This book is the sequel to the Tattooist of Auschwitz. It follows the anguishing story of a 16 year old girl who survives Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps, only to be condemned by the Russians, to 15 years in a Gulag in Siberia. It is fiction based on historical fact.
During her time in Nazi concentration camps the 16 year old girl is allowed to stay alive only by allowing the high ranking officers to abuse her. And who are we to judge? She is judged by the Russian “liberators” to be a collaborator, having slept with the enemy and endures another torturous time in another camp in the frozen wastes of Northern Russia.
The Red army may have helped bring the second world war to an end but Stalins Russia was never really one of our true allies. I’m not going to divulge the story, because you should read it, but I learnt a lot about the gulags and Russia at that time.
The Gulags were created by Stalin to rid the state of its enemies and make them work until they dropped. Stalins communism was just a different type of Nazi-ism. He wished to purge Russia of Chechens, Crimean Tartars and Volga Germans by using hard labour and starvation. Add to this Poles, Jews, Ukrainians . Then there were German prisoners of war, war criminals and Russian soldiers who had surrendered. oh and political prisoners too. All done on a far larger scale than Hitler. Over eighteen million went through the system until Stalins death in 1953. He really was a monster. They reckon 6 million died.
In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (colloquially referred to simply as “camps”) and 423 labor colonies in the Soviet Union.