Fourth International Social Science Summer School in Ukraine: "Violence and its Aftermath in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Context", Zhytomyr (Ukraine), 4-10 July 2012
Program description:
"How naive, how kindly and patriarchal the old prisons huddled on the outskirts of towns now appeared - beside these camp-cities, beside the awful crimson-black glow that hung over the gas ovens! You might well think that the management of such a vast number of prisoners would have required an equally vast army of guards and supervisors. In fact, whole weeks would pass by without anyone in an SS uniform so much as appearing inside the barrack-huts. It was the prisoners themselves who policed the camp-cities (...) It seemed as though the German authorities could disappear altogether, the prisoners would maintain the high-voltage current in the wires and go on with their work." This is the way Vasily Grossman, a Soviet writer born in a Jewish family in central Ukraine, defines in his major novel Life and Fate the level and sophistication of violence reached in the XXth century. The novel dedicated to the Second World War is a reflection on the management of violence in war conditions and its ambiguity, but also on the violence experienced by political prisoners in Stalinist camps and on the pervasiveness of violence in all spheres of life. Having lost his mother in the Berdichev ghetto during the war, the writer dedicated his novel to her and her shadow is present in the author's whole work of writing and memory.