The Man Who Saw Too Much

FROM THE FRONT LINE: STALINGRAD-TREBLINKA-BERLIN, 1941-45

By Vasily Grossman
Translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler.
Introduction by Robert Chandler and Julia Volohova.
New York Review Books; 512 pp.; $24.95
Buy the Book

This collection of 26 pieces by one of the Soviet Union’s most admired writers has an unusual mixture of superb prose interspersed with streaks and patches of cringeworthy propaganda. The translator-editor Robert Chandler and the Grossman scholar Julia Volohova, however, are sharp-eyed interpreters and guides. Their excellent editorial apparatus allows them to demonstrate for us the obstacles that Grossman (1905-1964) faced as he tried to convey devastating episodes of World War II (the “Great Patriotic War,” as the Russians still call it).

“Much of the material in these articles,” Chandler and Vorohova explain, “went through three incarnations. First came the manuscript notebooks, jotted down laconically in difficult conditions… Next came the articles published in Red Star; these incorporate much material from the notebooks – sometimes verbatim, sometimes toned down, sometimes expanded. Lastly, after the war, Grossman dictated from the manuscript notebooks to his wife… In the course of dictation, he added explanations, general reflections, and lyrical digressions.”

The introduction, the photographs, the commentary prefacing individual sections and the hundreds of readable and pertinent notes comprise about a quarter of the volume. I need (I think all readers will need) such reminders as Chandler and Volohova provide: “for Grossman, writing during Stalin’s lifetime, and for a military publication, attempting ‘to tell the whole truth’ would have been suicidal.” Otherwise, such propaganda as this in “The Battle of Stalingrad” would be appalling: “This was a battle that would decide the fate of the world, a battle that made manifest all the strengths and weaknesses of both nations: one of them battling to achieve world domination, the other battling in the name of world freedom, against lies, slavery, and oppression.” Grossman wrote that while knowing all too well that the USSR had only just left a decade of executions of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens; the catastrophic Soviet-induced Holodomar that starved to death millions in Ukraine; and the expansion of the GULAG system that was continuing to enslave or murder several million more.

Grossman could not of course point out amid his scoffing assessments of the Nazis’ wickednesses that in 1939 Stalin had joyfully and bloodthirstily partnered with Hitler to divvy up independent Poland. Professional writers know that if they don’t own the printing press, they’re going to have to compromise and wait for their opportunity to slip in their individual point of view. I trust that Grossman blushed when he let himself pity the poor Poles who had recently been subjugated to German rule (after more than a hundred years of Russian subjugation, with another forty-five to come!): “What was life like for these people under occupation? Poland was enslaved for longer than any other European state seized by the brute force of Fascism… it is important to ask the Poles about their living conditions, and the laws imposed upon them, during those fifty months which must have felt like five centuries.”

In this volume, what makes Grossman a great and unique voice are “The Hell of Treblinka” and “Ukraine Without Jews,” where he writes as if nothing could stop him from communicating to the world his horror at what he has learned and witnessed. In one heartrending section, composed as a simple list, Grossman chills our bones and brings us to tears:

A people has been murdered. Elderly artisans and well-known master craftsmen – tailors, hatmakers, cobblers, tinsmiths, jewelers, housepainters, furriers, and bookbinders – have been murdered; porters, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, stove makers, and locksmiths have been murdered; cabinetmakers, chauffeurs, and drivers of tractors and horse cabs have been murdered; millers, bakers, cooks, and water carriers have been murdered; doctors, dentists, surgeons, gynecologists, and physiotherapists have been murdered; professors of bacteriology and biochemistry and the directors of university clinics have been murdered; teachers of history, algebra, and trigonometry have been murdered; graduate students, assistant lecturers, and doctors of science have been murdered; architects, engineers, steelworkers, bridge-builders, and locomotive-builders have been murdered; road-makers, agronomists, farmers and land-surveyors have been murdered; accountants, bookkeepers, shopkeepers, supply managers, filing clerks, secretaries, and night watchmen have been murdered; teachers and dressmakers have been murdered; grandmothers who could mend stockings and bake tasty bread, who could cook chicken soup and make apple strudel with walnuts, have been murdered; women always faithful to their husbands have been murdered, and so have more frivolous women; beautiful young women, jolly schoolgirls, and serious women students have been murdered; silly and unattractive girls have been murdered; hunchbacks have been murdered; singers have been murdered; the blind and deaf-mute have been murdered; violinists and pianists have been murdered; two-year-old and three-year-old children have been murdered; eighty-year-old men with eyes clouded by cataracts, with cold, transparent fingers and quiet voices that rustle like parchment, have been murdered; newborn babies sucking at their mothers’ breast until their last moment have been murdered. All have been murdered; hundreds of thousands – millions – of Ukrainian Jews have been murdered.

One particular Ukrainian Jew that Grossman doesn’t name who was murdered in “the Shoah of bullets” is his mother, a native of Berdichev.

“The Hell of Treblinka” (November 1944) was, as Robert Chandler and Volohova note, “one of the first substantial publications about a Nazi death camp in any language.” In the midst of its telling, Grossman remarks: “It is infinitely painful to read this. The reader must believe me when I say it is equally hard to write it.”

From the Front Line includes a few fictional stories, the most intriguing one of which, “Tiergarten,” only posthumously published, is about the Berlin Zoo and the fate of a zookeeper and the animals during the Allied bombardment of the city. “People in this country no longer want freedom,” reflects the zookeeper. “Freedom wasn’t taken away from people by force of arms, as it was from animals. Even a worm wants freedom. But people yielded their freedom voluntarily. They slipped into the yoke of their own accord.” (Not to suggest that such yokings have any relevance to American or Russian politics today!)

This is the seventh volume of Grossman’s work published by New York Review Books, all of which Robert Chandler has translated solo or with his wife Elizabeth. As Volohova shepherds Grossman’s letters and notebooks into print in Russian, we should anticipate more translations of Grossman to come.

 – Bob Blaisdell