Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, who died of a cerebral haemorrhage on July 4th aged 81, was one of Europe's greatest contemporary writers, but is best known for A World Apart, one of the most dramatic accounts of the power of totalitarian systems over individuals - but also of the power of humanity and dignity.
When it first appeared in 1951 Stalin was at the height of his power and many intellectuals on the left did not want to acknowledge the existence of Soviet labour camps. Bertrand Russell prefaced the book by describing it as one of "the most impressive and the best written" accounts of Soviet power.
The Times Literary Supplement argued that in its intensity the book surpassed Dostoevsky from whose novel, The House of the Dead, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski borrowed the title phrase. In the eastern bloc, meanwhile, his book remained unpublished. In the Soviet Union and Soviet-dominated Poland possession of a copy was punishable. Apart from its artistic value, A World Apart is important as a document of life in the gulag but even more as a document of humanity, a chronicling of what becomes of a man from whom everything is taken and who is transformed into a hungry bag of bones. Like few people in this world, he understood the power of hunger. "Hunger is a horrible sensation," he wrote, "which becomes transformed into an abstraction, into nightmares fed by the mind's perpetual fever. The body is like an over-heated machine, working at increased speed on less fuel, and the wasted arms and legs come to resemble torn driving-belts. There is no limit to the physical effects of hunger beyond which tottering human dignity might still keep its uncertain but independent balance. If God exists, let him punish mercilessly those who break others with hunger."
Gustaw Herling-Grudinski was born in Kielce in southern Poland and studied Polish literature at Warsaw University, where he was interested in neo-Thomism and aesthetics. After the German invasion of Poland on September 1st 1939, he and his friends founded one of the first underground anti-Nazi organisations in Warsaw. Then, on September 17th, the Soviet Union attacked Poland and the country was divided between two totalitarian powers.
In 1940 he fled to the Soviet-occupied part of Poland but there, in March, he was arrested by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. He was thrown into prison and accused of being a German spy.
Interrogated under torture, he was sentenced to five years hard labour in a forced-labour camp at Kargopol, near Archangel on the White Sea. Then, in June 1941, came the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. Stalin agreed to an amnesty for Polish prisoners.
Before leaving the camp he dared to steal his own prisoner photograph as Labour Inmate Number 1872 from his dossier. In 1942 he enlisted in the Polish army and went through Kazakhstan, Iran, and Palestine to Libya.
He eventually arrived in Italy, where, as a soldier of the Second Polish Corps, he took part in the battle of Monte Cassino and was awarded Virtuti Militari, the highest Polish military honour.
After the war he lived in Rome, London and Munich, where he briefly worked for Radio Free Europe. After his first wife died in 1952 he settled in Naples where, in 1955, he married Lidia Croce, daughter of Italian historian and philosopher, Benedetto Croce.
In 1946 in Rome, Jerzy Giedroyc and Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski founded the emigre journal Kultura. It was to become one of the most important Polish intellectual forums of the postwar period. His contribution to Kultura included critical essays and excerpts from his `Diary Written at Night', which he composed over the past 30 years. He also wrote The Living and the Dead (1945), Phantoms of the Revolution (1969), The Second Coming (1963), and The Island: Three Tales (1967), as well as critical essays on literature and art.
In the last scene of A World Apart a former prisoner confesses to Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski that he has denounced four other prisoners who are eventually executed. The prisoner has to choose between his own life and the lives of four other men. He decides to save himself and wants to hear from someone who has gone through the same world of the camps, only two words - "I understand" - which would somehow justify that one can fight evil with evil, and that personal physical survival matters more than retaining one's humanity.
Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski writes: "No, I could not say it." To do so would have meant an acceptance of the morality of the totalitarian world which he never accepted, even in the gulag.
Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski: born May 20 1919; died, July 2000