The Second World War, with its global ramifications, was the greatest man-made disaster in history. The statistics of the dead – whether sixty or seventy million – are far beyond our comprehension. The sheer size of the numbers is dangerously numbing, as Vasily Grossman instinctively understood. In his view, the duty of survivors was to try to recognize the millions of ghosts from the mass graves as individuals, not as nameless people in caricatured categories, because that sort of dehumanization was precisely what the perpetrators had sought to achieve.
