Ehrenburg, Ilya Gregoryevich.

Ehrenburg, Ilya, born on 25-04-1897 Kiev, Ukraine, to a Lithuasian-Jewish family, his father was an engineer. Ehrenburg’s family was not religiously affilated, he came into contact with the  regligious practisces of Juaism only through his maternal grandfather. Inspired by his older high school comrade, the Soviet Russian economist, Nikolai Ivanovitsj Bukharin, Ehrenburg was drawn as a teenager to the Bolshevik underground. Arrested in 1908, Ehrenburg spent five months in a tsarist jail before being released and permitted to travel to France.

Bukharin was politically reinstated by Stalin in 1934 and was made editor-in-chief of Izvestia. Here he regularly talked about the danger of fascist regimes in Europe. He was arrested after a plenum of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party on charges of conspiracy against the state. Alexei Rykov and Bukharin on their way to their trial in 1938. He appeared in court in March 1938, as part of the Trial of the Twenty-One during Stalin‘s Great Purges. Bukharin was executed by the NKVD on March 15, 1938. Ironically, the news of his death was overshadowed by the Anschluss. The Anschluss  ’joining’ or ‘connection’), also known as the Anschluß Österreichs.  Annexation of Austria), was the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich on 12-03-1938.

Ehrenburg never joined any religious denomination.  He learned no Yidddish, although he aedited the Black Book, which was written in Yiddish. He considered himself Russian and later a Soviet citizen, but left all his papers to Israel’s Yad Vashem. He took strong public positions against antisemitism. He wrote in Russian even during his many years abroad. When Ehrenburg was four years old the family moved to Moscow, where his father had been hired as director of a brewery.

Ilya took part in revolutionary Bolshevik organizations. He was arrested in 1908 and in December of the same year he emigrated to Paris. From 1921 to 1924, Ehrenburg lived in Berlin and contributed to the Soviet press. During the National Revolutionary War of 1936–39 in Spain, Spanish Civil War, where he met the correspondent Ernst Hemingway

   Ehrenburg was a war correspondent for Izvestiia. He criticized capitalism and bourgeois morality and 1940 he began work on the novel The Fall of Paris, which deals with the political, moral, and historical reasons for the defeat of France by the German forces in World War II. With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Ehrenburg became widely known for his publicist writing. He exposed the policies and moral philosophy of fascism. Appealing to the conscience of nations he strengthened people’s belief in victory over fascism and their sacred feeling of hatred toward the enemy. Ehrenburg was active in war journalism throughout WWII. As a consequence, he is one of many Soviet writers, who have been by some accused of “lending their literary talents to the hate campaign” against Germans during World War II. His article “Kill” published in 1942 — when German troops were deeply within Soviet territory — became a widely publicized example of this campaign, along with the poem “Kill him!” Ehrenburg’s travel writing also had great resonance, as did to an arguably greater extent his autobiography People, Years, Life, which may be his best known and most discussed work. The Black Book, edited by him and Vassily Grossman, has special historical significance; detailing the genocide on Soviet citizens of Jewish ancestry, (see Anne Frank and (see Simon Wiesenthal) and (Adolf Eichmann)  it is the first great documentary work on the Holocaust. His novel ‘The Thaw’ (1954) was the first in Russia to start to tell the truth about the Josef Stalin era.

  Ehrenburg died on 31-08-1967, at the age of 76, of prostate and bladder cancer, and was interred in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Close by the graves of Nikita Krushchev, General Ivan Chernakhosky, Defender of Moscow, Lev Dovator, Russian Foreigh Minister 1942. Agreement with the Germans in 1939, Viacheslav Molotov, the Red Army’s 3^rd Tank Army commander Generaloberst Pavel Semjonovich Rybalko, Air Marshal, Ivan Mykytovych Kozhedub and Commanding General of the 1^st Belorussian’s 3^rd Shock Army, Vasily Kuznetsov.

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