Vasily Grossman

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman, born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman in Berdychiv, Ukraine, hailed from a thoroughly Jewish family background, though his upbringing was largely secular. Despite this, the horrors of World War II, particularly the Holocaust and the antisemitic currents within the Soviet Union, profoundly shaped his identity and gave his work a distinctly Jewish moral core, even when not explicitly religious. He was a keen observer of human suffering and resilience, particularly during the Battle of Stalingrad and the subsequent liberation of concentration camps. His reporting on the Treblinka extermination camp was among the earliest and most detailed accounts.

Grossman's magnum opus, "Life and Fate," a sprawling epic of the Eastern Front, was considered so dangerous by the Soviet authorities that it was "arrested" in manuscript form, with the KGB seizing all copies they could find. A senior Politburo member famously told him it could not be published for another 200 years. Grossman died without seeing his most important work in print.

Yet, thanks to heroic efforts by dissidents like Vladimir Voinovich and Andrei Sakharov, microfilmed copies were smuggled out of the USSR and published in the West, cementing his legacy as one of the 20th century's most significant writers. It's a shame the Soviet state decided to treat a literary masterpiece like a state secret, but then again, what else is new?