I have just finished reading, A Writer At War, Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945. If you are a World War II buff , like me, you will really enjoy this book. This is a riviting book and powerful reading that takes you directly to the Russion front in WWII. Vasily Grossman was a special news correspondent for The Red Star, which was the Red Army newspaper of the time. Grossman witnessed and wrote on every major Eastern Front battle, fighting and writing along with the Red Army. He wrote on the action from the defense of Moscow to the battle of Stalingrad. As a Jew, he fought closely alongside the Red Army only to return to Berdichev, where he would soon discover that his family and mother where killed in the Holocaust. He undertook writing and recording the German atrocities and published “The Hell of Treblinka”, a report that was used at the Nuremberg tribunal.
Editors and translators, Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, have done an excellent job at compiling his many ‘notes’ and translating them into readable form. The book is organized in a time-line fashion spanning ‘ The Shock of Invasion 1941′ to ‘Amid the Ruins of the Nazi World 1945′.
Vasily Grossman ((1905-1964) came to be regarded as a hero of WWII on the strength of his war reporting. His novel, Life and Fate about the siege of Stalingrad, was written in 1960, but was declared a threat to the Soviet government and was confiscated by the KGB. Grossman was told there was no chance of the novel being published for another 200 years. Some 20 years after his death and after the fall of the ‘iron curtain’, the novel was published outside of the Soviet Union to wide acclaim.
This is the preface of a multi-part series of my synopsis of Vasily Grossmans book, A Writer At War, Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945. Stay tuned for varying synopsis of this wonderful book.
