Karl Tobien - Dancing under the red star: the extraordinary story of Margaret Werner, the only American woman to survive Stalins gulag

The Gulag (an acronym in the Russian language for the Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps) began in 1918 as a penal system of forced-labor camps established by the Soviet regime after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Joseph Stalin expanded the system, beginning in 1929, to accelerate industry and to exploit the Soviet Unions natural resources (like the mining of coal, copper, and gold) in its barely habitable northern regions, particularly the Siberian tundra. Over the next ten years, the Gulag spread through all twelve of the Soviet Unions time zones, sending more than 18 million innocent people through its system4.5 million of whom were never heard from again.

By 1953, the year Joseph Stalin died, more than 30 million people had passed through the Gulag: prisoners of the Russian Civil War; former aristocrats, businessmen, and large landowners incarcerated alongside murderers, thieves, and common criminals; political opponents; intellectual enemies of the state; religious dissenters; women and children; and people deemed guilty of simply associating with any of the above.

They were shipped to and from the camps in cattle cars and corralled behind towering barbed-wire fences into hovels pocked by filth and disease. With few resources, clothes, and tools, they faced extreme hunger and harsh, sub-zero climates where even fog would freeze.

The brutality they endured parallels the Holocaust.

Yet few people knew about their extreme suffering until publication in 1972 of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyns epic oral history of the Soviet camps in three volumes.

It would be more than thirty years later before a fully documented, comprehensive history of the Gulag would be published: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag by Anne Applebaum.

New details of the Gulags horrors, as in Margaret Werners extraordinary account, are being unveiled and documented even to this day.

Dancing Under the Red Star stands as a powerful story of a womans survival.

E very person has considered at one time or another these eternally mysterious questions: Why am I here? Where did I come from? Where am I going?

As a child in the 1960s, I had no real ambition to find out the meaning or the history of my life. I was an average American boy, growing up in an urban, middle-class neighborhood in Cincinnati, too busy being a kid to care whether or not my history was unique. Yet I knew my roots were not commonplace.

As a young adult, I began to realize there was much that my mother, Margaret Werner, hadnt told me about her life during the decades she lived in Stalinist Russia. I knew she had suffered a great deal, but to what extent, I really didnt know. I had wondered at times but not all that much. I was a hard-living, wild young guy and didnt have the time to listenor so I thought.

Besides, the past was the past, right? Why should I seek to understandand reckon withsomething as strange and troubling as the past, which can pull at you, haunt you, hurt you? But then I learned, as the years progressed, that coming to terms with your past can also heal youif you let it.

My feelings changed, and eventually I found myself consumed with knowing and understanding the whats, whens, and whys of my mothers life.

One afternoon during the early 1990s, as my mother peeled potatoes at the kitchen sink, I asked her many questions. And she began to tell me more about her life, certain things I had never heard from her before.