The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays by Vasily Grossman
So here we are—this is death for you.
Appendixes
1. Grossman and “The Hell of Treblinka”*
Grossman wrote this long and powerful article with remarkable speed. The Red Army reached Treblinka in early August 1944; the article is dated September 1944 and was published in November 1944.
Grossman was overwhelmed by what he learned at Treblinka; we know that he suffered some kind of nervous collapse on his return to Moscow later that autumn. Nevertheless, “The Hell of Treblinka” is clear, measured, and carefully structured. The tone constantly modulates; horror gives way to irony, fury to pity, passion to mathematical logic—and even, near the end, to a moment of startling lyricism. The perspective from which Grossman writes is no less varied. Many passages are written from the perspective of those about to be gassed. Others are written from the perspective of the guards, from that of the Polish peasants living nearby, from that of a Red Army soldier, or from Grossman’s own perspective.
Having established at the outset that nearly all the victims were Jews, Grossman largely gives up using the word “Jews”; instead he insistently repeats the word “people.” This may be, in part, a rare instance of Grossman paying lip service to the demands of the anti-Semitic Soviet authorities. Nevertheless, the repetition of “people” is rhetorically effective. First, it is only the Jews whom Grossman refers to as “people”; he refers to the SS either simply as “the SS” or as “beasts”—a word that they, of course, used for the Jews. Second, rather than allowing the non-Jewish reader to stand outside, to imagine these horrors being inflicted only on members of some other nationality, Grossman invites us all to identify with the victims; both we, the readers, and they, the victims, are—simply—“people.”
One difficulty that faces anyone writing about the Shoah is the question of “aestheticizing” the death camps. It goes without saying that few writers addressing the Shoah consciously set out to create something beautiful. Nevertheless, most writers wish to write clearly, vividly, and powerfully. If a writer succeeds in these aims, his or her work will inevitably take on a certain beauty and begin to live a life of its own. There is then a danger that the subject matter—no matter how terrible it may be—will somehow be transcended, that it will be left behind and forgotten. This fear of transcendence is a driving force behind much of the later work of Paul Celan.
A second difficulty arises from a sense that the only true witnesses, the only witnesses who experienced the full truth of the camps, are the dead, those who can no longer speak to us. Primo Levi voiced this concern more than once. And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote with regard to the Gulag that “all those who drank of this most deeply, who learned the meaning of it most fully, are already in the grave and will not tell us. No one will now ever tell us the most important thing about these camps.”
Consciously or otherwise, Grossman comes as near to resolving these dilemmas as anyone is ever likely to come. Passages of near-poetry, passages that appeal vividly to all our senses, are followed by passages in what may seem like the most prosaic literary form of all: the list, the catalogue of objects. But these lists of objects, of the former belongings of former people, do more than just bring us down to earth—to what Grossman refers to as “the swaying, bottomless earth of Treblinka.” They are also the truest witnesses to the lives that have been destroyed. Grossman knows that these objects say more than he can.
***
Grossman wrote “The Hell of Treblinka” in wartime and with little in the way of sources. He evidently had access to a copy of Jankiel Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka, but it is unlikely that he had any other written sources. He spoke to Poles from the surrounding area. He interviewed former Treblinka inmates who had escaped during the uprising in August 1943 and who had been hiding in the forest. He was present while Soviet officers took down the testimony of former Wachmänner who had been captured. His notebooks contain facts, names, and numbers, though there is little indication of how he learned them. The manuscript takes up thirty-nine pages of lined paper; there are deletions and changes, but it is on the whole clear and neat. He also drew a small map, which broadly corresponds to maps drawn by former prisoners, and he wrote out the words of two songs that the prisoners were often made to sing: “Edelweiss” and “Lied für Arbeiter ‘Treblinka.’”
Around seventy people survived Treblinka, and a number of them wrote about their experiences. The very first account is Abraham Krzepicki’s “Eighteen Days in Treblinka.” Krzepicki was deported to Treblinka in August 1942, but he escaped to the Warsaw ghetto. There the historian Emanuel Ringelblum asked Rachel Auerbach to record his testimony. Krzepicki was killed in April 1943, during the ghetto uprising, and the manuscript lay buried in the rubble until December 1950. It was first published, in Yiddish, in 1956.
The first account to be published was Jankiel Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka. Wiernik escaped from Treblinka during the uprising of August 2, 1943. His account was set in type in a clandestine printshop in Warsaw and published in Polish, in May 1944, in an edition of two thousand copies. A courier from the Polish underground took a microfilm copy to London, and later that year it was published in New York, in both Yiddish and English. It is clear from Grossman’s notes that he possessed a Russian translation, and there is at least one occasion when Grossman follows Wiernik very closely indeed.
Another outstanding testimony is Samuel Willenberg’s Surviving Treblinka. This was written in Polish in 1945 but first published, in Hebrew, only in 1986; an English translation was published in 1989. A man of extraordinary strength and courage, Willenberg fought against the Russians when they invaded eastern Poland in 1939, survived thirteen months in Treblinka, took part in both the Treblinka uprising and the 1944 Warsaw uprising, and then joined a partisan group fighting alongside the Russians. Willenberg is probably the only Treblinka survivor still living. His daughter, a well-known architect, is the designer of the Israeli embassy in—of all cities—Berlin.
It has taken us many decades even to begin to take in the truth about Treblinka. Richard Glazar, another survivor of the 1943 uprising, wrote a memoir in Czech immediately after the war but was unable to find a publisher. Only in 1992 did his memoir first appear, from Fischer Verlag, in Glazar’s own German translation. Chil Rajchman’s testimony, written in Yiddish as early as 1944, has taken still longer to surface. Rajchman seems to have chosen not to publish it during his lifetime, but he instructed his family to publish it after his death. He died in 2004; French and German translations appeared in 2009, and an English translation, titled Treblinka, is due in 2011. Rajchman writes without a wasted word and with absolute clarity. His account reads like a medieval vision of Hell; he records the actions of the SS as straightforwardly as a medieval priest might record the behavior of a band of demons.
Our notes also draw on the work of a number of historians, journalists, and anthologists. Rachel Auerbach (1903–76), one of the most dedicated chroniclers of the Warsaw ghetto, was one of a party of twelve (four of them Treblinka survivors) who, on the initiative of the Central State Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, made an official inspection tour of Treblinka on November 7, 1945, probably about five or six weeks after Grossman had completed his article. Her account of this visit, “In the Fields of Treblinka” (first published in Yiddish in 1946), includes this unforgettable picture:
The Treblinka veterans [...] wanted to do something, to make some extravagant gestures, that would at least reflect their emotions, bound up as they were with this place. They wanted to gather bones. They leaped into ditches, reached their bare hands into rotted masses of corpses to show they were not repelled. They did the right thing. Now we were just like the Muslim sectarians who carried their dead along in their caravans to Mecca, considering it their sacred duty to bear the smell of death with patience and love as they went along the road. That was how we felt in these fields, where there lay the last remains of our martyrs.
Alexander Donat (1905??
This is the first time that “The Hell of Treblinka” has been published in English in full. Previous translators have made various omissions. In particular, they have omitted many of the references to the Battle of Stalingrad, perhaps seeing them as propagandist. These passages, however, serve a purpose. First, they help us to remember how much Grossman witnessed in the course of only a few years; he was filing reports from the right bank of Stalingrad only eighteen months before composing “The Hell of Treblinka.” Second, it was indeed—as Grossman tells us—within weeks of the German defeat at Stalingrad that Himmler visited Treblinka and ordered the bodies of the dead to be dug up and burned. We tend to see the Nazi leaders as possessed by an unquestioning faith in their own rightness. This episode indicates that Himmler, at least, was quick to imagine how the world would see their crimes.
2. Natalya Khayutina and the Yezhovs*
In the late 1930s, Soviet cultural life was frenziedly intense; sex, art, and power were—morbidly, dangerously, often fatally—intertwined. There were a number of cultural salons in Moscow, and the most glamorous was that of Yevgenia Solomonovna Yezhova, the wife of the head of the NKVD. While Yevgenia Solomonovna worked as deputy editor of a prestigious journal, The USSR Under Construction, and presided over her salon, her husband, Nikolay Yezhov, was presiding over the Great Terror. Between late September 1936 and April 1938, he was responsible for about half of the Soviet political, military, and intellectual elite being imprisoned or shot. He was also responsible for the deaths of approximately 380,000 kulaks and 250,000 members of various national minorities.
Among the members of the Soviet elite who visited Yevgenia Yezhova’s salon were the Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels; the jazz-band leader Leonid Utyosov; the film director Sergey Eisenstein; the journalist and editor Mikhail Koltsov; the poet and translator Samuel Marshak; the Arctic explorer Otto Shmidt; and the writers Isaak Babel and Mikhail Sholokhov, with both of whom Yezhova had affairs. Babel, whose affair with Yevgenia began in Berlin in 1927, is reported to have said of her, “Just think, our girl from Odessa has become the first lady of the kingdom!” In some respects, at least, Yezhova seems to have been impressively bold; Otto Shmidt’s son remembers her as being the only person who came up to speak to his father after Stalin had publicly criticized him at a Kremlin reception.
That Mikhail Sholokhov should have visited Yezhova’s salon is not surprising. Sholokhov moved in powerful circles; he was a member of the Supreme Soviet from 1937, and he was admired by Stalin. He appears to have been fearless; both in 1933, during the Terror Famine, and in 1938, toward the end of the Great Terror, he wrote to Stalin with surprisingly direct criticisms of his murderous policies. Isaak Babel’s presence is equally unsurprising; he was fascinated by violence and power. The writer Dmitry Furmanov records in his diary that Babel wanted to write a novel about the Cheka. And Nadezhda Mandelstam records her husband as asking Babel why he was drawn to such people as the Yezhovs: “Was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers? ‘No,’ Babel replied. ‘I don’t want to touch it with my fingers—I just like to have a sniff and see what it smells like.’”
Whether Grossman ever visited the Yezhovs is impossible to establish with certainty. We know only that he was on friendly terms with at least two of the regular visitors to the salon, Babel and Mikhoels, and that in 1938 he wrote to Nikolay Yezhov asking him to release his wife, Olga Mikhailovna, from prison. We also know that in 1960, more than twenty years after the death of both Nikolay Yezhov and his wife, Grossman wrote a story based on the life of a girl from an orphanage whom the Yezhovs had adopted. Grossman changes the girl’s name—he calls her Nadya, a name that means “hope”—and he has the Yezhovs adopt Nadya in 1936 or 1937, although they may well have adopted the real Natalya as early as 1933. In most respects, however, Grossman is factually accurate; he evidently knew a great deal both about Natalya’s life and about the life of her adoptive parents.
Natalya—who is still alive as I write—has tried to trace her true parents, but to no avail; other researchers have had no more success. The first page of Grossman’s story, set in London, hints at the possibility that Natalya was Yevgenia Yezhova’s daughter by her previous husband, the journalist and diplomat Aleksandr Gladun. In late 1926 and early 1927 Yevgenia and Aleksandr lived in London; she herself was employed in the Soviet embassy as a typist. In May 1927, as a result of Britain breaking off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, they were both expelled. Aleksandr returned to Moscow, but Yevgenia went first to work in the Soviet embassy in Berlin; it was during the several months that she spent there that she began her relationship with Babel. Soon after her return to the Soviet Union, she and Yezhov met in Sukhumi, a resort on the Black Sea. Yezhov fell in love with her; Yevgenia and Aleksandr divorced; and, in the summer of 1930, Yevgenia and Nikolay Yezhov were married.
Toward the end of the first section of “Mama,” however, Yezhova says to her husband that the baby girl they are about to adopt has the same eyes as he does. This hints at a very different possibility: that the girl was Yezhov’s illegitimate daughter—a claim made by Yezhov’s sister. Grossman, however, merely hints at these two possibilities; he does not insist on either.
Russians often refer to the Great Terror as the Yezhovshchina. Five feet tall, Yezhov was known as “the bloody dwarf.” A well-known pun on his name was yezhovye rukavitsy—“rod of iron” or, more literally, “hedgehog skin gauntlets.” Grossman’s irony with regard to Yezhov is subtle and penetrating; his suggestion that this terrifying figure was himself terrified of his little daughter’s nanny—the only person in the apartment with eyes that are free of madness, anxiety, and tension—is as convincing as it is unexpected.
The real Natalya, however, remembers Yezhov with love. She has said in an interview, “He spent a lot of time with me, more even than my mother did. He made tennis rackets for me. He made skates and skis. He made everything for me himself.” And the authors of the first English-language biography of Yezhov write, “At the dacha, Yezhov taught her to play tennis, skate, and ride a bicycle. He is remembered as a gentle, loving father, showering her with presents and playing with her in the evenings after returning from the Lubyanka.”
Grossman’s portrayal is in keeping with Natalya’s. Even the “plastic piglet” to which father and daughter give a drink of tea is evidently based on a real prototype. Only once, as Yezhov is already beginning to fall from power, does Grossman puncture this idyll. Nadya looks into Yezhov’s eyes and suddenly, for no apparent reason, screams. Yezhov asks if she is ill, and the nanny replies, “Something frightened her.” Yezhov asks, “What?,” and the nanny replies, “Lord knows—she’s only a child.” Here, as elsewhere in the story, Grossman has chosen to hint at something rather than to state it explicitly. In his first version this hint was more heavy-handed; Yezhov’s “What?” was followed by the sentence, “She wanted to reply but, instead of replying as she wanted, she sai
Neither version offers any serious explanation for the girl’s sudden terror. She may have glimpsed Yezhov’s own terror or she may somehow, uncomprehendingly, have glimpsed the terror to which Yezhov has subjected the country. It is possible that this episode is a distillation of an incident that Natalya herself recounted in an interview more than sixty years later. During a game of hide-and-seek Natalya apparently once slipped into her father’s study and hid on the windowsill, behind the blinds. There she opened a photograph album and found it to be full of neatly arranged photographs of dead children. In her horror, she was barely able to sleep for several days. Eventually she told her mother what had happened—and from then on Yezhov took care to lock his study securely. Natalya, however, remained frightened even to go past the door; to her it seemed that the dead children were not in a photograph album but there behind the door.
This account has the quality of a nightmare. It is possible it really was a nightmare—perhaps a nightmare that Natalya had some years later and that she remembered as real. There is, however, no doubt as to the reality of Yezhov’s macabre ways. The NKVD captain who searched Yezhov’s Kremlin apartment shortly after his arrest in April 1939 found four used revolver bullets in a drawer of his desk. In his report the captain wrote, “Each bullet was wrapped in paper with the words Zinoviev, Kamenev and Smirnov written on each in pencil, with the paper saying Smirnov wrapped around two bullets. Apparently, these bullets were sent to Yezhov after the executions of Zinoviev, Kamenev and the other. I have taken possession of this package.” Whatever she saw in reality, and whatever she saw with her inner eye, Natalya came to a true understanding of something very dark. A number of interviews with her have been published during the last ten years, and she mentions this story about the dead children only in one of them. For the main part, she is unremittingly positive in her portrayal of Yezhov; this story seems to have slipped out almost in spite of herself.