4 - Translation, the Cold War, and Repressed Memory: Vasily Grossman's “The Hell of Treblinka” and Anatoli Kuznetsov's Babii Yar

Summary

TRANSLATED TESTIMONIES cross many boundaries, not only linguistic or cultural, but also generational or between victim groups and broader readerships. The boundary between the two sides in the Cold War was not only physical and ideological, but also marked the contrast between very different ways of articulating knowledge about and memory of the Holocaust. Many texts made the journey between East and West, and there are important questions to ask about how the differing conditions of production and reception affected translation. This chapter does not claim to offer a comprehensive account, but instead will take a more detailed look at two texts and the translation journeys they underwent from East to West in the conditions of Cold War Europe.

The ideological context of developing interpretations of the Holocaust was inflected by individual national contexts, as well as by the conditions imposed by the Soviet authorities in the Stalinist and post- Stalinist periods; in the West, victim groups had to struggle to establish a visible identity as victims, and understandings of the Holocaust—and the range of familiar images associated with them—developed over time. The opening of Soviet and East European archives in the 1990s supported a shift in attention away from an exclusive focus on the extermination camps and imagery associated with them, to a more thorough understanding of the dynamics of genocide in the countries occupied by the Wehrmacht.

Victim testimonies played a key role in all these struggles, but they not only had to negotiate the tricky political dynamics of relationships between victims and nonvictims in the West or the state-imposed silence about the specifics of the Jewish experience in the Soviet bloc, but also to make themselves visible as testimony to readers with very different expectations.

Despite the large number of witness texts that have crossed between East and West, this is still an under-researched area. Therefore, I will refrain from drawing generalized conclusions, tracing instead a small number of texts in their translation journey. I will also concentrate on texts that crossed the border to the West, in order to make comparisons easier.