Life and Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series): **AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4** (Orange Inheritance Book 2)

by Vasily Grossman

Why had he had to report to them? Their illiteracy had nothing to do with their working-class origins; his own father and grandfather had been miners, as was his brother. Sometimes he had wondered whether this ignorance of theirs was in fact their greatest strength, whether his own correct speech and interest in books was really a weakness.

The air was thick and heavy, almost unbreathable. Everything that lies half-buried in almost every family, stirring up now and then only to be smoothed over by love and trust, had now come to the surface. There it had spread out to fill their lives. It was as though there were nothing between father, mother and daughter save misunderstanding, suspiciousness, resentment and anger.

‘When we strike a blow against your army, it’s ourselves that we hit. Our tanks didn’t only break through your defences – they broke through our own defences at the same time. The tracks of our tanks are crushing German National Socialism. It’s terrible – it’s like committing suicide in one’s sleep. And it might well end tragically for us. Do you understand? Yes, even if we win! As victors we would be left on our own – without you – in a world that is alien to us, a world that hates us.’

In Liss’s view, there were four main categories of leaders. The first were the simple, undivided natures, usually people without particular intelligence or finesse. These people were full of slogans and formulae from newspapers and magazines, of quotations from Hitler’s speeches, Goebbels’s articles and the books of Franck and Rosenberg. Without solid ground under their feet, they were lost. They seldom reflected on the connections between different phenomena and they were easily moved to intolerance and cruelty. They took everything seriously: philosophy, National Socialist science and its obscure revelations, the new music, the achievements of the new theatre, the campaign for the elections to the Reichstag. Like schoolchildren, they got together in little groups to mug up Mein Kampf and to make précis of pamphlets and articles. They usually lived in relatively modest circumstances, sometimes experiencing actual need; they were more ready than the other categories to volunteer for posts that would take them away from their families. To begin with, Liss had thought that Eichmann belonged to this category.