DZ Season 032 Part 04 The First Day of the Holocaust. Final Part.

In January 1944, Vasily Grossman, a non-practising Jew, entered the town of his birth, Berdichev in the Ukraine, to finally confirm that his mother had been murdered by the Nazis. It was the first time he’d been back there for a long time. Soon after the German invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941, he’d left his mother and other members of his family there because his wife, Olga Mikhailovna, had refused to let them move into their flat in Moscow. The flat was big enough for everyone. Vasily was a member of the prestigious Writer’s Guild and had more generous accommodation than your average Russian.

Because his mother was left in the town, which the Germans overran in July 1941, on 15 September, she was murdered by the Nazis in what was the first days of the holocaust.

20 years after her death, and not long before his own from cancer, Vasily wrote this letter to his mother:

My darling, twenty years have passed since the day of your death. I love you. I remember you every day of my life, and my sorrow has never left me in these twenty years.

I last wrote to you ten years ago, and in my heart you are still the same as you were twenty years ago … I am you, my own one. And as long as I am alive, you are alive, too. And when I die you will live in the book which I have dedicated to you and whose fate is so like yours. And it seems to me now that my love for you is becoming greater and more responsible because there are so few hearts left now in which you will live.”

His mother was immortalised by him in possibly the greatest Russian novel of the 20th Century, Life and Fate, as the character Anna Shrtum.

Tag words: Vasily Grossman; Berdichev; Nazis; Life and Fate; Anna Shrtum; Auschwitz; Aktion; SS; 1st SS Division; SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler; Einsatzgruppen C Sonderkommando 4a; Standartenführer Paul Blöbel; Luftwaffe; Heinrich Himmler; Reichsführer SS; Katya Vaisman; Chelmno; Belzec; Sobibor; Majdanek; Victor Alter; Henryk Erlich; Albert Einstein; Joseph Stalin; Winston Churchill; Shlomo Mikhoels; Itzik Fefer; Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee; Leo Tolstoy; War and Peace; Vostryakovskoe Jewish Cemetery;