Is the story of the conversation of Daniil Granin with a German woman near the Buchenwald concentration camp?

The network often quote the conversation of the famous Soviet writer with a resident of post -war Germany. We checked if she really had a place.

According to the widely dispersed text, the writer Daniil Granin told how he traveled with the delegation of writers to Buchenwald. The camp is located very close to the city of Weimar, and Granin realized that the townspeople perfectly saw the smoking pipes of crematoriums. He wanted to drink and, while he poured water in Kiosk, asked the saleswoman how she felt during the war. “Ah, what are you! - she answered, - We knew nothing! " Then he clarified: "But you saw the steaming pipes!" The saleswoman objected: “No. Have not seen. We looked the other way. " Further, Granin as if with bitterness writes that in order to look the other way, you need to know where to look.

Actress and TV presenter write about this case Maria Shukshina, artist Katya Margolisas well as numerous users of social networks. In particular, on Facebook you can find publications with 708, 644, 448 And 416 reposts at the time of writing this analysis.

Buchenwald is one of the largest concentration camps of Nazi Germany, located next to the city of Weimar in Thuringia. Although Officially, Buchenwald did not have the status of the death camp, since the summer of 1937 people have been destroyed there. Until April 1945 in the camp Died About 56,000 people, including victims of malnutrition and experiments on people. In the first three years, human remains were burned in the crematorium Weimara, and after 1940 at the concentration camp appeared your crematorium. After the fall of the Third Reich, the territory of the complex used Soviet troops as a special camp for interned, and in 1948 it Included In the gulag system.

In 1957, Buchenwald was visited by the young Soviet writer Daniil Granin. The trip was not reflected in his well -known works (for example, in five -volume Collected works of the concentration camp are not mentioned). However, in one of the numbers of the Literary Gazeta, a voluminous article of the writer under the name “Buchenwalda bowl". In it, Granin talks in detail about his impressions of Buchenwald and the neighboring Weimar, about the horrors whose evidence appeared before him. However, in the text there is no mention of the German woman who “looked in the wrong direction”, as well as the description of conversations on this topic with local residents.

“Verified” did not find traces of this story in other authoritative sources related to Granin: books, periodicals and transcripts performances. The oldest mention of this case on the network (including the Google Book archive) is only in 2008 when it I mentioned Live-user Leon-Orr (Jeanne Light). In a commentary on her post, she tells the story in her own words, and it was in this form that the story later spread over the Internet. So, in 2014, Leon-Orr comment was almost completely quoted Already mostly a post by another user. New Vitk The popularity of history occurred in the spring of 2022.

Here you need to separately highlight one of the late network options Stories about Granin, somewhat different from others. In him, Granin does not hear the answer “We looked the other way”, but mentally predicts him and dreams of a peg cap that he will be given in the Writers' Union for a note. However, the German saleswoman unexpectedly asks a counter question: “And where do you usually look when you swim along the White Sea Morkanal? In order not to see the graves of the prisoners of the Gulag on both sides of the grave? " Both the self-irony of Granin, and the mention of the Soviet camp, and the use of the word “caplok” in the text do not fit with the realities of the 1950s and censorship. Indeed, such a rethinking of the story about the writer belongs to the pen of his colleague Igor Ponochevno. The publication appeared in July 2022 in Facebook-The author of the author and caused a wide resonance. In the comments, the author himself admitted that his text is an irony over a common history (which at that time managed to promote, in particular, Maria Shukshina).

Is it possible to say that the story of Daniil Granin arose from nothing? Definitely not. Alexander Vinnikov in his book "Price of Freedom" (1998) mentioned The nameless resident of the village of Auschwitz, who gave a similar answer to the question about the pipes of the concentration camp of the same name. Rafael Goldberg in the work “Book of executed” (1999) also Writesthat he read about “people who lived side by side with enormous Nazi concentration camps” and expressed in this way. A similar, but somewhat different case is mentioned in the artistic book of Vladimir Krupin "We will be like children"(1989). Dmitry Bykov in 2023 did not refer to Granin and also mentioned Auschwitz. In general, judging by frequent use in quotation marks, the expression “look in the other direction” in the meaning of “not paying attention to crimes committed” has long been known, including on West. In 2015, Pope Francis I I used it He, speaking of the genocide of Armenians.

However, the situation is the most similar to Daniil Granin's story described in the novel of the Australian writer Dimfna Kusak "Hot summer in Berlin"(1961). Heroine shares memories About his visit to the former concentration camp Dachau after the surrender of Germany. At the kiosk with water, she talked with the saleswoman, and in response to the mention of yellow smoke, which fell from the camp’s pipes during the war years, calmly replied: “I never looked in that direction.” Kusak's work was published in the USSR repeatedly And it was quite popular. In an interview with “verified” Jeanne Light, the author of the oldest recorded mention of the story of Granin, said that she had read this novel. She did not exclude that in her memory an episode from the “Hot Summer in Berlin” and the knowledge of Daniel’s visit to Buchenwald could mix and form in such a bizarre plot. The final idea of ​​the story (“To look in the other direction, you need to know where to look”) Jeanne Light, according to her, put Granin herself in the mouth of it.

Thus, in all likelihood, the story of Daniil Granin dates back to the novel by Dimfna Kusak “The Hot Summer in Berlin”, and the Soviet and Russian writer turned out to be its defendant by mistake. There is no evidence of his connection with this case.

Photo on the cover: social networks

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