Thirty years have passed now since the death of Julius Margolin
(1900-1971), a thinker, writer, and prominent citizen. He was a man
with an unusual fate. Unfortunately, he is almost unknown in Russia.
Nevertheless, as a man of great character who relentlessly exposed the
lawless deeds of the Soviet regime and made a notable contribution
to the human rights movement, he undoubtedly ranks up there with
Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. Moreover, Margolin began
fighting the Soviet system long before them. Simply it was prohibited to
mention his name in the USSR.
As fate willed it in that turbulent epoch, a modest and quiet man, an
armchair scholar by nature fully passed the strength test in the
northern "corrective labour" camps of the GULAG. There was a second
miracle — Margolin was freed and obliged to live in a remote area. Then
came the third miracle — in Stalin's time he managed to escape from
the grip of the regime and go abroad. He did not break down and shrink
into himself but, having been set free, decided to tell the truth
about the Soviet camps, so thoroughly concealed from the world: what he
saw, experienced and thought in them, and what people he met there.
Julius Margolin was the first to bring up the subject of camps in Russian
literature by writing an extensive book entitled In the Land of the
Zeks (zek is the Russian slang for a prisoner—Tr.). He finished it
in 1947, when Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of the famous Gulag
Archipelago, had just begun serving his prison term. He had a brilliant
style and clearly expressed his thoughts. Many phrases of the book
sound like aphorisms. Some of his forecasts, for instance, about
the inevitable collapse of the dictatorship and the breakup of the USSR,
have been fully borne out.
Julius Margolin was born on October 14, 1900 in Pinsk (Western Byelorussia,
Polish territory since 1921 and now the Brest Region). His father
was a doctor well known in that city. The family, affluent and educated,
observed Jewish traditions but was not confined by their religion.
By the time Julius had finished secondary school he knew Russian, Yiddish,
Hebrew, Polish, German, French, and English. He wrote later: "I am
happy that the circumstances of my life allowed me to read in the
original not only the Bible but also the works of Pushkin and Tolstoy
and recently The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov and the books of Solzhenitsyn."
Margolin went to Berlin University, finally receiving a Ph.D. from there
in 1925. Then he married and a year later moved to Lodz with his
young wife. To earn money, Julius worked in a stock company, but
in his free time he engaged in writing.
In 1939, Margolin and his family moved to Palestine to live. At the
end of that summer, he visited his parents, who had remained in Pinsk,
and this led to a tragedy. In less than a month, units of the Soviet
"liberation army" entered the city. After them came the party officials
and NKVD men, who began to establish order. Margolin was arrested
together with other "socially dangerous elements", both Poles and
Jews, and, without a trial, sent to the concentration camp "48th
Kvadrat" on the northern bank of Lake Onega.
He experienced in full measure the wilful actions of camp superiors,
the outrages of criminals, and life in congested barracks in an atmosphere
of general thieving and mugging, Russian frosts, deportation points,
hard labour at timber cutting sites in the age-old taiga, sleeping in his
work clothes on a plank-bed among hungry rats, lice and bugs, chronic
hunger and despair.
On the verge of death
The prisoners were not kept long in one place. They were not to get
accustomed to one another and to one place and were let know they
were merely ants working for the state. Margolin worked in different
camps, all in the north. Sometimes he did not even have a shirt and shoes
and had to wrap up his legs in rags. He grew thin and weighed just
45 kg instead of the 80 in the past. Several times Margolin nearly
died of alimentary dystrophia, pellagra and furunculosis. He could
not walk, and, due to scurvy, lost his teeth and his gold crown was stolen
right away.
Margolin survived thanks to rare parcels from his mother, who was killed
by Nazis without learning in what conditions her son lived, and to
good luck. Owing to a higher education and knowledge of several languages,
he was made the camp head's secretary. After being dismissed from
this post because of his mild treatment of prisoners, he helped do office
work now and then, earning a plate of gruel, or in warehouses where
he managed to get food no one would eat in other conditions. But
he survived thanks mainly to the doctor who put him into a hospital.
"The doctor was our judge. There was only one thing he could not give
a man dying of exhaustion — enough food," Margolin wrote in his book.
"Here", said the doctor, "are two equal cases, you and your neighbour.
Both of you will die in three months. However, you can be saved if
you are fed properly. But food is a problem. In our hospital special conditions
can be provided for just one man by giving all crumbs and leftovers
gathered to him. It is also possible to give a part of my own ration
to that man. Thus some food can be scraped together for one man in some
way or another, but not for two. What's to be done? I have to choose one
of you. Your neighbour is a fellow without kith or kin, and no one
will cry over his death, whereas you have a family overseas, someone
is waiting for you. God knows who of you deserves more to remain alive.
I choose you."
Margolin did not stop exercising his brain. "One of the symptoms of
alimentary dystrophia is deterioration of memory and mental abilities
to the extent of imbecility," he writes in his book. "While my furuncles
were being treated with a lancet and ointments, I countered the process
of sinking into depression by turning my surroundings into an object
of quiet and passionless research. What surrounded me, rose above
my head, encircled me and my whole generation with a stifling ring
was a lie. The logical and psychological nature of this lie, and its cultural
and historical manifestations were my subject to think about at the
end of the winter of 1942."
The science of hatred and the revival of truth
As a true philosopher, Margolin also reflected on the essence of the
Soviet system and the roots of its political and economic stability,
the dictatorship and the role of camps in the state system, the propaganda
machine, the total deception and compulsion propping up the system, human
nature, and many other subjects. He secretly tried to write down his thoughts,
though it was immensely difficult to get paper, ink and other materials.
In his book, In the Land of the Zeks, Margolin recalls how he managed
to avoid becoming degraded.
In the camp, Margolin wrote three philosophical works entitled The Theory
of Lies, The Teaching of Hatred and Concerning Freedom. He kept his
manuscripts hidden. But during an inspection at the Vologda deportation
prison, a callous guard discovered the papers and, showing no interest
in their content, took them away together with letters from his mother.
He threw the papers and letters into the mud and trampled on them.
"It took three years of thinking and work to write this book, always
looking around in fear of being caught and hiding it well, and now
it was lost," Margolin wrote. "It is clear that books should not
be written in camps. But is it the only book lost in the world? Is it right
to recall this book on the graves of millions, the smouldering ruins,
the ocean of human blood and crimes, at present and in the future?"
Falling into despair, Margolin wrote a letter to Ilya Ehrenburg, citing
from memory a few of his verses. He hinted at his present state of
mind and asked for help. Margolin was summoned to a high chief to
give an explanation. The letter had evidently landed somewhere else, but
the attitude to him in the camp improved a little.
Julius Margolin spent nearly six years in Soviet camps, from 1939 to
1945. After the war he, as a former citizen of Poland, was granted
amnesty and released under an agreement between the USSR and the
new Poland. Margolin settled in the town of Slavgorod in the Altai Region.
Luckily, kindred people helped him to find work and lodging. Allowed to
return to Poland in 1946, he immediately left it to rejoin his family
in Palestine. "I am writing these lines on board the ship taking
me to the shores of my homeland. My return to life is a miracle, an actual
revival."
"Some things must be told the world immediately, without delay. I will
not allow myself to put them off. I have no right to do so because
it would be a crime against those who speak through me shouting a
mortal cry of despair," Julius Margolin wrote.
"But fate has put a pen into my hand and I will not put it down until
I have said everything I can. I have no literary ambitions. My task
is to tell the truth that many people do not dare, do not want, are
unable or simply fear to tell, and I am writing as a man who has only one
day to live, and on this day he has to say what is most urgent, most
important, and as soon as possible, for it may be too late tomorrow."
"Until the autumn of 1939 I was 'favourably neutral' towards the USSR.
It was the characteristic stand of progressive and radical intellectuals
in Europe. In the last seven years I have become an inveterate and
vehement enemy of the Soviet system. I hate this system with all my heart
and mind. Everything I saw filled me with fear and disgust for the
rest of my life. Everyone who was in camps and saw what I did will
understand me. I think the struggle against the slave-owning, terrorist
and inhuman regime of the Soviet Union is the prime duty of every honest
citizen in the world. Tolerance or support of this world disgrace
by people on the other side of the Soviet border is inadmissible
in normal European conditions."
A test for ompatibility
Julius Margolin began writing the book about the Soviet camps in 1946
and finished it in 1947. But he could not publish it right away —
the time was not right. The Soviet Union had crushed the Nazi monster
in an unprecedented and bloody war and was at the height of its glory.
The truth about forced labour and camps in the USSR would remind
the public of what it knew about the Nazi death camps. Such a book
would create a scandal. Stalin was respected and feared, and no one
wanted to get into a conflict with the Soviet Union. The author obviously
understood this.
In the preface to his book Margolin writes: "I did not fight near Stalingrad
and did not take Berlin by storm. Perhaps I would write in a different
way if I had fought there. Perhaps. But I did not choose my route.
It was decided by the Soviet regime. The world knows everything about
Stalingrad and nothing about the camps. Where does the truth about Russia
lie — at the victory parade on Red Square or in the land of the zeks
not indicated on the map? These things should apparently be regarded
together — as an integral whole and in their mutual connection. I have
no illusions, because I saw Russia from within. I saw it from inside.
Those who set their hopes on the Land of Soviets should take this
'material' into account and reconcile it with their conscience as
best they can."
The author cites Leo Tolstoy's words, "he who was not sent to prison
does not know what the state really means." In Margolin's book we
can find everything that Solzhenitsyn wrote later about the camps.
As a European, he could discern what was Soviet and what was Russian in
the camp realities and draw conclusions from what he saw and experienced.
"I met Soviet people callous to the needs of others. They only fended
for themselves and hated the weak who burdened the collective....
I did not take their friendship or enmity seriously. I did not feel
insulted by their swearing any longer because it was completely forgotten
the next day, and was not deceived by intimacy which could turn into
betrayal at any moment."
Since Margolin knew how many people were held in the camps where he
had served his term and heard from others how many camps of this
kind had been organized, he estimated the approximate number of prisoners
in the Soviet Union. It turned out that several million people were
being kept in prisons simultaneously. One to two thousand prisoners died
every day. Tens of millions of innocent people served their terms
in Soviet camps.
In 1950, Margolin wrote an article entitled "Can Nazi camps be compared
to Soviet ones?" Unfortunately, it is impossible to give a summary
of this article here or, even better, cite it because the original
text loses its zest when it is retold. Here are short excerpts from this
article.
"Nothing infuriates the leaders of international communism so much as
the term 'red fascism'. There is no greater insult than comparing
Soviet methods to Nazi ones. History has proved that fascism and
communism are unable to exist together. Communism dies where fascism triumphs.
Fascism is crushed where communism has won out. But we reply from our point
of view, not fascist or communist, but democratic and liberal: mutual
hatred does not yet prove absolute incompatibility. Fascism and communism
are two variants of a totalitarian regime which denies the freedom
and dignity of the individual. The hatred between them is the hatred of
rivals. The attitude of the Jewish people to Nazism was the attitude
of a victim to the hangman. We have been infected by it. Our hatred
is justified by the need to defend ourselves against evil. But who
is the hangman and who is a victim in the mututal hatred between Nazism
and communism? Both are of an equally aggressive, predatory and brutal
nature."
"The insistence on revealing the truth about the Soviet camps is instantly
dismissed by the advocates of the Soviet system as anti-Soviet propaganda.
It is an example of confusion of notions. Opinions or political programmes
can be propagandized. The truth is not 'propagandized', it is spread."
"Nazi camps can and should be compared with Soviet ones. They were places
of imprisonment. Millions of people died there. However, the camps
were not the same, both common and distinctive features should be
established. It can be said on the whole that the Nazi camps served
the purpose of annihilation, whereas the Soviet camps are used as pools
of manpower." "In the Nazi camps, the people were
tortured to death by sadists and cannibals, whereas the Soviet camps
were and remain vast reserves of the forced labour of state-owned slaves.
It is believed that in the Soviet camps the people are not supposed
to die because the state needs their manpower. Their health and life
are protected as long as they do not refuse to work."
A witness for the prosecution
In the Land of the Zeks was brought out in the United States in 1952
by the Chekhov publishing house. It brought world fame to the author
except in the Soviet Union. The Kremlin rulers hushed up the name
of Julius Margolin and his works. The NKVD could not reach the author,
and what he wrote could not be disproved.
Together with his literary work, Julius Margolin was actively engaged
in public activities. He spoke at meetings, formed the Union of Former
Prisoners of Soviet Concentration Camps, and was well informed about
events in the USSR.
Margolin became widely known owing to his part as a witnesss for the
prosecution in a trial which stirred up the French public — David
Rousset against the communist weekly Les Lettres franIaises. The
trial drew the attention of the public in many countries.
In October 1949, Le Figaro carried a series of excerpts from Margolin's
unpublished book. It ended with an appeal urging the world public
to take notice of the situation in the Soviet labour camps.
During the German occupation of France David Rousset, a writer, took
part in the underground movement, but later was arrested and sent,
together with other French patriots, to a concentration camp in Germany.
After the war he returned home seriously ill and actively fought against
the system of concentration camps. Rousset argued that there is no
future for a man in a country where such camps exist, regardless
of the economic and political situation there.
In 1946, he wrote a book entitled Concentration Universum and in 1947
a novel entitled The Days of Our Death. Both books expose the Nazi
camp system. In 1948, Rousset published a collection of official
Nazi texts entitled The Clown Does Not Laugh.
In November 1949, having learned that the "concentration camp world"
destroyed in Germany still existed in the USSR, Rousset, through
the weekly Le Figaro Litteraire, appealed to former inmates of Nazi
concentration camps to form a commission to inspect camps in the USSR.
Of course, first they have to get the permission of the Soviet government.
By July 1950, Germany, Belgium, republican Spain, Holland and Norway
had responded, in addition to France, to Rousset's call.
"But in our time it is dangerous to be a man," Margolin wrote. "Rousset
mentioned the Soviet Union."
The communist Les Lettres franIaises published a fiery article entitled
"Why Did Rousset Invent Concentration Camps in the USSR?" Rousset
was accused of forging the texts of Soviet law and using false information
supplied by some unknown persons who had invented slander about the
Soviet Union or copied it from books about the Nazi camps. The author of
this article described Rousset as "a dishonourable liar" and zealously
defended the Soviet camps, alleging that "no one is sent to them
without a trial" and that "people are re-educated there and taught to be
free". Moreover, it was reported that Rousset did not reply to the
charges. It was suggested that he take Les Lettres franIaises to
court.
Rousset brought charges against the weekly, accusing it of slander.
The court met from November 20, 1950 to January 6, 1951. Margolin
recalled later: "I took part in the trial against inhumanity because
in my eyes it was a legal action taken by militant liberalism in the struggle
against the Stalin regime".
Aware of their shaky position, the lawyers of the weekly tried to sidetrack
the trial, and they partly managed to do so, but the evidence given
by witnesses from various countries, Margolin first of all, revealed
the true picture to the court. Under the sentence passed by the court (the
defendants did not even come to hear it) Les Lettres was obliged to pay
a fine and publish the sentence on its pages and in ten other periodicals
to be chosen by Rousset.
In his long articles about the trial entitled "The Paris Account" and
"Concerning Villains", Margolin also notes the Jewish aspect of the
trial. "Why did so many Jewish witnesses and experts take part in
this case? Was it accidental? Was it the deliberate intention of the organizers
of the trial? No. Rousset easily found many Jewish witnesses because most
of the victims of camps were Jews and it is impossible to talk about
Soviet terror in general and camps in particular without mentioning
the terrible suffering they caused the Jewish people."
Margolin estimated that there were 200,000 to 250,000 Jews in the camps
at that time. (According to the official Moscow data of the 1990s,
the share of Jews in Stalin's camps was as high as 16 percent — second
after Russians. — Y.Z.)
All of us know about the anti-Jewish campaign launched in the postwar
years. It was linked with Stalin's personal insrtructions, though
the Jews had not been officially discriminated against at the front
and in the rear during the war. Perhaps it was a retaliatory measure against
the activity of foreign, including Jewish, human rights activists.
The Kremlin certainly knew about it. But the Soviet system was not
to be reformed.
***
Julius Margolin has left a big literary legacy. In addition to his book
In the Land of the Zeks, he wrote Israel, a Jewish State in 1958
(under the pseudonym Alexander Galin). The Jewish Story was published
in 1960. Dozens of articles, essays, travel notes and reminiscences were
written by him between 1946 and 1970 and printed in Israel, France
and the United States.
Julius Margolin died on January 21, 1971. Friends and admirers have
formed a society to perpetuate the memory of Dr. Margolin. It has
done much to popularize his literary legacy. In 1973 it brought out
The Story of the Millennia — essays on the history of the Jewish people,
and in 1975 it republished In the Land of the Zeks, which had become
a bibliographic rarity by that time.
Many Margolin's articles published in various magazines and collections,
including his speeches and statements, were gathered by members of
the society and published as a separate book entitled The Uncollected
in 1975. It is a very interesting volume. Here are the names of the
chapters into which the articles were grouped: "The Tel-Aviv Note-Book",
"Israel", "The Jews of Russia", "The Land of the Zeks and Its Champions",
"Zionism", "Essays" (on lies, the works of Pasternak, Mandelstam
and Solzhenitsyn, and an analysis of Vladimir Zhabotinsky's best
novel, The Five).
REHOVOT, ISRAEL