Yuli Margolin: An Early Voice From the Gulag
January 4, 2011
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In 1947, Yuli Margolin, recently released from Siberia, finished an 800 page book, "Trip to the Land of Ze-kas". He intended it not only to function as witness to the horrors he had seen, but a way to save for posterity the memories of fellow prisoners who he feared would otherwise be forgotten.
Margolin was afflicted with particularly bad timing. Returning from Palestine in 1939 to his birthplace in the USSR, he found himself imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag. Unlike many of his fellow forced labourers, he was able to return to Palestine in 1946. Unfortunately, his chilling message about Stalinist oppression fell on deaf ears. With the guns of war freshly silenced, the ears of the world still rang with the politically expedient praise lavished upon Stalin and upon the USSR as the price of harmony among wartime allies. While news of Hitler's genocide was accepted, the idea that he had been defeated with the aid of yet another criminal and mass murderer was not something the world was then ready to consider.
It was not until 1962 that One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was published in the USSR and soon followed by translations into other languages. This unprecedented expose of communist brutality had already been preceded by Communist Party Secretary Nikita Krushchev's famous "secret speech" at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR in which he slammed the brutality of the USSR under Stalin. By that time, Margolin's trail blazing and detailed recollection of his prison years had been eclipsed by Solzhenytsyn's better timed work.
January 21st will mark the 40th anniversary of the death of Margolis, The Forward notes. His memoir has been translated into French but has yet to be translated into English. Snubbed by fame, there is much to learn from a study of Margolin's life. Despite having been wounded fighting off Bolshevik invaders of Poland in 1920, Margolin was snubbed later on in the late 1930's when Poland was engulfed by a wave of anti semitism that would not have seemed out of place in neighbouring Germany.
Even in Israel, there were far too many people who were blinded by their politics and refused to believe what Margolin had to say. Fortunately, Margolin was not completely alone in his lonely witness to truth. Arthur Koestler advocated in vain for Margolin to English language publishers. Le Figaro, a conservative French newspaper serialised his book, which still remained far from the limelight of public attention.
In a perfect world, the truth would shape history. Unfortunately, we try to make the truth our servant in the service of ideologies we wish to serve and promote. Such willful moral blindness comes with a price tag that can not be itemised in dollars and cents but as a body count. In looking back on Yuli Margolin's early and unheeded message, one feels impelled to ask how many early and unwelcome messengers there are not only in past generations, but our own as well.
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