Julius Margolin (russian: Юлий (Юлиус) Борисович Марголин, October 14, 1900 – January 21, 1971) was a

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...

-born

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

i writer and political activist. He was the author of ''A Journey to the Land Ze-Ka'' (Путешествие в страну Зэ-Ка).

Biography

Margolin was born in Pinsk,

. He studied at the

Humboldt University of Berlin Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...

. Margolin received his doctorate in philosophy in 1929. He then moved to

Łódź Łódź, also rendered in English as Lodz, is a city in central Poland and a former industrial centre. It is the capital of Łódź Voivodeship, and is located approximately south-west of Warsaw. The city's coat of arms is an example of canti ...

, Poland, and later, in 1936, to

Palestine __NOTOC__ Palestine may refer to: * State of Palestine, a state in Western Asia * Palestine (region), a geographic region in Western Asia * Palestinian territories, territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely the West Bank (including East ...

. Three years later he was visiting his relatives in Pinsk and was trapped there by the

Soviet invasion of Poland The Soviet invasion of Poland was a military operation by the Soviet Union without a formal declaration of war. On 17 September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, 16 days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west. Subse ...

. Together with numerous other "socially dangerous elements", he was rounded up by the

NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. ...

and sent to a

labor camp A labor camp (or labour camp, see spelling differences) or work camp is a detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons (especi ...

on the northern bank of the Lake Onega. He survived, and was freed in 1945 as a former Polish citizen according to the agreement with Poland. In 1946, he was permitted to return to Poland. He

emigrated Emigration is the act of leaving a resident country or place of residence with the intent to settle elsewhere (to permanently leave a country). Conversely, immigration describes the movement of people into one country from another (to permanentl ...

to Palestine, settling in

Tel Aviv Tel Aviv-Yafo ( he, תֵּל־אָבִיב-יָפוֹ, translit=Tēl-ʾĀvīv-Yāfō ; ar, تَلّ أَبِيب – يَافَا, translit=Tall ʾAbīb-Yāfā, links=no), often referred to as just Tel Aviv, is the most populous city in the G ...

Literary career

He completed ''A Journey to the Land Ze-Ka'' in 1947, when

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repress ...

had just been sent to the

gulag The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...

. It was impossible to publish such a book about the Soviet Union in the West at that time, immediately after

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. The manuscript was also rejected by publishers in

. An abridged version was published in France in 1949.Gaby Levi
A Body Broken, But Free

Haaretz ''Haaretz'' ( , originally ''Ḥadshot Haaretz'' – , ) is an Israeli newspaper. It was founded in 1918, making it the longest running newspaper currently in print in Israel, and is now published in both Hebrew and English in the Berliner f ...

21.01.2011 The book was printed in the United States in 1952 by (also abridged), and was reprinted in 1975. In 1951, Margolin testified at the trial of

David Rousset David Rousset (18 January 1912 in Roanne, Loire – 13 December 1997) was a French writer and political activist, a recipient of Prix Renaudot, a French literary award. A survivor of the Neuengamme concentration camp and the Buchenwald Nazi ...

, who was accused of revealing information about the gulag to the French public.

Published works

*1949 - Margoline Jules. ''La condition inhumaine. Cinq ans dans les camps de concentration Sovietiques'' Traduit par N. Berberova & Mina Journot. Novembre 1949. Calmann-Levi, Editeurs, Paris. *1952 - Марголин Ю. Б. "Путешествие в страну зэ-ка", 414 стр. Chekhov Publishing House, New York **Reprinted several times in various places *1965 - Julius Margolin ''Uberleben ist alles. Aufzeichnungen aus sowietischen Lagern'', Munchen, *Separate chapters from the book were also published in various magazines. *2010 - Julius Margolin, ''Voyage au pays des Ze-Ka''. The first complete edition (more than 1/3 of the text had never been published before in any language). Edited by

Luba Jurgenson Luba Jurgenson et, Ljuba Jürgenson, russian: Люба (ou Любовь) Юргенсон (born 1 July 1958) is a French-speaking woman of letters. She is also a translator, a maître de conférences and codirector (with Anne Coldefy-Faucard) of t ...

. October 2010, Le Bruit du temps, Paris
More information here
*2013 - ''Reise in das Land der Lager''. Suhrkamp Verlag, November 2013, .spiegel.de

/ref> *2013 - Julius Margolin, ''"Podróż do krainy zeków"'', translated by Jerzy Czech, Czarne publishing house,

References

External links

Forgotten Witness to the GulagПутешествие в страну зэ-ка ''A Travel to the Land Ze-Ka'', as published in the book

(

KOI8-R KOI8-R (RFC 1489) is an 8-bit character encoding, derived from the KOI-8 encoding by the programmer Andrei Chernov in 1993 and designed to cover Russian, which uses a Cyrillic alphabet. KOI8-R was based on Russian Morse code, which was created fr ...

encoding) {{DEFAULTSORT:Margolin, Julius 1900 births 1971 deaths Writers from Pinsk People from Pinsky Uyezd Jews from the Russian Empire Belarusian Jews Polish emigrants to Mandatory Palestine Foreign Gulag detainees Israeli non-fiction writers Jewish Gulag detainees 20th-century non-fiction writers

Biography

Literary career

Published works

See also

References

External links