Deported to Siberia in 1941, a year after the Soviet invasion of Bessarabia, Euphrosinia Kersnovskaïa (1908-1994), like so many others, lived through hell – twenty million prisoners, four million dead. Born in Odessa into an aristocratic Russian family stripped for the first time by the revolution, who became a veterinarian and a farmer, this woman of steely character came back to life by a miracle. Against all odds. Illustrated chronicle of my life in the gulag tells the story in drawings and words of his long “relegation”. A life of agony, cold and forced labor where “hunger served as a backdrop”. She recounts the prison, the camps, her escape attempts, her death sentence, the injustice and cruelty, the greatness and the smallness of men. After her release in 1948, she secretly filled 12 school notebooks with her memories, illuminating her story with 700 drawings. A magnificent and disturbing book that is being reissued today. An invaluable testimony at a time when memory is more than ever undermined in Russia.
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