MABEL LE BEAU writes:

Personal stories from descendants of Gulag survivors are indeed poignant. They are the stories of every survivor, anyone managing to persist in their choice to live no matter the dire conditions, the indomitable will to not allow anyone or any circumstance to get the better of them. To keep going, one foot after the other, step by step by step, ever-foward based on a self-confident sense that a Way will be found to traverse through all peril.

Survival against tremendous odds is the same story of Holocaust victims headed toward Auschwitz in cattle cars, starving children of dust bowl drifters, air crash survivors in the Andes considering their next step in planning to live, nuns struggling through Central American jungles with their pupils during political guerilla warfare attacks, the raped victims in southern Africa, those suffering internal warfare in Darfur, others facing certain annihilation in Rwanda and elsewhere, the little sodomized Laotian victim of Dahmler, even for an exhausted mountain climber attempting to summit Marcus Baker in a winter storm, the 87-year-old with bedsores and multiple sclerosis, or the 13-year-old with muscular dystrophy or 24-year-old with cystic fibrosis struggling to breathe while awaiting lung transplant, and the athlete discovering amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in the prime of life.

Laura writes:

Events of mass suffering, such as the Holocaust and the Gulag, obviously have great cultural significance. They are the outcome of ideology supported in the West and part of modernity, and thus part of our own culture, our home. But, suffering is universal. An ordinary person may exhibit the same heroism as a Gulag captive in the agonies and torments of illness or hardship. That’s why we may be grateful and inspired by stories of survivors, as harrowing as they may be.“Bless you, prison,” said Solzhenitsyn. The voice of the captive and the shipwreck runs through our culture like a thread of gold. Crusoe fell to his knees, thanked God for his island and for the storm that landed him there. Bless you, prison. Solzhenitsyn was uplifted; his captors were degraded. Those who manage to survive possess more than sheer will. Will alone cannot master years of brutal captivity and cruelty. Eugenia Ginzburg was kept alive by literature, the memories of the poems and stories she had read among the great Russian authors. She was able to recite them from memory in prison and camp. Of the time when she was in solitary confinement (altogether a much easier period than her time in Siberia), she wrote:

After dinner was my time for Pushkin. I gave myself a lecture about him, then recited all I could remember of his poems. Like a chrysalis transformed into a butterfly, my memory, cut off from all outside impressions, blossomed. Wonderful!I found I even knew the “Cottage at Kolmna” by heart. That would do nicely till suppertime.

These were her spiritual resources, the voices of her ancestors, and, though she was not Christian, the carriers of Christ’s love and redemption. This sustained her as much as the soup. No captive lives for many years by bread alone if he lives at all.

Solzhenitsyn wrote:

Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings. What had seemed for so long to be beneficial now turned out in actuality to be fatal, and I had been striving to go in the opposite direction to that which was truly necessary to me. But just as the waves of the sea knock the inexperienced swimmer off his feet and keep tossing him back onto shore, so also was I painfully tossed back on dry land by the blows of misfortune. And it was only becaue of this that I was able to travel the path which I had always wanted to travel. (The Gulag Archipelago, II)

                                      — Comments —

 Karen I. writes:

My child was on a cancer ward once. People don’t know what it is really like in those places until they are there with a child. I remember the doctors telling me my child may have cancer, that all his blood counts were off and it did not look good. 

For days, my boy lay feverish in the hospital bed and we waited for the worst to be confirmed. Finally, a spinal tap was done and we knew we would soon have our answer. It was after midnight when the results came in and I was laying in the dark on a bed next to my son’s. Suddenly, the a group of doctors flicked the lights on and with a shout of joy told us it was NOT cancer! It was something else that needed care, but not cancer. 

As we were leaving, a little girl no older than two was toddled into the room we had recently vacated, her little arm already hooked up to an IV, her father slowly pushing the pole behind her. I always wondered how she fared, if she was lucky or not. I wondered about the bald 17-year-old girl who gave her parents a high-five as she walked out of chemo. and I prayed for the silent babies in the cribs. I also thought often of the 10-year-old boy who was so happy when he announced he was going to be going to St. Jude’s soon, to see if they could cure his brain tumor. 

Every children’s cancer ward is a testament to the human will to live.

Lydia Sherman writes:

I used Solzhenitsyn for part of the high school curriculum in our home school. Once a relative accused us of not allowing our children to have a broad scope of reading material, and we asked him if he had ever read the Bible or The Gulag Archipelago. He was silent. This man began life with good values but won a scholarship to a college, where his mind was re-trained. Today he is a full fledged socialist. Had he read either of these books, he may have seen the light.

The story that affected me the most in Solzhenitsyn’s writings, was the time when prisoners were outside and one man came to him and connected with him through a mere look. Without a word, the other prisoner drew a cross in the dirt. Alexander said it was a moment when he had great peace, knowing that someone else really did know him and know Christ.

Daniel Gruberg writes:

As a Thinking Jew, I was a little astonished to read this passage on your site:

“These were her spiritual resources, the voices of her ancestors, and, though she was not Christian, the carriers of Christ’s love and redemption.”

How is it that you justify making such a claim about the extent of your own religion into the suffering and endurance of others? I would not claim that a Buddhist who has achieved a feat of great endurance or found great spiritual strength is somehow the property of my own religion. I am committed to my own spirituality and religion but I would never attempt to baptize another based on my own inability to see courage and strength in a mindset, philosophy, or even religion not my own.

Laura writes:

I hardly baptized her; it is ridiculous to say so. I have not claimed her as religious property or presented her as a Christian. I never said she had a consciously Christian experience at those moments. Christ does not love only Christians and whether she was ultimately redeemed, I truly cannot say, but the Russian poetry and literature she loved was imbued with Christian values (Judaic values also) and was, as is all beauty, a reflection of Christ’s love.

What “mindset, philosophy or religion” are you suggesting she drew strength from and which I am unable to value? Communism? That was the only organized faith she ever embraced. She did admire the revolutionary poets, but anything good in them didn’t really come from Communism.

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