The Unlikely Journalist Who Looked Into the Heart of War
Grossman’s eyes, of course, were far more sensitive than Gromov’s. In the sixty-one years since his death—and since the reissues of “Stalingrad” and “Life and Fate,” his two magisterial novels about the Second World War—Grossman’s work has accrued a totemic importance. Photographs of him on the front lines have become synonymous with a certain kind of Soviet dissident intellectualism: his wide greatcoat like armor, a plume of smoke rising above the snug fur shapka atop his head, his gaze hollow behind wire-rimmed glasses.
He’d always seemed blessed, perhaps even burdened, by a perception beyond his years. As a teen-ager, Grossman’s owlish demeanor earned him the schoolyard nickname Old Man. He initially trained as a chemist, working as a chemical engineer in the Donbas, and Gedda Surits, a geophysicist who married his childhood friend, noted that Grossman “seemed to hide his huge eyes behind thick glasses.” Surits wondered whether Grossman’s curious gaze flowed from his “attentive attitude to people,” which “made him at once observant, interested and yet, a bit of an outsider, as if he was watching us from a distance.”
Much of Grossman’s writing evinces this insider-outsider quality, which was informed by his being, as a Jew from Ukraine, a twofold minority in the U.S.S.R. Born into a secular Russian-speaking home, Grossman received no formal Jewish education, and spoke neither Yiddish nor Hebrew. (He did speak Ukrainian, the language in which he sometimes addressed his father as bat’ko.) As an adult, however, he developed a belief system oriented around something the narrator of “Life and Fate” calls “senseless kindness.” It resembles the Jewish teaching which has come to be known as tikkun olam—the tenet of healing the world. Grossman’s narrator describes it as “the private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness.”
The kindness of Grossman’s prose is, on one level, a riposte to the harsh censorship of Stalin’s propaganda machine. And yet it finds its most potent expression not in tone but in attention, that quality which, “taken to its highest degree,” Simone Weil called “the same thing as prayer.” Steering clear of overt criticisms, Grossman’s reporting paints a war epic in miniatures, selecting subjects with an eye toward mystery, uncertainty, and the compromised character of men whom he was encouraged to cast as uncomplicated heroes. “When you read memoirs by French, British, or American combatants, they all say that in war they become different people,” Grossman writes in one report. “That is not what I have seen here.” Grossman’s soldiers might not be tidy paragons of bravery, but they’re portrayed with an unwavering, compassionate regard.
Reporting on the Holocaust tested Grossman’s attention to character, replacing the gray zone of Soviet morality with irrefutable villains and victims. The centerpiece of “From the Front Line” is “The Hell of Treblinka,” a forty-five page report, from 1944, that was supposedly circulated at the Nuremberg trials. Grossman arrived at Treblinka—which consisted of separate labor and extermination camps—not long after the Germans had killed nearly all the remaining prisoners and withdrawn. In his dispatch, he describes the leadership of the labor camp: “We know the names of the SS men in the camp; we know their characters and idiosyncrasies. We know that the head of the camp was a Dutch German named van Eupen, an insatiable murderer and sexual pervert with a passion for good horses and fast riding. We know about a huge young man named Stumpfe who broke out into uncontrollable laughter every time he murdered a prisoner or when one was executed in his presence.” While Grossman doesn’t linger on these men in the same way he does his compatriots, he still seems convinced that the texture of their inner lives—even the nature of their hobbies—tell us something crucial about the horrors they enacted.
