2025 Reading Challenge discussion

I didn't think it was possible but the camp that they were transferred to was even more bleak than the one they left.

How did you feel when the Americans came right into camp and didn't know they were there? I wanted someone to run out and scream "We're Here!" , but I knew how futile that would have been.

Londa wrote: "I wanted someone to run out and scream "We're Here!" , but I knew how futile that would have been."

Yep. The US Embassy in Moscow did nothing even for the Americans who asked for help before the war and were often arrested as soon as they left the embassy and then disappeared. (The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia) Vice President Henry Wallace even visited Gulag camps and later called one "idyllic". Roosevelt and Churchill also helped to hide the Katyn Massacre and blamed Germans for it, and those victims were their own allies, Polish officers. http://www.archives.gov/research/fore...

Later some Soviet POWs that were freed from the German camps rather killed themselves than returned to the Soviet Union, where they were sent directly to the camps. (The same happened to some American POWs that were "liberated" by the Red Army.)

yeah,I really hoped some one would make a move,but I completely believed that the cruelty has frozen everyone!

In many camps most of the guards were actually prisoners themselves, except they were real criminals, murderers and rapists and such, like Naftaly Frenkel who eventually became a commander of the camp, though he was sentenced for other reasons.

Besides, where would you go? We had former prisoners who had escaped from some of the camps closer to the border but Siberia was thousands of kilometres away. Also at some point people even said that at least you got some food at the camps, at home you may not get anything to eat...

Thanks for those links Tytti! One of the reasons I really enjoyed this book is that it exposes events in history that are not talked about nearly enough.

I also read Child 44 this year and enjoyed it for that reason as well.

Well I have been hearing stories about those times all my life. And again now because exactly 75 years ago Finland was fighting for her survival against the Soviet Union in the Winter War. (Well we lost "officially" but were never occupied and kept our independence, unlike every other country that had a border with the Soviet Union before the war.) Considering that Finland was a poor country with a population of about 3.6 million people and USSR had about 180 million people and later received massive help from USA, well...

The USSR invaded because Finland had rejected Stalin's demands (that Germany and the Soviet Union had agreed in the the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocal signed in August 1939 where they also had agreed upon the division of Poland which basically started WWII in Europe), the same demands the Baltic Countries were forced to accept. Probably one of the reasons for declining (and also to the will to fight) was that it was already quite well known that thousands of ethnic Finns living in the USSR had been executed in 1937-38 and tens of thousands had been sent to Gulag starting from 1929. Many of them had even been true Communists, others were farmers etc. So what happened to and in the Baltic countries in 1940-41 and also after WWII when there was an another wave of deportations wasn't exactly a surprise. Google Holodomor to read what happened in Ukraine...

A couple of other suggestions for the same era: an award winning book Purge by Finnish-Estonian author and a documentary by Estonian Imbi Paju: Sisters across the Gulf of Finland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP9p9...

Did anyone else finish and say WHAT. I thought the ending was abrupt and thought I'd have another 10 pages or so to go. I hadn't realized the rest was epilogue and author's notes.

Tytti, thanks for all your insights. I don't know nearly as much about all of this as I should, I will definitely look into Purge.

I agree the end was abrupt, but I was expecting it to be because there didn't seem to be a good way to wrap it up without dragging us through more of the same for a long time. It might have been interesting to learn how the camps ended even though the people weren't fully liberated. I think I might have enjoyed a more adult version of this book.

An adult version: The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 or maybe One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. There are many others, memoirs mainly, but I don't know how many are available in English. Some are quite old, too. Probably there are books written in the Baltic countries from their perspective as well. Every nation/ethnic group has its own story, though they are pretty similar. I think in one of them there is a story of using frozen bodies as "logs" when building a railway because there isn't any wood that far up north. (That railway couldn't be used during the short summer, though.)

I'm not exactly sure when (most of) the forced labour camps were closed (the last one was closed in 1987), things started to get better after Stalin died in 1953 and people started to get rehabilitated , especially after 1956. I recall that some POWs were allowed to return in 1954, the last Finn who returned was released in 1958, 14 years after the war. (There are also stories about American and British POWs from WWII, the Korean War and even from Vietnam kept in the camps.) In any case it wasn't very spectacular, I guess if they were lucky they were just put in trains, maybe not even that. Some just stayed in nearby towns, maybe they were deported as children and had nowhere to go.

Btw, I am guessing most of you are Americans... How do you feel about the fact that at the same time when all this was happening (and had been for over a decade), USA started supplying USSR with a massive amount of all kinds of military help and also food etc. as was agreed in the Lend-Lease Act? I have always thought that it is "interesting" that democratic countries invaded by USSR didn't get any help but the dictatorship that had slaved them did. (Also the Yalta Conference is often seen as a betrayal of the Eastern Europe by the Western powers.) And if the Soviet Union hadn't occupied half of Poland and the Baltic countries, Germany couldn't have attacked it in the beginning of the Operation Barbarossa because there was about four countries between them before the war. And then we get blamed for siding with Germany to keep our independence and the Soviet troops out of our country, even our Jewish veterans have been accused of being fascists...