A Writer at War

The Russian Academy of Sciences has estimated that the Soviet Union suffered 26.6 million fatal casualties in World War II, of which 8.7 million were military deaths.  Other researchers, according to Wikipedia, put the total number of dead and missing as high as 40 million, with 14 million of those being military.

In the West, we naturally focus our attention on the Normandy invasion and the battles in North Africa and Italy in determining the cause of Germany's defeat.  We overlook the huge losses and intense suffering of the Soviet people, on whose territory much of the war was fought.  But if Germany hadn't been desperately fighting on the Eastern Front throughout, especially, the early years of the war, Britain might have been overrun before American help ever arrived.

I've just finished reading a collection of the writings of Vasily Grossman, a Soviet war correspondent, nicely collected and organized into a coherent picture of his activities and observations from the time of the Germans' unexpected attack in 1941 until the conquest of Berlin in 1945:  A Writer at War with the Red Army 1941-1945, edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Lyuba Vinogradova.  The narrative paints a vivid picture of the heroism of the Soviet military, but also of the stolid acceptance of great suffering and loss by the common people. 

This is also a book that makes you wonder -- whatever possesses human beings to fight wars?  As Grossman ponders, after Berlin is overrun: 

Millions of our soldiers have seen the well-built roads running from one village to another and German autobahns ... Our soldiers have seen the two-storey suburban houses with electricity, gas, bathrooms and beautifully tended gardens.  Our people have seen the villas of the rich bourgeoisie in Berlin, the unbelievable luxury of castles, estates and mansions.  And thousands of soldiers repeat these angry questions when they look around them in Germany:  "But why did they come to us?  What did they want?"

Why are the wealthy never satisfied?  Why do they want even the little that the poor possess?

Grossman, a secular Jew, was not a hack journalist or party functionary.  He was a literary writer, and a Ukrainian.  He never joined the Communist party.  He survived the Stalinist purges, but frequently walked the edge of the precipice.  His newspapers at times refused to publish his war stories, where those submissions showed signs of contradicting the Communists' doctrinal approach to the war.

Much of the book relates Grossman's experiences during the Battle of Stalingrad, and during the German offensive leading up to that decisive battle.  Grossman was on the front lines, sharing the lives of the common soldiers.  As a writer, his observations and news stories -- more than those of most journalists -- described the small details that brought the front to life -- a flight of birds, a ruined home, a crying mother, the body of a dead child.  He felt -- and described -- the horror of war, for the civilian at least as much as for the soldier.  His dispatches had to be toned down at times to avoid reducing the readers back home to despair.

His mother -- a Ukrainian Jew -- died early in the war, as part of the Nazis' "final solution."  He carried his sorrow throughout the war, and it colored his sympathy for those who were suffering.  He never subscribed to Stalin's boast that a million deaths was merely "a statistic."

He was avidly patriotic.  Although not a party member, he supported the Communists' conduct of the war, although he despaired at the follies of individual bureaucrats and of self-centered, egotistical generals.  As the Germans withdrew from Stalingrad, and were defeated near Moscow in the north, he rejoiced, along with the soldiers, in the same way an American journalist would rejoice in the victories in the West.

Grossman noted -- in his own notes, if not in his published dispatches -- the brutal conduct of the Red Army, once it was marching outside the Soviet Union -- the widespread rapes, the cruelty.  He also observed a Soviet soldier fetching a cup of water from the river for a suffering German prisoner.  Would the Germans have done the same if their positions had been reversed, he wondered?

Many of Grossman's quotations are lengthy dispatches, tied together with very helpful narrative by the editor.  Especially in the second half of the book, the quotations often consist of mere notes Grossman wrote to himself; one sentence observations; small vignettes; snatches of conversation.

But one quotation, uninterrupted by editorial comment, makes up a lengthy chapter in the book -- the liberation of the death camp at Treblinka.  This chapter was neither the first nor the last of Grossman's descriptions of German atrocities.  But it's the most devastating.  The quotation concludes:

We walk on and on across the bottomless unsteady land of Treblinka, and then suddenly we stop.  Some yellow hair, waxy, fine and light, glowing like brass, is trampled into the earth, and blonde curls next to it, and then heavy black plaits on the light-coloured sand, and then more and more.  Apparently, these are the contents of one -- just one sack of hair --which hadn't been taken away.  Everything is true.  The last lunatic hope that everything was only a dream is ruined.  And lupin pods are tinkling, tinkling, little seeds are falling, as if a ringing of countless little bells is coming from under the ground.  And one feels as if one's heart could stop right now, seized with such sorrow, such grief, that a human being cannot possibly stand it.

Grossman was a writer of deep emotion, but emotion under control of a fine analytical mind. And he possessed a mind for detail and for description.

After the war, Grossman wrote a novel based on his wartime experiences.  Soviet authorities never permitted its publication during his lifetime.  But a microfilm copy of the manuscript was smuggled out to the West.  It was published under the title Life and Fate. It was first published in Russia in 1988. Some critics consider it one of the best Russian novels of the twentieth century, a finer novel than Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago.

We are entering, apparently, another period of mutual hatred with Russia.  Let's not forget that the Russians are every bit as human as ourselves, with the same hopes and sorrows.  A nation that produces a Vasily Grossman, a writer who survives the purges of a paranoid despot to become one of the best known and respected of war correspondents, without ever losing his ability to note a small, bright flower growing out of a common grave and use it to convey the sorrow of wartime -- such a nation is a nation with a soul.  We should try harder to understand the Russian people.