‘WE ARE NOT CATTLE, WE’RE PEOPLE:’ EVERYDAY HELL IN STALIN’S LABOR CAMPS.

The book starts with an arduous journey through a country Grinkeviciute and her fellow deportees don’t see as theirs (the USSR annexed Lithuania in 1940, and mass deportations began shortly before the German invasion the following year). They are brought to Siberia and left on an island with no vegetation, where they have to build a fish processing factory — but first, a place for themselves to live. Starvation, hard labour and diseases are such that many don’t make it through the winter, and those who do are reduced to a pitiable state, constantly looking for anything that can be burned or eaten. ‘We are not cattle, we’re people,’ Grinkeviciute repeats as she records it all. ‘Nor must we ever forget it.’

Reading the book, it is hard to decide what’s more horrific: to go through this everyday hell when you are ‘14 going on 20’, or to relive it when you are 20 and waiting for the nightmare to start again. Is the author a survivor trying to deal with her trauma, or a writer capable of saying things that cannot be imagined?

Flash-forward to the 21st century, and totalitarian socialist regimes continue to be totalitarian socialist regimes: “Gay McDougall, a member of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, cited estimates that 2 million Uighurs and Muslim minorities were forced into ‘political camps for indoctrination’ in [China’s] western Xinjiang autonomous region.”