When Janusz Bardach, a young Polish Jew, fled the Nazis to join the Red Army, he found himself enmeshed instead in the dangerous, paranoid world of Stalinist Russia. Falling foul of the regime, he was sent to Kolyma, the harshest of all the Siberian gulags. In this devastating memoir he describes in intimate detail the terror, cruelty, near-starvation and back-breaking physical labour of prison life. It is a moving testament to human endurance under unimaginable oppression.