Life and Fate Read Along, Part 3 Chapter 32

This post, covering Part 3, Chapter 32 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.

Surrounded by the Soviet encirclement, today’s chapter shows the slow, subtle changes Paulus’ forces have been undergoing.

Although Paulus and other officers have tried to maintain a sense of normalcy and routine, some of those tiny details have started to break down. The narrator describes how “You could see the changes in the colour of the coffee, in the lines of communication stretching out to new sectors of the front, in new instructions regarding the expenditure of ammunition, in the cruel, now daily spectacle of burning cargo-planes that had been shot down as they tried to break the blockade,” (p. 731).