A World Apart

"Gustaw Herling-Grudziński was a Pole who was captured by the Russians after their invasion of Poland in 1939. He wasn’t in the Gulag for long – only a couple of years, until 1941 – but what I like about his book is that, unlike many memoirs, it’s not just about his story or what happened to him. It’s more like a series of short stories , of the kind written by [Varlam] Shalamov or one of the Gulag novelists. Each chapter is a story about a different person or situation, together with an accompanying set of thoughts or meditations. In this sense, A World Apart also resembles Primo Levi’s book about the Holocaust . Like Levi, he is interested in how different people reacted to the conditions of the camps. How did people fit into this new moral order? Did their good qualities survive? Did they become evil like the system? Did they keep their humanity or not? He doesn’t answer yes or no, but shows how people wrestled with these dilemmas. This is a memoir, but it’s also a book about human morality in an extreme situation. Many people were in labour camps of various kinds between 1938 and 1953. But not many wanted to talk about it in this kind of depth – not even Herling-Grudziński. At the end of the war, he writes, he was approached by someone who wanted to tell him a horrible story about his experiences in a camp, and he backed away: Now that he was free, he didn’t want to hear about it or be part of it any more. It’s one of the two or three best Gulag memoirs. It came our very quickly, right after the war. It lifted the lid, although it didn’t have as deep an impact as Solzhenitsyn. A lot of people didn’t believe it, they thought the author was naturally anti-Soviet because he was Polish."