A World Apart
Imprisonment in a Soviet Labour Camp During World War II
A Polish writer's account of the gulag, written in 1951, years before Solzhenitsyn and largely ignored at the time.
Herling was arrested by the NKVD in 1940 and spent two years in a camp near Arkhangelsk. He wrote this in 1951, with a preface by Bertrand Russell, years before Solzhenitsyn, and largely ignored because the Western left was not ready to hear it. Like Levi, he is less interested in the horrors than in what the horrors did to people’s characters.
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Anne Applebaum
Like Levi, he is interested in how different people reacted to the conditions of the camps. How did people fit into this new moral order? Did their good qualities survive? Did they become evil like the system? Did they keep their humanity or not? He doesn’t answer yes or no, but shows how people wrestled with these dilemmas. This is a memoir, but it’s also a book about human morality in an extreme situation.
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