Word: arctics
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Even at night the aluminum sky gleams to every corner. To the south, a light swivels its beam around lonely Alaska, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle and barely 1,400 miles from the North Pole. Five hundred yards to the north, an iceberg, bleached turquoise by the cold and shaped like a baby's cradle, rocks along. There is no driftwood or trash in the freezing Beaufort Sea. Nature all but forbade man to sail in this place, and Captain Walt Kardonsky knows...
...skipper of the 9,000-hp. oceangoing tug Cavalier and his crew of seven are part of a convoy of tugs and barges making the hazardous trip from the Pacific Northwest to the oilfields around Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. Once a year, for up to six weeks, the Arctic ice pack crumbles away from the Alaskan coast, giving the oil companies their only chance to transport equipment too large to be carried by airplane or truck from Anchorage, more than 600 miles to the south. In 1975, when the entire fleet was trapped in the ice, the scheduled opening...
That haunting passage is from Journey into the Whirlwind, the first volume of Ginzburg's memoirs, published in the U.S. in 1967. There, she began recounting the 18 years she spent in the Gulag, mostly in the Arctic death camps of Kolyma. In this, the second volume, Ginzburg, who died in 1977, picked up her story about "the gradual transformation of a naive young Communist idealist into someone who had tasted unforgettably the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil...
Evil abounds in the world evoked by Ginzburg. The Kolyma region where she was ultimately imprisoned was the largest and most terrible of the Stalin-era concentration-camp complexes, stretching a thousand miles from the Arctic Ocean to the Sea of Okhotsk. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has called Kolyma "the pole of cold and cruelty." It was a place of massacre, where 3 million died, the men digging for gold under the permafrost, the women felling trees at temperatures of -56° F. Young men dispatched to the mines quickly succumbed to tuberculosis. Ginzburg, who acted for a time as a medical...
...most remarkable feature of Ginzburg's narrative is the decency and kindness she encountered in the Arctic inferno. She describes the kinship that developed among political prisoners as "the strongest of all human relationships " citing innumerable examples of their virtually suicidal generosity to one another. Alongside her portraits of cruel or monstrously indifferent guards and camp administrators are some of men and women capable of acts of compassion. One camp commander, whom she describes as a "peculiar specimen," intervened again and again to save her and her camp lover later her husband, the prisoner-physician Anton Walter...