The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman

Legendary WWII Soviet correspondent Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) covered the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk and advanced westward with the Red Army in its drive to Berlin. As he moved across liberated Soviet territory, he came upon the mass graves of Soviet Jews exterminated by the Germans. His accounts of these discoveries?as well as of Treblinka and Majdanek?made him the first journalist to chronicle the Holocaust, note the authors. The event that caused him to confront his Jewishness was learning that one of the 20,000 Jews annihilated at Berdichev, where Grossman was born, was his mother. The authors (Inside the Soviet Writer's Union) use mainly newly available archival material to show that the Holocaust actually began in the Soviet Union, before the death camps of Poland; that the German Wehrmacht was complicitous in the war against the Jews; that collaboration by the Ukrainians with the Germans against the Jews was widespread. This impassioned, meticulously researched story also tells of Grossman's failure to publish his fiction accounts (e.g., Life and Fate) of the war years. The authors break new ground in showing how a single Soviet Jewish journalist came to show the similarity between the totalitarian Nazi and Soviet states. A gripping narrative. Photos not seen by PW.
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