11 YEARS OF HORROR
Dallin, Alexander
11 Years of Horror ELEVEN YEARS IN SOVIET PRISON CAMPS, by Elinor Upper. Henry Regnery Co. 310 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Alexander Dallin IF A FEW years ago a book on Soviet concentration camps was...
...Mrs...
...unreliable" officers and officials...
...Lipper's pen one senses the flesh and stench, the sighs and cries, as well as the occasional ironic interludes: the American flour bags that are gratefully used for brassieres...
...the variety of camps within the Dalstroi...
...all those who perhaps once had sincere illusions about the nature of Stalin's empire—like the author, who fled there from persecution in Central Europe, only to languish for eleven long and dreary years of her young life in jails and camps from Moscow to the shores of the Pacific...
...with untold physical toil and moral degradation...
...ballet dancers, "nuns, thieves, speculators, and lovers...
...She got out because she was a Swiss citizen...
...The price...
...the head of the Yiddish Art Theater in Moscow...
...residents of the areas once occupied by the Germans...
...Japanese prisoners of war...
...The inmates...
...juvenile delinquents...
...Lipper describes how, arrested without cause, she along with legions of others experienced the "permanent uncertainty and complete helplessness" that produce perpetual fear...
...violators of labor discipline...
...Reviewed by Alexander Dallin IF A FEW years ago a book on Soviet concentration camps was apt to be met with general distrust, today one is tempted to fear that the response may be a mere note of boredom: "One more book on the Russian camps...
...This is a sincere account, well-written, not sensation-seeking, yet emotion-packed thanks to the author's sensitive ability to observe...
...Lipper was fortunate in escaping alive, six years after her sentence expired...
...From the standpoint of objective, non-Soviet justice, these people are innocent...
...this was the only time the prisoners had three successive holidays—so that there would be no chance of the guest seeing any of them...
...For the millions who remained, there is no protection, no salvation...
...In silence we stared through the barbed wire at the hearses which drove out of the camp every night...
...For only would-be suicides and heroes can raise their voice against the decision of their government in Russia...
...the tricks and tortures of interrogation...
...the endless trip to the Far East...
...politically suspect Communists...
...the peculiar fate of women in the camps...
...Piled high with naked bodies, the load tied on with cord and covered with canvas, the trucks drove out, carrying the victims to eternal freedom...
...Elinor Lipper's book, however, commands the most attentive reading by all those who are interested in a truthful account of the Soviet prison camps...
...slave laborers taken to Germany during the war...
...One by one, new groups of prisoners are brought in, for the labor supply must eternally be replenished: anti-fascists who fled Nazi Germany...
...Such is the measure of the political education about the Soviet system which we have acquired in recent years...
...Lipper reports how, in anticipation of his visit, the watch towers were razed, the prisoners replaced by office girls, and the guest dined and wined...
...It does immense credit to the author that, after all her privations and sufferings, she can still proclaim: "It is easy to condemn 'the Russians'— but to do so is to do the Russian people a great injustice...
...Better than any oratory, it conveys the horror of the "corrective labor" system...
...Others are convicted (often without proper judicial proceedings) because of their relatives, nationality or social origin, or on a mere suspicion of political dissatisfaction...
...But perhaps the most bitter irony was the visit of Henry Wallace and his party to Magadan, capital of the Far Eastern slave labor universe, in 1944...
...the daily life in the desolate taiga...
...Indeed, a number of them are "arrested solely to increase the supply of slave labor...
...She describes the Moscow prison...
...the camp officials who themselves wind up as prisoners: the old peasant woman who thinks she is in jail as a "trac-torist," not knowing what "Trotsky-ite" means...
...all those to whom civil liberties are dear...
...The Vice-President departed presumably unaware of the fact that he had visited the Soviet equivalent of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, convinced as he later wrote that the Dalstroi was a sort of "Hudson's Bay Company and TVA...
...What we get is a gripping picture of the internal Iron Curtain, behind which millions are kept shut off from the outside world, with officials free to abuse, with criminals in the camps as brazen masters of the "politicals...
...With her in jail were the wives of fallen high-ranking Soviet officials —the wives of Ambassador Rakov-ski, Comintern leader Bela Kun, People's Commissar Kossior...
...The dance macabre has no end, and under Mrs...
Vol. 15 • June 1951 • No. 6
