Torn Out by the Roots: The Recollections of a Former Communist

Vitzthum writes with uncanny poise about her 10 years of torment in Stalin's labor camps. An Austrian nurse, born in 1902, she joined the Austrian Communist party, which sent her to Moscow in 1929. Marrying a Russian engineer who shared her faith in Communism, she accompanied him to Siberia, where he helped build a steelworks. Her husband, falsely branded ``an enemy of the people'' by Stalin, disappeared forever into the gulag. Wrenched from her son in 1938, Vitzthum was hauled from one remote labor camp to another in unheated cattle cars. Her work as a nurse in the camps allowed her to feel human. Finally released and reunited with her son, she returned to Vienna. This moving, remarkably vivid memoir provides a woman's unflinching perspective on the Soviet Gulag, a grotesque hell where new mothers were forced to give up their babies to camp nurseries. (May)