One of my favorite kinds of books is fiction based on facts or a real happening. Sasha Vasilyuk, in her debut novel, includes a real happening that led her to discover facts to flesh out her work of fiction. In real life, her grandmother discovered a two-page confession letter following her grandfather’s death in 2007 in Donetsk, Ukraine. The letter to the KGB admitted to his capture at the beginning of World War II and the several years he spent in Germany in forced labor. In the Soviet Union, becoming a prisoner of war was considered a crime against the state. Her grandfather spent several decades hiding what he saw as a shameful secret.
Sasha grew up in Ukraine and Russia and uses her own background to weave a believable story of Yefim Shulman, her grandfather’s counterpart. A young man in 1941, he is determined to defend his large Jewish family and his country from Hitler’s forces. The primary narration of her story alternates between Yefim and his widow Nina with seventy years of history woven into their lives from post-WWII Ukraine to the present day Russian-Ukrainian War. For his entire life, Yefim carries on his assertion that he was never imprisoned until the confession letter is found after his death. Yet the shadow of his secret hovers over the lives of Yefim, Nina, their children and their grandchildren.
The well-researched book carries the hard stories of survival and equally hard stories of where one’s loyalties should lie. Sasha Vasilyuk captures both characters and place, bringing the hard choices they all had to make to life. Her background as a journalist undoubtedly added to her ability to tell the story realistically. Timeliness of the book with the current Russian-Ukranian conflict adds to its importance.