The third stop of my literary tour of Eastern Europe brings me to the home of Vasily Grossman, the great bard of WWII.

Seventy-seven years ago today, a landmark court case on Nazi war crimes began in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar. A Jewish poet in uniform tried to report on it in verse. His struggles challenged the Stalinist doctrine of universalizing the Soviet dead and obfuscating Jewish victimhood.

For the crime of acknowledging Jewish identity, the committee’s members were killed in a Stalinist pogrom