The Road by Vasily Grossman

your poor nation; the Jew who now excitedly awaits the triumph of his age-old dream of dominion? Let us fight shoulder to shoulder for our national honor, for a dignity that has been vilified. Let us cleanse the world, let us cauterize it of Jewry.”
    Grossman’s original text was refused by
Red Star
and remainedunpublished until 1988. The first two sections were published, in Yiddish translation, in consecutive issues of
Eynikayt
(the journal of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, an organization established in 1942 to gather international political and material support for the fight against Nazi Germany), but the last two sections never appeared—and no explanation was given for this. An article titled “The Ukraine” was published in the monthly journal
Znamya
, but this is an entirely separate article and it contains only a single— albeit powerfully worded—mention of the massacre at Babi Yar
.
These details are significant. Grossman was one of the first journalists to write about what is now being called the “Shoah by bullets,” the massacres of Jews in the western Soviet Union; he was also one of the first journalists to write about the death camps in Poland, the “Shoah by gas.” His moral and imaginative courage appears still more remarkable if we bear in mind that he was doing this at a time when the Soviet authorities were moving toward a policy of what would now be called Holocaust denial. There was not yet an outright ban on all mention of the mass murders of Jews, but there was no doubt as to what was the authorities’ preferred line: that all nationalities had suffered equally under Hitler. A frequently used slogan—all the more effective, no doubt, because of its apparent nobility—was “Do not divide the dead!”
    From 1943 to 1946, along with Ilya Ehrenburg, Grossman worked for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee on
The Black Book
, a documentary account of the massacres of Jews on both Soviet and Polish soil. As well as editing the testimonies of others, Grossman also intended to include two articles he had written himself. “The Murder of the Jews in Berdichev” is a soberly written account of life in the Berdichev ghetto and the massacre of September 15, 1941, at an airfield just outside the town; Grossman does not mention that one of the twelve thousand victims was his mother. Dated November 4, 1944, this too remained unpublished untillong after Grossman’s death. The other article, “The Hell of Treblinka,” though probably refused by
Red Star
, was published in
Znamya
in November 1944; it was republished in 1945, in the form ofa very small hardback book. It seems to have been impossible, at this date, to publish a substantial article about the extermination of Jews in the Soviet Union, but it was evidently at least a little easier to write about what had happened in Poland.
    The Black Book
was ready for production in 1946; all that was needed was for the authorities to confirm their final approval. No such confirmation was forthcoming. On February 3, 1947, Georgy Aleksandrov, the head of the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee, wrote that “the book presents a distorted picture of the real nature of Fascism [since the impression it gave was that] the Germans fought against the Soviets only in order to annihilate the Jews.” A final decision was announced on August 20, 1947:
The Black Book
wasnot to be published. And in 1948, after yet another year had passed, the plates were destroyed. Now that the war had been won, now that there was no longer any need to solicit international support against Hitler, no amount of compromises by the editors could render
The Black Book
acceptable. Admitting that Jews constituted the overwhelming majority of the dead would have entailed admitting that members of other Soviet nationalities had been accomplices in the genocide; in any case, Stalin appears to have understood that anti-Semitism was a force that he could exploit in order to unite