Anna Semyonovna’s Last Letter (80) from Life and Fate (1958) by Vassily Grossman

• Operation Barbarossa reaches the small town in which Viktor's mother lives in the Ukraine on July 7^th 1941.
• Anna Semyonovna's 1^st reaction on learning that she is about to die: 
• "I'd just accepted that the same would happen to me as to everyone else. To begin with I felt utter horror. I realized that I'd never see you again. I wanted desperately to look at you once more. I wanted to kiss your forehead and your eyes. Then I understood how fortunate I was that you were safe."
• The Anti-Semitism of her neighbors can now be expressed openly:  
• "And one thing-- ever since the time of the Tsars I've associated anti-Semitism with the jingoism of people from the Union of Michael the Archangel. But now I've seen that the people who shout most loudly about delivering Russia from the Jews are the very ones who cringe like lackeys before the Germans, ready to betray their country for thirty pieces of German silver.... And then there are people whose souls have just withered, people who are ready to go along with anything evil-- anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever's in power."
• Anti-Semitism is not restricted to the far right; no, people fall over themselves to collaborate with the Germans so they can get in on the robbery.  The woman next door is already throwing her out and moving into her room. 'You're outside the law!' She is dismissed from  the surgery where she has worked for years. 
•  The Einsatzgruppen's decree that all Jews must move to the Old Town (and rumors from the village of Chudnov).
  
• Anna must leave the home she has lived in her whole life.
• To her surprise,  Schukin, 'a gloomy and-- so I had always thought­-  rather callous man', promises to come to the fence and give her what he can, and Anna starts to feel human again.
• The surreal procession to the Ghetto: the people are wearing winter clothes on a hot summer day.
• In the ghetto, Anna is forced to live in  a cattlepen, but she feels relief to be free from the gaze of her village neighbors. She settles in two rooms with Dr. Sperling and his kind family,  hard times brings out terrible people too: Epstein and the ghetto police.
• Anna muses about the irony of her situation. She had never thought of herself as a Jew but instead as a Russian. The assimilated Jew had forgotten that she was a Jew. Now she must die for being a Jew. But now, she feels a maternal tenderness towards the Jewish people. She now no longer sees people as an eye doctor would:
  
• "Now I can no longer look at people's eyes like that; what I see now is the reflection of the soul. A good soul, Vityenka! A sad, good-natured soul, defeated by violence, but at the same time triumphant over violence. A strong soul, Vitya!" (87) 
• Eventually, Anna decides she can no longer stay with  the Sperlings who insist that they will survive this awful pogrom, like they have survived so many before. She prefers to be with  people who have lost hope. She wonders at the capacity for denial that many of the people display. Even though hope is  completely irrational,
• "People carry on, Vitya, as though their whole life lies ahead of them. It's impossible to say whether that's wise or foolish­- it's just the way people are." ...“if there’s a downpour, most people try to hide, but they have their own particular ways of sheltering from the rain…” (87)
• Anna carries on with her normal existence: 'visiting my patients, giving lessons, darning my clothes, doing my washing, preparing for winter, sewing a lining into my winter coat'. . 'nowhere is there so much hope as in the ghetto'
• Despite the doomed situation she and the others are in, the Jews maintain their essential humanity. They go about their lives as normally as they can. The children do their homework. It is “the life-instinct itself, blindly rebelling against the terrible fact that we must perish without a trace…” (89)
• At night, though, her fears break out and she cries out to Viktor for comfort. She dreams of her own mother. She even dreams of Sasha Shaposhnikov, the boy at House 9-1. A Russian soldier slips into the ghetto and Anna treats him. She hopes to escape.
• But the young men have been taken away to ‘dig for potatoes’. Everyone knows what that means: they are digging a mass grave at Romanovka. The imminence of death terrifies all, yet the last day goes on as any other.
• Anna thinks about the children whose lives will be lost and of the culture, the civilization that is being wiped out before finishing her letter and handing it to her friend through the hole in the ghetto wall.