Russian

The Exhibition “Jews in the Great Patriotic War” Is Taking Place in Moscow

The seventieth anniversary of Victory is another occasion to remember the terrible price that every people of our country, without exception, paid for that victory. The exhibition Jews in the Great Patriotic War, which has opened at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, is devoted to this subject.

One of the most piercing and honest texts about the Great Patriotic War is Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate. It reached readers only twenty-eight years after it was written and twenty-four years after the author’s death, in part because of Grossman’s nationality. The seventieth anniversary of Victory is an occasion to remember once again the terrible price that all the peoples of our country paid for that victory. This is the subject of the exhibition Jews in the Great Patriotic War, which has opened at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.

Passers-by listen anxiously to Molotov’s announcement over loudspeakers about Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union. On that very first day of the war, Yevgeny Khaldei became not merely a TASS correspondent but a wartime photographer. The exhibition shows the world through the eyes of Jewish photojournalists: rare archival images and photographs carefully preserved by the heroes’ relatives. Behind each image is a person and a story.

“Such photographs clearly demonstrate how the peoples of the Soviet Union stood shoulder to shoulder to defend their homeland regardless of nationality, because practically every nationality then living in the Soviet Union fought fascism and defended freedom at an enormous cost in human lives,” emphasized Sergei Ivanov, head of the Russian Presidential Administration and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.

A wartime field glass, a compass, a holster and military decorations — all these objects fit together like pieces of a puzzle to form a picture of those terrible years. There are soldiers here, and women of the Red Army — half a million of them served. The exhibition presents the war through individual people who brought victory over fascism closer. Here are letters sent home from the front from the family archive of Leonid Rabinovich. A lieutenant who had been an artist in civilian life, he took it upon himself during the war to find treasures of the Dresden Gallery hidden by the Nazis. Nearby is a photograph of Yelena Rzhevskaya, who took part in the search for Hitler’s remains.

“Young people will discover something new here, while people who already know the history of the war will see it in human faces, through living personal stories, in details and in the faces of very different people. A people consists of individuals; this is also an attempt to come closer to a people’s history of the war,” commented Oleg Budnitsky, Doctor of Historical Sciences and curator of the exhibition.

The exhibition has brought together important documentary materials. They include the manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate and the newly published wartime diary of Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand. Transcribing the diary was extremely difficult: much of it was hard to read, and some pages even had to be smoothed with an iron. All this was done so that everyone could learn what the war was really like — everyday routine, life and customs behind the lines and at the front, and deeply personal experiences.

At the end of the exhibition stands perhaps the most iconic photograph of the war years, Raising the Victory Banner over the Reichstag. In the context of this exhibition, it symbolizes the idea that every person who passed through the war was a hero.