From Stalingrad to Pillau: A Red Army Artillery Officer Remembers the Great Patriotic War

Strange sounds resembling the remote rumble of distant thunder were audible. Everybody understood: it was the echo of the battle for Stalingrad. . . . A heavy rain began falling.

Stalingrad’s outskirts provided Isaak Kobylyanskiy, a 19-year-old ethnic Jew from Ukraine, with his first exposure to combat and initiated his long odyssey in the Great Patriotic War against Germany. It would be more than three years before he was finally reunited with his family and his sweetheart, Vera, the school...