***
We arrived in Treblinka in early September 1944, thirteen months after the day of the uprising. For thirteen months from July 1942 the executioner’s block had been at work—and for thirteen months from August 1943, the Germans had been trying to obliterate every trace of this work.
It is quiet. The tops of the pine trees on either side of the railway line are barely stirring. It is these pines, this sand, this old tree stump that millions of human eyes saw as their freight wagons came slowly up to the platform. With true German neatness, whitewashed stones have been laid along the borders of the black road. The ashes and crushed cinders swish softly. We enter the camp. We tread the earth of Treblinka. The lupine pods split open at the least touch; they split with a faint ping and millions of tiny peas scatter over the earth. The sounds of the falling peas and the bursting pods come together to form a single soft, sad melody. It is as if a funeral knell—a barely audible, sad, broad, peaceful tolling—is being carried to us from the very depths of the earth. And, rich and swollen as if saturated with flax oil, the earth sways beneath our feet—earth of Treblinka, bottomless earth, earth as unsteady as the sea. This wilderness behind a barbed-wire fence has swallowed more human lives than all the earth’s oceans and seas have swallowed since the birth of mankind.
The earth is casting up fragments of bone, teeth, sheets of paper, clothes, things of all kinds. The earth does not want to keep secrets.
And from the earth’s unhealing wounds, from this earth that is splitting apart, things are escaping of their own accord. Here they are: the half-rotted shirts of those who were murdered, their trousers and shoes, their cigarette cases that have turned green, along with little cogwheels from watches, penknives, shaving brushes, candlesticks, a child’s shoes with red pompoms, embroidered towels from the Ukraine, lace underwear, scissors, thimbles, corsets, and bandages. Out of another fissure in the earth have escaped heaps of utensils: frying pans, aluminum mugs, cups, pots and pans of all sizes, jars, little dishes, children’s plastic mugs. In yet another place—as if all that the Germans had buried was being pushed up out of the swollen, bottomless earth, as if someone’s hand were pushing it all out into the light of day: half-rotted Soviet passports, notebooks with Bulgarian writing, photographs of children from Warsaw and Vienna, letters penciled in a childish scrawl, a small volume of poetry, a yellowed sheet of paper on which someone had copied a prayer, ration cards from Germany...And everywhere there are hundreds of perfume bottles of all shapes and sizes—green, pink, blue...And over all this reigns a terrible smell of decay, a smell that neither fire, nor sun, nor rain, nor snow, nor wind have been able to overcome. And thousands of little forest flies are crawling about over all these half-rotted bits and pieces, over all these papers and photographs.
We walk on over the swaying, bottomless earth of Treblinka and suddenly come to a stop. Thick wavy hair, gleaming like burnished copper, the delicate lovely hair of a young woman, trampled into the ground; and beside it, some equally fine blond hair; and then some heavy black plaits on the bright sand; and then more and more...Evidently these are the contents of a sack, just a single sack that somehow got left behind. Yes, it is all true. The last hope, the last wild hope that it was all just a terrible dream, has gone. And the lupine pods keep popping open, and the tiny peas keep pattering down—and this really does all sound like a funeral knell rung by countless little bells from under the earth. And it feels as if your heart must come to a stop now, gripped by more sorrow, more grief, more anguish than any human being can endure...
Scholars, sociologists, criminologists, psychiatrists, and philosophers—everyone is asking how all this can have happened. How indeed? Was it something organic? Was it a matter of heredity, upbringing, environment, or external conditions? Was it a matter of historical fate, or the criminality of the German leaders? Somehow the embryonic traits of a racial theory that sounded simply comic when expounded by the second-rate charlatan professors or pathetic provincial theoreticians of nineteenth-century Germany—the contempt in which the German philistine held “Russian pigs,” “Polish cattle,” “Jews reeking of garlic,” “debauched Frenchmen,” “English shopkeepers,” “hypocritical Greeks,” and “Czech blockheads”; all the nonsense about the superiority of the Germans to every other race on earth, all the cheap nonsense that seemed so comical, such an easy target for journalists and humorists—all this, in the course of only a few years, ceased to seem merely infantile and was transformed into a threat to mankind. It became a deadly threat to human life and freedom and a source of unparalleled crime, bloodshed, and suffering. There is much now to think about, much that we must try to understand.
Wars like the present war are terrible indeed. A vast amount of innocent blood has been spilled by the Germans. But it is not enough now to speak about Germany’s responsibility for what has happened. Today we need to speak about the responsibility of every nation in the world; we need to speak about the responsibility of every nation and every citizen for the future.
Every man and woman today is duty-bound to his or her conscience, to his or her son and to his or her mother, to their motherland and to humanity as a whole to devote all the powers of their heart and mind to answering these questions: What is it that has given birth to racism? What can be done to prevent Nazism from ever rising again, either on this side or on the far side of the ocean? What can be done to make sure that Hitlerism is never, never in all eternity resurrected?
What led Hitler and his followers to construct Majdanek, Sobibor, Bełzec, Auschwitz, and Treblinka is the imperialist idea of exceptionalism—of racial, national, and every other kind of exceptionalism.
We must remember that Fascism and racism will emerge from this war not only with the bitterness of defeat but also with sweet memories of the ease with which it is possible to commit mass murder. It has turned out that it is really not so very difficult to kill entire nations. Ten small chambers—hardly enough space, if properly furnished, to stable a hundred horses—ten such chambers turned out to be enough to kill three million people.
Killing turned out to be supremely easy—it does not entail any uncommon expenditure.
It is possible to build five hundred such chambers in only a few days. This is no more difficult than constructing a five-story building.
It is possible to demonstrate with nothing more than a pencil that any large construction company with experience in the use of reinforced concrete can, in the course of six months and with a properly organized labor force, construct more than enough chambers to gas the entire population of the earth.
This must be unflinchingly borne in mind by everyone who truly values honor, freedom, and the life of all nations, the life of humanity.
[1]Grossman mistakenly estimated that around three million people were murdered in Treblinka; the true figure was probably less than 800,000. This compares with a death toll of 1,100,000 at Auschwitz-Birkenau. See note at Bełzec, and Auschwitz .
[2]Grossman is also mistaken with regard to the number of people killed during a single operation of the gas chambers. The true figure was probably between two thousand and three thousand.
The Sistine Madonna*
1.
The victorious Soviet forces, after annihilating the army of Fascist Germany, removed paintings from the collection of the Dresden Art Gallery and took them to Moscow. These paintings were then locked away for ten years.
In the spring of 1955 the Soviet government decided to return these paintings to Dresden. First, though, they were to be exhibited in Moscow for three months.
And so, on the cold morning of May 30, 1955, I walked along the Volkhonka, past the lines of policemen controlling the huge crowds who wanted to see the works of the Old Masters. I entered the Pushkin Museum, climbed the stairs to the first floor, and went up to The Sistine Madonna.
As soon as you set eyes on this painting, you immediately realize one thing, one thing above all: that it is immortal.
I realized that I
had, until this moment, been careless in my use of this awesome word “immortal.” I had confused the powerful life of some particularly great human achievements with immortality. Now, however, it came home to me that—for all the admiration I feel for Rembrandt, Beethoven, and Tolstoy—there was no work of art other than The Sistine Madonna, no other work created by brush, chisel, or pen, no other work that had conquered my heart and mind, that would continue to live for as long as people continued to live. And should people die, then whatever other creatures might replace them on earth—wolves, rats, bears, or swallows—would also walk or wing their way to look at this Madonna.
This painting has been seen by twelve generations of people—a fifth of the generations that have lived on earth since the beginning of recorded history.
Old beggar women have looked at this painting—as have European emperors and students, American millionaires, popes, Russian princes. Young virgins, prostitutes, colonels from the general staff, thieves, geniuses, weavers, bomber pilots, and schoolteachers have looked at it. Good and evil people have looked at it.
During the centuries this painting has existed, European and colonial empires have risen and fallen, the American nation has come into being, the factories of Pittsburgh and Detroit have gone into production, revolutions have taken place, and the world’s social structure has changed. During these centuries humanity has left behind it the superstitions of the alchemists, just as it has abandoned hand-driven spinning wheels, muskets and halberds, sailing ships and horse-drawn mail-coaches. Humanity has entered the age of electric generators, electric motors, and turbines; it has entered the age of atomic reactors and hydrogen bombs. During these centuries great scientists have shaped a new understanding of the universe: Galileo has written his Dialogue, Newton his Principia, Einstein his On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. During these centuries Rembrandt, Goethe, Beethoven, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy have enriched our souls and made our lives more beautiful.
What I saw was a young mother holding a child in her arms.
How is one to convey the grace of a slender apple tree bearing its first pale heavy apple, the grace of a young bird raising its first fledglings, the grace of a young roe deer that has just borne a fawn? The helplessness—the new motherhood—of a girl, of a little girl, still almost a child.
After The Sistine Madonna one can no longer refer to this special grace as ineffable or mysterious.
In his Madonna, Raphael has revealed the mystery of mater- nal beauty. But the secret of the painting’s inexhaustible life lies elsewhere. The secret of the painting’s life, of the Madonna’s great beauty, is that the young woman’s body and face are—in fact—her soul. In this visual representation of a mother’s soul lies something inaccessible to human consciousness.
We know about thermonuclear reactions during which matter is transformed into an enormous quantity of energy, but we cannot as yet conceive of a reverse process—the transformation of energy into matter. Here, though, a spiritual force—motherhood—has been crystallized, transmuted into a meek and gentle Madonna.
The Madonna’s beauty is closely tied to earthly life. It is a democratic, human, and humane beauty. It is a beauty that lives in every woman: in the cross-eyed, in hunchbacks with long pale noses, in golden-skinned Asians, in black-skinned Africans with curly hair and full lips. It is a universal beauty. This Madonna is the soul and mirror of all human beings, and everyone who looks at her can see her humanity. She is the image of the maternal soul. That is why her beauty is forever interwoven and fused with the beauty that lies hidden, deep down, indestructible, wherever life is being born—be it in cellars, attics, pits, or palaces.
I believe that this Madonna is a purely atheistic expression of life and humanity, without divine participation.
There have been moments when I have felt that this Madonna expresses not only all that is human but also something that is a part of earthly life in a still broader sense, something that is present in the animal world as a whole. I have felt that the Madonna’s miraculous shadow can be glimpsed in the brown eyes of a horse, dog, or cow that is feeding its young.
The child in the Madonna’s arms seems more earthly still. His face is more adult than that of his mother.
His gaze is sad and serious, focused both ahead and within. It is the kind of gaze that allows one to glimpse one’s fate.
Both faces are calm and sad. Perhaps they can see Golgotha, and the dusty rocky road up the hill, and the hideous, short, heavy, rough-hewn cross lying on a shoulder that is now only little and that now feels only the warmth of the maternal breast.
Yet neither anxiety nor pain grips our hearts. Instead, we feel something new, something we have never experienced. It is a human feeling, a new feeling, and it seems as if it has just arisen from the salty and bitter depths of the sea. Here it is—and its newness and unfamiliarity make your heart beat faster.
Here lies yet another unique quality of the painting.
It engenders something new, as if an eighth color has been added to the seven colors of the spectrum that we already know.
Why is there no fear on the mother’s face? Why have her fingers not fastened around her son’s body so tightly that even death cannot untwine them? Why does she not wish to keep her son from his fate?
Rather than hiding her child, she holds him forward to meet his fate.
And the child is not hiding his face in his mother’s breast. Any moment now he will climb down from her arms and walk forward on his own little bare feet to meet his fate.
How are we to explain this? How are we to understand it?
They are one—and they are separate. They see, feel, and think together. They are fused, yet everything says that they will separate from each other, that they cannot not separate, that the essence of their communion, of their fusion, lies in their coming separation.
There are bitter and painful moments when it is children who amaze adults with their good sense, their composure, and their acceptance of fate. Peasant children dying in years of famine have shown these qualities—as did the children of Jewish craftsmen and shopkeepers during the Kishinyov pogrom, as have the children of coal miners when a wailing siren proclaims to a panic-stricken settlement that there has been an explosion in the mine.
What is human in man goes to meet its fate, and in every epoch this fate is peculiar, distinct from the characteristic fate of the preceding epoch. What these various fates have in common is that all are painful and difficult.
But even when a man was crucified on a cross or tortured in a prison, what is human in him continued to exist.
What is human in man survived in quarries, in lumber camps in the taiga where the temperature was fifty degrees below freezing, in the flooded trenches of Przemyśl and Verdun. What is human in man continued to live on in the monotonous existence of clerks, in the joyless labor of women factory workers, in the wretched lives of cleaners and washerwomen, in their hopeless and exhausting struggle against poverty.
The Madonna with the child in her arms represents what is human in man. This is why she is immortal.
Looking at The Sistine Madonna, our own epoch glimpses its own fate. Every epoch contemplates this woman with a child in her arms, and a tender, moving, and sorrowful sense of brotherhood comes into being between people of different generations, nations, races, and eras. Conscious now of themselves and the cross they must bear, people suddenly understand the miraculous links between different ages, the way everything that ever has lived and ever will live is linked to what is living now.
2.
Afterward, as I was walking back down the street, stunned and confused by these sudden and powerful impressions, I made no attempt to unravel my various feelings and thoughts.
My confusion of feeling was nothing like the days of tears and joy I had known when I first read War and Peace at the age of fifteen, nor did it resemble what I had felt when I listened to Beethoven during a particularly somber and difficult time of my life.
&n
bsp; And then I realized that the vision of a young mother with a child in her arms had taken me back not to a book, not to a piece of music, but to Treblinka:
It is these pines, this sand, this old tree stump that millions of human eyes saw as their freight wagons came slowly up to the platform...We enter the camp. We tread the earth of Treblinka. The lupine pods split open at the least touch; they split with a faint ping...The sounds of the falling peas and the bursting pods come together to form a single soft, sad melody. It is as if a funeral knell—a barely audible, sad, broad, peaceful tolling—is being carried to us from the very depths of the earth...Here they are: the half-rotted shirts of those who were murdered, their shoes, little cogwheels from watches, penknives, candlesticks, a child’s shoes with red pompoms, an embroidered towel from the Ukraine, lace underwear, pots, jars, children’s plastic mugs, letters penciled in a childish scrawl, small volumes of poetry...
The Road Page 17