Here are the memoirs of Austrian-born Karl Steiner, who spent 20 years in the camps of the GULAG archipelago (Butyrka, Lefortovo, Alexandrov Central, Solovki, «Norillag» and «Ozerlag»). He began serving his sentence with the sister of Heinrich Yagoda and ended it with relatives of Lavrenty Beria, having experienced all the horrors of repression and political violence.
«In NKVD prisons, in the icy wastelands of the far North—everywhere my suffering exceeded the human measure and the limit of endurance—I carried within me one single desire: to endure all of this and to tell the whole world, and above all my fellow party members and friends, how we survived these horrors...
I rarely went into analysis and commentary on events. First of all I wanted to describe the bare facts. And let the reader pass judgment for themselves.»