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shana verghis's avatar

thanks for this. several copies of the book are available for free on Internet Archive if anyone is interested. Reminds me of Victor Frankl.

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James Kirchner's avatar

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I practiced aikido about 15 hours a week. One day when I was 25, I met a doctor from Vietnam maybe 20 years older than me, who was delighted to hear that I did that. He said, "Aikido helped me survive a prison camp!" This astonished me a bit, until he explained. Aikido (correctly instructed) had taught him mindfulness and to think only about the next thing he had to do. His explanation matched that to be found from Victor Herman in his book "Coming Out of the Ice". Herman was an American who went to Russia to work at a plant that Ford built for Stalin, and like almost all his colleagues, landed in the gulag, but was one of the few who survived. Very much like the Vietnamese doctor told me, he wrote that the key to survival was to focus only on the next thing to be done. Herman said that many literally worried themselves to death in the gulag thinking about their past, their future, etc.

"Coming Out of the Ice" is a powerful memoir that was taken off the market when it was high in the bestseller lists, apparently because the New York publisher had gotten a deal to publish Brezhnev's autobiography if they pulled Herman's book off the shelves. He found a large stock of them still unsold somewhere and sold them from his home until they sold out, and then the book was republished by a company somewhere in the Plains states. It has also long been out of print, and used copies of the paperback go for $300 on Amazon, and the hardcover goes for over $500.

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