Gustaw Herling faced more suffering and depravity in two years than many men encounter in a lifetime. Yet he never lost his fascination for the fine line that separates hope and despair, or for the complex interaction of good and evil that can shape even the most ordinary of lives. “The human organism is an unfathomable machine,” he wrote several years after his release from a Soviet labor camp. Nevertheless, until his death in 2000, Herling sought, with grace, eloquence, and discretion, to plumb the depths of this organism he saw pushed to the extremes of degradation and exaltation.

In 1940, the twenty-year-old Herling, an idealistic student at Warsaw University, tried to cross the border from Soviet-occupied Poland into the area occupied by the Germans in order to fight the Nazis, then Russia’s allies. Caught by the NKVD, Herling was first sent to Vitebsk prison, then sentenced to five years in the Yercevo camp. When Hitler breached his nonaggression pact with Stalin, almost all of the Polish prisoners in the Gulag were granted amnesty so that they could fight alongside the Red Army. Herling and five other Poles in Yercevo, however, were passed over. They remained imprisoned in political limbo for several months until they forced the camp authorities’ hands by staging a hunger strike. The irony of this strike defies the imagination. All around Herling, thousands of men and women were dying of hunger each year, and yet the authorities, perhaps astounded by the Polish prisoners’