Without Vodka

Book excerpt: Aleksander Toplski was 16 when he was called up for military service on the morning of August 24, 1939. In eight days his native Poland would be invaded by the Germans. Shortly thereafter, the Russians rolled in under the Hitler-Stalin pact, and when Topolski tried to sneak across the border into Romania, he was captured by Soviet border guards. Thus began a more than two-year-long ordeal through the Soviet Union's outrageously absurd penal system, described here with an unexpected sense of irony, and a superhuman capacity for recalling fascinating details.