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Jan 14, 2019
To my knowledge, Solzhenitsyn has got a Nobel Prize, I don't remember if he was able to pick it up. His other book, titled sg. like "The House Of Matriona" is also a great work, a vivid picture on human nature. There he shows how Matriona, this kind natured woman is different from her own relatives, the "crowd." OK, now back to the prison camp. I was born during the war in Hungary, and after the war my father was also put into a prison camp for 3 months. The book here tells the real sufferings and complexities of human behavior (corruption as well) inside a Soviet camp. This is an unforgettable account directly from an insider's mouth. Now I tell you the story of R.B., a Hungarian accountant, who in the 1970s told me his own prison camp story in after-war communist Hungary, and he wept all thru his account. He said that in 1948 the company where he worked as chief accountant, bought some used furniture from a Jewish widow, whose husband had been killed by the Nazis. So he, as an accountant, did not deduct from the money due to that widow the mandatory "contribution" to the Comm. Party's election fund. Then the director of the company called him "traitor", spat into his face, and when he protested, slapped him on the face as well. And then reported him as an enemy, who badmouthed the Party (this was a lie), and based on that false charge he was sent into a prisoners' labor camp for 3 years for "reeducation." There was so much physical and moral suffering in there, that when he was released with another inmate, as they stood outside the gate and looked at the open meadow outside, suddenly both of them started running in the field until they dropped to the ground from exhaustion. Years later this accountant gathered enough strength to go back to the site of the camp to see it, but there was no sign whatever of the camp being there ever. Finally, years later he bumped into his old-time boss at a conference - the boss was very embarrassed, but finally he went up to our man and apologized. OK, so this book about a Soviet labor camp is very powerful and truthful, an unforgettable account. GUYS, as I re-read this comment of mine, I remembered what I learned in College here in Vancouver about concentration camps in Canada and in this province. I was horrified at those accounts in our textbook. During the Great Depression, abt 90 yrs ago the Chinese were put into such camps, bec. allegedly those immigrants brought some plague into this province. During and after WW1 the Italians, Ukrainians and the unemployed also were put into such camps, and even the Jews who fled from the Nazis to England - find and read the history of the Ripples-Pinto camp in New Brunswick, where the Jews were put into the same camp with the German POWs, and some Jews committed suicide out of fear. They were transferred from England to Canada, bec. it was supposed that some spies might have been hiding among them. Well, let's hope this won't repeat again here, but it looks to me that the folk here are prone to paranoia. I heard a Canadian radio program on the Ripples-Pinto camp, and a music prof, a Jew who was in there talked. And also I heard a program on French Canadian Radio on a person Von Alvenslebens, who created the Stock Market here in Vancouver before WW1, and he was arrested at the start of the war as a spy. He was not. Camps are looming ghosts of our rather recent past.