From the Front Line: Stalingrad–Treblinka–Berlin, 1941–45

Synopsis

From the Front Line: Stalingrad–Treblinka–Berlin, 1941–45 gathers Vasily Grossman’s most important wartime journalism, offering an extraordinary firsthand account of the Eastern Front from the German invasion of the Soviet Union through the fall of Berlin.

Grossman began working as a war correspondent for the Soviet newspaper Red Star shortly after Operation Barbarossa began in June 1941. Over the next four years, he reported from some of the most significant and brutal battles of the war, including Stalingrad, the Soviet advances through Ukraine and Poland, and the final battle for Berlin. His reports brought him into contact with soldiers, commanders, pilots, civilians, prisoners, and survivors, allowing him to record both the vast movements of armies and the individual experiences hidden within them.

The collection also includes Grossman’s landmark account of the Treblinka extermination camp, one of the earliest detailed testimonies to reach the public about the Nazi death camps. Alongside this are reports on combat, military life, devastated landscapes, liberation, and the human cost of the Soviet advance.

This new collection brings together forty-nine articles, including previously unpublished or newly restored versions that had been altered by Soviet censorship. Read alongside Grossman’s novels Stalingrad and Life and Fate, these dispatches reveal the development of a writer whose firsthand experience of war would become central to his understanding of violence, political power, suffering, and individual moral responsibility.

About the Author

Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) was a Russian novelist, journalist, and war correspondent. He worked for the Red Army newspaper Red Star throughout the Second World War, covering nearly all of the major battles on the Eastern Front, from the defense of Moscow to Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin. He was among the first journalists to report on the Treblinka extermination camp.

Grossman later transformed his wartime experiences into some of the most significant Russian literature of the twentieth century, including Stalingrad and Life and Fate.

Robert Chandler is a translator of Russian literature whose work includes Grossman’s Stalingrad, Life and Fate, Everything Flows, The Road, and An Armenian Sketchbook. Elizabeth Chandler has co-translated several of Grossman’s works with him.

Julia Volohova is an independent scholar who has researched Grossman’s life and work extensively, including previously unstudied material from his family archives.

Publisher

New York Review Books Classics

Publication Date

June 16, 2026

Format

Paperback

Pages

512

Subjects

World War II; Eastern Front; War Reporting; Military History; Soviet Union; Stalingrad; Treblinka; Berlin; Holocaust; Russian Literature; Journalism; Personal Narratives; History; Nonfiction

ISBN

9798896230083