Prisoner: Michael Solomon
“Our many frustrations seemed to have come to an end and our dreams closer to being realized when on the afternoon of the 7th of September, 1955, 14 men and one woman, all Romanian citizens, were put on a truck and taken to Magadan airport.” But Solomon’s incarceration was not yet over. He was transferred to Romania where he spent nine more years in prison. “Nine years of captivity were to follow that night I came ‘home.’ Seventeen years had gone out of my life; I was still a young man when I went in. If I do look back at those years of torture and terror in Kolyma, I can only ask myself: ‘Is there anything in the world more splendid, more precious, more irreplaceable than freedom?’”
Introduction
Survivors of the Gulag often found their former lives torn apart and irrecoverable after leaving the camps. Released prisoners experienced discrimination and alienation making living and working difficult. Those who did survive have contributed immensely to the documentation of the Gulag's history.
Movie Transcription
Across the former Soviet Union, millions lie in anonymous graves. Whether shot in a prison basement, or killed in Gulag camps by exhaustion, starvation, malnutrition-related illness, labor accident, or the violence of fellow prisoners and guards, millions died at the hands of Soviet terror.
Telling the story of the Gulag through the eyes of its prisoners inevitably excludes the stories of those millions who died. These victims did not make it out of the camps to publish memoirs. Their stories are buried beneath the grounds of Siberia, Kazakhstan and the whole of the former Soviet Union.
Even those who survived the camps emerged traumatized and brutalized. Readjusting to life outside the camps would be a struggle. Many former inmates maintained life-long bonds with their fellow inmates after leaving the camps, and many continue to struggle to keep the Gulag’s memory alive to prevent new human rights abuses in the countries of the former Soviet Union today.