The brutality of the Gulag was totally dehumanising

‘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.