News at Eleven: Todos Osmachka (1895--1962) is an author with

an unusual fate. He had to go through NKVD torture chambers, the bitterness of emigration, and the horrible loneliness of the artist. His Lviv period is particularly interesting for historians and literary critics.

The poet arrived in Lviv in the spring of 1942. Ironically, it was the Germans that saved him from Stalin's butchers. Before Hitler's assault on the Soviet Union, Osmachka was an inmate at the Kyrylivsky mental hospital in Kyiv. When the German troops neared the Ukrainian capital, the staff ran away, so the freed poet set out on foot to his home village of Kutsivka, Cherkasy oblast.

from The Day Weekly Digest: The poet and the martyr

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