
Kolyma Tales
1978 · 508 pages
Shalamov spent seventeen years in the Kolyma camps. His stories are short, about frostbite and stolen bread and men too weak to lift a shovel, and he insists that suffering teaches nothing.
★ 7.1

Shalamov spent seventeen years in the Kolyma camps. His stories are short, about frostbite and stolen bread and men too weak to lift a shovel, and he insists that suffering teaches nothing.

Wiesel was a religious teenager when his town was emptied and he arrived at Auschwitz with his father. He tells it in short flat sentences, and the flatness is unbearable.