Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Julius Margolin was born in 1900 in Pinsk. After studying philosophy in Germany in the 1920s he moved to Poland with his family, where he became active in Revisionist Zionism  and published a Yiddish book on poetry. From there he and his family moved to Palestine. For economic reasons, Margolin returned to Poland in 1936, where he was trapped by the Nazi invasion, and was eventually imprisoned in Soviet labor camps. In July, 1945 he was released and made his way back to Tel Aviv, where he wrote a pioneering memoir of the Gulag and died in 1971. The full text of Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back was not published in his lifetime. After my release from Maxik’s hospital, having had an opportunity to rest, and armed with certification as an invalid, I returned to the camp regime. In Kruglitsa, a certified invalid with a higher education has a wealth of possibilities. You can choose: assist the work supervisor in compiling the lists of personnel in the brigades; work in the Cultural-Educational Sector (KVCh); or be an orderly in the barrack. Until a prisoner is taken off the official work register, he will not be sent to such unproductive work. The place for a healthy, able person is in the forest or field, where hands and shoulders are needed. The work boss will not allow an able-bodied worker to have an office or service job. An invalid is another matter. Whatever he is able and willing to do without being obliged to do so is a pure gain for the state. At first, I was amused at the accessibility of work from which I had been barred as a third-category worker. When they found out that Margolin had been deactivated, people immediately invited me to work in various places, and I succumbed to temptation. An invalid is allotted the first level food ration and 400 grams of bread. By working, I received the second level and 500 grams. For an entire month, I tried various places. After a ten-week stay in the hospital, it was pleasant to be occupied and to be listed in a job. After a month, however, I came to feel that I had been deactivated for a reason. I lacked strength. The job with the work supervisor dragged on until late at night. Work at the KVCh entailed being in motion all day, making the rounds of the barracks, rising before reveille. As a worker in the Cultural-Educational Sector, I had to get up an hour before everyone else: by the time the brigades went out to work, I had to list on the huge board at the gate the percentage of the norm that each brigade had fulfilled the previous day. A worker calculated these norms in the headquarters at night and, before going to sleep, he left the list for me in a desk drawer in the office. The camp was still sleeping, the dawn reddened behind the barracks, and the guards were dozing on the corner watchtowers, when I would climb with difficulty onto a stool that I had placed in front of the giant chart and begin writing in chalk on the blackened board the figures for the twenty brigades. This work bored me. The thought that as an invalid I was not obliged to endure this misery gave me no rest. I had been an invalid for an entire month and had not yet utilized the blessed right to do nothing; I had not taken advantage of my marvelous, unbelievable freedom. In the middle of the summer in 1943, I declared a grand vacation. At the same time, it represented a great fast: 400 grams of bread and a watery soup. It was June. Blue and yellow flowers bloomed in the flowerbeds in front of the headquarters; under the windows of the infirmary, the medical workers had planted potatoes and tobacco. In the morning, the patients crawled out to the sun and lay on the grass in their underwear or sunned themselves in the area around the barracks. When I went by, barefoot, in my mousy gray jacket without a belt, fastened by one wooden button near the collar, they shouted to me: “Margolin, you’re still alive? We thought you were gone already!” Without stopping, I went on to the farthest corner of the camp territory. I had a blanket, a little pencil, and paper. There was lots of paper: in the past month, I had hoarded a respect-able amount. I even had a little bottle of ink from my work in the KVCh. I would take a rest from people, the camp, work, and eternal fear. I lay on my back, watching the clouds float above Kruglitsa. A year earlier, I had worked in the bathhouse and ran into the forest for raspberries. Amazingly, then I was able to carry three hundred buckets of water a day. That year depleted me. Now there were no raspberries, but neither did I have to drag water buckets. I was satisfied; it was a profound rest. In the summer of 1943, a storm raged over Kursk, and Soviet communiqués spoke of gigantic battles, as if all the blood receded from this great country and flowed to the single effort in that one spot. One hardly saw healthy males in Kruglitsa. Women guarded the prisoners and conducted the brigades to work. Gavrilyuk, who the past summer had been a Stakhanovite wagoner, now, like me, had been retired from work, and women prisoners worked as wagon drivers in camp. Women, like reservists, went to the first line of work. We knew from the newspapers that, throughout the country, women were working as tractor drivers, in factories, and in the fields. The free men held the battle front while the male prisoners in the camp melted like snow in the spring sun and descended under the ground. I knew that in another year I would be weaker than I was at present.