Archive for the ‘WWII’ Category

Earlier this month, an eccentric Italian professor by the name of Giovanni Maddalena packed his pop-up Vasily Grossman exhibition into a van and set off on a road trip across Europe.

It features a dense collection of video footage, manuscripts and — last but not least — life-sized cardboard cutouts of the writer. It has travelled from St Petersburg to Jerusalem, Buenos Aires to New York, and this time it was headed for Oxford, where a special edition of Radio 4’s Start the Week, dedicated to Grossman, was being recorded. Known for his monumental depictions of life during the second world war and under Stalin, the Russian writer remains relatively obscure. But Maddalena insists that he is in the same class as Tolstoy and Chekhov. “I am trying to spread the word,” he says. “Everyone should read Vasily Gross­man. It will change your whole perspective on life.”

The professor is not the only person with a passion for Grossman. Nor is he the most formidable. Other fans are said to include Martin Amis (who dubbed Grossman “the Tolstoy of the USSR”), Tom Stoppard and Mark Damazer, master of St Peter’s College, Oxford, who until recently was controller of Radio 4.

One of Damazer’s final decisions as controller was to commission an eight-hour dramatic adaptation of Grossman’s magnum opus, Life and Fate, a momentous 855-page novel centred on the battle of Stalingrad. The main strand of the story follows the Shaposhnikov family through their experiences of life under Stalin and the horrors of the Final Solution. Other narratives, however, sprawl out from this central core, pro­viding a rich tableau of life and fate in the Soviet Union of the “great patriotic war”. The central character, Viktor Shtrum — widely seen as Grossman’s alter ego — is a physicist burdened with the knowledge that his best work is behind him. (Grossman himself was a trained engineer.) In the radio play, this role will be played by Kenneth Branagh.

“I first read Life and Fate five years ago,” Damazer says. “In addition to being a colossally serious book, the novel is a page-turner. I was desperate to know what happened and read at a ­gallop, late into the night.” Damazer became absorbed into the world of the book and did not emerge for almost four days.

“I was completely secure in my own mind that it was a work of thundering brilliance and importance. I knew then that I would spend a large part of my time proselytising for it and getting it onto the radio.”

Antony Beevor, author of A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945, will be one of the guests on Start the Week. “Life and Fate is one of the greatest Russian novels of the 20th century,” he says, weighing his words carefully. “It is even more important than Dr Zhivago and The Gulag Archipelago. It forms an incredibly powerful ­portrayal of the struggle between Stalinism and Nazism, and the way it affected the population. It reveals the gross contradictions and dishonesties of life under ­Stalin.” According to Beevor, Grossman’s moral and physical courage “shines out” in the book. “It struck me straightaway,” he says. “Life and Fate drew the comparison between Stalinism and Nazism, which was almost suicidally brave. It made Grossman the first dissident.”

Grossman was born in the Ukraine in 1905. During the war, he was a special correspondent for the Red Army newspaper ­Krasnaya Zvezda, and became known as the most perceptive eyewitness of the Soviet front lines. His courage under fire, as well as his seemingly charmed life — a hand grenade once failed to explode between his feet — earned him the nickname “Lucky Grossman”. He was among the first to write about the horrors of the Holocaust, and The Hell of Treblinka, his depiction of the liberation of the death camp, ranks among the finest such accounts ever written.

Grossman completed Life and Fate in 1960, and — some say naively — submitted it for publi­cation. The KGB’s response was incisive.

Within months, they had “arrested” all copies of the manuscript (as the Russians still put it), and even confiscated the typewriter ribbons with which it was written. (They also dug up a Grossman family vegetable garden, but found nothing.)

Grossman was deeply affected by the loss of his book. In a letter to Nikita Krushchev, he wrote: “What is the point of being physically free when my life’s work has been arrested?” The poet Semyon Lipkin, a close friend, recalls that the writer “aged before our eyes. His curly hair turned greyer and a bald patch appeared. His asthma returned. His walk became a shuffle”. Four years later, Grossman succumbed to cancer. He would never see his masterpiece in print.

In 1975, the writer and dissident Vladimir Voinovich made persistent efforts to convert the novel to microfilm and smuggle it out of the Soviet Union. On his third attempt, he was successful, and in 1977 it arrived on the desk of Efim Etkind, a scholar living in Paris. He painstakingly salvaged the material from the micro­film and pieced it together. The near-complete Russian text was accepted for publication in 1980. At around this time, the writer Igor Golomstock, who was then working for the Russian service of the BBC, took the manuscript to a friend, the young Russianist Robert Chandler.

“Igor came in with this huge sheaf of papers,” Chandler recalls. “He said it was an unpublished masterpiece, and I could make my name by translating it. At first, I just laughed it off. But when I started to read, I realised that here was something remarkable.” It took Chandler several years to render it into English. The result remains the definitive translation and is the one on which the dramatic adaptation is based.

One of Grossman’s most visionary skills is to articulate profound philosophical questions through the lives of ordinary ­people. Among Life and Fate’s key pegs, for example, is a view of ­history as constituting a battle between a “small kernel of human kindness” and the ruthless ­pursuit of an abstract “goodness”. As one character, Ikonnikov, puts it after witnessing the massacre of 20,000 Jews: “I don’t believe in your ‘Good’. I believe in human kindness… You ask Hitler, and he’ll tell you that even this camp was set up in the name of Good.” Reflecting this, in one of the book’s most powerful scenes, a young Jewish woman volun­tarily goes to the gas chambers in order to comfort a small boy in his final moments. The contrast between her innate kindness and the inhumane ideology that was responsible for her murder could not be more affecting.

Grossman’s daughter Ekaterina — now 81 years old and living in Moscow — believes that Life and Fate encapsulates her father. “His mind combined the cerebral with the intuitive,” she says, “and he valued freedom above all else.

He found cruelty, hypocrisy and selfishness alien concepts, and always believed that good will prevail.” Life and Fate, she says, although painful to write, reflected all of these qualities. “He was an extraordinary man,” she says. “Even as a small child, I remember being proud of him.”

Jonathan Myerson, one of the dramatists who adapted Life and Fate for Radio 4, says: “We saw the text as a collection of Chekovian miniatures. Every episode stands on its own, which makes it easier for listeners.” This, he explains, also allowed the many powerful vignettes to come to the fore. “In one scene, an executed concen­tration camp victim revives, digs his way out of his grave and asks to be shot again,” Myerson says. “Grossman’s notes reveal that this was taken directly from real life.”

According to Maddalena, this unflinching realism lends gravity to his work. “Grossman makes you understand that beyond the confusion of life, there is something originally good,” he says. “He experienced all the darkness of the 20th century and still believed that freedom lies in living according to the goodness that can be found deep in our lives. That is why he is so important.”

Start the Week: Grossman, his life and legacy is on Radio 4 tomorrow; the dramatisation of Life and Fate is on Radio 4, Sept 18-25

Read on the Sunday Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

Four days after The English German Girl went on sale, it was announced that the entire first print-run had sold out. Hugh Andrew, Managing Director of Polygon Books, said: “this shows not only that The English German Girl is an excellent and moving read, but also that as we approach a time when there will no longer be any Holocaust survivors living, there is a renewed interest in the Kindertransport.” A second edition is currently being printed.

At the launch party last night, Jake Wallis Simons paid tribute to the Kindertransport survivors who were present before reading a moving extract from the book which described the moment that the protagonist, Rosa Klein, said goodbye to her parents for the last time.

The afterparty took place at Home House in Portman Square, Marylebone.

"A fine tribute to the bravery of the Kindertransport"

The Times reviews The English German Girl: “One morning in 1933, Dr Otto Klein is told that he may no longer have contact with patients because he is Jewish. He’s unfazed. “Almost 50 per cent of doctors in Berlin are of Jewish origin. They can’t do without us.” But over the years the family loses more and more.

Fighting to survive, they put 15-year-old Rosa on a Kindertransport train, to begin a new life in England. The distant cousins who are sponsoring her speak no German and were expecting her little sister; “Aunt Mimi” does not want a grown girl near her teenage son.

This well-researched and very moving novel is dedicated to the children of the Kindertransport and is a fine tribute to their bravery.” Visit the website

Waterstones have named The English German Girl by Jake Wallis Simons as one of their “next big things”, for promotion nationwide in May.

The English German Girl is a meticulously researched historical novel, set during WWII, which is based on the moving story of the Kindertransport.

The book has already been praised by Monica Ali as “fascinating and moving.” The eminent Holocaust historian Sir Martin Gilbert described it as a “powerful evocation of a bygone era,” and the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland said it is “an important subject explored by a writer to watch.”

To find out more, please visit The English German Girl website.

On March 5, 1943, The Times reported the findings of an inquiry into a “London shelter disaster” at Bethnal Green Tube. According to the report, a middle-aged woman, “burdened with a bundle and a baby”, had lost her footing on the stairs and obstructed the entrance to the landing. An “elderly man” stumbled over her; within seconds “a large number of people were . . . completely blocking the stairway”. This caused a crush in which 173 people were asphyxiated.

A yellowing clipping of the story in The Times is featured in Under Attack, a new exhibition at the London Transport Museum that explores life under bombardment. There is no other mention of the disaster, the worst civilian tragedy of the Second World War.

“Nearly 200 people suffocated needlessly, and the British Government hushed it up,” says the American writer Jessica Francis Kane, whose novel about the disaster, The Report — shortlisted for two prizes in the US — comes out in the UK later this month. “Churchill feared that the accident would be used as propaganda by the enemy, who would claim that Londoners were so scared they were crushing themselves to death in their scramble for the shelters.”

Read the rest of the article on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)