A WORLD APART BY GUSTAV HERLING, WHICH WAS RECENTLY republished by Feltrinelli in paperback, should be consumed in one bitter gulp. Reading it in one go is like getting punched in the gut or slapped in the face. Your dignity will be offended. You’ll fear falling into the same circle of hell that he describes. It is a terrible and fertile text, a rare testimonial of the Soviet concentration camps and the barbaric acts that millions of victims suffered as a result of the Stalinist regime.
Gustav Herling was twenty years old when he decided in 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, to cross the Russian-Lithuanian border in the hope of organizing an anti-Nazi resistance movement in Russia. However, he was arrested by the Soviet police for his plan. This episode, which might seem bizarre, is actually a tragic paradox. In 1939 the U.S.S.R. and Germany had signed a non-aggression pact, the celebrated Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. Therefore, according to the Soviet secret police, Herling had indirectly conspired against the U.S.S.R. by trying to leave Poland to fight Germany. Young Gustav was deported to Yertsevo, a labour camp that was part of the prison district of Kargopol on the Baltic Sea. This camp, where prisoners worked as lumberjacks, was a veritable industrial centre, with railway lines and a village built entirely by the prisoners for the free personnel. The living conditions of the camp were barbaric. The men worked in temperatures of minus forty degrees. They worked constantly. They were massacred by work. They worked around the clock on only three grams of bread and a ladle of soup for sustenance.
With the skill of an historian, Herling describes the organizational hierarchy of the labour camp, and the relationship between the workers and authorities. There were three different levels of prisoners: the bytoviks or common criminals with short prison terms; the urkas, hardened criminals who were the true lords of the prison; and finally there were the byelorutchki, the political prisoners. The byelorutchki had the least hope of survival, since they were treated the worst and given the heaviest jobs. The urkas had the most rights over the other prisoners. They were responsible for making sure the work got done and that people respected the political structure of the camp. Herling describes them as terrible people: men who thought that freedom was as repugnant as the idea of a camp was for any normal person.
The majority of political prisoners were Bolsheviks or communists who had fought for the socialist cause. Stalinism had snaked its way through various institutions and generations. It was responsible for purging, deporting and imprisoning communist revolutionaries, officers and directors who had acquired too much power, or else common people who had transgressed Stalin’s ideology without realizing it. Informers were rife and were often used as an instrument to keep neighbours, colleagues or family members in check. People denounced each other to ruin a rival’s career, to get a promotion or to save their own skins. All this was common practice in Stalin’s Russia.
Work was the chosen method of oppression and torture in Soviet prison camps. It was intended to destroy the prisoners. Bodies were broken down by fatigue and fever. People went blind from a lack of vitamins. The only way to survive was to be hospitalized in the infirmary. The hospital was like a church, offering sanctuary from an all-powerful Inquisition. As a result, self-mutilation became common. As in the trenches during the First World War, when soldiers shot themselves in the hands or legs so they could be sent away from the battlefield, Soviet prisoners used their axes to amputate fingers, hands and legs. After noticing many such cases, the Soviet authorities decided to punish everyone, including those who had been wounded accidentally, by forcing them to continue working. “I saw a young prisoner make his way back from the forest with his foot cut off.”
There is a particularly touching character in A World Apart named Kostylev. His story is valuable not only because he offers a unique perspective on the camps, but also because he endows the book with a quality that transforms it into something more universal. Before being imprisoned Kostylev dedicated his life to the Bolshevik cause. He admired European communists as if they were saints and saw them as freedom fighters on a continent oppressed by the bourgeoisie. He learned French in order to understand the speeches of Maurice Thorez, general secretary of the French Communist Party. When he read Balzac, Stendhal and Constant, however, Kostylev discovered “a different air. I felt like a man who, without knowing it, had been suffocated his whole life.” After this experience as a reader, Kostylev changed his mind about the West and Bolshevism. He abandoned Party work and spent all his time reading, wanting to discover the truths that had been hidden from him. Foreign books, which he bought clandestinely, got him arrested. The secret police accused him of being a spy and tortured him until he confessed to false charges. When Herling and Kostylev met in prison, the latter had recently and deliberately burned his arm. Kostylev preferred to have a wounded and swollen arm rather than work for his warders. A friendship was born.
Exempted from work, Kostylev spent his days in the prison cabin, reading. Herling never understood how he managed to get the books, but he was not jealous. He felt only profound admiration. Reading had changed Kostylev. Yes, it had led to his being imprisoned, but it also continued to be the strongest affirmation of his humanity in that circle of hell. Preserving and conserving one’s humanity was not only impossible in a labour camp, it was almost always lethal. Helping a wounded companion or passing him food was dangerous, because it meant depriving yourself of resources that your own weakened body required. Also, it could drive you crazy, as it reminded you of your past life. Remembering that you are a human being under such inhuman conditions is deadly. Life in a prison camp can only be tolerated when your memory and spirit discard everything that reminds you of freedom. The power of this book – evident in all of Herling’s writing – is how the writer manages to create a new code of judgement: you cannot judge an individual for his actions when he is being held in inhuman conditions. The betrayal, the informing, the prostration and the prostitution generated by hunger and illness are no longer considered human behaviour, even if committed by men.
I, too, have reached the conclusion that man can only be considered human under humane conditions. It is absurd to judge him severely based only on his actions in inhumane situations, just as it would be absurd to measure water with fire.
The systematic repression in the Soviet Union represented the most idiotic bureaucracy that ever existed on the face of the earth. Every arrest had to be given a motive and formalized. Thousands of people were incriminated using the most sordid and ridiculous accusations: sabotage of Soviet industry, espionage, conspiracy against the fatherland, betrayal, insurgency. Through these condemnations the Soviet system found justification for each of its crises and every slowdown of the economy. Thousands of innocent and often harmless people, the total opposite of political enemies, were whisked away, victims of an illogical and ruthless internal war.
In Yertsevo Herling met a prisoner who had been denounced by the N.K.V.D. (the terrible secret police who later took on the name of K.G.B.) for putting a bullet in a poster of Stalin by mistake when he was drunk. This absurdity got him ten years in prison. Unlike the German concentration camps, where individuals were gassed, massacred and arrested without a farcical trial, but simply for being Jewish, communist, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay, etc., the Soviet system extorted confessions, invented sabotage plans, forced their people to come up with some ridiculous proof. And it formalized every mise-en-scène. “It’s not enough to shoot a man in the head. He has politely to ask to be shot during the trial.”
Gustav Herling managed to be saved because he was a Pole, and got himself shipped off with the force commanded by Lieutenant-General Anders. After a pilgrimage to Baghdad, Mosul, Jerusalem and Alexandria, Herling landed in Italy. Sick with typhus, he spent his time recovering in Sorrento, where he met Benedetto Croce’s family. This event proved a determining factor in his life. Many years later he met the daughter of the philosopher, Lidia, whom eventually he married, and they had two children, Benedetta and Marta. Herling ended up living a large part of his life in Naples. He dedicated his life to writing and worked on his monumental book, Journal Written at Night, until he died. This colossal narrative is composed of more than twelve volumes. Only one of these has been published in Italy, covering the period 1970–87. This intellectual endeavour is a combination of philosophical reflections, moments of profound wisdom, invective and docile, lazy reflections. Journal Written at Night is practically a geological site where you can explore the different strata that were laid down as they emerged from Herling’s mind.
In the labyrinth of the Journal there is a disturbing episode that describes a meeting between Thomas Mann and Ignazio Silone in Switzerland. The two men were discussing how different political systems should be judged. Silone believed that “it is sufficient to see what kind of role has been reserved for the opposition”. For Mann, however, “the supreme test is the place that has been reserved for art and artists”. Herling was deeply disturbed by Mann’s aesthetic posturing and profoundly critical of the German writer when he discovered that Mann was indulgent towards the Soviet system and that he analyzed it exclusively on the basis of the sales of Goethe in the U.S.S.R.
For Herling, the intellectual must stand against human pain. He must be a sentinel of human freedom, and he must never delegate the defence of human dignity to others. In spite of his literary eminence, Mann negates all of this by prioritizing art.
There are also some lacerating personal memories in the Journal, many of which are profoundly moving: the story of how Herling found a wounded puppy in the Iraqi desert during the war and lovingly cared for it is one example. Or the pages from 1980, when he describes the earthquake that hit Naples: the faces of people in Irpinia, Lucania and Partenopeia, their voices, their fleeing, the clusters of people, the absolute impossibility of being angry with someone. Paradoxically, this diary-like narration never seems to be inflected with personal experience. The title suggests the somewhat posthumous role of thought, like Hegel’s night of the world that arrives too late, when day has already come: the author does not offer a sum of what happened to him, but what happened through him. It is a narrative that has a departure point, but not a destination. It starts off for a precise reason, but is then seized by the power of impulse. Inspiration for this lifelong work can be found in the fragment of the text entitled “A Brief Tale of Myself”, edited by his daughter Marta: “I write because I have an inner need to challenge myself to think about specific issues. If you are alive, you are alive because you have kept to a mission . . . I always wanted to leave something of myself behind. I really only write for myself. I write because it gives me pleasure.”
Even the texts that were published as distinct and free-standing works are actually part of the connective tissue of the Journal. Two stories, “Requiem for a Bell-Ringer” and “The Island”, are narratives that appear like landforms out of Herling’s vast ocean of words. There are also short stories that reveal strong traces of ancient Naples, such as “Don Ildebrando” and “Venetian Portrait”. In “Don Ildebrando” Herling tries to paint a fresco of the Italian landscape, while simultaneously maintaining his distance as an exile and recognizing the sense of complicity that comes from being an Italian citizen by adoption. This piece of writing offers a portrait of Naples as a city of chaos. A city determined by a whirling force that knocks it back and forth between the misery of street urchins and the sumptuous baroque of Spanish domination, and compelling it to amalgamate its superstitions, popular traditions and highest ideals. The story entitled “Ex Voto” reveals the heart, chest and body of Herling’s dear Naples, the city where he lived with his father-in-law, Benedetto Croce; the city of San Domenico Maggiore, where Thomas Aquinas was trained and came of age. Naples, for Herling, provided more of a spiritual map than a geographical or historical one. The prose of his stories is elegant and respectful. He possesses a rational passion that seems to care little for what in literature is defined as “talent”, imaginative sparkle or the meaning of a sentence. Herling’s writing is a continuous kind of writing, ready to trace and communicate rather than express. As the writer Cristina Campo has observed, “the great ceremonial words of horror and piety traverse his discourse with the ease of an autumn breeze blowing rain through the trees and against the windows”.
Herling introduced narration into the plot through his role as witness. His work contains many, many characters, all races of an orchestra of the damned. They transcend the details of the Soviet work camps, the earthquake, the Nazi persecution, his experience of war, ruined Naples, and come to represent the human condition in the twentieth century. Perhaps it is true that all stories that emerge from the deepest reaches of memory resemble one another. The pages of Primo Levi, Varlam Shalamov, Herling and Elie Wiesel reveal a common genetic disposition towards forgiveness, even before being linked by the shared barbaric experiences their writers suffered. Their final words, their hinted judgements and their understanding of pain were written to give humanity the option of living differently, the chance to remember and change. We will never know whether these authors forgave their guards – their banal jailers – and ultimately it does not matter. But we do need to recognize that they forgave the primary executioner: the human being. Writing one’s memoirs is a seal of faith in man for future generations. Dark memories, in other words, express the promise and hope of a new path for humanity.