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.
U.S.S.R. labor camps : hearings before the subcommittee to investigate the administration of the Internal Security Act and other internal security laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress.