Life and Fate (Stalingrad, #2)

by Vasily Grossman

Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of ‘a man’, and operates only with vast aggregates.

There were moments when science seemed like a delusion that prevented one from seeing the madness and cruelty of life.

This Kalmyk steppe, which stretches, gradually changing to desert, right to the mouth of the Volga and the shores of the Caspian, has one strange characteristic: the earth and the sky above have reflected one another for so long that they have finally become undistinguishable, like a husband and wife who have spent their whole lives together.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

At the same time anti-Semitism is an expression of the lack of consciousness of the masses, of their inability to understand the true reasons for their sufferings.

Ignorant people blame the Jews for their troubles when they should blame the social structure or the State itself. Anti-Semitism is also, of course, a measure of the religious prejudices smouldering in the lower levels of a society.

What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought, but simply the blind, heart-breaking miracle of life itself.

Here, in the glow of the gas ovens, people knew that life was more than happiness – it was also grief. And freedom was both painful and difficult; it was life itself.

Music had the power to express the last turmoil of a soul in whose blind depths every experience, every moment of joy and grief, had fused with this misty morning, this glow hanging over their heads.

Perhaps music was just the key to a man’s feelings, not what filled him at this terrible moment, but the key t...

For a moment this sense of her past blotted out everything present, blotted out the abyss. It was the very strangest of feelings, something you could never share with any other person – not even your wife, your mother, your brother, your son, your friend or your father. It was the secret of your soul. However passionately it might long to, your soul could never betray this secret. You carry away this sense of your life without having ever shared it with anyone: the miracle of a particular individual whose conscious and unconscious contain everything good and bad, everything funny, sweet, shameful, pitiful, timid, tender, uncertain, that has happened from childhood to old age – fused into the mysterious sense of an individual life.

Everything that had ever terrified his little heart now became one. The fear aroused by the picture of a little goat who hadn’t noticed the shadow of a wolf between the trunks of the fir-trees, the blue eyes of the dead calves at market, his dead grandmother, Rebekka Bukhman’s suffocated daughter, his first unreasoning terror at night that had made him scream out desperately for his mother. Death was standing there, as huge as the sky, watching while little David walked towards him on his little legs. All around him there was nothing but music, and he couldn’t cling to it or even batter his head against it.