![]() Ikonnikov’s hands and face were smeared with clay. Russian soldiers and inmates at Treblinka. Ikonnikov is a former Tolstoyan Gardi is an Italian priest (and a “Vernichtungslager” is a German extermination camp): The characters: Mikhail Sidorovich Mostovskoy is an Old Bolshevik, often in fierce argument with Chernetsov, a former Menshevik. Here’s an moving excerpt, from a conversation in a German concentration camp. ![]() The author had witnessed the Battle of Stalingrad as a war correspondent, and provided the first eyewitness accounts of an extermination camp, from Treblinka. It made a five-hour delay at the Denver Airport bearable, certainly by comparison with the circumstances writer and journalist Grossman describes. As Book Haven readers know, I’ve been ploughing through the 880-page epic tale of World War II, which eloquently, powerfully, unforgettably describes the dark forces that shaped the 20th century (more here and here). ![]() ![]() Vasily Grossman‘s Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics) was deemed so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only was the manuscript confiscated – the typewriter ribbons used to type it were taken as well. ![]() War correspondent Vasily Grossman with the Red Army in Germany. ![]()
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