Recent acquisition:
Une Française dans l'enfer du goulag (A Frenchwoman in the Hell of Gulag)
The story of one Genevieve Koffmann, who was born in France to a Russian father and French mother, and due to her parents' revolutionary fervor and poor judgement, respectively, ended up getting dragged to live in the USSR in the 1930s.
After she and her sister failed to escape Russia, she made her living teaching French and later interpreting during the war. As one might expect, she eventually got brought up on fanciful Article 58 charges and sent out to a remote women's gulag to chop wood. After 6 years, Stalin died and she was one of the many political prisoners freed. From there Genevieve was able to slowly build a new life in Ukraine with one of her fellow ex-prisoners, navigate the bureaucracy to get her name officially cleared, and work until retirement.
In her later years, after the fall of the Soviet Union, she was able to move back to France, where she met the author of this book, who at the time was a student of Russian who wanted speaking lessons. They became friends and eventually Genevieve recounted the story of her many ordeals, which was retold in this book.
Genevieve Koffmann's older sister Marie-Jeanne led a
very different life in the USSR. She became a doctor and decorated combat veteran, also got sent to gulag on political charges but had an easier time of it as camp medic, then after rehabilitation became an eminent cryptozoologist who hunted the Yeti in the Caucasus mountains XD
http://www.cryptozoonews.com/mjkoffmann-obit/
