Within The Whirlwind: Eugenia (Yevgenia) Ginzburg

Many have lived through what Eugenia Ginzberg (1906 - 1977) survived, yet very few can narrate it and fewer still could write about. Eugenia survived - physically, morally and spiritually - Kolyma in Siberia, the worst province of Stalin's empire after being falsely accused of terrorism in 1937. She spent two years in the infamous Lefortovo and Butyrka prisons in Moscow before being transported via prison train and cargo hold to Magadan to work in a camp hospital and thence to Kolyma. She was repeatedly snatched from extinction by assignments to inside work - in hospitals, nurseries, kitchens, farms - all of which, with their hapless inmates and all-powerful supervisors, she describes in vivid detail, never losing interest in her interest in human nature or her skills at observation. In this grim place, she met her future husband - Anton Walter, a German Catholic homeopathic physician - and convicts were not permitted to form 'attachments'. She would spend 18 years in exile...