WHERE DOES THE WAR END A ND THE HOLOCAUST BEGIN? BERGELSON ON WORLD WAR II AND THE HOLOCAUST David Shneer University of Denver The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research 2601 Fourth Avenue, Suite 310 Seattle, WA 98121 TITLE VIII PROGRAM Proj ect Information* Principal Investigator: David Shneer Council Contract Number: 821-15g Date: February 1 2th, 2007 Copyright Information Indivi dual researchers retain the copyright on their work products derived from research funded through a contract or grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER). 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Neither NCEEER nor the United States Government nor any recipient of this Report may use it for commercial sale. * The work leading to this report was supported in part by contract or grant funds provided by the Nati onal Council for Eurasian and East European Research, funds which were made available by the U.S. Department of State under Title VIII (The Soviet-East European Research and Training Act o f 1983, as amended). The analysis and interpretations contained herein are those of the author. ii Executive Summary In the Soviet Union, the story of the Nazi war against the Jews was subsumed into the total war between the Soviet Union and the fascist enemy, a war that took between 20 and 30 million Soviet lives, 2 million of them Jews. We forget that many of those who told the Soviet story of war were themselves Jewish. With Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) and Vasily Grossman (1905- 1964) writing for the important military newspaper Red Star, Jewish photojournalists visually recording the war, and the many Jews as members of the editorial staff of most major Soviet newspapers, Soviet Jews were the ones charged with telling the war to the entire Soviet audience. And at the same time, this was a Soviet war told in all of the languages of the Soviet Union — in Ukrainian, Georgian, Uzbek, and even in Yiddish, the official language that marked Soviet Jews as a nationality. Ehrenburg and Grossman had been relatively well-known Russian- language journalists before the outbreak of war. Who would be called on to tell the story of the war in Yiddish? That task fell to many important twentieth-century Yiddish writers, among them David Bergelson. iii Where Does the War End and the Holocaust Begin? Bergelson on World War II and the Holocaust1 ___________________________________________________________________ — Lo amut ki ekhye. Va’asaper ma’asei yah: yasor yisrani ya velamavet lo netanani. — Ikh vel nit shtarbn nor lebn, un dertseyln di maysim fun yah. Ober tsum toyt hot er mikh nit gegebn. — I will not die, but will live to tell the great deeds of God. He has not brought me to death. –Psalm 118: 17 (The first four Hebrew words of Psalm 118: 17 formed the title of David Bergelson’s speech made on behalf of the Jewish Antifascist Committee in August 1941.) In the Soviet Union, the story of the Nazi war against the Jews was subsumed into the total war between the Soviet Union and the fascist enemy, a war that took between 20 and 30 million Soviet lives, 2 million of them Jews. We forget that many of those who told the Soviet story of war were themselves Jewish. With Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) and Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) writing for the important military newspaper Red Star, Jewish photojournalists visually recording the war, and the many Jews as members of the editorial staff of most major Soviet newspapers, Soviet Jews were the ones charged with telling the war to the entire Soviet audience. And at the same time, this was a Soviet war told in all of the languages of the Soviet Union — in Ukrainian, Georgian, Uzbek, and even in Yiddish, the official language that marked Soviet Jews as a nationality. Ehrenburg and Grossman had been relatively well-known Russian-language journalists before the outbreak of war. Who would be called on to tell the story of the war in Yiddish? That task fell to many important twentieth-century Yiddish writers, among them David Bergelson. Bergelson was not a journalist. He had never been trained to write quickly and simply to ‘tell the facts,’ but in truth, most Soviet journalists were not trained simply to ‘tell the facts’. Moreover, the fact that Bergelson had made his reputation as a writer of 1 Thank you to Harriet Murav and Joseph Sherman for their incisive reading of an earlier version of this paper. 4 impressionist fiction meant that he had a keen eye for describing, or at least envisioning, scenes, a talent that served him well as a wartime essayist. In his four years of writing in Yiddish about this very Jewish and very Soviet war, Bergelson crafted a narrative that placed the Jewish story at the centre of his Yiddish readership’s narrative universe, while also situating it within the universal tragedy unfolding around him. His was a story of victimhood and revenge and ultimately, a story of the loss and destruction that Bergelson personally lived through. Jewish Heroes and Jewish Victims On 6 July 1944, as Red Army soldiers crossed the old Soviet border and moved into Poland, Bergelson published an interview with General Yakov Kreyzer (1905-1969), an official Hero of the Soviet Union and the victor of the Battle of Sevastopol who, by 1944, was easily one of the most popular and visible of Soviet Jews. In addition to his military position, Kreyzer was also an honorary member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), the organization established in 1941, along with four other outreach organizations, to build international support for the Soviet war.2 Passing through Moscow in the summer of 1944, Kreyzer attended one of the JAFC’s meetings when Bergelson met him and described their encounter on page two of the JAFC’s newspaper, Comment [js1]: What happened to Eynikayt (Unity), the only remaining national Yiddish newspaper in the country. Based Der emes? Close down in 1938 after Litvakov’s arrest. on his account, Bergelson seemed shy, almost intimidated, by being in the presence of probably the greatest living Soviet Jewish hero, the man who proved that Jews were not weaklings fleeing the front but were leading the Red Army. Bergelson claims that by 1944, with the eastern front nearing the former frontier of the Soviet Union and the Allies opening a second front in France, the war had turned from one of survival and defence to one of revenge: 2 The history of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee has been well documented in recent years. See, for example, Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust, and Stalinism: A Documentary Study of the Jewish- Antifascist Committee of the USSR (Luxemburg: Harwood, 1995); Vladimir Naumov and Joshua Rubenstein (eds.), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 5 Zey veysn, az er iz a yid, un az akhuts dem groysn khezhbm, vos er hot mit zey far zayn sovetish land, hot er mit zey a khezhbm far zayn folk. They [ the Germans] know that he [Kreyzer] is a Jew, and that aside from the great need to get even with them for what they did to his Soviet country, he also has to get even with them for his people.3 Although by 1944, revenge was a common trope in the Soviet press, such an article about specifically Jewish revenge would never have appeared in the Russian-language press, which was in general reluctant to highlight the particular suffering of any ethnic group during the war.4 One month later, on 17 August1944, Bergelson wrote about the other side of this very Jewish war — not as one of Jewish pride, but of Jewish victimization and German criminality on a scale unprecedented in history. In ‘The Germans Did This,’ Bergelson writes about Majdanek, the first extermination camp liberated by the Allies on 25 July 1944. This was the only article about the Nazi extermination camps to appear in the Soviet Yiddish press, and it was one of the most powerful pieces Bergelson wrote during the war. Together, these two pieces show how Bergelson crafted a particularly Jewish war in Yiddish out of the universal Soviet experience. Bergelson as War Essayist and Soviet Jewish Propagandist During the war, Bergelson was called on to become more than a novelist; he was aske d to become a public Jewish cultural figure, and a leader of Soviet Jewry. He began writing essays about the war as soon as it broke out on 22 June 1941 from his home in Mos cow, but as the German army reached the outskirts of the capital, he was evacuated 3 Dovid Bergelson, ‘Der general Yakov Kreyzer,’ Eynikayt, 6 July 1944, 2. All translations are my own. 4 For more on wartime correspondence, see Ilya Ehrenburg, The War: 1941-1945 (Cleveland: World Publications, 1965); Ehrenburg and Konstantin Simonov, In One Newspaper: A Chronicle of Unforgettable Years (New York: Sphinx Press, 1985); V.