old Teacher, captures the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

[00:15:56] which he called the murder of a whole nation and choiceless choices of Jews trapped in the occupied territories. He writes in the story, the murder of a whole nation was something too terrible. Nobody could believe. In the fall of 1943, he submitted to Zname magazine his powerful article, Ukraine without Jews.

[00:16:24] Censors suppressed its publication in Russian language, and in Russia it could not appear in Grossman’s lifetime. It only appeared in 1990 for the first time. Ukraine Without Jews was translated into Yiddish and published in two issues of Yenukait, the newspaper of a Jewish anti fascist committee.

[00:16:49] Albert Cheng: Wow, thanks for sharing all of that. Let’s get into some of the other investigative pieces, Ms. Popoff, in particular, The Hell of Treblinka. This was one of the first articles in any language about a Nazi death camp. And in fact, as you mentioned, the Nuremberg trials a little bit ago, it was used and translated as testimony for those trials. So, can you tell us about what Grossman saw and how he reported on the Nazis mass murder of European Jews? And then the larger legacy that he has as a early chronicler of the Holocaust.

[00:17:25] Alexandra Popoff: Yes, Grossman arrived in Treblinka in early September 1944, three months after the Soviet troops entered the area, and 13 months after the inmates uprising on August 2, 1943.

[00:17:43] After the uprising, The Nazis worked to liquidate all evidence of mass murder, along with the camp structures. When Grossman arrived, he saw carefully made sand paths, lupins, planted at the sites of former mass graves in Treblinka II, which was a Jewish camp. He begins this work by describing Treblinka’s remote station some 60 kilometers from Warsaw and close to a junction station of Malkinia, where transports arrived from four different points.

[00:18:21] Treblinka was chosen as a major killing center for its location. It was in the middle of wilderness, surrounded, he writes, by pines, sand, sand, and more pines. And this allowed keeping its extermination center in total secrecy. The dull landscape, he writes, concealed a vast executioner block such as the human race has never seen.

[00:18:52] He was able to reconstruct the evidence of mass murder from testimonies of survivors, local peasants. railway workers, other witnesses, and his own calculations. But as an early chronicler of the Holocaust, he believed mistakenly that Treblinka was the SS’s main killing ground, which surpassed Auschwitz.

[00:19:16] He interviewed Polish survivors from Treblinka I. It was a labor camp located next to the quarry. where inmates extracted gravel. Treblinka I, he writes, was like a Lesser Majdanek, meaning Majdanek’s concentration camp. Prisoners incarcerated there knew about the existence of a more, far more terrible camp, Treblinka II.

[00:19:44] This was a Jewish camp. Established to implement Hitler as final solution and where it writes, nothing was adapted for life and everything was adapted for death. The area of this camp, Treblinka 2, was extremely small. So hundreds of people. who were transported very daily, could not have been kept alive.

[00:20:10] He knew by then about Sobibor and Majdanek, but his readers would learn about Treblinka for the first time. And it was a great responsibility to tell the world about the unprecedented crime of the Holocaust and describe it in a way that his readers could fathom it. When reconstructing the picture of Treblinka’s vast executioner block, he describes it from two parallel perspectives, that of the victims and that of the executioners.

[00:20:46] He describes the humanity of the victims, and he refers to the executioners simply as beasts. Rossman explains how it was possible for a few SS and auxiliaries to lead hundreds of thousands to slaughter. The SS psychiatrists of death, as he calls them, used deception to minimize attempts to resist and escape.

[00:21:12] The arrival area in Treblinka was rebuilt to make it look like a regular railway station while in fact a single railway track ended there. False signs were posted on a building to make it look like a ticket office and all that he learns through his interviews. This deception helped the SS to minimize instances of escape and resistance.

[00:21:39] The Nazis used and never ending sequence of abrupt commands to break the rival’s will and maintain deception to the end. And then, Grossman pictures the psychological condition of Jewish Departees, whose thoughts and feelings alternate between hope and doom. As a writer, he possessed a unique ability to describe the multitudes in a personal way.

[00:22:05] He wrote, And all these thousands, all these tens of hundreds of thousands of people. All were caught up in a single flood, a flood that swallowed up reason and splendid human science and maidenly love and childish wonder and the coughing of the old. And the human heart. Then he shows through stages how deputies are being robbed of their freedom of their possessions.

[00:22:40] Women’s hair is cut. So they’re robbed of their possessions by the brute beasts of the SS who will make use of gold and valuables. But this card, he writes, the most precious valuable in the world, human life. And finally they marched onto the road of no return, a sandy path leading to the gas chambers.

[00:23:07] And he writes, this faint trace in the sand was all that remained of the thousands of people. Inside the gas chambers, the plunder of human beings is complete. They robbed of the sky, the stars, the wind. And he writes with an immediacy that fully engages his readers emotionally, and then he steps back and speaks about the overall significance of what he learned through his investigation.

[00:23:42] The Nazis have condemned the Jewish nation, he writes, to the abyss of non being. Rossman believed in the importance of facing facts. And in this work, he wrote, it is the writer’s duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader’s civic duty to learn the truth, to turn away, to close one’s eyes. It’s to insult the memory of those who have perished.

[00:24:12] It also points out that it is not enough to speak about Germany’s responsibility for what has happened. The responsibility to prevent Nazism from ever rising again lies with the entire humanity.

[00:24:30] Jason Bedrick: The quotes you just read from Grossman, they transcend journalism. They are haunting poetry. And in your biography of Grossman, you write of his work, The Hell of Treblinka, quote, His writing has the everlasting quality of genuine art, inviting comparison to Picasso’s Guernica.

[00:24:49] Grossman is presenting evidence of unprecedented crimes before the eyes of humanity, before the conscience of the world. End quote. So, what do you mean that Grossman’s journalism is art? And if we see it as art, how does that affect how we relate with his works?

[00:25:07] Alexandra Popoff: Rossman’s intention in Treblinka is to honor the nameless and to keep them in world’s memory.

[00:25:15] He uses biblical evocations. to elevate the Jewish victims above their sufferings and death. The Hell of Treblinka is both a careful investigation and a requiem, written with a deep emotional connection to the hundreds of thousands who perished there. He engages his powers as an artist to imprint this tragedy on our memory when he writes, I quote, Earth of Treblinka, bottomless earth, earth as unsteady as the sea.

[00:25:51] This wilderness behind a barbed wire fence has swallowed more human lives than all the Earth’s oceans and seas have swallowed since the birth of mankind. Picasso painted Guernica as an immediate reaction to the Nazis devastating bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The Hell of Treblinka represents Grossman’s immediate reaction to the unprecedented crime of the Holocaust, the magnitude of which would take the world decades to absorb.

[00:26:31] Like Picasso’s Guernica, Grossman’s Treblinka It’s an everlasting work with a global appeal. It will continue to affect us with great emotional power and its underlining message, never again.

[00:26:49] Albert Cheng: So let’s continue talking about the hell of Treblinka. And before you were discussing how the Nazi attempted to cover up.

[00:26:57] what they were doing there. And Grossman, importantly, interviewed many survivors and laborers and witnesses. Could you talk more about, you know, Grossman’s article as an important record of Nazi attempts to cover up those crimes? So what’s the enduring legacy there and what role did it play in making sure we have this history recorded and not covered up?

[00:27:16] Alexandra Popoff: After a ravine made surprising in August 1943, Treblinka’s handlers started liquidating all evidence of mass murder along with camp structures. And Grossman wrote that for 13 months from July 1942, that’s when the camp was founded, the executioner’s block had been at work. For 13 months from August, 1943, the Germans had been trying to obliterate every trace of this work.

[00:27:50] But in July, 1944, when a Red Army entered to blink, 40 survivors were found in the woods. Grossman was able to interview zoner of members from Rinca, and I captured Ukrainian auxiliary to a SS also. Peasants from surrounding villages, various other witnesses, such as railway workers. And he made a very important statement in this work, making us understand that it’s all a document.

[00:28:24] He wrote, everything written below has been compiled from the accounts of living witnesses, from the testimony of people who worked in Treblinka. I have seen these people myself and have heard their stories. And their written testimonies lie on my desk before me. So he appears as a witness in this work.

[00:28:51] His notebook contains drawings of the death camp’s layout, of the railway station, the road, the six meter wall surrounding the camp. All this he reconstructed from the interviews with survivors. Grossman also relied on his expertise as a chemical engineer to explain how Treblinka’s death factory operated.

[00:29:16] And he described it as a conveyor belt executioner’s block. It was run according to the same principles as any other large scale modern industrial enterprise. Grossman’s story of how the Nazis were Erasing Evidence of Mass Murder in Treblinka was based on Janko Wiernik’s published memoir The Year in Treblinka.

[00:29:46] Rossman obtained a Russian translation of his memoir. Wiernik briefly handled disposal and incineration of bodies in the summer of 1943. And wrote in his memoir, not even Lucifer could possibly have created a hell worse than this. But even early before he came to Treblinka, Grossman was aware of the Nazis attempts to erase evidence of mass murder.

[00:30:15] In his 1943 article, Ukraine, he told of learning from civilians how the Nazis worked to destroy evidence of mass murder in Babi Yar, where gigantic bonfires burned for days. He wrote in this article that it was impossible to conceal all evidence. Here are his words. Are they so mad that they really hope to erase their horrible trace?

[00:30:46] This trace is etched forever with Ukraine’s blood and tears. It glows in the darkest night.

[00:30:56] Jason Bedrick: The Nazis weren’t the only ones who wanted to erase. Any trace of what had happened. I want to ask you about another one of Grossman’s works, The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, which he co authored with Ilya Ehrenberg. It’s a 500 page book. It documents the horrors of the Holocaust. And yet, after World War II, the Soviet state suppressed its publication. So, how did the Soviet response to Grossman’s book impact him and erode his loyalty to the Soviet government?

[00:31:28] Alexandra Popoff: After the war with fascism, Stalin launched his own anti-Semitic campaign, and Grossman lived through a series of events that turned him into a Soviet heretic.

[00:31:42] The events of a post-war decade, the years from 1946 to Stalin’s death in 1943, later became known as the Black years of Soviet jury. In Life and Fate, when referring to the rise of state nationalism and anti Semitism during these years, Grossman wrote that Stalin raised the very sword of annihilation.

[00:32:09] Over the heads of Jews, he had rested from the hands of Hitler. The destruction of a Jewish antifascist committee in 1948 rests of its members whom Grossman knew closely and had worked with the murder of Salamon Hoy on Stalin’s orders, the closure of Michael’s Jewish theater in Moscow, and the ban on publication of the Black Book of Russian jewelry.

[00:32:39] These events deeply affected Grossman. The decade ended with Stalin’s highly publicized campaign against the Jewish doctors. But back to the Black Book, in 1943, Grossman, along with Ilya Erenburg, became involved in the work of the Jewish Anti Fascist Committee, then chaired by Mikhoels. They were collaboratively collecting and editing witness accounts and other documentary evidence for their planned anthology.

[00:33:13] In 1945, Erenburg resigned as the general editor. of this anthology. Upon realizing that there was no commitment on the part of the Soviet authorities to publish it, Grossman took over the project as the general editor. The anthology included his and Ehrenburg’s original articles, Ehrenburg’s on Sobibor and Grossman’s The Murder of the Jews of Berdichev and Treblinka.

[00:33:45] But Soviet publications of the time were prohibited from mentioning the final solution or attracting attention to the Jewish tragedy. References to Jews and Jewish suffering were censored. Newspapers had to refer to undesignated Soviet civilians. Publication of a black book was endlessly postponed.

[00:34:11] Numerous changes were demanded by the authorities. And in the fall of 1947, the anthology was found to contain serious political errors. The Black Book was banned in 1948, and the same year, members of anti fascist Jewish committee involved in bringing it out were arrested, secretly tried as Jewish nationalists, and shot.

[00:34:41] Rosman could not know of their execution, but he knew of their arrests, and of mass arrests. of ethnic Jews in the Soviet Union. Vass Krossman had experienced anti Semitism during the war with the Nazis, when his mother was executed in Berdichev. And then back in the Soviet Union, during Stalin’s secret pogrom, as it would become known, his friend, the great actor and director, Solomon Mikhoels was murdered.

[00:35:16] Having lived through these events, he realized the similarities between Stalin’s and Hitler’s regimes.

[00:35:26] Jason Bedrick: I know that Albert has another question for you, but before we get to that, I just wanted to comment on what you had just said, because it reminded me of a comparison that the Lubavitcher Rebbe had made between what Nazi Germany did And the Purim story, Purim’s a Jewish holiday that’s coming up soon.

[00:35:44] And what the Soviets were trying to do, and the Hanukkah story. So, like the enemy of the Jewish people, Haman, in the Purim story, the Nazis wanted to eradicate all the Jews. They wanted to Kill the Jewish people as human beings to wipe them out. The Soviets, however, like the Syrian Greeks in the Hanukkah story, we’re fine letting the Jews live, but not as Jews, they had to bend to their ideology.

[00:36:18] So if we were going to document anything that happened during the war against. Jews, we couldn’t recognize their suffering and persecution as Jews. They had to be recognized only as Soviet citizens. Essentially, the Nazis wanted to kill the Jewish body. The Soviets wanted to kill the Jewish soul. The Jews could live, but only as Soviets.

[00:36:42] They had to abandon their identity. They had to abandon their history. They had to abandon their religion and just be like everybody else. But a spiritual form of death is really not much better than a physical death. I just wanted to make that observation, but I know Albert has another question for you.

[00:37:01] Alexandra Popoff: Yes, and Elie Wiesel called Soviet Jews, Jews of silence. You remember?

[00:37:08] Albert Cheng: Yes. You know, we could keep thinking about this as worth reflection, but I, I do want to bring in some of Grossman’s novels. So he didn’t just write journalistic articles and these kinds of. Classic documentation of events, but let’s talk about for a just cause.

[00:37:25] So this is a novel published in 1952 and then later republished under Grossman’s preferred title, Stalingrad. So a bit of background on this novel, the, it takes place in the Soviet union before operation Barbarossa, uh, which is the 1941 German invasion of. The U. S. S. R. and has a bit that focuses on the first month of the Battle of Stalingrad in the summer of 1942.

[00:37:49] Give us a summary of the plot. Tell us about the main characters and the overall historical narrative and what can we learn from it?

[00:37:57] Alexandra Popoff: Grossman’s novel, Life and Faith, was conceived as a dialogy. That is, two novels, you may look at it as two novels, of which Stalingrad was the first part, and Life and Fate became the second.

[00:38:12] Stalingrad was written when the dictator was still alive, so understandably Grossman could only tell half truths in this work, but even what he was able to tell was courageous. He was the first Soviet writer to depict the war as a global event. This novel opens with Hitler’s and Mussolini’s meeting in Salzburg in April of 1942.

[00:38:41] Most of the events in this novel take place in 1942, with a hero’s flashbacks to the summer and fall of 1941 and sometime before the Nazi invasion. Because this novel was conceived as a dialogy. Most of the characters that appear in Stalingrad re emerge in Life and Fate. Stalingrad ends with a depiction of the Stalingrad battle in September 1942, and Life and Fate takes the story of the battle to the end, while telling numerous other stories along the way.

[00:39:19] Both novels are written with Epic Sweep. To include war parts and peace parts, and Grossman research notes show that he used the structure of war and peace as a blueprint. Like Tolstoy, he depicted historical figures such as Hitler and Stalin alongside fictional characters. His narrative switches between global events and family occurrences.

[00:39:45] The family of Soviet physicist Viktor Shturm first appears in Stalingrad. In this novel, Grossman makes the first, although careful, examination of Hitler’s Germany. But Stalingrad is by far less philosophical than Life and Fate. Moreover, this novel was written during Stalin’s campaign against the Jews, when Grossman had to obscure the Jewish theme.

[00:40:14] His editors demanded that he remove the Jewish physicist Viktor Shum, replace him with a Russian physicist. But Grossman prevailed in leaving his character intact. In this novel, Stroum receives a farewell letter from his mother, who, like Grossman’s mother, is incarcerated in a Jewish ghetto. The text of the letter appears in Life and Fate, but in Stalingrad, we learn About the intricate ways it traveled to reach Stroum and how it affected him.

[00:40:50] Other characters, including the old Bolshevik, Mostovskoy, and the Jewish military surgeon, Sophie Levington, are first introduced in this novel. Both reappear in Life and Fate, which opens with a story of a German concentration camp.

[00:41:10] Stalingrad is a largely patriotic work, unlike Life and Fate. It tells of Soviet heroic resistance during the war. It first appeared during Stalin’s lifetime in a censored version. In subsequent editions, Grossman restored more of his original text. Stalingrad was numerously reprinted in the USSR and in post war Russia.

[00:41:37] Soviet Russia, but Grossman did not live to see the publication of Life and Fate.

[00:41:44] Jason Bedrick: One of the interesting things about Life and Fate is that although Grossman himself was never arrested, his book, Life and Fate, was. So what does it mean that the book was arrested? Many of his books were censored. described how the Soviets objected to the specifically Jewish themes that are in the book and wanted to replace them with just universal Soviet themes.

[00:42:07] What does it mean that they arrested the book and how did that affect Grossman?

[00:42:12] Alexandra Popoff: Life and fate is structured to reveal similarities between Hitlerism and Stalinism. Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR were governed by different ideologies of race and of class. But the two regimes were alike in their complete inhumanity.

[00:42:32] Under both Hitler and Stalin, people were divided into two categories, to be kept and to be destroyed. Under Hitler, the enemy was the Jewish people. Under Stalin, the peasantry. The theme of the Holocaust is most prominent in Life and Fate. There is a discussion of a final solution in it. In some chapters, action takes place in German concentration and in Defke, and in a Jewish ghetto.

[00:43:04] Then Grossman switches the narrative to show Stalin’s mass arrests, circles of hell. In Soviet political prisons and in the Gulag. After the Stalingrad victory, which secured Stalin’s reputation as a great leader, a new terror campaign is launched. And he shows this campaign against the Jewish doctors in life and faith.

[00:43:31] But the novel’s major theme is human desire for freedom. Its overall message is that even the most brutal dictatorship cannot extinguish humanity in one’s heart. Some of the most moving episodes concern Anna Stroum’s farewell letter written in the Jewish ghetto on the eve of its liquidation. This letter becomes a source of spiritual strength to her physicist son.

[00:44:03] Another moving chapter tells of Sophia Livingstone, how in a gas chamber in a place like Treblinka, she is gasping for breath. But her thoughts are about a boy, David, to whom she is trying to give a bit more space in the gas chamber. When Grossman completed this novel and read it to friends, Nobody believed that this anti totalitarian work would be published in the U.

[00:44:36] S. S. R. His friends told him it was dangerous to even attempt publication. Decades later, when the book was smuggled to the West and published, first appeared in Russian in 1980, Russian dissidents were saying it could not appear in the U. S. S. R. Soviet Union was built on the edifice of lies. It’s propaganda claimed that it was the freest country in the world.

[00:45:06] Life and fate revealed that it was but a brutal dictatorship. But even today, in Putin’s Russia, the comparison made in this novel between Stalinism and Hitlerism is an absolute taboo. Under Putin, Stalin was again resurrected as a great leader. And in 1960, during Khrushchev’s brief de Stalinization period, known as 4, this novel was arrested because it was seen as a threat to Soviet communism, to Soviet ideology.

[00:45:45] Following the rest of his novel, Grossman was told by a party apparatchik his book can be published only in 250 years. And in his response to the Soviet government, he wrote that the truth would not be postponed by 250 years. Life and fate is uncompromising. In Putin’s Russia, you will not see it on this place in bookstores.

[00:46:18] It first appeared in the Soviet Union. It didn’t take 250 years to publish it. It took three decades. It first appeared in 1988 during go of GM Nest, and even this was regarded and it appeared, by the way, not in a full edition, in partly censored edition, but that was regarded as a miracle. The very appearance in the Soviet Union.

[00:46:46] Albert Cheng: Well, for that. You know, glad it, uh, as you say, the truth will come out. It’s not going to wait 250 years. And certainly we have much to thank Grossman for a lot of things for his work in revealing that. So let’s Let’s close with one question, which is about his legacy. As you’ve been describing, he profiled the twin totalitarian regimes of the USSR and Nazi Germany that terrorized and murdered tens of millions of people.

[00:47:14] Share with us your thoughts on Grossman’s literary legacy, and then what are the main lessons we should all draw from his writings about the political nature of Nazism and Soviet Communism. Rossman

[00:47:28] Alexandra Popoff: today is quoted in hundreds of scholarly books on the Second World War, on the Holocaust, Stalin’s gulag, and the terror famine in Ukraine.

[00:47:39] I attended two international conferences where his legacy was discussed and where his texts were examined from different perspectives. His works are translated now around the world. In 1964, when Grossman died, Ilya Irenburg, speaking at his funeral, said that if it’s not necessary to learn from him how to write, it’s necessary to learn what to write.

[00:48:07] But I believe that Grossman should be remembered not only for his subject matter. He should be remembered for his ability as an artist to imprint the 20th century calamities on our collective memory. His expressive powers and humanity of his works explain their universal appeal. Today we’re again witnessing The rise of state nationalism, the rise of totalitarian leaders, and most disturbingly, the rise of anti Semitism in the world.

[00:48:44] Rossman’s topics remain current. His works serve as a powerful reminder of the 20th century tragedies. And his humanistic message is a warning from history.

[00:49:00] Albert Cheng: I want to give you the last word, Ms. Popoff, and give you an opportunity to read a passage from your book about Vasily Grossman.

[00:49:08] Alexandra Popoff: Well, thank you for that.

[00:49:09] And of course, there is an audio book with Stefan Rudnicki as the narrator. I will read a little piece from the introduction about life and fate. Grossman’s novel opens with an image of camp cities in 20th century Europe, a world of straight lines and identical barracks where individuality is erased.

[00:49:34] Tens of thousands share the same fate, whether they live and die. in a Nazi camp or in the frozen wastelands of Russia’s Far North. People are treated as the living dead. And then a little piece also from the introduction about the time when this novel was arrested. The main Soviet ideologist, Mikhail Suslov, compared the explosive power of Grossman’s work to a nuclear bomb, thus admitting that its historical facts endangered the regime.

[00:50:16] founded on fabrications. In his appeal to the Soviet government, Grossman wrote, There is no logic, no truth in the present condition, in my physical freedom, when the book to which I have given my life is in prison. For I wrote, I have not renounced it, and I do not renounce it. I ask for my book’s freedom.

[00:50:42] The regime suppressed the truth, and Grossman’s novel For as long as possible.

[00:50:49] Albert Cheng: Thanks, Ms. Popov, for your time with us and getting us really acquainted with the work of Vasily Grossman. We really appreciate all the work you’ve done to help us remember the work of Vasily Grossman. As we kind of began the show with talking about the importance of memory.

[00:51:06] And so, I want to thank you for your work in helping us do that.