Erma's comments (member since Jun 03, 2009)

Erma's comments from the White Nights group.

Tom wrote: "Wow, fascinating stuff, Erma, especially your family connection to this place -- "This is our future." What a chilling line!

Ever read Chekhov's account of his travels to Siberia and the penal ..."

Hi Tom,

I'm familiar with Chekhov's book of letters about his travels to the czarist penal colony in Russia's severe north but haven't read it. Of course, he wasn't sentenced but I believe comissioned to write about the settlements there(??) But still, the extreme brutality and isolation of the land is only further documented. I will pick it up and read it, but mainly because it's Chekhov. Thanks.

Archangel (under the Stalinist regime) is definitely a part of Russia's painful past, but how much they actually remember it or even acknowledge it today I can't really say (probably not as much as they should). And are there even memorials up there for the countless victims? In my father's immediate world (south-western Belarus; actually, same location as movie Defiance), thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children were put in boxcars and sent about 1,000 miles north to Archangel to work, starve and die.

As my father's translator, it's difficult work (on the emotional level) when it hits so close to home. I never really knew my father because he died when I was quite young. It would have been nice to just sit and talk.

Hello White Nights,

Just finished reading The House by the Dvina, which is an amazing memoir beginning with the years leading up to the Russian Revolution to 1920. Much of the book takes place in the Russian Arctic town of Archangel (Arkhangelsk), where the author was born.

This brings me to the point of discussion -- Archangel itself and its mention in literature. Though times were tough in The House by the Dvina, after the book's end, from 1923-1939 the Solovetski Islands just off Archangel became one of the most brutal and feared gulags of the Stalinist era. A point of reference here - Solzhenitsyn had a lot to say about Solovki (diminutive form) in Gulag Archipelago, "A scream would never be heard."

Also, my father, Theodore Odrach, who wrote Wave of Terror (which I translated) and who himself was slated for Archangel before his escape, writes in chapter 14 of his book, "We heard they were headed for Arkhangelsk, far, far away in the north, on the White Sea. The sun hardly rises over the horizon there in the wintertime and it's always cold. They say the people have to work sixteen-hour days, and all they have to eat is gruel and rotten fish. This is our future." (For anyone interested, Wave of Terror is Publishers Weekly and TLS approved.)

And now an absolutely fascinating find!!! Escape from Archangel: An American Merchant Seaman at War by Thomas E. Simmon, 2007. Haven't read it yet, but it's a true story about an American merchant marine (Jac Smith), who is imprisoned in the Archangel gulag. Managing to escape, he makes a laborious and incredible 900 mile trek to freedom. The dangers merchant seamen endured while keeping the goods flowing during WWII!

For anyone interested in Archangel (such an 'angelic' name for what was really the town of horrors), you might want to check out some of the above titles. Any input or added info would be appreciated.