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A special correspondent for The Red Star, the Red Army's newspaper, documents the savage battles of World War II, the siege of Stalingrad, the great tank battle of Kursk, the defense of Moscow, and early revelations about the Holocaust.
Based on the notebooks in which Vasily Grossman gathered the raw materials for his newspaper articles, this book depicts as never before the crushing condition on the Eastern Front during World War II and the lives and deaths of infantrymen, tank drivers, pilots, snipers, and civilians. Deemed unfit for service when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman became a special correspondent for 'The Red Star, ' the Red Army newspaper. A portly novelist in his mid-thirties with no military experience, he was given a uniform and hastily taught how to use a pistol. Remarkably, he spent three of the next four years at the front, observing with a writer's eye the most pitiless fighting ever recorded. Grossman witnessed almost all the major events of the Eastern Front: the appalling defeats and desperate retreats of 1941, the defense of Moscow, and the fighting in the Ukraine. In August 1942 he was posted to Stalingrad, where he remained during four brutal months of street fighting. Grossman was present at the battle of Kursk (the largest tank engagement in history), and, as the Red Army advanced, he reached Berdichev, where his worst fears for his mother and other relatives were confirmed. A Jew himself, he undertook the faithful recording of Holocaust atrocities as their extent dawned. His supremely powerful report 'The hell of Treblinka' was used in evidence at the Nuremberg tribunal. Anthony Beever, a historian, along with Luba Vinogradova, have woven Grossman's notebooks into a fluid, compelling narrative that gives us one of the best descriptions- at once unflinching and sensitive- of what Grossman called 'the ruthless truth of war.' -- from Book Jacket.… (plus d'informations)
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Dédicace
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Premiers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Vasily Grossman's place in the history of world literature is assured by his masterpiece Life and Fate, one of the greatest Russian novels of the twentieth century. (Introduction)
Any translation from the Russian which hopes to be readable in English requires a slight compression of the original, through the deletion of superfluous words and repetitions. (Translator's note)
Front, when written with a capital letter refers to the Soviet equivalent of an army group, for example, Central Front, Western Front or Stalingrad Front. (Glossary)
Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union began in the early hours on 22 June 1941.
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
The PPZh was the slang term for a ‘campaign wife’, because the full term, pokhodno polevaya zhena, was similar to PPSh, the standard Red Army sub-machine gun. Campaign wives were young nurses and women soldiers from a headquarters—such as signalers and clerks—who usually wore a beret on the back of the head rather than the fore-and-aft pilotka cap. They found themselves virtually forced to become the concubines of senior officers. Grossman also scribbled down some bitter notes on the subject, perhaps for use in a story later.
Women—PPZh. Note about Nachakho, chief of administrative supplies department. She cried for a week, and then went to him. ‘Who’s that?’ ‘The general’s PPZh.’ ‘And the commissar hasn’t got one.’ Before the attack. Three o’clock in the morning. ‘Where’s the general?’ [someone asks]. ‘Sleeping with his whore,’ the sentry murmurs. And these girls had once wanted to be ‘Tanya’, or Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. ‘Whose PPZh is she?’ ‘A member of the Military Council’s.’ Yet all around them tens of thousands of girls in military uniforms are working hard and with dignity.
A number of Soviet generals did not shrink from hitting even quite senior subordinates, although the striking of soldiers by officers and NCOs had been one of the most hated characteristics of the Tsarist Army.
Conversation of Colonels Shuba and Tarasov with the army commander: ‘“What?” ‘“May I say again...?” ‘“What?” ‘“May I say again...?” ‘He hit Shuba in the mouth. I [presumably Tarasov] stood still, drew my tongue in and clenched my teeth, because I was afraid to bite my tongue off or be left with no teeth.’
Suffering seemed to have become a universal face. Towards the end of the month, Grossman received a letter from his wife, Olga Mikhailovna, in which she recounted the death of her son, Misha, who had been killed by a bomb. He wrote back in a clumsy attempt to mitigate her despair.
My own one, my good one. Today I received your letter which someone had brought from Moscow. It grieved deeply. Don’t let your spirits sink, Lyusenka. Don’t give way to despair. There is so much sorrow around us. I see so much of it. I’ve seen mothers who have lost three sons and a husband in this war, I’ve seen wives who’ve lost husbands and children, I’ve seen women whose little children have been killed in a bombing raid, and all these people don’t give way to despair. They work, they look forward to victory, they don’t lose their spirits. And in what hard conditions they have to survive! Be strong, too, my darling, hold on . . . You’ve got me and Fedya, you have love and your life has a meaning.
I’ve been recommended for the Order of the Red Star for the second time, but to no effect so far, just as before. I’ve got this letter taken from a dead soldier; it’s written in a child’s scribble. There are the following words at the end: ‘I miss you very much. Please come and visit, I so want to see you, if only for one hour. I am writing this, and tears are pouring. Daddy, please come and visit.’
Like the other snipers, Zaitsev seemed to be proud of taking revenge on any Russian woman seen associating with a German.
Zaitsev has killed a woman and a German officer: ‘They fell across each other.’
He also interviewed a teacher who had been raped by a German officer.
Teacher (I decided not to ask her name and surname). At night, an officer, helped by his orderly, raped her. She was holding a six-month-old baby in her arms. He fired at the floor, threatening to kill the baby. The orderly went away and locked the door. Some of our prisoners of war were in the next room. She cried out and called, but there was dead silence in the next room.
Terrible torments awaited those who arrived from the Warsaw ghetto. Women and children were separated from the crowd and taken to the places where corpses were burned instead of to the gas chambers. Mothers who went mad with terror were forced to lead their children between the glowing furnace bars on which thousands of dead bodies were writhing in flames and smoke, where corpses were squirming and jerking in the heat as if they had became alive again, where stomachs of dead pregnant women cracked from the heat, and unborn babies burned on the open wombs of the mothers. This sight could render even the strongest person insane.
It is infinitely hard even to read this. The reader must believe me, it is as hard to write it. Someone might ask: ‘Why write about this, why remember all that?’ It is the writer’s duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it. Everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead. Everyone who does not know the truth about this would never be able to understand with what sort of enemy, with what sort of monster, our Red Army started on its own mortal combat.
Inhabitants of the village of Wulka, the one closest to Treblinka, tell that sometimes the screams of women who were being killed were so terrible that the whole village would lose their heads and rush to the forest, in order to escape from these shrill screams that carried through tree trunks, the sky and the earth. Then, the screams would suddenly stop, and there was a silence before a new series of screams, as terrible as the ones before, shrill, boring through the bones, through the skulls and the souls of those who heard them. This happened three or four times every day.
Horrifying things are happening to German women. An educated German whose wife has received ‘new visitors’—Red Army soldiers—is explaining with expressive gestures and broken Russian words, that she has already been raped by ten men today. The lady is present.
Women’s screams are heard from open windows. A Jewish officer, whose whole family was killed by Germans, is billeted in the apartment of a Gestapo man who has escaped. The women and girls [left behind] are safe while he is there. When he leaves, they all cry and plead with him to stay.
Soviet girls liberated from the camps are suffering a lot now. Tonight, some of them are hiding in our correspondents’ room. During the night, we are woken up by screams: one of the correspondents couldn’t resist the temptation. A noisy discussion ensues, then order is re-established.
A story about a breast-feeding mother who was being raped in a barn. Her relatives came to the barn and asked her attackers to let her have a break, because the hungry baby was crying the whole time.
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Grossman himself may have been dragged down by the wolfhound century, but his humanity and his courage have survived in his writing.
A special correspondent for The Red Star, the Red Army's newspaper, documents the savage battles of World War II, the siege of Stalingrad, the great tank battle of Kursk, the defense of Moscow, and early revelations about the Holocaust.
Based on the notebooks in which Vasily Grossman gathered the raw materials for his newspaper articles, this book depicts as never before the crushing condition on the Eastern Front during World War II and the lives and deaths of infantrymen, tank drivers, pilots, snipers, and civilians. Deemed unfit for service when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman became a special correspondent for 'The Red Star, ' the Red Army newspaper. A portly novelist in his mid-thirties with no military experience, he was given a uniform and hastily taught how to use a pistol. Remarkably, he spent three of the next four years at the front, observing with a writer's eye the most pitiless fighting ever recorded. Grossman witnessed almost all the major events of the Eastern Front: the appalling defeats and desperate retreats of 1941, the defense of Moscow, and the fighting in the Ukraine. In August 1942 he was posted to Stalingrad, where he remained during four brutal months of street fighting. Grossman was present at the battle of Kursk (the largest tank engagement in history), and, as the Red Army advanced, he reached Berdichev, where his worst fears for his mother and other relatives were confirmed. A Jew himself, he undertook the faithful recording of Holocaust atrocities as their extent dawned. His supremely powerful report 'The hell of Treblinka' was used in evidence at the Nuremberg tribunal. Anthony Beever, a historian, along with Luba Vinogradova, have woven Grossman's notebooks into a fluid, compelling narrative that gives us one of the best descriptions- at once unflinching and sensitive- of what Grossman called 'the ruthless truth of war.' -- from Book Jacket.
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