Julius Margolin's Memoir of the Gulag

 

I had planned to travel to the Soviet Union long before the start of World War II.
 
At the time, I was living in Łódź, Poland, and interest in the Soviet Union was considerable in that country. Indeed, interest in the communist country was different in Paris and New York from that in Poland, where people remembered 150 years of tsarist occupation and the war of 1920; moreover, the two countries had a common border and Russia had always been both a real threat and a nearby temptation. The Communist Party was illegal in Poland. There were no grounds for it in an agrarian, Catholic country with weakly developed industry and a negligible proletariat.
 
But about ten to fifteen percent of Jewish youth were under the sway of communism. God knows what communism meant to the miserable dreamers of the Polish ghetto. In the 1930s, the Pamphlets of Karl Radek and Historical Materialism of Bukharin were sold from carts on the streets of Łódź. On the day of Lenin’s death in January, the anniversary of the three “Ls,” (the three communist leaders, Lenin, Liebknecht, and Luxemburg) a red flag appeared on the telegraph wires, and Jewish youth broke the glass windows in Jewish-owned shops on Piotrkowska Street. The radical intelligentsia read aloud Broniewski’s poems about “the furnaces of Magnitogorsk.” In Warsaw theaters, Kirsanov’s Granada was recited to loud applause.
 
Tourists traveled the routes of the Soviet travel bureau Intourist to become familiar with the great country of the Revolution. Many returned after a week’s stay in Moscow with a box of Soviet chocolate and pleasant memories. A two-week tour enabled one to visit Ukraine. The resorts of the Caucasus and Central Asia were open to those who could afford a three-to four-week tour. Thus, André Gide visited Gori, Stalin’s birthplace, and Sieburg, a German journalist who traveled frequently to the Soviet Union and published his impressions from there, visited the Red Arctic. Everyone who could write conveyed his own impressions about the Soviet Union.
 
In the years of my Soviet imprisonment, I recalled that literature. It included some well-crafted reportage, full of subtle observations, wit, and brilliance. As a whole, however, all this literature was childish prattle. Neither the skeptics nor the enthusiasts had any understanding of the Soviet Union; they did not have the right to write on a subject about which they knew so little. Now the absurd and tragic disparity between this “tourist” literature and Soviet reality is evident to hundreds of thousands of people like me who wound up deep in the Soviet hinterland during the war years.
 
In addition to institutionalized tourist visits, during the years of Polish independence, there was another sort of travel about which the newspapers were silent. At all times, illegal renegades were crossing the border, people who did not want to remain in capitalist Poland and sought the promised land, “the homeland of all workers,” in search of justice and freedom. We do not know the fate of these people. Why didn’t we hear from any of them? They were not famous writers or delegates from America. When they disappeared like a stone in water, no one took an interest in them. They were insignificant people, anonymous, sawdust, attracted to the lodestone of a dream about a better world. It would have been, however, most worthwhile to question them. Their truthful and nonliterary report would have said much more than volumes of official propaganda. Many of them are living in the Soviet Union, and it is a shame that they are unable to tell us about themselves.
 
In the city of Biała-Podlaska, a Jew had a stall where he sold soda water. His children became rebels: they did not pray to God and did not want to hear about Polish kindness or distant Palestine. When the younger son grew up and became convinced that there was little hope of a revolution in Biała-Podlaska, he arranged with the peasants on the border to take him to the Soviet side. That was in 1931. I met him eleven years later in a Soviet camp, in the great and populous country of the zek [Russian abbreviation z/k for the word “convict,” zakliuchennyi], and I heard his story, which was similar to thousands of others.
 
The country of the zek does not appear on a Soviet map nor is it in any atlas. It is the sole country in the world where there are no disputes about the Soviet Union, no delusions, and no illusions.
 
Melman, the owner of his own engineering firm, lived in the city of Lublin. If his relatives are still alive, here is a report on one who disappeared without a trace. Engineer Melman was an independent and stubborn person. He could not stand the Polish regime, and he crossed the border with a group of “dissatisfied” people. They were sent directly from the border post to prison and from there to a labor camp, where I met him. At that time, after several years of incarceration, he was an unusually taciturn person, broad-shouldered, with a darkened face and gloomy mien. I think by that time he no longer had any convictions. His goal was not to die in a camp, but he did not succeed. He died of an intestinal obstruction in the spring of 1944 in the Kruglitsa corrective labor camp in the Arkhangelsk region. Someone gave him two extra meal tickets and his body, which was unaccustomed to normal food, did not hold up.
 
The year 1937 was fatal for “illegal” tourists. That was the year of the great purge in the Soviet Union. Among the millions dispatched to camps were those who had arrived from abroad to reside in the Soviet Union. It made no difference whether they had arrived legally or illegally.
 
I remember a young nurse in a camp infirmary.
 
“Why were you arrested, nurse?” “My papa came from Latvia.” “How old were you when you arrived?” “Eight.” This is not a conversation of two crazy people. In the Soviet Union, everyone understood this exchange without explanations.
 
I did not arrive in Russia via Intourist and did not cross the Polish border in the dark of night; I was a tourist of a third, special sort. I did not need to travel to Russia—it came to me. The route was a special one that we did not hear about from Intourist. I did not observe Russia from the window of the Metropol Hotel or from the window of a restaurant car on a train. I saw it through the barred window of a prison car, from inside the barbed wire of camps, and I covered hundreds of kilometers on foot when the cursing guards goaded the crowd of prisoners in stages through the forests and the impoverished kolkhozes (Soviet collective farms) of the north; I crossed the Urals twice—in a cattle car and on the third bunk of a rough train car, where the presence of foreign correspondents is not permitted; I lived in the Siberian backwoods, like everyone else went to work, and carried in my pocket the document of which Mayakovsky was so proud: a Soviet passport good for five years. [Margolin was in error: The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote about a Soviet passport for travel abroad, to which ordinary Soviet citizens were not entitled. Margolin, who was not a citizen of the USSR, had only a residence permit.] I do not have this document any longer, which is why I am able to write things about the Soviet Union that our wise men did not dream of and about which people with Soviet passports do not write.

 
People who sympathize with the Soviet system assume that my itinerary was infelicitously chosen and diverted me from famous Soviet routes. I was not in the battle for Stalingrad; I did not take Berlin. Had I been there, perhaps I would have written differently? Perhaps. I did not choose my route; the Soviet regime decreed it.
 
The world knows everything about Stalingrad but nothing about the camps. Where is the truth of Russia, at the Victory Parade on Red Square or in the country of the zek, which does not exist in the atlas? Evidently, we must take these things together in their entirety and interconnection. I have no illusions; I saw underground Russia. I saw it. Let those who pin their hopes on the country of the Soviets take this “material,” too, into consideration and harmonize it with their conscience as best they can.
 
Excerpt from Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back by Julius Margolin. Oxford University Press. 2020.
 
Doing Time in the Dark Underbelly of Soviet Russia. By Juliius Margolin. LitHub, October 13, 2020.

We speak of memory, but memory is empty without witness. It is too much to expect that all who suffer speak. Yet without witness, memory devolves into propaganda that serves the moment. Julius Margolin asks whether the real Russia is the one that celebrates victory over Nazi Germany on Red Square, or the one that exists in the uncharted universe of concentration camps that he calls “the land of the zek.” He wrote in 1946 and 1947, right after five years of Soviet penal servitude; the question is still pertinent in the Russia of the 21st century. Margolin was himself a “zek,” a convict, who survived incarceration in the largest concentration camp system during its most murderous period.
 
We call the Soviet camps the Gulag, after the title of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s much later book, published in 1973. Had Margolin’s book been published when he wrote it, “zek” and “land of the zek” would be the terms we use now. This first complete collection of Margolin’s texts about the camps, published as a whole in English translation, arrives at a time when we know a great deal about them. When documents became available after the end of the USSR in 1991, historians sought to balance the experiences of the prisoners with those of the guards, the camp directors, the politburo, Stalin himself. We know certain things that Margolin did not: the locations of most of the camps, the numbers of registered prisoners and deaths, the names of those who persecuted them. Yet without the voices of the witnesses, even such knowledge is not enough. If memory is challenged by witness, history is enriched by it.
 
Only a very few memoirs of concentration camps, and only a scarce handful of memoirs of the Gulag, give a sense of what it was like on the inside. Margolin gives a reason: to become a zek was to lose the points of reference that would make the experience intelligible to others: “No one retains his original form. Observation is difficult because the observer himself is deformed. He, too, is abnormal.” In this sense the title of this book is perfectly chosen. Margolin recounts the five years between his deportation from Soviet-occupied Poland in 1940 and his return to postwar Poland in 1946 and then his subsequent departure for Palestine via France. It is a mark of his honesty that he records his own decline; it is a mark of his recovery that he was able to write this book. This literary and philosophical memoir is not simply an unmatched historical record; it is also a deep moral judgement. Tens of millions of people passed through the Gulag; only a few were able to write searching and reliable books about it. This one is perhaps the best.
 
Margolin was a philosopher, which made him a special witness. Born the son of a doctor in the predominantly Jewish town of Pinsk in what was then the western Russian Empire, he studied for a while in revolutionary Russia and then completed a doctorate in philosophy in Berlin. He called himself a Polish Jew and spent most of the 1930s in Poland, mainly in Łódź. In 1936 he and his family moved from Poland to Palestine. He was in Poland settling some necessary business when Germany invaded on 1 September 1939. Like about a quarter million Jews in western Poland, he fled eastward before the Germans. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on 17 September. Like many of those Jews, Margolin tried to find a way out. When he failed, he returned to his parents in Pinsk, where he lived through the annexation of eastern Poland and the imposition of the Soviet system.
 
Margolin defines himself as a European and as a “man of the West.” He was forty years old when he entered his first concentration camp, old enough to have seen something of the world and to start a family, but young enough to react with flexibility. He had a strong sense of decency and normality: human rights and truth were basic concepts. He had the vocabulary and concepts of a philosopher with a strong interest in literature: he never lacked for words or concepts in an environment that beggared description. He was a native speaker of Russian, the language of the camps, but also a native speaker of Polish and Yiddish, the languages of the prisoners with whom he was sentenced.
 
As Margolin saw matters from Łódź or Pinsk in late 1939 and early 1940, the Nazis and the Soviets had together destroyed Europe. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939,and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland that followed, was the end of the life he thought he was leading. Poland, from which he had emigrated but for which he had sympathy, was destroyed by its powerful neighbors. In Pinsk Margolin watched as local resources, grain and meat, were directed by Soviet power to the Nazi ally, even as Germany invaded western Europe. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union declared that the Polish state did not exist; this created a basic problem of access to law and protection for tens of millions of people who were subject not to a conventional occupation but to annexation and colonization. In Margolin’s case, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor in a camp for having the wrong papers.
 
His choices were constrained by the joint action of Nazi and Soviet power. Jews could flee Germans, but would find themselves in territory that would become Soviet. Margolin is a keen observer of what happened in eastern Poland under Soviet rule: the deportation of elites, the subjugation of the economy, the closing of all independent organizations. Many Jews wanted to go back: “as late as spring 1940, Jews preferred the ghetto to the Soviet equality of rights.” Many Jews did in fact return. Those like Margolin who stayed were expected to take Soviet citizenship. Jews who did not were deported to special settlements in Soviet Kazakhstan and Siberia in June 1940. A few weeks after that, Margolin was sent to a camp in the Russian far north to fell trees.
 
During Margolin’s first year as a zek, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies. His forced labor served an economy that supplied the Wehrmacht. We might be tempted to think of this as ironic; for Margolin it was simply the end of his world: “Both sides were inhuman reflections of everything we held dear and sacred.” There was nothing surprising, for him, in “Russia’s alliance with Nazi Germany.” A Jew in Soviet confinement, he had to endure pro-Nazi propaganda: “The rare Soviet newspapers that landed in the camp were full of pro-German publicity.” The Soviet press was reprinting the speeches of Nazi dignitaries. “In line with Hitler’s successes,” Margolin recalls, “antisemitism increased in the camp.” Although he was a Polish Jew, and well aware of Polish antisemitism, no one called him a kike until he was in a Soviet camp.
 
Margolin knew Germany well but never saw a Nazi camp; he left the country in 1929, four years before Hitler came to power. The comparisons were, however, unavoidable. A young German Jew who feared Nazi terror found his nightmares realized in a Soviet camp. Jews who had been in Dachau said that Soviet servitude was worse. Margolin also noticed that young fascists with whom he was imprisoned admired the camp structure. They agreed with its basic organizing principle: the strong should survive, the weak perish.
 
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.
 
Margolin survived these conditions, observed them, chronicled them, and analyzed them with unparalleled clarity and insight. In extraordinary descriptions, we learn about what he called “the fatal year 1942” when around him “zeks were falling like grass.” He and his fellow prisoners talked about which kinds of grass and which kinds of bark could be eaten. With great precision and without pathos he describes, for example, digging in a canal downstream from an outhouse looking for edible material left over from swill for pigs.
 
Margolin’s great subject was dehumanization: the reduction of zeks in their own minds to hungry beasts, and in the minds of their bosses to laboring machines. Everyone was hungry all the time. Food was rationed so that the more productive got more than the less: “The means of coercion was hunger.” A prisoner can be brought “to a bestial condition where the moment of satiety becomes the culminating point of every day, the sole stimulus of his actions.”

 
To be treated only as an instrument of labor destroyed a sense of self-worth. “Only a free person,” Margolin wrote, “knows the joy of free labor, and for him this labor is meaningful because it serves a goal that he chooses and in which he believes.” It is physically difficult to fell trees all day in a north Russian forest, as Margolin did in his first labor assignment. Yet he notices the spiritual costs as well: “The surest way to make a person ludicrous and contemptible is to force him systematically to do work that he is incapable of doing, in the company of people who are superior to him in strength and skill.” People are reduced to the quantity of labor they perform: “I myself was not worth anything. My right to life was measured by the percentage of the work norms that I fulfilled.”
 
The sheer pointlessness was an element of the suffering. Margolin labored poorly, punished for actions that he could not regard as a crime, sentenced by a state of which he was not a citizen, serving a regime he abhorred. After the war, Margolin read Jean-Paul Sartre and laughed at Sartre’s idea that alienation was something experienced by bourgeois French people. He saw Sartre’s complaint about the absence of absolute meaning in existence as a temptation to seek it in politics, in a system such as communism. As a prediction of Sartre’s politics, this was correct. Margolin actually experienced something very much like a pure alienation and wrote about it with a skill that should have been humbling to those who wrote about what they did not know.
 
Margolin is a chronicler not only of the cruelty and suffering of others but also of the disappearance of the self. In his prose the physical and institutional structure of the camp figures as a threat not just to life but to any sense of what living might mean. Throughout the book, for example, he returns to his constant difficulty in keeping clothed. These passages concern the extreme cold—and basic dignity: “The moment arrives when we no longer have anything of our own. The state dresses and undresses us as it pleases.” Poland is destroyed and Palestine is far away; he has no contact with the people who mattered to him before his sentence; “family ties are liquidated.” It pains him that his wife and son in Palestine do not know what has happened to him. The continuity of life itself is broken, the accumulation of moments, days, and memories that is the oxygen of our consciousness. Prisoners “gradually forgot about our past,” as the present became a matter of mechanical repetition and animal survival.
 
Margolin survived physically, thanks to his languages, his friendships with camp doctors, his canniness, and a good deal of luck. He almost died several times, and his gifts as a writer are perhaps most apparent in his recollections of those moments. Yet perhaps the central experience was not malady but dehumanization. He is saddest about the day when he first robbed from a fellow prisoner, the day when he first struck another man in the face. Even as Margolin gave way physically and spiritually to the system, he never lost his sense of human value. In circumstances where such behavior was understandable and even necessary for survival, he still remembers it as wrong, and as damaging to himself. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski said that when we choose the lesser evil we must remember that it is evil. This is a challenge in daily life; that Margolin could retain this level of ethical reflection in the camp is miraculous.

Margolin never lost his capacity to see his fellow zeks as human. He takes care to describe the particular conditions of his fellow Jews, who were the majority of his campmates at the beginning. He explains that Poles, with whom he shared a language and a country, were the group closest to Jews in the camp. Margolin befriends Ukrainians, with whom, as he recalls, Jews had an uneasy history. Ukrainians were sent to the Gulag in disproportionate numbers before, during, and after the war; in Margolin’s book they have a voice.
 
Margolin knew that he was an unusual witness. Concluding his book in 1947, at a time when the world did not know about the Gulag and did not want to learn, he writes, rather formally, that on “the basis of my five-year experience, I affirm that the Soviet government, utilizing specific territories and political conditions in its country, has created a subterranean hell, a kingdom of slaves behind barbed wire, inaccessible to world public opinion.” Margolin correctly anticipated that the very moral emptiness that he experienced would become an argument of the defenders of the Soviet regime. What he opposed was the total abandonment of ethics, the open nihilism and its attendant sadism: “Might is right; everyone lies; everyone is a scoundrel; fools must be taught a lesson.”
 
The defense of the Soviet system, before the war, during the war, after the war, and even today, was that the abandonment of humanity served some goal. What Margolin experienced as an emptiness could be seen from a distance as a stage in history. Hunger, dehumanization, and mass death in wastelands were necessary to reach a greater good. This is what Sartre, for example, believed, and similar defenses of the Gulag are mounted even now, in Russia and beyond. Margolin’s experience directly contradicts this wishful thinking: “What I saw in five years of my stay in the Soviet subterranean kingdom was an apparatus of murder and oppression acting blindly.” He turns the argument from determinism around: “The Soviet regime’s crime is not justified but, on the contrary, aggravated and accentuated if it turns out that there is no other way of reinforcing the power of those in the Kremlin than the monstrous camp system of contemporary slavery and millions of anonymous deaths.”
 
Margolin had no patience with relativism, or what we today call what-aboutism. It is no defense of Soviet mass killing to point out that the Nazis committed worse crimes. The Soviet camp system, he noted, was older, larger, and more durable than the Nazi one. It was wrong to “justify the Soviet camps by asserting that Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka were much worse.” As Margolin saw matters, the Nazis and the Soviets had together destroyed Europe in 1939. Neither side was right in the war that began in 1941,and so defending one by referring to the crimes of the other was a logical mistake. Margolin was himself physically trapped between the two systems. But human freedom, for him, was the ability to judge both on higher criteria, rather than on the terms their alliance or their clash seemed to force.
 
Margolin has a final word for those who would shrug their shoulders at the history of Soviet concentration camps in the belief that in so doing they are somehow serving progress. “The people who justify Soviet camps, who say ‘Let them sit in camps’ or ‘Perhaps this is not true’ or simply ‘What do we care?’ may consider themselves anti-fascists and wear a mask of rectitude. It is clear to me that these people are preparing a second edition of Hitler in the world.” If you lose your concern for the facts of history, you have lost your concern for humanity. If you choose evasion and propaganda, then the anti-fascists lose out to the fascists, the better evaders and the better propagandists. The act of truthfully recording human suffering, by contrast, is also the act of affirming human value. The dignity of recalling detail is also the dignity of passing judgement. As a matter of individual ethics and also as a matter of democratic pragmatism, no “trampling on human rights should remain anonymous.”
 
Witness undoes anonymity, and judgment girds an ideal. Margolin thought that democracy transcended a shallow quarrel between Right and Left. The Right was not bound to defend fascism, and the Left was not bound to defend the Soviet Union. And no one was bound to identify with Right or Left. The trap of us-and-them was dehumanizing. What humanized was an active moral concern for truth, access to the historical record, and the freedom to express what was learned. Although every democracy is flawed, as he recognized, the flaws can be seen as such. When the witness and judgment of individuals informs the discussion and choices of citizens, a democracy can be corrected and renewed.
 
Foreword  in  Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag by Julius Margolin.Oxford University Press, 2020.
 
A Zek Remembers Stalin’s Camps. By Timothy Snyder. Tablet, October 1, 2020.

Oxford University Press

Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag by Julius Margolin.
 
The first full English translation of a masterful Gulag memoir that preceded Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago by decades.
 
Panelists:
• Deborah Kaple, Princeton University (the author of Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir)
• Stefani Hoffman, Hebrew University (book translator) 
• Leona Toker, Hebrew University (the author of Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors)
Chair: Eli Lederhendler, Hebrew University.

 YouTube

Julius Margolin was a Polish Jew caught between the twin 1939 invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He spent the years 1940-1945 in Soviet labor camps, finally returning to his family in Palestine, in 1946. In her book Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back (Oxford UP, 2020), Israeli scholar Stefani Hoffman has provided the English-speaking world with its first full translation of Margolin’s story, which reiterates the importance of individual human dignity, no matter the circumstances.

 Aaron Weinacht  talks with Hoffman.

 New Books Network, November 12, 2020

Julius Margolin (1900-71), a philosopher-writer, after having barely survived five years in the Soviet gulag with other zeks (a Russian slang term from the abbreviation of the word zakliuchennyi, meaning “convict, a prison or forced labor camp inmate”), found himself stuck in Marseilles for three weeks in 1945, waiting for a ship to Palestine. He had two books by Jean-Paul Sartre with him, Nausea and Being and Nothingness.
 
Margolin’s time in the gulag profoundly influenced his experience of reading these two books. He remembers in Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back that Sartre’s “world was quite simply not the one in which I lived, and I resolutely refused to submit to Sartre’s ‘nonbeing.’” Later he asks, “How could [Sartre’s philosophy] help my friends whom I had left in Russia in the camp hell, and whom it would have been so easy for me to néantiser [turn into nothingness] according to Sartre’s prescription?”
 
In other words, Sartre had written of life in the West as an existential hell, but Margolin had lived in an actual hell, that of the Bolshevik concentration camp. He had left a wife and child behind in Palestine to seek work in his native Poland; unfortunately, he did so in September of 1939 and was swept up in the German invasion from the west and the subsequent Soviet invasion from the east. After attempts to get home ended in vain, he found himself on the Soviet side of Poland. Because he didn’t have a Soviet passport and the Soviets didn’t recognize his Polish one (because Poland no longer existed), he was rounded up with thousands of other Poles, a mix of Gentiles and Jews, and crammed into boxcars sent to the gulag in northwest Russia.
 
Margolin’s memoir of his five years there reminded me of Varlam Shalamov’s two books Kolyma Stories and Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories, and of Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago. Margolin’s work is not as well-written as theirs: Shalamov was the equal of Hemingway, and Solzhenitsyn brings Tolstoy to mind. Yet Margolin’s lesser talent as a writer (though he is no less passionate) makes Margolin’s book more affecting, at times, as a record of the hell of the gulag.
 
But he wrote for a world that did not want to hear him. The West had been allied with the Soviet Union in the war, and many Jews in Palestine and elsewhere were still hopeful about the Soviet Union. Further, the world did not want to read more bad news. After the Allies had ripped out what Margolin calls the “thorn” in the body politic of Hitler’s concentration and extermination camps, few wanted to read of camps that were worse, in terms of population and duration, even if not dedicated to genocide.

But now we have the first English translation of the book, and in our current political climate it behooves people on both sides of the political aisle to read it. It reiterates what Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn describe: the severe malnutrition combined with absurd work quotas; the ravages of the urki, or criminals whom the camp commanders often allowed to run the camp interiors; the arbitrariness of the sentences prisoners received.

 Almost all of them (except the urki) were innocent of any offense; the Party had set quotas for how many people from each district should go to the gulag, and Russian prisoners of war were always given 10 years on principle. Margolin mentions a middle-aged man sent to the camps for three years because he had murdered his wife, and a younger man who, for sweeping a floor for German occupiers, was given 20 years.

 Where Margolin’s book differentiates itself from Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn is in the depths of one man’s experience. Shalamov shares his experience in a shattering series of stories, but one comes away with a kaleidoscopic view of the Far East gulag. Solzhenitsyn tells the epic story of the gulag as a whole: his personal story, but also the historical and political development of what he calls “our sewage disposal system.” Shalamov spent 17 years in the gulag, Solzhenitsyn 10; Margolin, there for five years, wrote a more concentrated and distilled work.

 Trained as a philosopher, he also makes occasional philosophical and psychological asides. In fact, he wrote several philosophical works in the camps, but they were destroyed by guards. In Chapter 32, “The Doctrine of Hate,” Margolin tells of how he wrote it and gives a précis of what he wrote. “That man,” Margolin writes, meaning Stalin, “hates, which means that some kind of inner weakness develops into hate, the result of some organic problem. Some kind of lack, defect, or unhappiness may remain within the bounds of his sense of self, but it may also spread to his social milieu and be transmitted to other people.”

 Hitler, Margolin says, must have felt himself to be “deeply hurt.” “Had he wanted the truth, he would have found a real cause, but the truth was too much for him to bear. He therefore began to search for external guilty parties.” He goes on to explain:

 “All haters are great unmaskers. Instead of a mask, however, they tear off live skin, the true nature, and they replace reality with a creation of their inflamed fantasy. Hatred starts with an imaginary unmasking and ends with real flaying, not in theory but in practice…. It is sufficient to compare the tirades of Mein Kampf with Lenin’s passionate polemics and his thunderous charges against capitalism to sense their psychological affinity. It is the language of hate, not of objective research.”

 We hope, Margolin concludes, to assuage our own suffering with our hate, and restore “mental equilibrium.” But this possibility is imaginary, and the result is “eternal mental anguish.”

 Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that “dwelling on the horrors” of the concentration camps, although not helpful in forming political programs, can help us determine if a political movement is prone to totalitarianism. Concentration camps sprang up as soon as both Lenin and Hitler came to power. Their present-day prototypes in the West are warnings.

 The left, when it strives for utopia, comes up with communism; the right with fascism. Both ultimately produce concentration camps where, as Arendt said, people are “superfluous.” Hell can be other people, as Sartre said, but as Margolin describes in his latter chapters, lovers know their temporary heaven. It is the ultimate irony that the two movements of the 20th century that tried to create heaven on earth—one of a future workers’ paradise, the other of a nostalgic hearkening back to a glorious nationalist past—ended up creating instead the hells of the concentration camps.

 Review: Never forget the suffering and injustice of the gulag. By Franklin Freeman.  America : The Jesuit Revue, April 22, 2021.

 

 

‘It was a gray mass of people in rags, lying motionless with bloodless, pale faces, cropped hair, with a shifty, gloomy look.’ Julius Margolin’s first encounter with Soviet prisoners takes place in August 1940 on the way to a labour camp in the north of Russia. Four years later, waiting at another transit point, he sees ‘semi-cripples, former, present and future invalids’, ‘bony shadows with hands and feet like sticks, in smelly tatters and dirty rags’. He has another year of horror ahead.
 
A Polish Jew stranded in the USSR at the beginning of the second world war, Margolin refused to take Soviet citizenship and as a result was sentenced to five years of forced labour. There followed a succession of prison camps with their inhumane conditions, everyday brutality, hunger and diseases. Margolin’s account of those years, first published in 1947, is as clear and detailed as it is chilling, his analysis of human behaviour under terror not blurred by what he had to live through.
 
‘I immediately ceased to be a human being,’ he says of his arrest. His abiding memory is of man being reduced ‘to a bestial condition, where the moment of satiety becomes the culminating point of every day, the sole stimulus of his actions’. That Margolin managed to survive, both physically and mentally, was partly down to luck — at one point a doctor gave him three months to live — and partly to his ability to adapt. For many inmates, however, hardship was but the first step to total dehumanisation, a loss of dignity more irreversible than physical demise. Deprivation paralysed their spirit, making them want ‘to fade into the common mass, to be as obedient as possible, an industrious instrument of another’s will’.
 
‘Every day the food ration is ready,’ former peasants say of their life in the camp. ‘At liberty I did not live better.’ Such testimonies demonstrate how far from reality the radiant future promised by the Soviets is for the majority of the population; but also, even more importantly, how little it takes for human beings to forget what makes them human, to stop noticing ‘the abnormality of the abnormal’. This motif runs through the book: ‘In camp, they say the words: man, culture, home, work, radio, dinner, cutlet, but not one of these words means what it normally signifies in freedom.’ In that, the camp is a replica of totalitarian society as a whole, one in which language has degenerated into empty propaganda.
 
When the war broke out, the choice for many of the Jews trapped in occupied territories was between a Nazi ghetto and a Soviet camp. Inevitable comparisons between the two lead Margolin to conclude that it is wrong to defend the Gulag as an antidote to Auschwitz. ‘The people who justify Soviet camps,’ he writes, ‘are preparing a second edition of Hitler in the world.’ The historian Timothy Snyder reiterates this view in his foreword, quoting the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, who said that ‘when we choose the lesser evil we must remember that it is evil’.
 
Margolin repeatedly turns to the West’s perception of the Soviet system, talking of ‘imagined communism’ and other illusions entertained by sympathisers of the USSR, labelling reports from enthusiastic visitors to the country as ‘childish prattle’. When Journey first appeared, the crimes of the Stalinist regime were relatively little known in the wider world; by now they have receded far enough into the past to be seen by some as a historical aberration. And yet totalitarianism remains a threat to this day. That is why documents like this book must be read and remembered.
 
The brutality of the Gulag was totally dehumanising. By  Anna Aslanyan. The Spectator, December 12, 2020.
 

People in the gas chambers knew, when they were dying, that the world had risen up against their executioners. People in the (Soviet) camps, however, did not have even this consolation.
 
These stark, shocking words were written by Julius Margolin over 70 years ago in Tel Aviv after a forced sojourn of five years in a camp in the Gulag Archipelago.
 
His account as “an accursed zek (prisoner)” and the daily struggle to survive in the permafrost is now being published for the first time in English this month.
 
Margolin’s memoir, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, was not only one of the earliest accounts of the incarceration of millions by Stalin’s regime, but one which significantly also mentioned the suffering of Jews in the Gulag.
 
Born in Pinsk, Margolin was a follower of Jabotinsky and a writer on Zionism. He was the archetypal Polish Jewish intellectual who spoke many languages and completed his PhD in Germany.
 
In 1936, he emigrated to Palestine with his wife and son, but had to borrow £1,000 to qualify for a visa. In order to pay off this debt, he returned to Poland to manage a textile factory in Łódz. He was due to return to Tel Aviv on 3 September 1939 — the very day that war broke out between Nazi Germany and this country.
 
Two days before, Hitler had invaded Poland from the West. Two weeks afterwards, Stalin invaded Poland from the East. Poland ceased to exist — the outcome of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the friendship treaty between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
 
A desperate Margolin tried to cross the border into Romania, but discovered that Jews were barred from entry. He returned to his aged mother’s home in Pinsk, which became a centre for gatherings of the Jewish intelligentsia.
 
In many towns, the entry of the Red Army was welcomed by the Jews as salvation from official discrimination. In Pinsk, Jewish youth demonstrated in the streets — carrying portraits of Pushkin and Stalin. Reality soon began to overwhelm such enthusiasm.
 
The NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) began the Sovietisation of Pinsk with the closure of newspapers, libraries and bookshops. The Jewish school of 700 pupils was closed down. The works of the Hebrew poets, Bialik and Tchernikovsky, were declared illegal. Yiddish replaced Hebrew as the language of educational instruction.
 
The phoney war ended with the invasion of Norway, the fall of France and the Battle of Britain in 1940. In Soviet-occupied Poland, Zionists and Bundists were arrested and deported in increasing numbers. It is estimated that between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941, more than a quarter of a million people were arrested by the NKVD in eastern Poland. As Margolin comments: “They were doomed to fall into the meat grinder and to be reworked into a formless glob in the Soviet kitchen.’
 
Margolin regarded the Soviet Union as being in neither Europe nor Asia, but more a hybrid where arbitrary commands by indifferent apparatchiks could mean the difference between life and death.
 
Some Polish Jewish refugees could not cope with this environment and actually crossed back into Nazi-occupied Poland — much to the astonishment of the Germans. As one returnee put it: “With the Germans, there is the threat of physical death, but here it is moral death. With the Germans, you don’t have to lie or conceal your thoughts.”
 
Polish Jews were prevailed upon to take Soviet citizenship. Margolin refused because he knew that if he did so he would never be able to return to Tel Aviv. Margolin placed his hopes in receiving a visa for Palestine. He suspected that the British in Tel Aviv were blocking entry as a matter of policy.
 
Although he did eventually receive a visa extension because he possessed a permanent residence certificate, the NKVD still arrested him for violating passport regulations. His Polish passport was one of a country that now no longer existed. His documents were not recognised and instead he was imprisoned for many weeks, awaiting deportation.

 
All the prison inmates were covered in armies of lice. Margolin remarks: “Lice of all sizes and colours swarmed on the undershirts: chestnut, brown, black and transparent white lice, brunettes and blondes and powerful pregnant lice.”
 
Within weeks, he was one of 700 people, aboard “the Wandering Coffin”, a train pulling bolted boxcars to the Gulag.
 
In the camps, only the strong survived. In Margolin’s camp, the work of tree felling began at 5 am, at -30°C during the harsh winters. Margolin describes the bewilderment of Galician Chasidim from Złoczów and the proud aristocratic wives of Polish officers on arrival. The descent into “Dante’s Hell” included both Silesian coalminers and Jewish writers from Vienna. The “urki”, Russian camp criminals, preyed on the newcomers and stole their possessions with total impunity. Women who fell pregnant had their babies taken away after birth.
 
Everyone had to work. Fundamentalist Christians, “the little christs”, refused to work on a Sunday — and were shot.
 
There were four levels of food supplied. Those who did not fulfil the work norms were given 500g of bread and “a thin soup” in the morning and evening.
 
The bread ration rose to 700g for those who fulfilled the norm. The third level was those who passed the norm by 125 per cent and the top level those who surpassed it by 150 per cent. They received macaroni and peas — and “a goulash” of rotten horsemeat.
 
The prisoners of the first two levels simply did not survive through lack of food. The zeks were reduced to “hungry beasts” — labouring machines for their masters.
 
Margolin survived years in the camp because he was able to avoid the rigour of inhuman labour. His proficiency in language, friendship with doctors and plain luck saw him through. He was able to occasionally read books in the camp and regarded his sole weapon as “the power of the word”. Yet other prisoners now called him ‘Grandpa’ instead of ‘Dad’ as his hair had turned white — he was still in his forties.
 
Margolin writes that antisemitism was widespread and that all intellectuals were regarded as ‘Jews’. Religious Jews, he observed, possessed “great moral strength and fortitude” and yeshiva students seemed to fare much better than former members of the Komsomol (Young Communists).
 
News filtered into the camp sporadically. When Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland, the zeks believed that this was an attempt to forge a pact with Britain in which both countries would turn against the USSR.
 
After several false starts, Margolin was finally released from the camp into a year’s internal exile. His aim was to return to Poland and then travel home to his wife in Tel Aviv who had no idea of what had happened to him.
 
In Poland he came across starving German prisoners. “While remembering that my tortured mother lay in a mass grave in Pinsk, with a feeling of fastidious horror, I gave them bread.”
 
When Margolin had completed this book, he found it extremely difficult to find a publisher. No one wished to criticise the Soviet Union whose armed forces had helped to defeat Hitler. The imagery of the victory parade in Red Square was preferable to the knowledge of the parallel world of the Gulag. No European Communist wished to believe this “fake news” about the beloved Soviet motherland. Margolin regarded his book in the same light as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin — it was a clarion call to condemn slavery and slave owners.
 
Margolin died a few weeks after the first show trial of Soviet Jews in Leningrad exactly 50 years ago this month. He lived long enough to bear witness therefore to the genesis of the great emigration movement which eventually brought one million Jews to the state of Israel.
 
The publication of his book finally in English brings his remarkable story to a new generation.
 
 
A journey to the Gulag and back: one survivor's account of Stalin's slave camps. By Colin Shindler. The Jewish Chronicle , December 4, 2020. 

If a writer’s message is unwelcome, it may not be heeded for many years. January 21 marks the 40th anniversary of the death of the Polish Jewish author Yuli Borisovich Margolin at age 70. Margolin — whose first name is also transliterated as Julius or Yuly, and was also known as Yehudah in Israel — should be as familiar a name as Solzhenitsyn for bearing witness to the Soviet gulag system. Yet the first-ever complete edition of Margolin’s almost 800-page-long gulag memoir in any language only appeared last November from the small Paris literary press Les éditions Le Bruit du temps.
 
“Voyage au pays des Ze-Ka” (“Trip to the Land of Ze-kas”), now edited and translated by Luba Jurgenson — a Moscow-born Sorbonne professor who specializes in modern Russian history — was written in 1946 but neglected for decades. In France, an abridged edition of Margolin’s book appeared in 1949, under the title “La Condition Inhumaine” (“Inhuman Condition”), a title which parodied that of André Malraux’s naïve prewar Marxist novel, “La Condition Humaine” (“Man’s Fate”). This was followed by another abridged Russian-language version, which appeared from a New York publishing house, since it was impossible to print it in Stalinist Russia. An unsparing, often furious narrative, Margolin’s work was out of sync with widespread Western European admiration for the USSR.
 
Born in Pinsk, Margolin earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1929, but became a resident of Palestine in 1937, after meeting Ze’ev Jabotinsky and other leading Zionists. Unfortunately, Margolin decided to visit his homeland in 1939, just before war broke out. He was arrested in Pinsk in 1940 and imprisoned by the Soviet secret police as a “Ze-Ka” (or Z/K). The term is a Russian-language abbreviation for zakliuchyonnyi, or “inmate,” a term which originally referred to prison laborers who built the White Sea Canal in the early 1930s. Unlike 8,000 of the slave laborers who died in that earlier project, Margolin survived his imprisonment in several gulags. He returned to Palestine in 1946, where he wrote his memoir in Russian, finally finishing the book in 1947.
 
 
However, Israeli publishers and politicians did not want to hear about the gulag system in the USSR, which was seen as a wartime ally against Hitler. In February 1946, Margolin wrote letters to such leading Israeli politicians as Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Moshe Sharett and Yosef Sprinzak, informing them of the situation of Soviet Jews imprisoned in the gulags; none of these leaders replied. Nor did English-language publishers take any interest, despite the advocacy of Arthur Koestler. (Jurgenson notes that Koestler “tried in vain to interest influential English-language personalities to get the book published.”)
 
Margolin’s book caused some stir in Europe, mostly in conservative circles. Excerpts were serialized in the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, and these were accentuated when the French political activist and Buchenwald survivor David Rousset called for a commission composed of former Nazi concentration camp inmates to inspect the USSR’s slave labor camps. Pierre Daix, a hard-line Marxist art historian, friend of Picasso and survivor of the Mauthausen concentration camp, refused to believe Rousset, calling him a “counterfeiter.” Rousset sued for libel, and in 1951, Margolin traveled to Paris to testify on his behalf, since Rousset had based many of his arguments on “La Condition Inhumaine.” Margolin informed the tribunal:
 
 
“I am a Jew. In the streets of Tel Aviv, Mr. Daix’s article is sold as a pamphlet entitled ‘Why did David Rousset invent Soviet camps?’… Neither Mr. Rousset nor myself invented these camps. In these camps, my hair turned white. Who will claim that Mr. Rousset invented my white hair? Let me personalize the words of a great Polish poet [Adam Mickiewicz]: ‘My name is Million, for I love and suffer for millions of people.”
 

With Margolin’s support, Rousset won his case against Daix, who is still thriving in Paris today at age 88. When a lawyer asked Margolin how he dared attack Stalin, that staunch enemy of Hitler, Margolin replied: “Hitler shed enough Jewish blood, so there is no need to attribute Stalin’s victims to him as well.” Yet Margolin’s memoir is more than merely accurate in a legal sense. It’s an uncompromising work with a gimlet eye for literary detail. Even when describing the most harrowing oppression, Margolin often pauses for a pen portrait of a friend, as if realizing that his verbal description may be all that will remain of someone otherwise lost in the war and subsequent Soviet oppression.
 
One such victim was his friend, the Polish Jewish poet Mieczysław Braun (born Bronsztejn; 1902-1942), who, despite having suffered combat wounds in 1920 defending Warsaw against Bolshevik invaders, was by 1939 shunned as a Jew by fellow Poles. Margolin notes that Braun had to “cross the challenging path from socialist assimilation to Zionism.” In 1939, Braun wrote a poem about secret immigration to Palestine, situating among the youngsters fleeing anti-Semitic Poland on a hazardous ship the anachronistically caped figure of poet Heinrich Heine, also “returning home.”
 
Not just Heine, but also Dostoyevsky is invoked after Margolin’s arrest and deportation to a series of gulags. Among the scant reading materials available in Siberia was Dostoyevsky’s novel “The House of the Dead,” which provided unexpected comic relief for Margolin and his fellow prisoners. In his 19th century Siberian prison camp, Dostoyevsky employed his own personal servant to cook for him, keep his samovar warm and go to the market for his favorite delicacies. Margolin recounts: “‘That’s a penal colony for you!’ we guffawed. ‘They went shopping!’” More seriously, Margolin notes that since Dostoyevsky’s time, the Soviet camps’ “school of depersonalization” was marked by “contempt for humanity which far exceeded anything in the Tsarist penal colonies… Instead of thousands, as in Dostoyevsky’s time, the prisoners now numbered in the millions.”
 
Writings by another Soviet-approved author, John Steinbeck, were also represented in the gulag library. Even the benighted Joad family in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” victims of the Great Depression, had it comparatively easy, Margolin argues: “[The Joads] were free to travel across the country, to protest, to struggle. Steinbeck’s pen advocated for them, whereas our mouths were gagged. Had Steinbeck lived for a time in our camp, he would have reacted less violently to the American mess.”
 
Ever the philosophy student, Margolin also reflects on what he terms the “paradox of hatred,” seen in the “anti-Semitism of those maniacs who are incapable of doing without Jews.” Margolin cites the example of the rabidly anti-Semitic Polish author Adolf Nowaczynski, who wrote a 1921 novel, “The Anonymous Power,” about Jewish bankers ruling the earth and whose mania is well described in Aleksander Hertz’s 1988 “The Jews in Polish Culture,” from Northwestern University Press. Margolin writes: “[Nowaczynski’s] life would have been quite empty without the Jews; if they had not existed, he would have had to invent them.”
 
Such reflections, born of bitter experience, are found throughout Margolin’s massively impressive account, which on its merits should have been translated into English decades ago. Preceding even Gustaw Herling’s compelling 1951 gulag memoir, “A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II,” Margolin’s text substantially foreshadows Solzhenitsyn’s works, written in the 1960s, and also offers a unique Jewish perspective on this tragic chapter of modern history. Margolin spent the remaining years of his life as a militant for the rights of Soviet Jews and lived long enough to see more recent gulag inmates finally reach Israel, emerging from the inhuman prisons he had so unforgettably described.
 
Forgotten Witness to the Gulag.    By Benjamin Ivry. Forward , December 28, 2010