Julius Margolin (1900-1971) was trapped in Poland by the successive Nazi and Soviet invasions in 1939 and was arrested by the Soviets in June 1940 for refusing to accept Soviet citizenship. From 1940 to 1945 he served time in the Soviet Gulag. Upon his return to the West, he wrote his memoirs, Journey to the Land of the Zek, and a description of his return via Europe, The Road to the West.
Stefani Hoffman is the former director of the Mayrock Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Research at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has translated numerous works, including Fear No Evil by Natan Sharansky.
Timothy Snyder is Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. His award-winning works include The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999; Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin; and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

Katherine R. Jolluck is Senior Lecturer in History at Stanford
University. She is the author of Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union During World War II and the co-author of Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile.

• Acknowledgements


• Glossary


• Foreword by Timothy Snyder


• Introduction by Katherine R. Jolluck


• Prologue


• Chapter 1 September 1939


• Chapter 2 Encircled


• Chapter 3 The Story of a Disillusionment


• Chapter 4 Pinsk Intermezzo


• Chapter 5 Elijah the Prophet


• Chapter 6 The Pinsk Prison


• Chapter 7 The Wandering Coffin


• Chapter 8 BBK [Baltic-White Sea Canal]


• Chapter 9 "Square Forty-Eight"


• Chapter 10 Rabguzhsila [Man/horsepower]


• Chapter 11 Conversations


• Chapter 12 Karelin's Brigade


• Chapter 13 Dehumanization


• Chapter 14 Wood Felling


• Chapter 15 The Medical Sector


• Chapter 16 My Enemy Labanov


• Chapter 17 Gardenberg's Brigade


• Chapter 18 Evening in the Barrack


• Chapter 19 People at Square 48


• Chapter 20 Spring 1941


• Chapter 21 Etap


• Chapter 22 Amnesty


• Chapter 23 "You Must Work"


• Chapter 24 Ivan Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov


• Chapter 25 A Letter to Ehrenburg


• Chapter 26 KVCh [Cultural-Educational Sector]


• Chapter 27 Isaac the Fifth


• Chapter 28 Camp Neurosis


• Chapter 29 In the Bathhouse


• Chapter 30 In the Office


• Chapter 30a Three


• Chapter 31 Maksik


• Chapter 32 The Doctrine of Hate


• Chapter 33 An Invalid's Lot


• Chapter 34 The Brigade Leader of Chronic Invalids


• Chapter 35 The Road to the North


• Chapter 36 Kotlas


• Chapter 37 Block Nine


• Chapter 38 Block Five


• Chapter 39 Release


• Chapter 40 Conclusion


• The Road to the West


• Chapter 1 Slavgorod


• Chapter 2 The Freedom Train


• Chapter 3 Non Omnis Moriar


• Chapter 4 The End of Maria


• Chapter 5 September 1946


• Chapter 6 Heliopolis

Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back is a vivid, first-person account of life in the Soviet Gulag, a work that has never appeared before in English. It was one of the earliest published accounts of the Soviet camp system when it was published in France in 1949 and became an established classic in the Russian-speaking world, influential in the formation of the genre of Gulag memoirs.