Polish Ukranian author Piotr Rawicz wrote two books. On the strength of the first one, Le Sang du ciel (1961; translated as Blood from the Sky, 1964), which was translated into at least twelve other languages, he is regarded by many as a great European writer who has made a major contribution to Holocaust fiction. Throughout his life, most of the writing of this cynical and brilliant man, apart from his journalism, was confined to a private journal in several languages--which has never been edited or published.

Petro Solomonowicz Rawicz was born in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), on 12 July 1919, during a brief and doomed attempt to establish a West Ukraine People's Republic. Rawicz's birthplace had been the capital of East Galicia, the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it then became part of independent Poland. His father, Salomon Rawicz, was a lawyer and active in Jewish communal organizations...