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of the most terrible legacies of our century is the concentration
camp. Countless men and women have passed through camps in Nazi Germany,
Communist China, and the Soviet bloc countries. In Voices from
the Gulag Tzvetan Todorov singles out the experience of one country
where the concentration camps were particularly brutal and emblematic
of the horrors of totalitarianism—communist Bulgaria.
The voices we hear in this book are mostly from Lovech, a rock
quarry in Bulgaria that became the final destination for several
thousand men and women during its years of operation from 1959 to
1962. The inmates, though drawn from various social, professional,
and economic backgrounds, shared a common fate: they were torn from
their homes by secret police, brutally beaten, charged with fictitious
crimes, and shipped to Lovech. Once there, they were forced to endure
backbreaking labor, inadequate clothing, shelter, and food, systematic
beatings, and institutionalized torture.
We also hear from guards, commandants, and bureaucrats whose lives
were bound together with the inmates in an absurd drama. Regardless
of their grade and duties, all agree that those responsible for
these "excesses" were above or below them, yet never they themselves.
Accountability is thereby diffused through the many strata of the
state apparatus, providing legal defenses and "clear" consciences.
Yet, as the concluding section of interviews—with the children
and wives of the victims—reminds us, accountability is a moral
and historical imperative.
The testimonies in Voices from the Gulag were written specifically
for this volume or have been published in the Bulgarian press or
on Bulgarian television. Todorov compiled them for this book and
has written an introductory essay—a lucid and troubling analysis
of totalitarianism and the role that terror and the concentration
camp play in such a world. He reflects upon his own experience living
in Bulgaria during the years when Lovech was in operation. It is
through that experience that Todorov has sought to understand the
totalitarian horrors of our century.
Although Lovech and the other camps of Soviet Russia and Eastern
Europe have been closed down, concentration camps still exist in
the countries whose communist regimes remain in power—Vietnam,
China, North Korea, and Cuba. The voices in this book remind us
that we are never completely safe from the threat of totalitarianism,
a threat that we all must face. As Todorov writes, "I cannot say
that these stories do not concern me." |
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Born
in Sofia, Tzvetan Todorov left Bulgaria in the early 1960s
and moved to Paris, where he established himself as a literary theorist,
historian of ideas, and world-renowned essayist. He is a director
of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
and the author of numerous books. Several of these have been translated
into English, including: Facing the Extreme (Holt, 1996), A
French Tragedy (New England, 1996), On Human Diversity (Harvard,
1993), and The Conquest of America (HarperCollins, 1984).
Robert D. Zaretsky is an Associate Professor at the University
of Houston where he holds a joint appointment in the Honors College
and the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. He is the author
of Nîmes at War: Religion, Politics, and Public Opinion in
the Department of the Gard, 1938-94 (Penn State, 1995), which
won the 1997 Hans Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award of the Woodrow Wilson
Foundation. |
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