A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945

The authors brought Grossman to life and made his books and their characters even more beloved. His descriptions of the liberated concentration camps revealed to me unimaginable horrors. Grossman witnessed the worst of humanity and after the war endured Soviet censorship. We owe him a debt of gratitude for what he left us.

I started this book with misgivings. The introduction informed me it was the unpublished notes of Grossman's war correspondence, rather than the stories themselves. I've been a reporter, and let's just say my unpublished notes will never win a National Book Award. I also gathered that "Life and Fate", rather than this, was Grossman's masterwork, so perhaps I should have gone directly to it. I was completely and thankfully wrong. Edited by noted historian Anthony Beevor, an expert on Stalingrad, and collaborator Luba Vinogradova, the book expertly sets vignettes from Grossman's notes into ample background material putting it all in context. Grossman's reportage sweeps from the stunning fall of the western Soviet Union following Germany's invasion in June 1941, to the epic battle of Stalingrad in 1942 and early 1943, to the reconquest of Soviet lands, the taking of Berlin, and war's end. Grossman distinguishes himself both by his willingness to expose himself to combat and his ability to get everyone to open up to him, from peasant soldiers to tight-lipped generals. This was no mean feat for a Jewish intellectual whom many Russians despised just for who he was. You see an entire nation shell-shocked by war. They've fought so long they can't remember what peace is like. They've lived so long in the mud they can't remember what it's like to be clean or warm or dry. They don't care about getting paid because there's nothing to buy at the front. They have seen so much death; millions of people take it for granted they won't survive the war, and many are right. They die fighting with a uniquely Slavic romanticism otherwise vanished from the modern world, and despite the violence behind them - just at Stalingrad, thousands of Red Army soldiers were executed by their own commissars. We see the heroism of countless soldiers thrown into the meatgrinder of Stalingrad, on the banks of the Volga, where Stalin finally realizes he's got no more ground to give and must stop the Nazis now. Powerful too, and more unique, are later chapters where Grossman covers the Red Army's rollback to the west, where he learns what actually happened to more than a million Jews living there - including his hometown of Berdichev, where his mother was murdered. He writes the first take on the Holocaust wherever he goes from 1943 to 1945. He was the first reporter into much of the annihilated Jewish Pale in the Ukraine and Byelorussia; the first into Treblinka and Majdanek. But the Communists stunningly censored any reference to the Holocaust's victims as Jews. Stalin wanted them seen merely as Soviets, and the Ukrainian complicity covered up to ease the Ukraine's postwar reabsorption. At Treblinka, the Nazis, having spent almost two years mass murdering the Jews of Poland and neighboring areas, then spent more than six months disinterring 800,000 bodies from mass graves to destroy the evidence - starting, Grossman learns, precisely when Stalingrad fell to the Russia

What I loved about this book is that Grossman wrote both about the good and the bad. He could admit about the Red Army having 'cowards' in its ranks and about the executions that followed. But at the same time you can read about a soldier who was sentenced to be executed, the executioners gun misfired, the soldier ran away and was hidden by a commissar for days. Eventually after many inquiries and the fact that the soldier came back on his own accord his death sentence was rescinded and he followed the commissar around all the time, when asked why he replied "I am afraid that the Germans may kill you, Comrade Commissar. I am guarding you." Another recollection is about a soldier who accidentally shot another Red Army man, he was so sick with grief that he eventually killed himself. The retreats of 1941 are covered in some detail as Grossman was right there on the front, a few times even narrowly avoiding the encirclements themselves. He ate with the troops, slept with them, wrote letters with them, and interviewed them again and again. From pilots, to artillery and mortar men, to tank troops and nurses. Stories of how girls went into battle outside of Stalingrad and throughout the war, how they died just as quickly and easily as any man and how they fought just as proudly and courageously risking their lives to bandage the wounded and evacuate them from the battlefield. Stalingrad of course consumes a large portion of the book as this was Grossman's forte, he was there for a large part of the siege and the stories from this city are captivating to say the least. Snipers were quite popular and he interviewed many of them finding out how they came to be snipers and how they did their jobs so well. Lastly is the liberation of territory from the Germans and Romanians and of course the war being taken to Germany. He holds nothing back while describing the destruction the German Army reigned over his land and eventually discovering that his mother was among the victims of an execution of the entire Jewish population of his him town. When Treblinka is discovered the reader is presented with a large article about it, some of the stories recounted are heartbreaking and at the same time he shows how many times Jews rebelled and fought back, on dozens of occasions. Covered are the rapes and robberies of Germans and Germany as a whole, Grossman holds nothing back and talks about the screaming of women and their bruised and swollen bodies and faces when he encounters them sobbing and asking for help. One incident stayed in my memory, a Jewish officer was billeted in a house that used to belong to a Gestapo man who had run away. His family, a mother and her girls, begged this man to stay and protect them, this Jewish Red Army officer who had his entire family killed by the Germans. If one wants to understand with what stride these Red Army men fought and died, how easily the line was crossed between life and death and how they eventually tri

I walk mid shamble smear and stench, The dead I mourn." John Finley. The Soviet journalist and author Vasily Grossman did more than kneel behind the soldier's trench. He lived with the Red Army from the catastrophic summer of 1941, through the defense of Moscow, the apocalyptic carnage of Stalingrad, the hard-won liberation of Soviet territory, the horrible discoveries of Nazi genocide in Madjanek and Treblinka, and the final bloody, triumphant march into Berlin. Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova's "A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945" is a marvelous examination of both "Grossman's war" and the war itself. Vasily Grossman is something of a forgotten, unsung giant of Soviet literature. Born in Berdichev, Ukraine in 1905, Grossman rose to prominence and received national acclaim as a war reporter for Red Star, the official newspaper of the Red Army. Although never a member of the Communist Party, Grossman was, for most of his life, a strong supporter of the Soviet Union. Grossman's reporting was realistic (despite editing by Party censors) and was enormously popular among both high ranking officers and foot soldiers. After the war, Grossman returned to writing. His magnum opus, Life and Fate was not published in the USSR until 1988. When it was originally submitted for publication the Soviet authorities `arrested' the book and told Grossman that it would not be published for 200 years. Fortunately, a copy of the manuscript survived, was smuggled to Switzerland and published in Europe in 1980, fifteen years after Grossman's death. Life and Fate was based, in good part, on Grossman's wartime experiences. Consequently, Beevor's work provides both an historical, ground-level examination of the war generally and a great deal of insight into the life experiences that formed the moral foundation of Grossman's novels. Beevor (and his translator and collaborator Vinogradova) have taken Grossman's notebooks, war diaries, personal correspondence and his Red Star articles and set them out as part of their narrative. The transition from Grossman's text to the commentary is well thought out and seamless. Beevor is no stranger to the Eastern Front, (he has written two well received books"Stalingrad" and "The Fall of Berlin") and he does an excellent job of putting Grossman's writings into the context of his times. Grossman is swept into the war as a reporter for Red Star immediately after the German invasion in June, 1941. Grossman's writing (and Beevor's commentary) takes us through that first disastrous summer of defeat, despair, death, and retreat. The magnificent and bloody defense of Stalingrad follows and the success of Operation Uranus in November, 1942 that resulted in the encirclement and destruction of General Paulus' Sixth Army follows. The next portion of the book has Grossman writing about the Red Army on the offensive, from the Battle of Kursk through the liberation of the Ukraine and then Poland. It is

I have done a fair amount of reading on the "Russian War" and have read Grossman's "Life and "Fate." Of all these books "A Writer at War" stands out. Anthony Beevor has done a fine job of creating the narrative, filling in the gaps and explaining the situation the Russian Army and Vasily Grossman found from 1941 to 1945. This book brings the overall arc of the war, the great battles and the agony of officers, soldiers and civilians into full view. Most memorable are his up close descriptions of Stalingad and his searching interviews in his Ukranian hometown where his mother was executed along with twenty thousand Jews. His description of the heroism of young women at Stalingard is extremely moving. The section on the Treblinka concentration camp, where nearly a million people were exterminated, was used at the Nurenberg Trials and has an immediacy that is profoundly affecting even after all these years and all we know about the Holocaust. I cannot recommend this book too highly, particularly in conjunction with "Life and Fate" and other histories of the Russian-German cataclysm.

With 'A Writer at War', Anthony Beevor has produced a remarkable book that succeeds in a number of ways: as a biography of a crucial period in an important writers life, as a compelling eye-witness account of the most brutal conflict in history, and in revealing the inspiration and source material for two of the most significant works of literature from the last century, 'Life and Fate' and 'The Black Book'. This last aspect is the most original and most revealing, as throughout this wonderful piece of research Beevor points you to characters and events that were to appear in both books, although sadly Grossman didn't live to see either published; as both were suppressed by Stalin. Most readers of 'A Writer at War' will come to it from an interest in the events and time period it covers, but I hope they will leave with a desire to read Grossman's masterpiece 'Life and Fate', as everything he witnessed during that tumultuous period of history are contained within it's pages. My full review can be found at thebookforum.com