Julius Margolin

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Julius Margolin ( Russian Юлий (Юлиус) Борисович Марголин ), ( October 14, 1900 in Pinsk - January 21,  1971 in Tel Aviv ) was a Russian-speaking writer and Zionist activist. He wrote a highly regarded book about his five years imprisonment in the Soviet gulag .

Life

Margolin was born in Pinsk (western Belarus, then the Russian Empire ). He studied philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin , completing his studies with a doctorate. He then settled in Poland, from where he emigrated to Palestine in 1936.

In the late summer of 1939 he visited his relatives in Pinsk and was surprised by the Soviet invasion . Together with numerous other "socially dangerous elements" he was deported by the NKVD to a labor camp on the northern bank of Lake Onega . He survived and was released as a former Polish citizen in 1945. In 1946 he was allowed to return to Poland, from where he traveled to Palestine . He immediately began to write down his memories of the gulag and finished the manuscript in 1947.

His manuscript was rejected by Israeli publishers. A shortened version was published in France in 1949. The book was printed in 1952 by the Chekhov publishing house in New York, run by Russian emigrants (also abridged) in Russian. (See below for details)

In 1951, Margolin testified in favor of the plaintiff as a witness in the defamation trial brought by the writer David Rousset against the communist magazine Les Lettres françaises , extensively confirming the existence of Soviet concentration camps. Rousset won the trial.

Publication history

  • 1949: La condition inhumaine. Cinq ans dans les camps de concentration Sovietiques (for example: Inhuman conditions. Five years in Soviet concentration camps )
  • 1952: Марголин Ю. Б. "Путешествие в страну зэ-ка". Chekhov Publishing House, New York
    • several reprints
  • 1965: survival is everything. Records from Soviet camps . J. Pfeiffer Verlag Munich.
  • Individual chapters of the book appeared in magazines.
  • 2010: Voyage au pays des Ze-Ka . First complete edition. Over a third of the text had never been published before.
  • 2013 - trip to the land of the camps . Suhrkamp Verlag, November 2013, ISBN 978-3518424063 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ biographical information according to Eastern Europe , 11-12.2014, p. 81.
  2. ^ Gaby Levin: A body broken, but free Haaretz , January 21, 2011
  3. ↑ Olga Radetzkaja: The lonely witness, Julius Margolin and his report from the underworld; in: Julius Margolin, Journey to the Land of the Camps . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-42406-3 , pp. 626 .
  4. ^ Michel Winock: La Gauche en France. Paris 2006, p. 198.
  5. ^ Translated by N. Berberova & Mina Journot. November 1949. Calmann-Levi, Editeurs, Paris.
  6. ↑ Luba Jurgenson (ed.), Le Bruit du temps, Paris. www.lebruitdutemps.fr .
  7. ↑ spiegel.de: slave service for Stalin , suhrkamp.de
personal data
SURNAME Margolin, Julius
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Марголин, Юлий Борисович (Russian); Марголин, Юлиус Борисович
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lithuanian writer and political activist
DATE OF BIRTH October 14, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Pinsk
DATE OF DEATH January 21, 1971
Place of death Tel Aviv