The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 45

he Nazi Holocaust and the
ession of Jewish Suffering
9
The exploration of this topic resulted
from a comment in the Introduction
of Vasily Grossman’s wartime
memoir A Writer at War (2005). Grossman’s
editor, Antony Beevor, noted that
when the Red Army first learned of the
camps, Grossman was determined to
discover as much as he could about the
Holocaust, a subject that the Soviet authorities
tried to suppress. Grossman,
a talented writer with a troubled past,
quickly “proved to be the most perceptive
and honest eyewitness of the Soviet
frontlines between 1941 and 1945.” 1 He
held no affection for Stalin, but he also
did not make waves that would arouse
the wrath of the Party or the People's
Commissariat for Internal Affairs or
NKVD. The fact that someone who genuinely
reported on war events sought to
bypass (or even disregard) Soviet policy
regarding the Holocaust proves the dire
need for that effort to be studied.
The Holocaust targeted mostly
Jews, and so the event was suppressed
in the Soviet Union primarily because
there was also plenty of prejudice
against Jews in the Soviet Union and
Stalin wanted to correlate the two. The
Soviet leader did not want to have his
anti-Semitic policy likened to that of
Hitler’s, so instead he steered the authorities
to emphasize Soviet heroism
and glory in defending the Motherland
against the fascist invaders. In the initial
years after 1945, “under the influence
of Cold War events, the ‘stories’ about
WWII and the Nazi occupation of the
Soviet Union became not only a subject
of scholarly research or a part of popular
culture, but an important tool in
state [political] propaganda .... The nar-