Word: kolyma
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...time of the mass purges during the 1930s and begins with an angry rhapsody to all those who suffered death, punishment and exile. The hero, a Ukrainian Cossack named Hryhory Mnohohrishny, has been sentenced as "an enemy of the State" to 25 years at the slave-labor camp at Kolyma on the frozen Sea of Okhotsk. Now he is one of thousands of prisoners jammed into a 60-car convict train rolling across Siberia to the camp. As a counterpoint to the doomed men in the cattle cars, Author Bahriany describes the comforts of another train, also bound east, which...
Hryhory makes his escape at the last Siberian station before the prisoners are transferred to boats for the voyage to Kolyma. He plunges south into the taiga, the vast, swampy forest that stretches along the Manchurian border. After six days of flight, during which he has only a handful of nuts for food, Hryhory is still powerful enough to stab a bear to death and rescue Natalka Sirko, the daughter of a family of hunters. The remainder of the book is largely a hymn to the free life of the Sirko family, whose elemental existence is wondrously untouched...
...organization of 100,000 survivors of Nazi camps, to decide whether the Russians run a similar system. Said Prosecutor David Rousset, a French writer and former Nazi prisoner: "For the first time, the men who lived at Auschwitz and Buchenwald are going to hear men who lived through Kolyma and Magadan...