Reading Vasily Grossman on a Saturday night...
1. At first, the Nazis buried the Jews they had gassed at Treblinka in mass graves. Weeks after Stalingrad, when Himmler sensed the tide was turning, he began thinking about how the Nazis' crimes would come to be seen by an unforgiving world. He had the bodies dug up and burned.
2. As head of the NKVD during the Great Purge, Yezhov had hundreds of thousands of people murdered. One night, while his young daughter was playing hide-and-seek in her father's study, she found a photo album filled with photographs of dead children.
3. After he fell out of favor with Stalin in 1939, Yezhov was arrested. The NKVD captain who searched the apartment found 4 used bullets in his desk. One was wrapped in paper w/Zinoviev's name on it, one in paper w/Kamenev's name on it, and two in paper w/Smirnov's name on it.
4. While Yezhov was conducting his terror, his wife hosted the most prestigious and glamorous literary salon in all of Moscow. Eisenstein went. So did Babel.
