Karlo Štajner spent seven thousand days in Siberia and learned nothing. Of course the reader is moved by the awfulness of spending all that time in the Gulag, but still he is left only with the experience of a man who survived. Yet, for better or for worse, for many of the named victims, Štajner’s book is the only memorial.
When Štajner singles out a General Brodis, the crime becomes vivid: “After breakfast, I saw General Brodis putting his possessions into a bundle. He took off his slippers (which I had always envied, since it was hard to walk around the cell wearing shoes all the time), placed them on top of the bundle, and then handed me everything, saying: ‘You have been a friend to me. Please keep this as a souvenir; I won’t need it anymore.'”
Such honesty makes Štajner’s book difficult to ignore on a purely human level. And the constant emphasis on sleeping, eating, and excreting under the most horrendous circumstances of months upon months of 30 and 40 below zero reinforces our understanding of what actually did happen. (Unfortunately, the closer you get to the actual truth of the Gulag, the more difficult it is to live with the happy-go-lucky Soviet-American relations.)
Karlo Štajner is an Austrian who worked many years for the Yugoslav Communist Party. A dedicated activist, he arrived in Moscow on September 14, 1932, to work for the Comintern. In due course he was arrested and framed for being a Gestapo agent. Sentenced to ten years in Siberia, he was “tried” again at the end of his first hitch and given an additional ten years for “anti-Soviet behavior.”
Štajner served out both sentences and would probably have died in Siberia had not Tito asked Khmshchev for an accounting of 113 Yugoslav Communist Party members sent to Siberia by Stalin. Two days after Tito’s query, Khrushchev replied, “Exactly one hundred are no longer of this world.”
Štajner’s book was published in Yugoslavia in Serbian, because it served to lay out the differences between Tito and Stalin, between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. In a way, it also served to hide the existence of concentration camps in Yugoslavia, where opponents of Tito, branded as agents of Stalin, were imprisoned. One such camp at the Naked Island (Goli Otok) was detailed in Venko Markovski’s memoir, Goli Otok, The Island of Death, published in Bulgaria, where it served to emphasize the differences between the Bulgarians and the Yugoslavs and to obscure the camps in Bulgaria, and so on . . . )
The reader has no recourse but to go to Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago for the actual truth of the camps. They were not created by accident, despite anything that Štajner (who remains a Communist to this day) might think. The camps were set up by Lenin himself as early as December 1917—two months after the October coup. Perhaps Štajner needed the fiction of blaming Stalin for the camps as a way to keep his faith in Communism. Sadly, the reader is left just with horror.
Politics, as Štajner’s book makes it very clear, do matter and do have consequences, and it is good to read accounts like Štajner’s, flawed though they may be, to remind us that when only politics remain and when everything becomes political, camps become necessary.
There are, however, other books, like What a Beautiful Sunday by Jorge Semprun, a former member of the Central Committee of the Spanish Communist Party (author of the screenplays for films like Z and La Guerre est finie). As a young man, Semprun survived Buchenwald, survived writing a falsified record of his experiences in the camp, survived being expelled from the party, survived with the illusion that there were distinctions between the Nazi and the Communist camps—survived until an April 11, 1975, appearance of Solzhenitsyn on French television convinced him that he was one of the good left-wingers who condemn the camps while approving of everything that set them up in the first place.
What A Beautiful Sunday, a memoir of Semprun’s encounter with Solzhenitsyn, unlike Štajner’s Seven Thousand Days in Siberia, is the right book for gaining an understanding of how this century has come to be dorminated by the image of the Camp, and why we are all likely to see many more of them, all set up in the best interests of the people.
[Seven Thousand Days in Siberia, by Karlo Štajner (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) $30.00]
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