Source # 1- Video on World War Two and the Holocaust - click here
Source # 2 - Video of the Warsaw Ghetto and Invasion of the Soviet Union - click here
Source # 3 - Video of Nazi Holocaust Plans for Eastern Europe - click here
Source # 4 - Video on the Holocaust in Lithuania - click here
Source # 5 - Video on Einsatzgruppen - click here
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Biography - Vassily Grossman
Vassily Grossman was born to a Jewish family in Ukraine in the Russian Empire in 1905. He supported the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. He began writing short stories while he was an engineering students at Moscow State University. His early stories got the attention and support of high ranking Soviet leaders and by the early 1930’s, he became a full time writer.
In 1937, during the period of the Great Purge, Grossman had his first confrontation with the Soviet authorities when his wife was arrested because she had not denounced her first husband after he had been arrested as an “enemy of the people”. In response to his wife’s arrest he took the risky move of writing the head of the NKVD (the secret police) to complain that his wife was being held responsible for a man she had left. Surprisingly, his wife was released by the NKVD.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman became a war correspondent for a Soviet newspaper. In this role, he reported on many of the major battles of the war such as the battles for Moscow, Stalingrad and Berlin. Grossman preferred to report on the lives and struggles of many of the ordinary Soviet soldiers and he spent a lot of time at the front lines of battles. His articles became a favorite read among the Soviet soldiers.
The Nazi Holocaust had a major affect on Grossman and he was one of the first reporters to bring the issue of the Holocaust to the world's attention. Grossman wrote about what the Soviet army encountered as it pushed the German army out of the Soviet Union. For example, when the Soviets liberated the region of Ukraine (which had one of the highest Jewish population in pre-war Europe), Grossman wrote, “There are no Jews in Ukraine… All is silence. Everything is still. A whole people have been murdered.” It was as the Soviet army advanced into Ukraine that he learned that his mother had been murdered along with 30,000 other people when her village had been captured by the Germans.
Grossman was the first journalist to arrive at the Nazi death camp of Treblinka in 1944. Grossman interviewed the survivors and the people who lived around the camp to write his article “Hell of Treblinka”. This article was used as evidence against the Nazi leadership at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Grossman went on to gather more evidence of Nazi crimes in the Soviet Union that he was compiled into a “Black Book”. However, following the war, Stalin wanted to downplay the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and focus on the general suffering of the Soviet people and ordered that Grossman’s work be supressed. This turned Grossman against the Soviet government.
Grossman turned his wartime experience into his major novel Life and Fate, which told the story of the war on the Eastern Front, but is focused mostly on the battle of Stalingrad and the events of the Holocaust. The novel tells the story on an epic scale that tells the story of many different characters from both the Soviet and German sides of the war as they fought in Stalingrad and suffered the Holocaust. Grossman finished the manuscript for the book in 1959. However, because the book was openly critical of the Soviet system, the government decided that it would not be published. In fact, the Soviet government considered it dangerous. The secret police raided Grossman’s house and confiscated all the copies of the manuscript, including the typewriter ribbons he used when writing the book. Grossman wrote to Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, to complain about how his book had been “arrested” and that he was “requesting freedom for my book”. A government official responded to Grossman letter by saying that the book could not be published for “two or three hundred years”.
A few years later, in 1964, Grossman died bitter over his treatment and the loss of his book. However, one copy of the manuscript of Life and Fate had escaped the Soviet authorities. Grossman had lent it to a friend who hid it at his country house. This copy of the manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and was published in Europe in 1980. The novel was later published in Soviet Union in 1988 as the country opened up under Gorbachev’s policy of Perestroika.
Source # 6 - Excerpt from Life and Fate - this scene captures the thoughts of on of the novel's characters, Sofia Livinson as she dies in the gas chamber at Auschwitz with David, a young orphan met and befriends in the cattle car to death camp.
David watched the door close: gently, smoothly, as though drawn by a magnet, the steel door drew closer to its steel frame. Finally they became one.
High up, behind a rectangular metal grating in the wall, David saw something stir. It looked like a grey rat, but he realized it was a fan beginning to turn. He sensed a faint, rather sweet smell.
The shuffling quietened down; all you could hear were occasional screams, groans and barely audible words. Speech was no longer of any use to people, nor was action; action is directed towards the future and there no longer was any future. When David moved his head and neck, it didn’t make Sofia Levinson want to turn and see what he was looking at.
Her eyes–which had read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul–her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.
She was still breathing, but breathing was hard work and she was running out of strength. The bells ringing in her head became deafening; she wanted to concentrate on one last thought, but was unable to articulate this thought. She stood there–mute, blind, her eyes still open.
The boy’s movements filled her with pity. Her feelings towards him were so simple that she no longer needed words and eyes. The half-dead boy was still breathing, but the air he took in only drove life away. He could see people settling onto the ground; he could see mouths that were toothless and mouths with white teeth and gold teeth; he could see a thing stream of blood flowing from a nostril. He could see eyes peering through the glass; Roze’s inquisitive eyes had momentarily met David’s. He still needed his voice–he would have asked Aunt Sonya about those wolf-like eyes. He still even needed thought. He had taken only a few steps in the world. He had seen the prints of children’s bare heels on hot, dusty earth, his mother lived in Moscow, the moon looked down and people’s eyes looked up at it from below, a teapot without its head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by holding their front feet–this world still preoccupied him.
All this time David was being clasped by strong warm hands. He didn’t feel his eyes go dark, his heart become empty, his mind grow dull and blind. He had been killed; he longer existed.
Sofia Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her hands. Once again she had falled behind him. In mine-shafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the bird and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.
“I’ve become a mother,” she thought.
That was her last thought.
Her heart, though, still had life in it; it still beat, still ached, still felt pity for the dead and the living. Sofia Levinton felt a wave of nausea. She was hugging David to her life a doll. Now she too was dead, she too was a doll.
Source # 7 - Video on Treblinka - click here
Biography - Samuel Willenberg
Samuel Willenberg was born in 1923 to a Jewish family in Poland. He volunteered for the army when the Germans invaded Poland in September, 1939. He was sent into combat to fight the Soviet army as it invaded Poland from the east. Willenberg was wounded fighting the Soviet army and was taken prisoner. He escaped three months later and returned to his home in central Poland, then under German control. Willenberg was forced, along with his sisters and parents, to move into a Jewish ghetto. Willenberg worked as a forced laborer until his family was able to escape the ghetto with forged documents. However, the family was rounded up and forced into another ghetto. From here, Willenberg was sent to Treblinka when the ghetto was liquidated in 1942.
When he arrived at Treblinka, Willenberg was wearing paint-stained work clothes and the Germans thought is was a manual laborer. Instead of sending him to the gas chambers to be killed, they selected him to do work at Treblinka. He was the only one on his train not sent to the gas chambers. He was sent to work sorting through the belongings of the people killed in the gas chamber. While doing this work, he found the cloths that his sisters had been wearing on their way to Treblinka.
Willenberg conspired with the other prisoners to revolt against the Nazis. In August 1943, they rose up in rebellion. Most of the prisoners were killed, but Willenberg was able to escape with a few other prisoners. He travelled to Warsaw where he joined the Polish Home Army and participated in the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans in September 1944. He was captured at the end of the battle for the city when the Germans put down the rebellion. However, he escaped the prison train and hid in the countryside until the Soviets liberated the region.
After the war, Willenberg joined the Polish army and worked to help Jewish families find their children who had been hidden by non-Jewish Polish families. However, life for Jewish people in post-war Communist Poland was very difficult and Willenberg immigrated to Israel where he worked as an engineer and studied art. He focused his art on memorializing the victims at Treblinka. He also wrote and spoke about his experiences. He died in February 2016
Source # 8 - Fate of German Jews - click here
Biography - Samuel Willenberg
Samuel Willenberg was born in 1923 to a Jewish family in Poland. He volunteered for the army when the Germans invaded Poland in September, 1939. He was sent into combat to fight the Soviet army as it invaded Poland from the east. Willenberg was wounded fighting the Soviet army and was taken prisoner. He escaped three months later and returned to his home in central Poland, then under German control. Willenberg was forced, along with his sisters and parents, to move into a Jewish ghetto. Willenberg worked as a forced laborer until his family was able to escape the ghetto with forged documents. However, the family was rounded up and forced into another ghetto. From here, Willenberg was sent to Treblinka when the ghetto was liquidated in 1942.
When he arrived at Treblinka, Willenberg was wearing paint-stained work clothes and the Germans thought is was a manual laborer. Instead of sending him to the gas chambers to be killed, they selected him to do work at Treblinka. He was the only one on his train not sent to the gas chambers. He was sent to work sorting through the belongings of the people killed in the gas chamber. While doing this work, he found the cloths that his sisters had been wearing on their way to Treblinka.
Willenberg conspired with the other prisoners to revolt against the Nazis. In August 1943, they rose up in rebellion. Most of the prisoners were killed, but Willenberg was able to escape with a few other prisoners. He travelled to Warsaw where he joined the Polish Home Army and participated in the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans in September 1944. He was captured at the end of the battle for the city when the Germans put down the rebellion. However, he escaped the prison train and hid in the countryside until the Soviets liberated the region.
After the war, Willenberg joined the Polish army and worked to help Jewish families find their children who had been hidden by non-Jewish Polish families. However, life for Jewish people in post-war Communist Poland was very difficult and Willenberg immigrated to Israel where he worked as an engineer and studied art. He focused his art on memorializing the victims at Treblinka. He also wrote and spoke about his experiences. He died in February 2016
Source # 8 - Fate of German Jews - click here
