This multilayered description of a personal interaction between two people trying to make sense of a particular history—on the one hand, hostile astonishment by the social historian and interviewer that the Holocaust survivor did not wish to participate in laying out history for posterity, and, on the other hand, this same interviewer’s justifiable point that history is more than facts in books or memoirs, which together produced, in turn, distrust and misgiving on the part of the interviewee—well highlights certain tensions that occur particularly in the pursuit of the human dimension of historical suffering and transformation. A third...

Smolensk lies on the Dnieper River, approximately two hundred miles southwest of Moscow, bordering present-day Belarus. A proto-Slavic Krivitchian tribe once lived there and paid tribute to the Varangians (Vikings) until, according to the Primary (Nestor) Chronicle, Oleg, in the late ninth century, incorporated the town into Kievan Rus’. The origin of the name is disputed. Most likely it comes from the word for pitch or resin (smolá), which was applied especially to traders’ boats to make them watertight.¹ The Chronicle also appears to be the first source to identify the town with the epithet “key and gateway to Moscow.”...

On June 16, 1941, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary: “The Führer estimates the campaign to last about four months; I estimate less. Bolshevism will fall like a deck of cards. We stand before a victory without parallel. . . . What we have fought against our whole life long, we will now destroy. I said this to the Führer, and he completely agreed. . . . The Führer said: ‘And if we win, no one will ask us about our methods.’”¹ Six days later, in the middle of the longest day of the year, the German...

For the majority of Smolensk civilian residents who did not flee or were not evacuated—from a mere 1,000 in early August 1941,¹ to an average 20,000–30,000 over the course of the next two years—the transition to a new authority was gradual yet forced, symbolic yet profound. With time, the city found new rhythms, and some residents accommodated themselves well to them. One representative example of change is the mayor’s order of December 30, 1941, calling for 224 new Smolensk street names, excluding streets in the area of the ghetto, which were now “beyond” the city’s borders.² These...

Nazi-German war policies in the Soviet Union entailed methodical terror and crimes against humanity. Indeed, acts of violence appeared wherever German forces were present, in Smolensk as elsewhere. These acts included the systematic starvation and killings of prisoners of war as well as civilians, especially Jews, Communist Party commissars, Roma, the disabled, and children. German soldiers also raped Russian women. Actions such as these depict an even more somber aspect of everyday life than both the one described in the previous chapter and the one typically depicted in the local Russian-language paper, Novyi put’. This chapter examines these atrocities as...

Prior to 1941, the Stalinist regime, promoting a policy of “socialism in one country,” encouraged its citizens to believe that it was constructing a utopian socialist welfare state. One means to this end was state control of the entire political apparatus and suppression of domestic opposition, even potential opposition. Stalin, for instance, on November 7, 1937, declared: “We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts!—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!”¹ Repression of dissent and enforced obedience reached a peak during...

Propaganda is a craft used to generate consensus. Anyone who controls the dissemination of knowledge through language and image, who “narrates or blocks other narratives from forming and emerging,” as Edward Said argued, importantly incorporates culture and imperialism.¹ Both the Stalinist and Nazi-German regimes were highly resourceful in monopolizing knowledge and using the power of persuasion to serve their domestic and foreign political interests: to unite the collective will to victory on the one hand and undermine the opponents’ will on the other. Nazi Germany’s sudden invasion of the Soviet Union launched the respective propaganda ministries into direct confrontation.² Like...

Operation Barbarossa’s impact on the Smolensk community was multidimensional. Along with the physical suffering imposed by the war (e.g., a ruined urban infrastructure, food shortages, disease, arrest, executions), the National Socialist invasion and occupation provoked new and shameful political, ethnic, and social distinctions. In part this was accomplished through Nazi propaganda efforts, as described in the previous chapter. The present chapter, relying mostly on material obtained from five in-depth oral history interviews (as well as interviews of Smolensk refugees by the Harvard Project), analyzes how the propaganda was alternately absorbed and deflected and how various group— Germans, Jews, collaborators, partisans—...

In April 1942 there were 29,260 officially registered Soviet workers in Smolensk: 14,817 women, 6,361 men, 4,093 girls, and 3,989 boys.¹ Apart from omitting all German residents (including estimates of up to 50,000 soldiers) 2 and young children, these figures also exclude the official Soviet nonworking adult population—namely, the elderly, invalids, and mothers with small children. But based on these statistics, at least insofar as the majority of civilians of occupied Smolensk were concerned, there were twice as many women as men, clearly more teenagers than men, and roughly the same number of boys as girls. In other words,...

In early 1943, as the German-Soviet front shifted westward, Heinrich Himmler ordered the Wehrmacht to evacuate and take with them from the occupied Soviet territories “first the eligible working men, and then the eligible women, as work forces in Germany.”¹ Himmler also wanted to evacuate “collaborating” Soviets, because “we owe these people who have helped us our protection.” By contrast, Wilhelm Kube, German general commissar for “White Ruthenia,” argued around the same time for remaining in the territories and acting more humanely: “If we wish to stay on these territories, pushing the borders up to Smolensk, then we must also...

Thousands of civilians who had fled or been evacuated from Smolensk in July 1941 returned in the late fall of 1943 and found their city in ruins. Almost upon arrival, they were instructed by local authorities to remember and enumerate the losses of their personal and household belongings. Every single item, with its estimated value (price), was documented, and these statements were among the tens of thousands used by the Soviet authorities to calculate a comprehensive war reparations demand from Germany.

Those who had stayed in Smolensk during the occupation also faced another type of Soviet war reckoning, often a...