“Was it possible – after the monstrous losses of the 41st and 42nd years – to reach Berlin? Yes, you can, we got there. But at the expense of a deep distortion of the people’s soul. With the help of the ghost of the world conqueror rising from the grave. Batu, Genghis Khan. Such victory is the witch’s drink. And the people who swallowed it will remain poisoned for a long time, and after several generations the poison appears as a rash – portraits of Stalin on windshields … “. Thoughts on the war of the philosopher Grigory Pomerants.
“…I have never experienced such fear in my life! Everything in me screamed: “Home, to my mother! Home, to my mother! An integral nature, probably, would not have resisted, ran, and then landed under execution or in a penal company. But I am an intellectual; reflection, from which the blush of a strong will fades, did not stop in me, and she said that only idiots were running around under the bombardment; it’s safer to lie down. I lay with my nose in the dust, and inside everything continued to scream: “Home, to my mother!” … Half an hour passed. And suddenly reflection reminded me how I myself once went towards the fear of infinity and passed through fear. If I am not afraid of the abyss of space and time, am I really afraid of a few lousy “Heinkels”! This simple thought worked. Something surfaced in my soul, stronger than front-line fear. And after, many times, when the lull gave way to the roar of shells and bombs, a slight wave of anxiety swept through the heart … and receded. I knew that I had a talisman, that I had the power to conquer fear.
The abyss into which everything falls, everything, every meaning, not only my life, but absolutely everything – it was more terrible than the Heinkels. And, remembering that darkness, I also remembered the light that splashed out of the darkness, when I endured it, endured it, did not retreat. Fear instantly lay down, like a German chain under a volley of Katyushas. He seized the initiative when I did not expect an attack, did not know that he was sitting in ambush, somewhere deeper than the level of consciousness – and ready to hit me. Then I waited for the attack, I was on my guard – and I knew in advance what would happen next, when the emotional wave soared up and the fear turned into joyful excitement. On the crest of a wave, I wanted more danger, more trembling of the heart – and the joy of going beyond fear, flying above fear. I think it’s like ski jumping. I remember how, around September 43, I looked from a high-rise at the attacking chain, at these unprotected figures running among powerful gaps, and I wanted to be there, to experience the same feeling of the moral superiority of man over technology.
«War freed me from all fear. They got used to not feeling sorry for their own skin, and strangers … We got used to the fact that we, the heroes, are allowed everything. I remember very well this feeling in October 1944 before the invasion of East Prussia (near Tilsit). You will cross the border (they immediately put a black board on it: Germany) and take revenge as your heart desires. Every time I saw “everything is allowed” in reality, I recoiled. The first time – at the beginning of the 44th, when a prisoner was hanged. The order – to hang the Germans captured for setting fire to village huts, did not cause me doubts. But it’s one thing to order, it’s another thing to watch how they hang. I was not sure that it was this German who set fire to it. And if he set it on fire, then how can a soldier not do what he was ordered to do? He had a good face, and he silently stood on a stool, clenching his teeth. And the crowd was busy around, they thought out what to make the gallows out of. There were no suitable trees, the steppe. I was struck by the sincere joy on the faces of soldiers and officers. This is how boys hang cats… Having lost the fear of death, people surprisingly easily lose their conscience. At the end of the war, I was shocked – how much abomination can get out of a hero who has passed from Stalingrad to Berlin. And how indifferently everyone looks at this abomination.
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- The work of love
«There is fate in every external victory. Every victory has to be paid. Only internal victories are infinitely fruitful: over fear, over the desire to excel, to grow rich, to take revenge. And win. For an external victory, which completely destroys what seems to us a perfect evil, immediately becomes a new evil, and only those modest victories are good that restore the natural balance and do not allow one thing to grow at the expense of the rest. That is, victory over the inertia of victory. Victories that stop the revelry of victories, like a fire in the steppe – oncoming fire. And the ecstasy of victory, the delight of victory – a deadly hop … “
«I do not regret that I was born in the XNUMXth century. I took it out… The war did not erase my fragility, vulnerability, without which there is no real sensitivity, but this “almost feminine sensitivity”, as one girl put it about me, was superimposed by the excitement of battle … and in the end, courage separated from the fighting “we”, became independent and free and as if turned from outside to inside. But it started in the war. There – the first experience of life in the consciousness of death. Eternal consciousness of danger. Elasticity, fit … “
Fragments from Grigory Pomerants’ book Notes of the Ugly Duckling (Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2012).