November 1942

Our book is a microhistory of a single month of World War II - arguably the most important, fateful month not only of the war, but of 20th-century world history - day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. It reconstructs the events from the perspective of the smallest component of history, the individual participant. Among them are soldiers: a Soviet infantryman fighting at Stalingrad, an American pilot serving at Guadalcanal, an Italian truck driver from the North African desert, a partisan from the Belarusian forests; but there are also civilians: a twelve-year-old refugee girl from Shanghai, a housewife from Long Island, a university student from Paris, a shipwrecked Chinese sailor, a Sonderkommando from Treblinka, a Korean sex slave from a camp brothel set up in Mandalay. Mostly unknown people from the lower ranks of the ranks, although there are some familiar names among them such as Sophie Scholl, Ernst Jünger, Albert Camus, Vasily Grossman. Not from a historical distance, not from the heights of our current knowledge, but from their perspective, we can experience those days when the future of the entire world was at stake. "What do these words mean?" Mansur Abdulin walks around among his comrades, asking them. "Gott mit uns?" It says this on the belt buckle of every German soldier. Those belts seem very durable, made of real leather. He has often stopped in front of a fallen German and thought about taking the belt off for his own use. But first he wants to know what these words mean. They can also bring bad luck. He senses a pattern: a soldier who, for example, takes a dead German's watch usually dies soon himself, sometimes within hours. One of his friends picked up a German pistol and accidentally shot himself in the hand with it - which is strictly speaking self-mutilation, and he can be executed on the spot for it. He also believes he has a sixth sense that he can sense who will fall next: they usually become excessively afraid, lose their composure, or retreat, or in a subtle but transparent way "They're trying to humanize themselves. There are signs of it."