Min
fars dagbok
"Tysk dagbok 1945-46" har i Sverige mottagits med många olika
läsarter. En del
vill se sådant som inte finns i boken,
hittar på och gör om. Andra kopplar sina egna
siffror och önskningar till
dagboken.
In Defence of Facts and Decency
My father's diary, Tysk dagbok 1945-46, has been read in very different ways in Sweden. Some people want to see things in it that are not there, inventing or reshaping material; others attach their own figures and wishes to the diary.
The authenticity of the diary and the accuracy with which the published text corresponds to the original - word for word - were checked thoroughly by historian Elke Scherstjanoi of the Berlin branch of the Institute of History.
Katrine Kielos (Expressen, 16 January 2007) is dissatisfied with Stefan Lindgren's article. She wants the figure of 1.4 million raped German women - a figure Lindgren mentions critically with reference to Antony Beevor - to become fixed in public memory. In Kielos's article, 1.4 million rapes have already become "the historians' estimate." But what are we to do if my father's diaries do not describe a single rape except for one story he once heard from a German family he met? Perhaps he simply was not present where and when such crimes occurred. Why should Stefan Lindgren, who read my father's diary both in the original and in Swedish translation, or Flamman, which published his article, be blamed because the diary does not produce the number Kielos expects?
If we insist on a predetermined figure, we can return to the postwar memoir literature on which people relied for decades. We can set aside a newly discovered testimony written day by day while events were actually happening, simply because it conflicts with Beevor's number, and call every contrary finding an expression of pro-Stalinist sentiment. But that is not how evidence should be treated.
Kielos writes that after six years of war Berlin was a city of horror, filled with women who had no capital other than their own bodies. But the horror of those six years did not exist only in Berlin during the final months. Other cities in Europe and the Soviet Union had also endured years of violence. Turning suffering into an arithmetical competition produces absurd results rather than a clearer history.
The documentary record of German crimes in the occupied Soviet Union is enormous. In the village of Semyonovskoye in the Kalinin region, twenty-five-year-old Olga Tikhonova, the wife of a Red Army soldier, mother of three and heavily pregnant, was raped, tortured and killed. In Basmanovo in the Smolensk region, more than two hundred schoolchildren who had come to help with the harvest were driven into a field and shot; a group of schoolgirls was taken away for German officers.
In Borodayevka in the Dnepropetrovsk region, women and girls were raped on a mass scale. In Berezovka in the Smolensk region, drunken German soldiers raped and abducted women and girls between sixteen and thirty. In Smolensk the German command established a brothel for officers and women were forcibly dragged there through the streets.
In Lviv, thirty-two women workers from a textile factory were raped and then killed. German soldiers dragged girls and young women into Kosciuszko Park and assaulted them. An elderly priest who tried to intervene was beaten and killed. Near Borisov in Belarus, women and girls captured while fleeing were raped and murdered; sixteen-year-old L. I. Melchukova was raped and tortured to death. In Tikhvin, fifteen-year-old M. Kolodetskaya, already wounded by shell fragments and lying in a hospital, was gang-raped by German soldiers and died as a result. These examples are cited from the materials of the Nuremberg Trials, volume 5.
I am not defending rape, and I am not defending Stalinism. I am defending a history that respects facts.
Kjell Albin Abrahamson complains that my father says nothing about concentration camps or torture chambers. But my father was not there - not as a prisoner, guard or liberator. Much has already been written about those subjects. He likewise does not write about Hitler's emotions during the last days of the war or Stalin's doubts during its first days, because he did not meet either man. A diary can record only what its author encountered.
Abrahamson also wrote in Sundsvalls Tidning on 15 October 2006 that Gelfand describes battles in which he could hardly have participated and mentions a German women's battalion that supposedly never existed. But the diary passage in question explicitly attributes the story to Senior Sergeant Andreyev. Gelfand records Andreyev returning after being separated from the unit, describing his adventures and saying that during fighting near Berlinchen he had come face to face with a counterattacking enemy women's battalion. What follows is Andreyev's account, retold as Andreyev's account.
I do not want to offend anyone. I have no reason to be ashamed of my father and no right to be ashamed of either his love or his hatred of Germans. I simply want to be understood.
Vitaly Gelfand,
Berlin, 6 February 2007