Hitler grabbed all attention.
The Jews hogged all the sympathy.
The books and memoirs written
about the Shoah/Holocaust,
the concentration camps and the rise of Hitler
and his gang would fill a large room
right up to the ceiling. On the other hand,
the books about the rise of Stalin, his genocidal
reign of terror, his henchmen, his instruments of terror
and the Gulag, would fill a modest bookcase.
The memoirs of those who lived under Soviet dictators
would not occupy a small shelf.
Stalin moved whole peoples, many of whom died en route
in trains which took weeks or months to get to distant parts;
hundreds of thousands were simply done away with,
but he didn't particularly persecute the Jews.
Talented musical ones did well, as they did not in Germany.
Eighteen million Russians of all ethnicities and origins
passed through the Gulag (53 camps, 423 labour colonies)
in which nearly two million perished. A further six or seven
million were exiled to remote parts of the Soviet Union.
As in Germany, only a fraction were classed 'political'.
Then there were the POW camps (4 million internees).
Why no books, no memoirs ? So few biographies of henchmen, Molotov, Mikoyan, Beria - not much even on Khrushchev,
but the books on Nazis, gangs, camps, extermination-camps
are legion.
 |
| The Gulag Archipelago. Click to enlarge. Kharp is indicated by the green arrow, top centre. |
his sole opponent 'with his head above the parapet'
surviving weakly in the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp.
“The conditions there are harsh, with a special regime
in the permafrost zone. It is very difficult to get there,”
said his friend, Ivan Zhdanov.
some memoirs, will surface some day,
if only through dubious antisocial media.
Meanwhile, despite no journalists being allowed
to witness the massacre in ever-rebellious Gaza,
we are seeing smartphone images
from Israel's own Warsaw Ghetto.
Israel's Palestinian (West Bank) Gau...
The testaments and memoirs are few...
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