Elinor Lipper

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Elinor Lipper (born July 5, 1912 in Brussels , † October 9, 2008 in Ticino ) was an author and translator . As a staunch communist , she became an employee of the Comintern and, after emigrating to the Soviet Union in 1937, finally became a victim of the Great Terror and as a camp inmate witnessed the terror in the Soviet Gulag . Her book Eleven Years in Soviet Prisons and Camps , published in 1950, is considered to be one of the first detailed German-language reports on thisKolyma area , a notorious area of penal camps in the Russian Far East , where hundreds of thousands of prisoners had to dig for gold and other precious metals under inhumane conditions in the arctic cold .

Life

youth

Lipper was born as the daughter of the Jewish - German businessman Oskar Salomon Lipper and her mother Lilli from the Netherlands . The parents divorced. The mother moved to The Hague with her daughter Elinor , the father to Switzerland .

From 1931 she studied medicine , first in Freiburg , then in Berlin , where she became a supporter of communism . She fled from National Socialism and the threat of persecution for spreading Marxist literature to Switzerland, where she studied psychotherapy . There she worked for the Communist International out of conviction . In order for her to receive Swiss citizenship , people from the Communist International arranged a marriage of convenience with the Swiss Konrad Vetterli.

Captivity in the Soviet gulag

When arbitrary arrests were the order of the day in the Soviet Union during the Great Terror , Elinor Lipper traveled to Moscow in 1937 despite urgent warnings about the political situation in the country to work as an editor at the publishing house for foreign literature . There she lived in the Hotel Lux , which had functioned as the Comintern guest house since 1933 and in which mostly German exiles were quartered in the 1930s. In Moscow, she met Berta Zimmermann (1902-1937) who, originally from Switzerland, wife of Fritz Platten (1883-1942), a Swiss Communists and personal friend of Lenin , which he in 1917 after the Russian Revolution of February 1917 , the return from exile in from Switzerland to Russia and saved his life in an attack the following year. It is possible that this acquaintance was also fateful for Elinor Lipper, because both were later executed; Zimmermann on December 2, 1937 and Platten a few years later on April 22, 1942, Lenin's birthday. On the night of July 26, 1937, she was arrested by the Soviet secret police and imprisoned in their Lubyanka prison for fourteen months. She was threatened with the sentence "death by shooting". On September 8 and October 14, 1938, she was sentenced to five years in a camp for counterrevolutionary activity.

It was finally to Siberia in a Gulag - labor camp in the River Kolyma deported. The Kolyma area was a notorious penal area in the Russian Far East. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners, including foreigners and prisoners of war, had to dig for gold and other precious metals under inhumane conditions in the icy arctic cold . There she had to suffer far longer than the five years because of the outbreak of World War II , as the Soviet Union did not release any prisoners during the war. Elinor Lipper was only released from the Gulag in autumn 1946. During her detention, she was on the verge of death twice from starvation and exhaustion. She was fortunate that she was able to work in hospital wards as a former medical student. After she was released from Kolyma, she was transferred from transit prison to transit prison. During this time she gave birth to their daughter Genia, who had emerged from a love affair with a prisoner doctor. In June 1948 she finally came to Switzerland with her child. She continued to suffer from the aftermath of her imprisonment for a long time; had a nervous breakdown and unbalanced balance for months.

Elinor Lipper as a witness to the terror in the post-war period

At the end of 1950 in Paris , she supported the political activist David Rousset as a witness in the trial of the Soviet camps . He was referred to by left-wing French media as a "Trotskyste falsificateur" ( Trotskyist forger) after reports published by him and stimulated investigations into the Soviet prison camps . Elinor Lipper reported on her experiences and the atrocities in these labor camps. It was a public appearance as part of the case brought by Rousset libel lawsuit against a magazine of the French Communists , who took courage at that time, because public opinion in France was mostly positive about the Soviet Union, the Communist press critics attacked Stalinism as Rousset and Lipper and may call them liars. In May 1951 she took part in a tribunal against the Soviet camp system in Brussels , also as a witness.

She wrote a book about her observations: Eleven Years in Soviet Prisons and Camps . The work, which was published in 16 languages, was also set to music as an audio book several years after its publication. The German political scientist Siegfried Jenkner (1930–2018) paid tribute to them in his bibliography Memories of Political Prisoners at the GULAG and said that the book was the first detailed German-language report on the penal area in the Russian Far East.

This book and conversations with Elinor Lipper inspired the Austrian publicist Robert Neumann (1897–1975) to write his novel The Puppets of Poshansk .

Through the English translation of her book in 1951, it became known how the American Vice President Henry A. Wallace had been deceived by the NKVD about the use of Gulag prisoners in gold mining during his visit to Siberia in Magadan in May 1944 .

Retreat into private life and work as a translator

In 1951 Elinor Lipper married the Jewish tropical medicine specialist Just Robert Català and lived with her family in Ticino . She was still working as a translator, mainly from French into German. Her daughter Genia Català is also a translator. Elinor Lipper died in October 2008 at the age of 96.

The Icelandic political scientist Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson described her as a European cosmopolitan in an article published in 2018 .

plant

  • Eleven years in Soviet prisons and camps. Verlag Oprecht, Zurich 1950. As an audio book: RADIOROPA audio book, 2008, ISBN 978-3836801560 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Introductory Mirjam Sprau: Kolyma and Magadan. Economy and camp in the northeast of the Soviet Union . In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (ed.): Gulag. Texts and Documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 80–91, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
  2. ^ A b c Siegfried Jenkner: Memories of political prisoners at the GULAG (PDF file). Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism (Ed.), Dresden, 2003.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g Gissurarson, Hannes Holmsteinn: The Survivor - ELINOR LIPPER - A Brief Note on a Little-Known Episode of the Cold War, Reykjavik February 19, 2018
  4. ↑ a b c d e f Lucien Scherrer: Witness of Terror - how the Swiss Elinor Lipper revealed the truth about the «Gulag Archipelago» , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , November 29, 2020
  5. ^ Günther Stocker: Between horror and grotesque. Robert Neumann's Gulag novel The Poshansk Puppets and Cold War Culture. Between horror and grotesquerie. Robert Neumann's Gulag novel Insurrection in Poshansk and cold war culture . In: ILCEA. Revue de l'Institut des langues et cultures d'Europe, Amérique, Afrique, Asie et Australie . Issue 16-2012. (La culture progressiste à l'époque de la guerre froide) .
  6. ^ Robert Neumann: The Poshansk Dolls (1952). Kurt Desch publishing house , Munich, 1952.
  7. ↑ Perversion of Faith. In: Der Spiegel . No. 53 , 1952 ( online - Aug. 25, 1952 ).
  8. ^ Vadim J. Birstein: Three days in “Auschwitz without Gaz Chambers”: Henry A. Wallace's Visit to Magadan in 1944 . (CWIHP e-Dossier No. 34). 2012.
  9. ↑ Elonor Catala-Lipper's obituary in the Tribune de Genève of October 13, 2008, www.hommages.ch, accessed on December 6, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Lipper, Elinor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Prisoners in the gulag
DATE OF BIRTH July 5, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Brussels
DATE OF DEATH October 9, 2008
Place of death Ticino