What's a Human Being Worth?

In this new translation, an extraordinary memoir of resistance and survival in the camps of the Gulag is made available to English-speaking readers for the first time. Eufrosiniya Kersnovskaya was a Bessarabian Russian woman who was deported to Siberia by the Soviet authorities in 1940. After suffering horrific conditions in a work camp in Western Siberia, she escaped into the taiga, where she wandered for months, before being captured and again sentenced to a decade of hard labor. A tough, uncompromising opponent of the system, Kersnovskaya survived through her strength of character and determined resistance. Her memoirs, which she began writing and illustrating while still in Siberia, offer a gripping testimony through the eyes of a woman who never lost her fighter's spirit.

In short vignettes accompanied by striking color drawings, Kersnovskaya recalls her life in prewar Bessarabia, the Red Army occupation, her deportation in cattle cars, travails in the work camps, detention facilities, and her confrontations with the Soviet authorities. She vividly captures the realities of life as a prisoner and an escapee of the camps, offering insightful observations about the behavior of brutal Soviet bosses and their beaten-down victims. First circulated in clandestine samizdat form, Kersnovskaya's memoirs would not be published in Russia until 1990. This translation brings together an abridged selection that captures her distinctive voice and unique experiences. Attesting to the fearsome inhumanity of the system and the emotional toll of survival, her story is a key text in the history and memory of Stalinist repression.