A German camp commandant’s has a meeting with Adolf Eichman where he learns for the first time he will be responsible for the slaughter of thousands of human beings. As he sits in his staff car heading back to his headquarters, the commandant reflects on what lies ahead of him:
“In Budapest,and Fastov, in Vienna, Melitopol and Amsterdam, in detached houses with sparkling windows, in hovels swathed in factory smoke, lived people belonging to the Jewish nation. All of them - fanatical believers and fanatical atheists, workers and scroungers, doctors and tradesmen, sages and idiots, thieves, contemplatives, saints and idealists - were to be exterminated.
The Gestapo limousine sped down the autumn autobahn.”
Later we find ourselves on journey with a train-load of Jews to the gas chambers, and are moved to tears and anger.
This is a truly epic novel that shows the heights and depths of of the human spirit as powerless individuals seek to retain their humanity amidst crushing forces that threaten, overwhelm and kill the innocent.
There’s a great review here in The Guardian:
Grossman’s Life and Fate took me three weeks to read – and three to recover: Linda Grant
She says, for her this was a life changing book and writes:
“Like many of my generation, I’d been shaped by ideas; by a number of -isms, socialism and feminism above all. I saw the world in terms of various us and them groupings. After reading Life and Fate they seemed to matter less. Grossman wasn’t advocating Christian saintliness, and was far from perfect in his own life. But if, even in the horror of war, you can alleviate suffering through some extraordinary action (volunteering to go to the gas chamber to hold the hand of a child so he won’t have to die alone), how easy might it be to behave with less anger, cynicism, irritation or sneery dismissiveness? And that’s what I have tried to do. Life and Fate is a daunting undertaking, but for those who finish it the experience is profound. Few novels that set out to change the world succeed; this one merely changed me.“
Vasily Grossman also wrote a prequel to Life and Fate that he titled For a Just Cause. This was was published last year in a revised translation as Stalingrad. Unlike Life and Fate that was banned in Soviet Russia, For a Just Cause was published while Stalin was alive. Guardian review here
