Fire villages

Posted by Thomas Klikauer

Operation Barbarossa was Nazi-Germany’s code-word for Hitler’s brutal war of racial annihilation on the Soviet Union starting in 1941.

Almost 85 years after that – in 2025 – Germany has finally translated one of the most vital books on the subject: Ales Adamowitsch, Janka Bryl and Uladsimir Kalesnik’s Feuerdörfer or Out Of The Fire.

This book tells the story of the crimes of Hitler’s army – the Wehrmacht. Unlike conventional armies, Hitler’s fascist army did not conduct a conventional war – army against army.

Instead, it was, in large parts, a war of one army – Nazi-Germany’s army set against defenceless civilians. Hitler’s Nazi army came to Eastern Europe as ferocious mass killers.

In this, the words Out Of The Fire or Feuerdörfer stand for the unbearable fact that well over 9,000 villages, hamlets, Jewish shtetels and rural settlements were destroyed by the Germans and with many of its people barbarously and callously massacred.

Unsurprisingly, it took the Germans a whopping fifty years to translate the book. One might argue that a cold-war Soviet book might not have been popular in Germany fifty years ago – even though it spoke – and still speaks – the truth of what Nazi-Germany did.

During the last fifty years, what was even less popular in Germany was outlining – to the Germans – what their brothers, uncles, fathers and grandfathers had done in their Nazi army – not so long ago.

After Nazism, Germany’s Nazis had managed to survive the Allied Forces’ De-Nazification (1946-1951) and enjoyed the ensuing Re-Nazification – the recycling of Nazis – during the subsequent years that filled Germany’s state and corporate apparatus with ex- (and not so) ex-Nazis.

In 2025, finally, Adamovich’s book has been translated. It even won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Perhaps very deservedly, some say that it is impossible to read this book in one go.

The book is more like a novel or a non-fiction book that you go to immerse yourself into. With this book, you will need several attempts and extended breaks in order to finish the book.

Again and again, you want to stop reading. It is hard to plunge yourself in the gruesome world of the German Wehrmacht invading the Soviet Union.

The atrocities are too overwhelming and the horror, the Germans unleashed, is too terrifying. For this reason, it is not intended to describe, in minute detail, how the people of Belarus were murdered by the criminal killer squads of the Wehrmacht and the SS while being burned to death in their houses and barns.

The fact that this book can now be published in German language for the first time – 50 years after it was published in Minsk despite initial reservations by the Soviet censorship authorities – is still somewhat of an event.

Its translator – Thomas Weiler – has accomplished an enormous feat and rightly received the Translator Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2025.

This also applies to the psychological effort required to find a language for the unspeakable. Weiler also managed the rather challenging task of a complex dialectal diversity spoken by the people of Belarusian as the collected eyewitness accounts entailed.

In a workshop report for the Toledo programme of the Deutscher Übersetzerfond, Weiler gives exciting insights into the history of the creation of the book and into his work on the book. Perhaps because of his dedication and the original content of the book,

anyone who has read the book,

will have to live with it forever

Decades earlier, the authors of the original book – Ales Adamovich, Janka Bryl and Uladzimir Kalesnik had travelled through Belarus between 1970 and 1973, and had visited 147 localities where they conducted and recorded 300 conversations.

Like Lanzmann for his epic documentary on the Shoah, they spoke with survivors and witnesses from the burned villages.

The Germans were running a so-called punitive action against partisan attacks to camouflage their mass murder. The Nazi occupiers had destroyed over 9,000 villages and settlements between 1941 and 1944, killing most of its original inhabitants in a bestial manner.

One of the most impressive yet most unbearable films about war ever made – Come and See by Elem Klimov from 1985 – details the horror of German occupation and the crimes of the Nazi army through the lens of the cinema.

Even today – where drastic depictions of cinematic violence are a rather everyday occurrence – the emotional force, the viciousness and ruthlessness of Come and See remains unmatched.

Adamovich – like the other authors of the book – fought in the resistance against Hitler’s murderous army. He has written the script for the film, based on the reports from Out Of The Fire and his own experiences.

He was driven by the idea of telling the war as it is – without heroic pathos and false hopes. Adamovich was looking for a way to give a voice to those who had experienced the unspeakable.

Until then, ordinary people and their truthful stories were not part of the official Soviet ideology in literature and art. Instead, the hard-won victory over German fascism had to be presented as glorious and brilliant.

The glorious Soviet man was not allowed to be a victim. Human suffering in all its shades had little place in Soviet movies – even though Soviets suffered momentously, more than any other country.

Together with Janka Bryl and Uladzimir Kalesnik, Adamovich transcribed the conversations with contemporary witnesses and assembled these transcripts into a polyphonic collage of suffering and horror, regardless of redundancies and ramifications.

The core idea was that the narratives should be as immediate as they flowed from people’s memory. We saw our task in this. The book’s preface says,

to preserve the unbearable degree of human pain, bewilderment and anger, which are manifested not only in words, but also in voices, eyes and faces in the state of plasma; to preserve all that surrounded the person who spoke to us like the air, the person who now turns to the reader on the pages of this book, to you.

When the original book was published, it caused a shock in Soviet society. Reading this book was hard. Like the movie Come and See, the book is unbearably tough to read, wrote literary critic Lazar Lazarev.

Nobody had ever wrote about the war in this way before, said the Nobel Laureate in Literature Svetlana Alexievich. Yet, Out of the Fire and Ales Adamovich have had a decisive influence on her documentary prose.

This book has no age, writes Valzhyna Mort, one of the most famous contemporary lyricists from Belarus. The book’s effect is total. Once you read this book, you have to live with it forever, Mort says.

Yet, it took half a century for such an utmost important book to be published in German. Strangely, a translation had never been published before – not even in the former East-Germany.

A corresponding translation was actually under discussion at the East-German publishing house Volk und Welt in 1974.

Perhaps it wasn’t published because of the drastic depictions of violence that are laid out in the book. One of the publisher’s reviewers was disturbed, above all by the compositionally monotonous character of the collection of witnesses’ voices and by the subjective perceptions of ordinary people.

Accordingly, it was thought that the book’s authors weren’t analytical enough and didn’t display appropriate didactic gestures. This is a criticism that had actually accompanied the book’s first and original publication.

Despite such criticisms, the book was – and still is – able to develop its powerful impact on readers. However, only by making substantive concessions to the official ideology of the Soviet Union that the original version was able to get published.

After all, the Holocaust which destroyed the rich Jewish culture in Belarus, almost does not appear in Soviet reports. Even sensitive topics such as Nazi collaboration and the crimes of the partisans against their own population are omitted.

Nevertheless, Adamovich’s, Bryl’s and Kalesnik’s Out Of The Fire and its most recent translation as Feuerdörfer is of seminal brilliance. And, its magnitude is illuminated rather exquisitely.

The book continues to be an historical document and will withstand time. It is a key text for our understanding of what war is actually like, and what Hitler-fascism means.

Adamovich’s, Bryl’s and Kalesnik’s Out Of The Fire or Feuerdörfer is a masterpiece at the same level as, for example, Svetlana Alexievich’s War Has Not a Woman’s Face, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Daniil Granin’s and Ales Adamovich’s A Book of the Blockade Book.

Photo: (source: www2.lunapic.com)

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