My Journey: How One Woman Survived Stalin’s Gulag
by Olga Adamova-Sliozberg
Translated by Katherine
Gratwick Baker ’55
Northwestern University Press, August 2011
In the spring of 1936, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg’s husband, a professor at Moscow State University, was arrested and accused of being a Trotskyite. A short time later, Adamova-Sliozberg herself was arrested as the wife of “an enemy of the people.” Torn from her children, she spent a decade subjected to grueling interrogations and a prison regime designed to crush inmates both physically and psychologically. Released in 1946, she was rearrested three years later and spent another seven years imprisoned and then exiled in Kazakhstan.
After her first year in prison, the author began to “write” her memoirs in her head every night (paper and pencils were unavailable to prisoners), chronicling the day-to-day story of her own survival, as well as the stories of the many men and women who suffered along with her. Her story, translated from the Russian by Katherine Gratwick Baker, gives voice to the millions who passed through the slave labor camps in Stalin’s Soviet Union.