A novel about the Holocaust? No, rather about the period preceding the Holocaust. Which is just as well. It's been said that a novel about Auschwitz is, of itself, a contradiction in terms. A phenomenon that transcends and negates all possibility of communication; you can't use it to make literature.

Heavy Sand, nonetheless, does deal with the Holocaust. More specifically, the author, Anatoli Rybakov, shows us an unknown or not well enough known, side of it. Of all the documents, studies and testimonies published on the subject of the concentration camp experience, few are devoted to the fate of the Jews in the Ukraine or White Russia. Do people know that all or most of them were never even deported to the death factories? They were massacred on the spot by the Einsatzkommando. Rybakov's book ends with that event.

At the beginning of his story, children are playing...