Tell The West

From the Time Archive, a short book review from the years just after World War II:

Apr. 19, 1948
TELL THE WEST (358 pp.) — Jerzy Gliksman—Gresham ($3.75).

When Jerzy Gliksman, a Polish Socialist, was about to be released, in 1941, from the Siberian forced labor camp in which he had been held for a year, he asked a fellow prisoner if he could help her in any way.

"You can do one thing for us, and one thing only," she replied. "Tell all you know about us. ... Tell the West. . . ."

The next day Gliksman repeated these words to another slave laborer, Professor Strovsky, an aging Russian scholar. Strovsky, with the fatalism of those who have suffered too much, doubted if telling the West would help much: "They won't want to believe you anyway. . . ."

Strovsky's bitter words are a damning comment on that double standard of morality by which large sections of the Western world, especially its intellectuals, have judged the Stalin dictatorship. Many of the same people who, in the 1930s, had been stirred by reports of Nazi concentration camps, refused to face the unpleasant fact that Russia used them too. Now Gliksman, who found himself in a Siberian labor camp after Poland was carved up by Hitler and Stalin, tells the story of that experience with a better chance of attention. The book is an unadorned record of human suffering devoid of literary flourish.

Gliksman was one of those Socialists who had thought that the Stalin regime would welcome non-Communist radicals. When he was arrested he tried to convince the NKVD it was making a mistake. The mistake, as others have discovered before & since, was his.