When World War II broke out in 1939, Julius Margolin had just returned to his native Poland from the Land of Israel—three years after making aliyah—to attend to some business. He soon found himself in the Soviet-occupied portion of the country and, the next year, was exiled to one of Stalin’s vast network of prison camps, where he remained until 1946, after which he returned to Palestine. According to the historian Timothy Snyder, Margolin’s memoir of this period is perhaps the very best personal account of the Gulag. Snyder writes in his foreword to the recently published English translation:
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More about: Anti-Semitism, Communism, Jean-Paul Sartre, Nazi-Soviet Pact, Soviet Jewry, Soviet Union