A World Apart: The Journal of a Gulag Survivor

In 1940, after Poland was annexed by the Soviet Union, Polish writer Herling, then 21, was arrested on several false charges and placed first in a Russian prison, then in a slave-labor camp. This memoir, first published in 1951 and available here for the first time, is apowerful account of life in the Kargopol camp, where wretched conditions and subzero weather were only the outward signs of the prisoners' inhuman existence. Herling goes beyond the daily rounds of life to detail the psychological adjustments (the ""Great Change'') that required prisoners to eliminate all memory of the past to survive. In sharp, spare prose, he gives us the faces, moods and stories of these hopeless prisoners as they cope with hunger, pain and the ever-present fear of anonymous death. An important document of its kind. Photos. (September 24)