A Writer at War

by Vasily Grossman

  Morning. Trip with Berzarin and his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Bokov, to the centre of Berlin. This was where that we saw the [bombing] work done by the Americans and English. Hell!

  We crossed the Spree. Thousands of encounters. Thousands of Berliners in the streets. A Jewish woman with her husband. An old man, a Jew, who burst into tears when he learned about the fate of those who went to Lublin.

  A [German] lady in an astrakhan coat, who likes me very much, says: ‘But surely, you aren’t a Jewish commissar?’

  In a rifle corps [headquarters].5 The commander [is] General Rosly. The corps is fighting in the centre of Berlin. Rosly has two dachshunds (amusing fellows), a parrot, a peacock, a guinea fowl. They are all travelling with him. There’s a cheerful excitement at Rosly’s headquarters. He says: ‘We fear our neighbours now, not the enemy.’ He says laughing: ‘I’ve given orders to place burned-out tanks on the way to the Reichstag and the Reichschancellery so as to block our neighbours. The greatest disappointment in Berlin is when you learn about your neighbour’s success.’

  Grossman was fascinated by the behaviour of the defeated enemy – how ready they were to obey orders from the new authority, and how little partisan resistance there had been, unlike in the Soviet Union. His vignette below of the old German Communist was repeated frequently. These Party members emerged, expecting to be greeted as comrades by the Red Army, but instead were treated with disdain, if not contempt and even outright suspicion. Soviet citizens, having had no guidance from their own political leaders, could not understand why the working class in Germany had done so little to fight the Nazis. SMERSh and NKVD officers even arrested some German Communists as spies. In the Stalinist mindset, the fact that they had not fought the Nazis as partisans provided grounds for deep suspicion.

  Colonel General Berzarin, the commandant of Berlin, receives German dignitaries.

  A day in Berzarin’s office. The Creation of the World. Germans, Germans, Germans – Bürgermeisters, directors of Berlin’s electricity supply, Berlin water, sewerage, underground, trams, gas, factory owners, [and other] characters. They obtain new positions in this office. Vice-directors become directors, chiefs of regional enterprises become chiefs on a national scale. Shuffling of feet, greetings, whispers.

  An old man, a house painter, produces his [Communist] Party identity card. He has been a member since 1920. This does not make a strong impression. He is invited to sit down.

  Oh, how weak human nature is! All these big officials brought up by Hitler, successful and sleek, how quickly and passionately they have forsaken and cursed their regime, their leaders, their Party. They are all saying the same thing: ‘Sieg!’ – that’s their slogan today.

  2 May. The Day of Berlin’s capitulation. It’s difficult to describe it. A monstrous concentration of impressions. Fire and fires, smoke, smoke, smoke. Enormous crowds of [German] prisoners. Their faces are full of drama. In many faces there’s sadness, not only personal suffering, but also the suffering of a citizen. This overcast, cold and rainy day is undoubtedly the day of Germany’s ruin. In smoke, among the ruins, in flames, amid hundreds of corpses in the streets.

  Corpses squashed by tanks, squeezed out like tubes. Almost all of them are clutching grenades and sub-machine guns in their hands. They have been killed fighting. Most of the dead men are dressed in brown shirts. They were Party activists who defended the approaches to the Reichstag and the Reichschancellery.

  Prisoners – policemen, officials, old men and next to them schoolboys, almost children. Many [of the prisoners] are walking with their wives, beautiful young women. Some of the women are laughing, trying to cheer up their husbands. A young soldier with two children, a boy and a girl. Another soldier falls down and can’t get up again, he is crying. Civilians are kind to them, there’s grief in their faces. They are giving prisoners water and shovel bread into their hands.

  A dead old woman is half sitting on a mattress by a front door, leaning her head against the wall. There’s an expression of calm and sorrow on her face, she has died with this grief. A child’s little legs in shoes and stockings are lying in the mud. It was a shell, apparently, or else a tank has run over her. (This was a girl.)

  In the streets that are already peaceful, the ruins have been tidied.

  [German] women are sweeping sidewalks with brushes like those we use to sweep rooms.

  The [enemy] offered to capitulate during the night over the radio. The general commanding the garrison gave the order. ‘Soldiers! Hitler, to whom you have given the oath, has committed suicide.’6

  I’ve witnessed the last shots in Berlin. Groups of SS sitting in a building on the banks of the Spree, not far from the Reichstag, refused to surrender. Huge guns were blasting yellow, dagger-like fire at the building, and everything was swamped in stone dust and black smoke.

  Reichstag. Huge, powerful. Soldiers are making bonfires in the hall. They rattle their mess tins and open cans of condensed milk with their bayonets.

  A seemingly empty conversation has remained in my memory. It was with a middle-aged horse-driver, who had a moustache and a dark brown wrinkled face. He was standing beside his ponies at the corner of Leipzigerstrasse. I asked him about Berlin, and whether he likes the city.

  ‘Oh, you see,’ he said, ‘there was such a fuss yesterday in this Berlin. A battle was going on, in this very street. German shells were exploding all the time. I was standing by the horses, and my foot bandage had become loose. I bent down to redo it, and then a shell blew up! A horse got scared and ran off. This one. He’s young, but a bit naughty. And I was thinking, what should I do now, retie my foot bandage or run after the horse? Well, I ran after him, the foot bandage trailing after me, shells blowing up everywhere, my horse running, and me running after him. Well, I’ve taken a look at this Berlin! I was running for two hours in just one street, it had no end! I was running and thinking – well, that’s Berlin. It’s Berlin all right, but I did catch the horse!’

  Just to the west of the Reichstag, Grossman wandered around the Tiergarten, the central park in Berlin where all the trees had been blasted to pieces in the battle and the ground was churned up by shell and bomb blast. The great victory column, the Siegessäule, was known to Soviet troops during the battle as the ‘tall lady’, because of the figure of winged victory on top, which Berliners called ‘Golden Elsa’. The ‘fortress’ he refers to below is the huge Zoo bunker, or flak tower, a vast concrete construction with anti-aircraft batteries on top and shelter inside for several thousand people. It had been Goebbels’s headquarters in his role as Reich’s Commissioner for Defence, but he did not die there. Goebbels and his wife Magda had shot themselves in the Reichschancellery garden after Magda had killed their six children with poison.

  Memorials to victory. The Siegessäule, colossal buildings and concrete fortresses, sites of Berlin’s anti-aircraft defence. Here was the Defence HQ of Goebbels’s residence. People say he had given orders to poison his family and killed himself. Yesterday, he shot himself. His little scorched body is lying here, too: the artificial leg, white tie.

  The enormity of victory. By the huge obelisk, a spontaneous celebration is going on. The armour of tanks has disappeared under heaps of flowers and red flags. Barrels are in blossom like trunks of spring trees. Everyone is dancing, laughing, singing. Hundreds of coloured rockets are shot into the air, everyone is saluting with bursts from sub-machine guns, rifle and pistol shots. (I learned later that many of those men celebrating were living corpses, having drunk a terrible poison from barrels containing an industrial chemical in the Tiergarten. This poison started to act on the third day after they drank it, and killed people mercilessly.)

  The Brandenburg Gate is blocked with a wall of tree trunks and sand, two to three metres high. In the space [of the arch], like in a frame, one can see the startling panorama of Berlin burning. Even I have never seen such a picture, although I’ve seen thousands of fires.

  Foreigners. [Forced labourers and prisoners of w
ar.] Their suffering, their travelling, shouting, threats towards German soldiers. Top hats, whiskers. A young Frenchman said to me: ‘Monsieur, I love your army and that’s why it is painful for me to see its attitude to girls and women. This is going to be very harmful for your propaganda.’

  Grossman in a Berlin street on 2 May 1945, the day of the surrender.

  Looting: barrels, piles of fabric, boots, leather, wine, champagne, dresses – all this is being carried on carts and vehicles, or on shoulders.

  Germans: some of them are exceptionally communicative and amiable, others turn away sullenly. There are many young women crying. Apparently, they have been made to suffer by our soldiers.

  It was in Germany, particularly here in Berlin, that our soldiers really started to ask themselves why did the Germans attack us so suddenly? Why did the Germans need this terrible and unfair war? Millions of our men have now seen the rich farms in East Prussia, the highly organised agriculture, the concrete sheds for livestock, spacious rooms, carpets, wardrobes full of clothes.

  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?’

  Most soldiers flocked to the Reichstag on this day of victory. Only a few, mainly officers, appear to have found the Reichschancellery. They were allowed to wander around on the ground floor, but SMERSh operatives, under the command of General Vadis, had sealed the cellars and the bunker. They were searching desperately for Hitler’s body. Grossman, who went with Efim Gekhman, collected souvenirs and Nazi memorabilia. According to Ortenberg, Grossman obtained the last souvenirs in his collection on 2 May 1945 in Berlin. Grossman and Gekhman entered Hitler’s office in the morning. Grossman opened a drawer of a desk, inside were stamps saying ‘The Führer has confirmed’, ‘The Führer has agreed’, etc. He took several of these stamps, and they are now in the same archive as his papers.

  The new Reichschancellery. It’s a monstrous crash of the regime, ideology, plans, everything, everything. Hitler kaputt . . .

  Hitler’s office. The reception hall. A huge foyer, in which a young Kazakh, with dark skin and broad cheekbones, is learning to ride a bicycle, falling off it now and then. Hitler’s armchair and table.

  Grossman at the Brandenburg Gate.

  A huge metal globe, crushed and crumpled, plaster, planks of wood, carpets. Everything is mixed up. It’s chaos. Souvenirs, books with dedicatory inscriptions to the Führer, stamps, etc.

  In the south-west corner of the Tiergarten, Grossman also visited Berlin’s zoo.

  Hungry tigers and lions . . . were trying to hunt sparrows and mice that scurried in their cages.

  The Zoological Garden. There was fighting here. Broken cages. Corpses of marmosets, tropical birds, bears, the island for hamadryases, their babies are holding on to their mothers’ bellies with their tiny hands.

  Conversation with an old man. He’s been looking after the monkeys for thirty-seven years. There was the corpse of a dead gorrilla in a cage.

  ‘Was she a fierce animal?’ I asked.

  ‘No. She only roared a good deal. People are angrier,’ he replied.

  On a bench, a wounded German soldier is hugging a girl, a nurse. They see no one. When I pass them again an hour later, they are still sitting in the same position. The world does not exist for them, they are happy.

  Grossman returned to Moscow and in early June escaped to a dacha. At first he could not write. He collapsed with nervous exhaustion, a reaction which had been postponed, like for so many who returned from the war. But then, with rest, fresh air, fishing and long walks, he felt ready to start his self-imposed task – to honour in his writing the heroism of the Red Army and the memory of the countless victims of the Nazi invasion.

  1 Starostas, the village elders or mayors, appointed by the Germans, rightly feared the retribution of the NKVD and had fled to Germany in front of the advancing Red Army.

  2 This rumour was wrong. General Vlasov and the bulk of his troops were in Czechoslovakia, where at the last minute they sided with the Czech uprising in Prague against the Germans, but this did nothing to temper their fate at the hands of a vengeful NKVD. Vlasov was captured by a Soviet tank unit and flown back to Moscow, where he is said to have been tortured to death.

  3 Colonel-General Nikolai Erastovich Berzarin (1904–1945)

  4 The Tresckows (with a ‘c’) were an old Prussian family, of whom the best-known member was Major-General Henning von Tresckow (1901–1944), who smuggled a bomb aboard Hitler’s plane on 13 March 1943, but it failed to go off. Tresckow committed suicide with a grenade on 21 July 1944. The Schloß Treskow in which Grossman was billeted was most probably Schloß Friedrichsfelde on the east side of Berlin, which belonged to the illegitimate, and much richer, branch of the family, spelt without a ‘c’. They had made their money by selling cavalry mounts all over Europe. Münthe von Treskow, whose book Grossman examined, was thrown out of his house by Soviet troops and is said by the family to have died of starvation.

  5 This is the IX Rifle Corps commanded by Lieutenant General I.P. Rosly, which was part of the 5th Shock Army, commanded by Colonel-General Berzarin.

  6 General Helmuth Weidling, the commander of LVI Panzer Corps, had been appointed commander of Berlin on 23 April by Hitler just after the Führer, due to a misunderstanding, had ordered his arrest for cowardice. Weidling, after his surrender at General Chuikov’s headquarters, prepared this announcement to encourage his men to lay down their arms and halt the bloodshed.

  AFTERWORD

  The Lies of Victory

  Vasily Grossman’s belief in a ‘ruthless truth of war’ was cruelly scorned by the Soviet authorities, especially when they attempted to suppress information about the Holocaust. At first, he refused to believe that anti-Semitism could exist within the Soviet system. He had assumed that the jibes of Sholokhov which had outraged both Ehrenburg and him were an isolated example of reactionary sentiments, leftovers from the pre-revolutionary past. But he was to find soon after the war that the Stalinist system itself could be deeply anti-Semitic. Much later, when writing Life and Fate, he made it appear to be overt during the war, but this was premature. There were warnings, but the anti-Semitism within the regime did not emerge fully until 1948. It then became virulent in 1952, with Stalin’s ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign and the conspiracy theory that Jewish doctors were attempting to kill Soviet leaders. Yet Stalin’s anti-Semitism was not quite the same as that of the Nazis. It was based more on xenophobic suspicion than on race hatred.

  The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, formed in April 1942 following the appeal the year before to ‘brother Jews’ throughout the world to aid the struggle, was bound to be an object of distrust to Stalin. The slightest hint of contact with foreigners had been enough to condemn countless victims of the Great Terror in 1937 and 1938. Only during the early months of the war, when the country was faced with a mortal threat, could Stalin contemplate the idea of Jews in the Soviet Union making direct contact with American and British Jews. But the suggestion that a sort of International Brigade of foreign, especially American, Jews could be recruited to fight as a separate unit within the Red Army was firmly vetoed. It is perhaps significant that almost immediately after Moscow was saved in December 1941, two of the original proponents of the scheme, the Polish Jews Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter, were arrested. Erlich later committed suicide in prison and Alter was executed.

  The Soviet authorities tolerated the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee as a propaganda front at a time when American Lend-Lease aid was so vital to the country’s survival. But the committee’s energy and determination to expand its remit to cover the Ho
locaust was bound to put it on a collision course with Stalinist policy. The fact that the idea had partly originated in the United States with Albert Einstein and prominent American Jews later made The Black Book even more unacceptable to the Stalinist mind, even though the Soviet Information Bureau had given its consent to the project in the summer of 1943. Grossman, the Russian patriot, and the Francophile Ehrenburg were both assimilated Jews who had never cared for Orthodox ritual. They now identified with the fate of all the Jews of Europe. Also during the summer of 1943, once the tide of war had turned decisively against the Nazis, both Ehrenburg and Grossman found that major publications rejected most of their articles on the subject. Only small Jewish journals could be counted on to accept them, so they concentrated their efforts on the project of The Black Book, involving over twenty writers in the Soviet Union alone.1 Later, Grossman pointedly asked Konstantin Simonov to contribute a section on Majdanek, but he excused himself on the grounds that he was too busy. Simonov was evidently not prepared to risk antagonising the authorities.

  It was towards the end of 1944 that Ehrenburg quarrelled with the other members of the JAC’s literary committee and Grossman took over editorial responsibility. But in February 1945, the Sovinformburo criticised the emphasis on the activity of traitors in the occupied territory collaborating with the German annihilation of the Jews. It was a point on which Grossman had passionately disagreed with the far cannier Ehrenburg. For the authorities, the only useful purpose of The Black Book was as testimony for the prosecution case against fascist Germany.

  After the war, the JAC found it impossible to obtain a decision on The Black Book from the authorities. In November 1946, Ehrenburg, Grossman and Solomon Mikhoels, the chairman of the JAC, addressed a petition to Andrei Zhdanov, the secretary of the Central Committee.2