Swedish

Testimony from the Inferno of War

Book: German Diary 1945-46 - Notes of a Soviet Officer
Author: Vladimir Gelfand
Translation: Lars Wiklund
Publisher: Ersatz

During the past fifteen years the stream of books and television documentaries about the Second World War has continued to grow. They cover everything from soldiers landing on the Normandy beaches to interviews with servants of the Goebbels family and new attempts to interpret Hitler and his closest circle.

The reasons for this fascination can be discussed, especially because much of the new literature repeats facts that are already well known. Research on the Soviet Union's role in the war, however, remains comparatively limited. In recent years deeper studies of particular aspects have begun to appear, helped by works such as Simon Sebag Montefiore's biography Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which opened a window onto the internal workings of Soviet power.

Against that background, the appearance of the young Soviet officer Vladimir Gelfand's German Diary 1945-1946 is a surprising and welcome discovery. Gelfand spent the final months of the war in Germany and then took part in the occupation. His diary reveals a complex world in which the human and the inhuman are constantly intertwined: horror and fear coexist with admiration and hatred, while compassion and delight in life alternate with crude realism and military harshness.

Gelfand writes about the suffering of the poor, the wounded and enemy women struggling to find food. At the same time he records warm and sincere contacts with ordinary Germans. The relationship between the Red Army and German civilians was therefore neither simple nor reducible to oppression and mutual hatred.

Taken as a whole, the diary is a compelling personal testimony from within the totalitarian machinery of war and allows us to see that world through the eyes of a man who passed through it.

Niclas Sennerteg