Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps
Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1951. Presumed First U. S. Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. xii, 310 pages. Endpaper map. Ink notation on the fep. The dust jacket is in multiple pieces with parts missing, the remains of the dust jacket are in a protective plastic cover. This is an authorized translation from the original German, Elf Jahre in sowjetische Gefangnissen und Lagern (Zurich, Verlag Oprecht, 1950). Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps is a harrowing firsthand account by Elinor Lipper detailing her wrongful arrest in 1937 and subsequent decade-long ordeal in the Kolyma forced labor camps of Siberia. The memoir documents the systematic dehumanization, near-fatal starvation, and brutal conditions of the Soviet Gulag before her release in 1948 through Swiss diplomatic intervention. Elinor Lipper (July 5, 1912 – October 9, 2008) was a Belgian-born author, translator, and political activist who became one of the earliest voices to expose the horrors of the Soviet Gulag system to the Western world. Richard Winston (1917 – December 22, 1979) and Clara Brussel Winston (1921 – November 7, 1983), were prominent American translators of German works into English. Richard and Clara began translating together in the late 1930s, working with the many German exiles in New York. The Winstons translated over 150 books as well as many other works, and they received a number of awards for their translations. In 1978, they won the American Book Award for Uwe George's In the Deserts of This Earth. In 1972 then won the PEN Translation Prize for their translation of Letters of Thomas Mann.Their best known translations included the works of Thomas Mann, Kafka, Arendt, Speer, and Hesse. Elinor Lipper (born July 5, 1912, in Brussels; died October 9, 2008, in Ticino) was an author and translator. A communist, she became an associate of the Comintern; after emigrating to the Soviet Union in 1937, she fell victim to the Great Terror and, as a camp prisoner, witnessed the terror of the Soviet Gulag. Her book Eleven Years in Soviet Prisons and Camps, is considered one of the first detailed German-language accounts of the Kolyma region—a notorious area of penal camps in the Russian Far East where hundreds of thousands of prisoners were forced to mine gold and other precious metals in Arctic cold and under inhumane conditions. Beginning in 1931, she studied medicine—first in Freiburg, then in Berlin. Fleeing National Socialism and the threat of persecution for distributing Marxist literature, she went to Switzerland, where she studied psychotherapy. There, she also worked for the Communist International. To secure Swiss citizenship for her, associates of the Communist International arranged a marriage of convenience with the Swiss national Konrad Vetterli. Elinor Lipper traveled to Moscow in 1937—despite urgent warnings about the country's political situation—to work as an editor for the Foreign Languages Publishing House. Lipper was arrested by the secret police on the night of July 26, 1937, and held for fourteen months in the Lubyanka prison. She faced a potential sentence of death by shooting. On September 8 (or October 14, 1938), she was sentenced to five years in a labor camp for counterrevolutionary activity. She was ultimately deported to a Gulag labor camp in Eastern Siberia, in the Kolyma River region. The Kolyma region was a notorious penal zone in the Russian Far East. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners—including foreign nationals and prisoners of war—were forced to mine for gold and other precious metals there under inhumane conditions in the freezing Arctic cold. Due to the outbreak of World War II, they were forced to endure this ordeal far longer than the initial five-year term, as the Soviet Union released no prisoners during the war. Elinor Lipper was not released from the Gulag until the autumn of 1946. During her imprisonment, she twice came close to death from starvation and exhaustion. She was fortunate enough to work in infirmaries, thanks to her background as a former medical student. After her release from Kolyma, she was transferred from one transit prison to another. During this period, she gave birth to her daughter, Genia, the child of a romantic relationship with a fellow prisoner who was a doctor. In June 1948, she and her child finally arrived in Switzerland. She continued to suffer the aftereffects of her imprisonment for a long time, experiencing a nervous breakdown and months of balance disorders. In late 1950, Lipper appeared as a witness in Paris to support political activist David Rousset during a trial concerning Soviet camps. Rousset had been labeled a Trotskyist falsifier by left-wing French media following his publication of reports and his efforts to initiate investigations into the Soviet penal camps. Lipper gave an account of her experiences and the atrocities committed in these labor camps. It was a public appearance in the course of the defamation suit Rousset had brought against a French Communist periodical—an act that required courage at the time, given that public opinion in France regarding the Soviet Union was predominantly positive and the Communist press attacked critics of Stalinism such as Rousset and Lipper, at times labeling them liars. In May 1951, she participated—also as a witness—in a tribunal held in Brussels against the Soviet camp system. She wrote a book about her observations:Eleven Years in Soviet Prisons and Camps. The work was published in 16 languages. The English translation of her book, published in 1951, revealed how US Vice President Henry A. Wallace had been deceived by the NKVD regarding the use of Gulag prisoners for gold mining during his visit to Siberia—specifically Magadan—in May 1944. Condition: Very good / Poor.
Keywords: Political Prisoners, Gulag, Kolyma, Prison Camps, Arrest, Hunger Strike, Trotskyites, Transit Camp, Magadan, Henry Wallace, Owen Lattimore, Taiga, Corruption, Medical Organization, Self-Mutilation, Suicide, Forced Labor, Freedom, Survival
[Book #91892]
Price: $125.00