Vasily Grossman: Life And Fate

The grey-haired engine-driver watched casually yet attentively. Concrete posts, revolving searchlights on high masts, and glass-domed towers flashed by. In the domes stood guards with mounted machine-guns. The driver winked at his mate and the locomotive gave a warning hoot. A brilliantly lit cabin passed by, then a queue of cars beside a striped level-crossing barrier and a red traffic signal.

From the distance came the hoot of an approaching train. The driver turned to his mate. 'That's Zucker. I can tell by the whistle. He's already unloaded. Now he's taking the empty wagons back to Munich.'

There was a deafening roar as the two trains met. The air was torn apart, patches of grey flashed past between the wagons – and then the torn shreds of space and grey autumn light were woven together into a seamless cloth.

The driver's mate took out a pocket-mirror and looked at his smudged cheek. With a gesture, the driver asked if he could borrow it himself.

'Honestly, comrade Apfel,' said the mate excitedly, 'if it wasn't for all this disinfecting the wagons, we'd be back home by supper-time. As it is, we'll be out till four in the morning. As though they couldn't be disinfected back at the junction!'

The old driver had heard this complaint many times before. 'Give a good long hoot,' he said. 'We're to be put straight through to the main unloading area.'

In the German camp, for the first time since the Second Congress of the Comintern, Mikhail Sidorovich Mostovskoy had the chance to make use of his knowledge of foreign languages. Before the war, in Leningrad, there had been few opportunities to speak to foreigners. Now he remembered his years of exile in London and Switzerland, years when he and his fellow-revolutionaries had talked, quarrelled and sung in nearly all the languages of Europe.

Gardi, the Italian priest who was Mostovskoy's neighbour on the bedboards, had said that there were fifty-six different nationalities in the camp. The tens of thousands of prisoners shared the same fate, the same pallor, the same clothes, the same shuffling gait, and the same soup made from swedes mixed with the ersatz sago known by the Russians as 'fish-eyes'.

The camp authorities distinguished the prisoners by number and by the colour of the stripe sewn onto their jackets: red for politicals, black for saboteurs, green for thieves and murderers.

People unable to understand one another in the confusion of tongues were bound by a shared fate. Specialists in molecular physics or ancient manuscripts lay on the bedboards beside Italian peasants and Croat shepherds who were unable to sign their names. A man who used to order breakfast from his cook, worrying his housekeeper with his bad appetite, walked to work beside a man who had lived all his life on a diet of salt-cod. Their wooden soles made the same clatter on the ground, and they looked round with the same anxiety to see if the Kossträger were coming round with their rations.

The very differences in the lives of these prisoners gave rise to a certain similarity. Whether their vision of the past was a small garden beside a dusty Italian road, the sullen boom of the North Sea, or an orange paper lantern in a house for senior personnel on the outskirts of Bobruysk – all these prisoners, without exception, had enjoyed a wonderful past.

The more difficult a man's life had been before the camp, the more furiously he lied. This lie had no practical purpose; it served simply to glorify freedom. How could a man be unhappy outside the camp?

Before the war this camp had been known as a camp for political criminals. National Socialism had created a new type of political criminal: criminals who had not committed a crime. Many of the prisoners had been sent here merely for telling political anecdotes or for criticizing the Hitler regime in conversation with friends. The charge against them was not that they actually had distributed political leaflets or joined underground parties, but that one day they might.

The detainment of prisoners-of-war in a concentration camp for political prisoners was another innovation of Fascism. Here, as well as English and American pilots shot down over Germany, were officers and commissars of the Red Army. The latter were of especial interest to the Gestapo and were constantly being pressured to give information, to collaborate, to sign every conceivable sort of document.

There were 'saboteurs' in the camp: men who had left their work at military factories or construction sites without permission. Sending idle workers to concentration camps was another innovation of National Socialism.

There were people with lilac stripes on their jackets: émigrés from Fascist Germany. This too was an innovation of National Socialism: anyone who had left Germany, however patriotically he had behaved abroad, was a political enemy.

The people with green stripes on their jackets, the thieves and burglars, were a privileged caste: the authorities relied on them to supervise the politicals. Giving common criminals power over political prisoners was yet another innovation of National Socialism.

There were people whose past history was so peculiar that no appropriate colour of stripe had been found for them. But the Italian snake-charmer, the Persian who had come from Tehran to study German painting and the Chinese student of physics all found National Socialism ready to offer them a board to lie on, a bowl of watery soup and twelve hours a day of work on the marshland.

Day and night trainloads of men continued to arrive at the death camps and concentration camps. The air was full of the rumble of wheels, the whistling of locomotives and the thud of hundreds of thousands of prisoners marching to work, each with a five-figure number sewn onto his clothes. These camps – with their streets and squares, their hospitals and flea markets, their crematoria and their stadiums – were the expanding cities of a new Europe.

How naïve, how kindly and patriarchal the old prisons huddled on the outskirts of towns now appeared – beside these camp-cities, beside the awful crimson-black glow that hung over the gas ovens!

You might well think that the management of such a vast number of prisoners would have required an equally vast army of guards and supervisors. In fact, whole weeks would pass by without anyone in an SS uniform so much as appearing inside the barrack-huts. It was the prisoners themselves who policed the camp-cities. It was the prisoners themselves who supervised the internal routine, who made sure that the rotten, half-frozen potatoes ended up in their own saucepans while the good-quality ones were set aside for army supply-bases.

The prisoners themselves were the doctors and bacteriologists in the camp hospitals and laboratories, the caretakers who swept the camp pavements. They were even the engineers responsible for providing the camp with light and heat, for maintaining the motorized transport.

The 'kapos' – the fierce and vigilant camp police – wore a thick yellow band on their left sleeve. Together with the camp orderlies, block orderlies and hut orderlies, they controlled the hierarchy of camp life – from matters that concerned the camp as a whole to the personal affairs that were carried on at night on the bedboards. The prisoners played their part in the most confidential work of the camp: even the selection of prisoners to be sent to the death camps, even the interrogation of prisoners in the concrete boxes known as the 'darkrooms'. It seemed as though the German authorities could disappear altogether – the prisoners would maintain the high-voltage current in the wires and go on with their work.

The kapos and block orderlies simply carried out the tasks assigned to them. Sometimes they gave a sigh of regret, sometimes they shed a few tears for the people they sent to the gas ovens. What they did not do, however, was include their own names on these lists.