Free The Road by Vasily Grossman Page B

often so veryready to talk to him. This concern for the individual, perhaps not surprisingly, also sometimes brought Grossman into conflict with the authorities. For all his wholehearted commitment to the Soviet cause, he was no less wholeheartedly opposed to the unnecessary sacrifice of individual lives for the apparent good of this cause. Korotkova has summarized Grossman’s own account of a meeting at the editorial office of
Red Star
: “Ortenberg once summoned three correspondents—Aleksey Tolstoy, Vasily Grossman, and Pyotr Pavlenko—and suggested that one of them write an article to illustrate the necessity for the new decree about the execution of deserters. My father responded sharply, ‘I’m not going to write such a piece.’ Pavlenko somehow ‘wriggled up to my father and, hissing like a snake,’ said, ‘You’re a proud man, Vasily Semyonovich, a very proud man.’ Only one man remained silent—Aleksey Tolstoy. It was he who then wrotethe required article.”
    After encircling the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the Red Army began its long march westward. The liberation of the Ukraine, however, almost certainly brought Grossman more bitterness than joy. In the autumn of 1943 he learned about the massacre at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, where a hundred thousand people, nearly all Jews, were shot in the course of six months, more than thirty-three thousand of them during the first two days, September 29 and 30. Soon afterward, in Berdichev, he learned the details of the death of his mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, in what was probably the first of the Einsatzgruppen massacres carried out in the Ukrainein September 1941. This knowledge must have been all the harder to bear because Grossman blamed himself for failing to fetch Yekaterina Savelievna from Berdichev while this was still possible during the first weeks of the war.
    One of the most striking of Grossman’s wartime works is “The Ukraine Without Jews”—an article that combines factual detail and moving lament. It also includes a remarkable passage in which Grossman not only analyzes the appeal of Nazism but also, through the use of incantatory, almost folkloric repetition, forces the reader to feel this appeal:
“You fear proletarian revolution,” the National Socialists said to the German industrialists. “You fear Communism, which is a hundred times more terrible for us than any Versailles treaty. We too fear proletarian revolution—so let us fight together against the Jews. They, after all, are an eternal source of sedition and bloody rebellion. They know how to incite the masses. They are orators and authors of revolutionary books. It is they who gave birth to the ideas of class struggle and proletarian revolution!”
    “You are suffering from the consequences of the Versailles treaty,” the National Socialists said to the laboring masses of Germany. “You are hungry, you are without work. The heavy millstone of the reparations is crushing your exhausted shoulders. But look whose hands are turning the wheel that moves this stone. It is the hands of the Jewish plutocracy, the hands of Jewish bankers—the uncrowned kings of America, France, and England. Your enemies are our enemies—let us fight shoulder to shoulder against them!”
    “You have been insulted—and your ideals desecrated,” the National Socialists said to the German intelligentsia. “Your enemies write contemptuously about Germany, examining with cold skepticism the history of a great nation. Your thought has been castrated, your pride crucified. There is no one who needs your talents and knowledge. You, the salt of the earth, are doomed to become waiters and taxi drivers. Can you not see the cold eyes looking out of the fog that now surrounds Germany? Can you not see the cold merciless eyes of the world’s Jews—of the Jew who is the eternal, hate-filled enemy of the national hearth; the Jew who is without country; the Jew who hates and despises