"As the Red Army swept into Ukraine in the late summer of 1943, Vasily Grossman was overcome with both exhilaration and foreboding on re-entering his homeland. The novelist-turned-war-correspondent warmed to the “soft breath of Ukraine” on his face again and the evocative sight of tall poplars, white huts and wattle fences in the countryside. But after two years of Nazi occupation, he found his beautiful mother country scarred by “fire and tears” and consumed by “sadness and wrath”.
Vasily Grossman, with his mother and his daughter Katya. His mother was killed by the roaming SS death squads murdering Ukraine’s Jewish population © The Estate of Vasily Grossman
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