Author: Vasily Grossman

Grossman reported the Soviet war from the front for four years, spent the whole siege at Stalingrad, and wrote the first account by any journalist of an extermination camp after walking into Treblinka in 1944. His mother was killed with the Jews of Berdychiv in 1941 while he was away, and he never forgave himself for leaving her there. Life and Fate sets Stalingrad beside the Gulag and the Holocaust and says plainly that the two dictatorships resembled one another, which is why the KGB seized the manuscript, the typewriter ribbons and even the carbon paper in 1961. Suslov told him it could not be printed for two hundred years. A microfilmed copy survived, reached the West after his death, and the novel appeared in 1980, sixteen years after stomach cancer killed him.