You choose the page of the map that names Kolyma - and go back

A son of an “enemy of the people” returns from Soviet prisons with a hand-drawn map of Kolyma and a lifetime of proof - what would you do with it?

You choose the page of the map that names Kolyma - and go back

In this episode, we follow Avraham Shifrin’s journey from a childhood marked by his father’s arrest to surviving punishment battalions, the Gulag, and eventual emigration. It traces how his memories of camps became a deliberate map and a public record - and asks what one man does with knowledge the world has forgotten.

Person: Avraham Shifrin Date of birth: October 8, 1923 Location: Minsk, then Soviet Union Event: Sentenced to 25 years (commuted from death) in 1953; served 10 years; released 1963 Location after emigration: Zichron Ya'akov, Israel

- His father Isaak was arrested in 1937 and sentenced to ten years of corrective labor in Kolyma. - Labeled syn vraga naroda (son of an enemy of the people), Avraham was assigned to a Shtrafbat during WWII and fought at the Battle of Königsberg. - After the war he studied law and worked for the Soviet Union of Defense while secretly networking in the Zionist movement. - In 1953 he was accused of espionage, sentenced to death which was commuted to 35 years; he served ten years in the Gulag before release in 1963. - By 1970 he emigrated to Israel and began transforming his detailed memories of Soviet camps into a four-hundred-page guidebook and mapped record.

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