Margolin and his fellow inmates were evacuated eastwards from the camp on Lake Onega when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Some four million people were in Soviet camps when Hitler betrayed Stalin and Nazi Germany invaded its ally. In the next two years some 2.5 million more Soviet citizens were sentenced to the camps. Between 1941 and 1943, chaotic transports and drastic shortages made a camp sentence even more dangerous than before. About half a million deaths were officially registered in the camps in those years; the true figure is likely far higher.
The author, FWIW, while he has written compellingly on 20th-century horrors, thinks Mr. Trump is an incipient fascist.
This is Kamala Harris’ vision for America.
The most fascinating book of this type that I’ve read is “The Long Walk”, by Slavomir Rawicz. Prepare for a long night because you won’t be able to put it down.
If there is one constant throughout human history, it seems to be man’s inhumanity to man. Across all centuries and all forms of government and all cultures.
Every American should read Solzhenitsyn. And Wurmbrand.
“This both fascinating and horrifying.”
Once started, difficult to stop reading.
Curious as to whether he reunited with his wife and son, I found this interesting review.
“Forgotten Witness to the Gulag”
https://forward.com/culture/134265/forgotten-witness-to-the-gulag/
Have yet to learn if he reunited with his family in Israel?
Does anyone know?
This short piece was riveting. The memoir has to be a heart breaker.
Try to find the three volume hearings on “Soviet Labor Camps”, or “Labor Camps in the Soviet Union”, 1973 Testimony of Avram Shifrin”, Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS).
They should be online, esp. at Hein Online, ProQuest, etc.
He was a Soviet Jew whose father was killed by Stalin, then he was forced into a Soviet WW2 death unit known as a “penal battalion” of lightly armed (if at all), made up of Jewish political, religious or even somewhat secular individuals. Fatality rates for penal battalions ran up to 80%, as planned by Stalin and his henchmen.
By changing his name, Shifrin was able to get an education as a lawyer, work on secret KGB contracts inside Soviet “light industries” who turned out military equipment, and then was picked up by the infamous “Black Maria” vans, thrown into Lubianka Prison in Moscow, followed by ten years on imprisonment in Stalin’s slave labor camps along the Potma Railroad system all the way east to Lake Baikal.
Eventually he was brought back for a term of “internal exile” before being expelled from the Soviet Union.
I covered his story for the major Jewish newspaper in DC in the 1970’s and then helped avram edit his fourth congressional testimony on the hidden Soviet military budget which had followed the 3 volumes hearing on Soviet Labor Camps.
He has often been referred to as the Jewish Solzenitsyn. His own story in book form was published in Russian in Israel.
He provided the US government and public with the first updated map of Soviet slave labor camps since those created by the AFL-CIO in the mid-1950’s, as well as the story of what went on in those camps.
Zek’s story, that of Avram, Jack? Herman (Coming Out of/On the Ice), John Noble (the Soviet salt mines of post-WW2) - possibly titled “I Was A Prisoner in Soviet Russia”,
and Solzenitzyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” are great history books/personal stories to have for the truth about Leninism/Stalinism and their human cost.
flr
Alexander Dolgun’s Story: An American in the Gulag
Alexander Dolgun compelled himself to reconstruct his long ordeal at the hands of the Soviet Secret Police. As a 22 year old young American, son of one of the American engineers who took jobs in Russia during the depression, He was stopped by Secret Police, and became prisoner of the MGB for 18 years of hell.
p
WOW! OUTSTANDING post, education. Thanks robowombat. I love reading Solzhenitsyn. I started in middle school in a country far, far from this one called The United States of America.
In my last job at a BIG BOX store the “human resource” person/friend Carrie said to me, “you not an employee or even an “associate” you’re viewed as a ‘unit of labor’”.
Ominous Parallels - The end of Freedom in America. Leonard Peikoff
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ominous+parallels+peikoff&t=osx&ia=web
Audio online for free (I was listening to it a couple of days ago). I can’t find it right now.
Lifelong learning in a Free Republic. Thanks to all posters. Thanks JimRob.
Check out article and comments.
If you choose evasion and propaganda, then the anti-fascists lose out to the fascists, the better evaders and the better propagandists.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
TIMOTHY SNYDER , the author of this redefined historical drivel, wold make Margolin into a Bolshevik. Interesting that he has fallen for the old trope that conservatives are disguised fascists and liberals are disguised communists.This is such a gross over simplification which belies the current fascist social work, the yet unimpeded rioting, arson, shaming and stigmatization of ordinary people on racial grounds by Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA.
SNYDER is not much of a writer. Snyder is an ideologist addicted to his own noise.
Bkmk
