When Sofya Leviton Became a Mother

A haunting story from Life and Fate.

Vasily Grossman was one of the most renowned war correspondents of the 20^th Century and one of the greatest novelists. I have written many essays based on his masterpiece Life and Fate, a searing indictment of both communism and fascism leavened with beautiful writing. In it he conveys the ability of human beings to choose between love and hate, depravity and beauty, and freedom and totalitarianism.

As his translator, Robert Chandler, puts it, Life and Fate is not only a great novel “but also an exercise in moral and pollical philosophy, asking whether or not it is possible for someone to behave ethically even when subjected to overwhelming violence.”

In the aftermath of the October 7^th massacre, it has been harrowing to see the number of people, especially on college campuses, who have chosen hate, depravity, and totalitarianism. Grossman understood how totalitarians exploit weaknesses in human nature. And today’s students are all too easily manipulated. Through years of social justice indoctrination, their minds have been twisted to deny the humanity of some groups deemed oppressors while losing their own humanity. Today, the Jews are to be sacrificed; tomorrow, more will need to be destroyed in service of a larger warped goal. On their trajectory, we can anticipate a future of horrors.

The number of students who will read Grossman’s 900-page masterpiece is vanishingly small. Yet, those denying the humanity of Jews can choose to redirect the trajectory of their lives if they take 20 minutes to read Grossman’s description of Jewish people being unloaded from a train and then murdered after arriving at a concentration camp.

The selection process began as soon as the train was unloaded: who was to go straight to the gas chambers and who got to live at least temporarily. Here, Grossman describes a man chosen to live while the Nazis sent the rest of his family to be gassed:  

How can one convey the feelings of a man pressing his wife’s hand for the last time? How can one describe that last, quick look at a beloved face … How can he ever bury the memory of his wife handing him a packet containing her wedding ring, a rusk and some sugar-lumps?... Now the hands he had kissed must be burning, now the eyes that had admired him, now the hair whose smell he could recognize in the darkness, now his children, his wife, his mother… How can he breathe? With the screams of his mother and children in his ears?

Sofya Levinton was alone on the train to the camp, and so was little David. Having been separated from their families, they bonded:

She had always loved children, but little David evoked some special tenderness in her that she had never felt before. In the goods-wagon she had given him some bread and he had turned his little face towards her in the half-light; she had wanted to weep, to hug him, to smother him with kisses like a mother kissing her child. In a whisper that no one else could hear, she had said:  ‘Eat, my son, eat.’

She seldom spoke to the boy; some strange shame made her want to hide the maternal feelings welling up inside her. But she had noticed that he always watched anxiously if she moved to the other side of the wagon and that he calmed down when she was near him.

Doctors were spared from the gas chamber, and Sofya was a doctor; but to stay with David, she chose not to identify herself. Selected for death, Sofya “was walking with heavy, even steps; the little boy beside her was holding her hand. His other hand was in his pocket, clutching a matchbox containing a dark brown chrysalis, wrapped in cotton wool, that had just emerged from the cocoon.” Sofya, Grossman wrote,

had no future, only a past. For a moment this sense of her past blotted out everything present, blotted out the abyss. It was the very strangest of feelings, something you could never share with any other person – not even your wife, your mother, your brother, your son, your friend or your father. It was the secret of your soul. However passionately it might long to, your soul could never betray this secret. You carry away this sense of your life without having ever shared it with anyone: the miracle of a particular individual whose conscious and unconscious contain everything good and bad, everything funny, sweet, shameful, pitiful, timid, tender, uncertain, that has happened from childhood to old age – fused into the mysterious sense of an individual life.

To keep calm in the doomed lines, the Nazis had orchestras playing soothing music. Those to be killed were told they were in line for a shower:

When the music began, David had wanted to take the matchbox out of his pocket, open it just for a moment – so the chrysalis wouldn’t catch cold – and let it see the musicians. But after a few steps he forgot the people on the bandstand. There was nothing left but the music and the glow in the sky. The sad, powerful melody filled his soul with longing for his mother… Everything that had ever terrified his little heart now became one…

As the column turned, a gap appeared in the ranks and David saw that some of the buildings had their doors flung wide open. Not knowing why, he took the little box out of his pocket and, without saying goodbye to the chrysalis, flung it away. Let it live!

As Sofya and David entered the gas chamber, Sofya’s maternal feelings intensified. As those feelings swelled, so did her regard for others:

Sofya looked at her own broad, white shoulders; no one had ever kissed them – only her mother, long ago when she was a child…No longer ashamed of the maternal feelings that had been aroused in her – virgin though she was – she bent down and took David’s narrow little face in her large hands. It was as though she had taken his warm eyes into her hands and kissed them. ‘Yes, my child,’ she said, ‘we’ve reached the bath-house’…

The door to the gas chamber opened gradually and yet suddenly. The stream of people flowed through. An old couple, who had lived together for fifty years and had been separated in the changing-room, were again walking side by side; the machinist’s wife was carrying her baby…Again, Sofya Levinton hugged David’s shoulders. Never before had she felt such tenderness for people.

Warning: You may be haunted by Grossman’s description of Sofya’s and David’s last moments:

She clasped the boy to her with the peculiar strength familiar to the Germans who worked there – when they emptied the chamber, they never attempted to separate bodies locked in a close embrace…

The shuffling quietened down; all you could hear were occasional screams, groans and barely audible words. Speech was no longer of any use to people, nor was action; action is directed towards the future and there no longer was any future. When David moved his head and neck, it didn’t make Sofya Levinton want to turn and see what he was looking at.

Her eyes—which had read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn, and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul—her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.

She was still breathing, but breathing was hard work and she was running out of strength. The bells ringing in her head became deafening; she wanted to concentrate on one last thought, but was unable to articulate this thought. She stood there – mute, blind, her eyes still open.

The boy’s movements filled her with pity. Her feelings towards him were so simple that she no longer needed words and eyes. The half-dead boy was still breathing, but the air he took in only drove life away. His head was turning from side to side; he still wanted to see…

All this time David was being clasped by strong warm hands. He didn’t feel his eyes go dark, his heart become empty, his mind grow dull and blind.

Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her arms. Once again she had fallen behind him. In mine-shafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the birds and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.

‘I’ve become a mother,’ she thought.

That was her last thought.

Grossman ended this section of Life and Fate with this coda: “Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead.”

Reading Grossman calls to our conscience. How can we close our eyes and sit out the battle of our time for the future of civilization? 

At least 45 million civilians died during World War II. Add to that at least 15 million battle deaths and another 25 million battle wounded, and we understand why Grossman, who was a Soviet journalist on the front lines, including the battle for Stalingrad, pitied the living and the dead.  

The parents of Abigail Mor Edan, a four-year-old Israeli-American, were killed by Hamas; her mother died in front of her, and her father died shielding her. Abigail was taken hostage and just released. In over six weeks of captivity, did Abigail have a Sofya to care for her?

Sofya and David had no future, but if we make the right choices, we can still help prevent the worst.

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