Life and Fate Read Along, Part 2 Chapter 39

This post, covering Part 2, Chapter 39 is part of The Slavic Literature Pod’s chapter a day read along of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Learn more about our project here.

Today we return to Mostovskoy in the bath-house. Osipov received a change of job to work there in order to communicate with Mostovskoy about their burgeoning underground organization.

It turns out that Yershov is no longer part of their group. Osipov explains that “Nothing would make him submit to the centre. He’s a doubtful individual, an alien element… The first rule in any underground work is iron discipline - and there were two different centres, one of them outside the Party,” (p. 530). To put the icing on the cake, a Czech communist who worked in the office was the one who moved Yershov’s card into a pile destined for Buchenwald.