SOVIET LABOR AND WESTERN HORROR
TELL THE WEST. By Jerzy Gliksman. Gresfvam Press. $3.75.
The pain caused by stones in the gall bladder or the kidney
can be the most excruciating known to human beings. But one may
tell the sufferer, he ought to consider himself lucky it's not cancer. It
is in this sense that the Russian concentration camps are milder than
the German. The two basic methods of totalitarian coercion are terror
and privation: the Soviets have had much less to do than the Nazis
with the former. But this is merely to say that they know how to make
privation do the job; the fact that it's usually a different job, a political
one, and that the Russians are not out to exterminate whole populations
as such or practise torture for the fun of it, is not a great advantage to
the prisoner, to whom all that such magnanimity means is that he shall
be executed for political reasons or be worked to death. Concretely, how
much better off were Ehrlich and Alter for being murdered because they
were socialists and not because they were Jews?
Jerzy Gliksman was the half-brother of Victor Alter, the Polish–
Jewish
Bund
leader. He was arrested in Russian-occupied Poland in
October, 1939; after the NKVD failed to obtain from Gliksman a con–
fession that would incriminate his brother and
his
friends, he was re–
leased in the hope that he would lead a Soviet tail to his comrades., He
shook off the NKVD agent by escaping to another city but was rear–
rested in March of the following year while attempting to steal across
the border into Lithuania. Until August, 1941, he was a political
prisoner of the Soviet Union; together with thousands of Russian and
Polish nationals he was detained in cellars and jails, transported by
cattle-car to the transfer camp, Kotlas, and finally shipped to the
"Corrective Labor Camp," UKHTIZHMLAG, in the northeastern, sub–
arctic Republic of
Komi,
where he began serving a five-year sentence
by felling trees in weather as cold as -50° F., and was employed, when
his health was seriously impaired, at various other, though lighter, cor–
rective tasks, until a Soviet decree freed the Poles two months after
Hitler's invasion of Russia.
This is one of the few first-hand accounts we have of life in Soviet
prisons and slave-labor camps. Gliksman makes no observations on
Russian politics ; his book is concerned merely with reliving an in–
jurious experience-it does so often in extremely painful detail-that
we may know what it was like for him and what it is like to the present
day for millions of other prisoners. But
Tell the West,
as do all reports
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