When I was 15 years old I read a book that shattered me. The book was called SS im Einsatz (“The SS in Action”). It was a nonfiction book, a 600-page collection of documents—memos, orders, dispatches sent to the units of Waffen-SS, reports from the sonderkommandoes in action in Germany and elsewhere. There were some pictures, too, taken by SS photographers. The book was impersonal, detached, and matter-of-fact.

Now, many years later, I have come across another book that has devastated me almost as much, although I’m wiser now and know quite a few things on the subject of that second book. It is called Grey Is the Color of Hope, but might as well be called “The KGB in Action.” And if the SS book was detached and impersonal. Grey Is the Color of Hope is very much attached and very personal. It is a book of prose written by a true poet.

I have read numerous books written by people who went through horrible imprisonments, from the torture chambers of the Inquisition to the prisons of Jacobin Paris, and from Hitler’s auschwitzes to the present-day Soviet “strict regime” political camps, but hers is one of the most heartwrenching accounts I have ever read on the encounter of a decent human being with vicious jailers, and of a flickering human spirit struggling to survive in a man-made hell.

In 1982, Irina Ratushinskaya, a 28-year-old professor of physics at a teachers’ college in Odessa, was arrested by the KGB for alleged “anti-Soviet activities.” These “activities” consisted of writing poetry and voicing objections to the torturing of political prisoners in Soviet jails. “I’m here because of my poems,” she says, answering one of the jail inmates. “How’s that? Your poems against the government, were they?” “No, independent of the government, so they took offense.” (Under Soviet law poetry can be qualified as “dissemination of slanderous documentation in poetic form.”) In 1983 she was sentenced to seven years’ strict (the harshest) labor camp plus five years’ internal exile.

Ratushinskaya tells of an episode that, perhaps, could have happened only in Russia. While in jail, she had copied some poems of Pushkin and of a great Russian lyric poet of the 19th century, Tyutchev. When she was transferred from the jail to the camp, the poems were confiscated. She had hoped that they would be returned. But “instead of having them returned to me, I was given a document [which] stated that these poems were found to be slanderous, ideologically dangerous, and for this reason had been destroyed by burning. . . . The Kiev KGB staff are not expected to know anything about literature, and they had simply decided that these poems had all been written by me. . . . So, by courtesy of the ignorance of the Kiev KGB, I was arbitrarily elevated to genius rank: writing about the mountains of Georgia, the depths of the Siberian mines, about thunderstorms in early May . . . “

Ratushinskaya needs just a few strokes to evoke a character. A pregnant woman-prisoner is led by her cell in the transit train. “I see her as she passes my cage: a small, tear-stained face, a shock of hair peeping out from under a washed-out headscarf,” or “grey-faced, withered, with bluish lips were some of them; others sought to brighten their pallid faces with defiant slashes of bright, cheap lipstick. My hands seemed to move of their own accord to share what I had with them, while something inside me screamed and screamed its pity for these pathetic creatures . . .”

Her book is about prison. Having been persecuted, tortured, beaten; having gone through the most horrid experience one can imagine a young, intelligent, talented woman to go through in this time of the late 80’s, when Auschwitz and Treblinka are no more, still she is not angry, not even bitter. She is rather sad. She feels sorry for them all, even the guards.

. . . my erstwhile traveling companions . . . Our nation has always referred to those sentenced to hard labor as “unfortunates.” And unfortunates they are, and I pity them as, no doubt, they pity me. Certainly I know about the vicious camp “laws” by which criminals live, about merciless revenge, about the exploitation of the weak among them . . . Yet there is something else to them as well—and that I will never forget. I shall try to appeal to that “something else” which exists in even the most hardened criminals, and the guards, and maybe even in that one, who has just peered in through the Judas-hole in the door to check whether I am asleep or not. Oh, Lord, save my unfortunate people and have mercy upon them!

The only ones for whom she never asks mercy are the KGB. Unobtrusively but clearly through the whole book there runs the leitmotif—the SS is not dead. It is still alive, and it is called the KGB.

“It’s not my job to prove to you that you’re wrong. I don’t have the education or, the words for that. My job is much easier: to make your life here so miserable you’ll never want to come back,” boasts the “blonde fiend,” a woman KGB lieutenant whom they dubbed “Use Koch.” And, indeed, she does. (One can’t help recalling Goering’s frankness at his trial: “I have always bet on villains.”) The description of how the author and another political prisoner, an older woman, both on a hunger strike, were stripped, handcuffed, beaten severely by six KGB men, force-fed two liters of a horrible solution pumped into their shrunken stomachs, and then thrown into a damp cell with no bunks and puddles of frozen water on the cement floor—this description can be placed in SS im Einsatz without so much as lifting a comma.

And still, this is not all that is there, in this strict regime Soviet political camp. “What is the worst thing in the camps?” Ratushinskaya asks Tatyana Mikhailovna, a woman who was in the “strict regime” much longer than she. And Tatyana answers without a moment’s hesitation: “The perpetual lies.” This answer can serve as a metaphor not just for the political camps, but for the entire Soviet Union, more, for the entire Communist system. The “perpetual lies” about the Communist ideology, the Soviet constitution, the Soviet peaceful intentions . . .

ZhKh-385/3. That’s the official designation of our camp. What do the letters “Zh” and “Kh” stand for? Why, the Russian words for “Railway Property.” That’s because, officially, there are no concentration camps in the USSR! And the number “385”? Well, the authorities must keep count of the non-existent camps, mustn’t they?

If I were asked to formulate in one sentence what Ratushinskaya’s book is about, I would say it is about the KGB attempt to destroy the human spirit and to mutilate the soul.

. . . only by a maximum exertion of will is it possible to retain one’s . . . scale of values. . . . But in doing so, you must not, under any circumstances, allow yourself to hate. Not because your tormentors have not earned it. But if you allow hatred to take root, it will flourish and spread during your years in the camps . . . and ultimately corrode and warp your soul. You will no longer be yourself, your identity will be destroyed, all that will remain will be a hysterical maddened and bedevilled husk of the human being that once was. And this is what will come before God should such a creature die while still behind bars. And this is just what “they” want.

And that’s exactly what “they” can’t do with people like Ratushinskaya and the other women, the “political” inmates.

Reading about these women, I kept asking myself of whom do they remind me so much, and then I realized, yes, of course, the early Christians in the time of Nero, only instead of holding their religious rites in secret in the catacombs, they hold theirs for human dignity and human liberty in the open, in their “Small Zone,” this camp within a camp amidst the swamps of Soviet Mordovia. “Keep beating my heart!

Keep beating,” Ratushinskaya tells herself Yes, please, keep beating! one wants to join in. In 1986, after spending three years and seven months in the camp, Ratushinskaya was released and allowed to emigrate. She has survived. “I did not betray my conscience, and the man I love was waiting for me when I came out . . . What else can one ask for?”

[Grey Is the Color of Hope, by Irina Ratushinskaya, translated by Alyona Kojevnikov (New York: Alfred A. Knopf) 360 pp., $18.95]