This post, covering Part 3, Chapter 5 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.
While sitting in his cell, Krymov reflects on the nights before the war when he would walk past the Lubyanka, wondering what happened behind those walls.
Thousands of people disappeared for lengthy investigations before the sentencing could be completed. The narrator explains how “many thousands would disappear for ever after their spell in the Lubyanka. The Public Prosecutor’s office would inform their relatives that they had been sentenced to ‘ten years without right of correspondence.’ But no one in the camps ever met anyone who had received this sentence. What it meant was: ‘shot,’” (p. 627). Even if those sentenced had made it to the camps, the odds of their loved ones finding them was miniscule.
