journal Kultura and occasionally writing for the Italian press. He returned “home” to Poland for the first time only in 1991, after the collapse of the Communist regime.
Herling wrote his Gulag memoir A World Apart immediately after the war’s end. In part an account of his own experiences, the book is more accurately described not as a memoir but as an exploration of the different human reactions to life in an inhuman place. It could not be published in Communist Poland, but it did appear in English in 1951, twenty years before Solzhenitsyn’s writings. But although it had a preface by Bertrand Russell and was admired by Albert Camus, Herling’s book never won wide renown in the West. Because its author was a Pole, it was considered too biased, too “anti-Soviet” to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, A World Apart did eventually appear illegally in Poland’s underground press, where its impact was little short of revolutionary. Adam Michnik, one of Poland’s best-known dissidents, wrote at the time of Herling’s death that reading A World Apart at the age of fifteen had been a “shock”: “All of the Communists’ propaganda was reduced to nothing. I understood that every day, in school, in books, in the newspapers, they are lying to me.”
The selection that follows describes an aspect of camp life which is rarely discussed elsewhere: the “house of meetings,” the special barrack where prisoners were occasionally allowed to meet family members, usually their wives. Although memoirists often describe the world of the camps as separate from the “real” world, there were contacts between the two. Recent research has shown that it was possible to exchange letters more frequently than had long been assumed, at least in some camps and in some periods. Prisoners could also receive packages, and in the worst years a bar of chocolate or a hunk of lard from home might have been enough to save a life. Nevertheless, misunderstandings often arose between Gulag prisoners and their free family members–owing not least to the profound differences in the moral codes inside and outside the camp–and it is these which interest Herling the most.
The House of Meetings
Dom svidaniy, literally “the house of meetings,” was the name which we gave to a newly built wing of the guardhouse, where prisoners were allowed to spend between one and three days with their relatives, who had come from all parts of Russia to the Kargopol camp for this short visit. Its topographic situation in the camp zone was to some extent symbolic: our entrance to the barrack was through the guardhouse, from the zone, and the way out was already on the other side of the barbed wire, at liberty. Thus it was easy to think that the house in which the prisoners saw their relatives for the first time after so many years was on the borderline between freedom and slavery; a prisoner, shaved, washed, and neatly dressed, having shown his pass and the official permit for the visit, walked through the partition straight into arms extended to him from liberty.
Permission for such a visit was granted only after the most complicated and trying procedure had been undergone by the prisoner as well as by his family. As far as I can remember, every prisoner was in theory allowed to have one visitor a year, but the majority of prisoners had to wait three, sometimes even five, years for it. The prisoner’s part was limited: when a year had passed from the moment of his arrest, he was free to present to the Third Section 1 a written request for a visit, together with a letter from his family, which made it quite unmistakably clear that one of them wished to see him, and a certificate of his good behavior, both at work and in the barrack, from the camp authorities. This meant that a prisoner who wanted to see his mother or his wife had to work at the level of at least the second cauldron, 2 or full norm, for a year; the inhabitants of the mortuary were as a rule
Herling wrote his Gulag memoir A World Apart immediately after the war’s end. In part an account of his own experiences, the book is more accurately described not as a memoir but as an exploration of the different human reactions to life in an inhuman place. It could not be published in Communist Poland, but it did appear in English in 1951, twenty years before Solzhenitsyn’s writings. But although it had a preface by Bertrand Russell and was admired by Albert Camus, Herling’s book never won wide renown in the West. Because its author was a Pole, it was considered too biased, too “anti-Soviet” to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, A World Apart did eventually appear illegally in Poland’s underground press, where its impact was little short of revolutionary. Adam Michnik, one of Poland’s best-known dissidents, wrote at the time of Herling’s death that reading A World Apart at the age of fifteen had been a “shock”: “All of the Communists’ propaganda was reduced to nothing. I understood that every day, in school, in books, in the newspapers, they are lying to me.”
The selection that follows describes an aspect of camp life which is rarely discussed elsewhere: the “house of meetings,” the special barrack where prisoners were occasionally allowed to meet family members, usually their wives. Although memoirists often describe the world of the camps as separate from the “real” world, there were contacts between the two. Recent research has shown that it was possible to exchange letters more frequently than had long been assumed, at least in some camps and in some periods. Prisoners could also receive packages, and in the worst years a bar of chocolate or a hunk of lard from home might have been enough to save a life. Nevertheless, misunderstandings often arose between Gulag prisoners and their free family members–owing not least to the profound differences in the moral codes inside and outside the camp–and it is these which interest Herling the most.
The House of Meetings
Dom svidaniy, literally “the house of meetings,” was the name which we gave to a newly built wing of the guardhouse, where prisoners were allowed to spend between one and three days with their relatives, who had come from all parts of Russia to the Kargopol camp for this short visit. Its topographic situation in the camp zone was to some extent symbolic: our entrance to the barrack was through the guardhouse, from the zone, and the way out was already on the other side of the barbed wire, at liberty. Thus it was easy to think that the house in which the prisoners saw their relatives for the first time after so many years was on the borderline between freedom and slavery; a prisoner, shaved, washed, and neatly dressed, having shown his pass and the official permit for the visit, walked through the partition straight into arms extended to him from liberty.
Permission for such a visit was granted only after the most complicated and trying procedure had been undergone by the prisoner as well as by his family. As far as I can remember, every prisoner was in theory allowed to have one visitor a year, but the majority of prisoners had to wait three, sometimes even five, years for it. The prisoner’s part was limited: when a year had passed from the moment of his arrest, he was free to present to the Third Section 1 a written request for a visit, together with a letter from his family, which made it quite unmistakably clear that one of them wished to see him, and a certificate of his good behavior, both at work and in the barrack, from the camp authorities. This meant that a prisoner who wanted to see his mother or his wife had to work at the level of at least the second cauldron, 2 or full norm, for a year; the inhabitants of the mortuary were as a rule
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