The stormy Revolutionary period came as a major blow to the Dolmatovskys, and they decided to send their children to live with relatives in Rostov-on-Don.

On one occasion,he was able to show his poems to the celebrated poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, but the latter criticized them harshly, suggesting that Yevgeniy write on subjects that were truly dear to him.

The family remained ignorant of his fate until 16 years later, after Joseph Stalin's death, when they were notified of Aron Dolmatovsky's posthumous rehabilitation.

Despite being the son of an "enemy of the people", Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky was included in a group of celebrated Soviet writers who were awarded the Order of the Badge of Honour in January 1939.

Like thousands of other Soviet prisoners of war, he was locked up in a makeshift concentration camp that had been set up in a clay pit at a brick factory.

The time spent by Dolmatovsky in captivity, together with his two escapes, drew the attention of the NKVD (the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs).

Yevgeniy underwent a lengthy screening process, and only in January 1942 was he permitted to return to frontline duty, this time in the rank of a battalion commissar.

Dolmatovsky's most celebrated and "gut-wrenching work" is the long poem "Missing in Action" (the first part of the One Fate trilogy, 1942-1946), which reflected his own wartime experiences.

In February 1943, while he was on the Stalingrad Front, Dolmatovsky learned that Lieutenant-General Alexander Edler von Daniels was one of the German commanders who had been taken prisoner.

Back in early fall 1941, von Daniels had delivered propaganda speeches to the POWs held in the "Uman Pit", who were humiliatingly forced to listen to him while seated at school desks in the pouring rain.

Dolmatovsky convinced Konstantin Rokossovky, commander of the Don Front, to let him meet the captive general and remind him of the events that had transpired two years previously.

In 1944, against the backdrop of tightening official control over reporting on the events of the war, Dolmatovsky was harshly criticized for alleged "distortions" in his depiction of the Red Army retreat in 1941 – which had, indeed, been utterly chaotic and uncontrollable on many occasions.

Drawing on his own experiences, Dolmatovsky wrote the book Zelyonaya Brama (1979-1989), which contained stories and sketches of combat, captivity, and escape.