Grossman is not only one of the great war novelists of all time, but also one of the first and most important of witnesses to the Shoah. “Treblinskii ad” [“The Hell of Treblinka”, September 1944], one of the first articles in any language about a Nazi death camp, was used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials. And there may be no more powerful lament for East European Jewry than the chapter of Zhizn' i sud'ba [Life and Fate] that has become known as “the Last Letter” – the letter that Anna Semyonovna, a fictional portrait of Grossman's own mother – writes in the last days of her life and manages to have smuggled out of the Jewish ghetto of a Ukrainian town under Nazi occupation. …
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