Word: ginzburg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Within the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg...
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...
...survive to bear witness to these unspeakable happenings? In his moving introduction to her book, the German Nobel-prizewinning novelist Heinrich Böll notes that though many shared Ginzburg's experience, "very few can narrate it, even fewer can write about it, and it is these few who transform personal experience into testimony." Ginzburg tells us that her book was the "main object" of her life in captivity. Like Solzhenitsyn she committed names, facts and events to memory by incorporating them into long rhymed poems that she could more easily memorize...
...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...
...Ginzburg experienced not only friendship and love in Kolyma but also snatches of happiness. The post-Stalin years found her desirous, not of bloody vengeance, like many ex-prisoners, but of telling her story of good and evil to Russia and the world. As her husband observed, "You just aren't very good at hating " How striking is the difference between Ginzburg's account of the camps and that of Solzhenitsyn, whose governing passion in the writing of The Gulag Archipelago was an unconquerable rage. No outsider in the West can hazard a judgment...