Gerhard Sawatzky

Gerhard Sawatzky (1901–1944) was a Russian-German writer, journalist, and teacher. Born in southern Ukraine, he studied in Leningrad and subsequently worked first as a teacher and later as a journalist and author in the Volga German Republic. Sawatzky is regarded as an early advocate of an independent Soviet German literature. In 1937, he completed his novel Wir selbst (We Ourselves). He was arrested by the NKVD in 1938 and deported to a labor camp. He died on December 1, 1944, in the Gulag in Solikamsk.