Jacques Rossi

'The Frenchman in the Gulag'

Jacques Rossi became famous only towards the end of his long life. He was known as "the Frenchman in the Gulag". His life in those inhuman jails was no prison horror story, but rather an epic of human endurance in the torture camps of Russia, mainly in Siberia, where he spent 20 years of misery and terror. He was not allowed to return to France until 1985, after being freed only provisionally in 1961 and allowed to live in Poland.

Jacques Rossi, writer: born Breslau, German Empire 1909; died Paris 30 June 2004.

Jacques Rossi became famous only towards the end of his long life. He was known as "the Frenchman in the Gulag". His life in those inhuman jails was no prison horror story, but rather an epic of human endurance in the torture camps of Russia, mainly in Siberia, where he spent 20 years of misery and terror. He was not allowed to return to France until 1985, after being freed only provisionally in 1961 and allowed to live in Poland.

Like many of those who had experienced Soviet prison life, he managed to survive by sheer willpower and a lively intelligence, spiced with a particular sense of humour. What kept him alive was the hope and the strong belief that one day he might be able to share the horrors of life in the Gulag with others through his writings.

But when he was finally permitted to return to France, and had completed his first work, Le Manuel du Goulag ( The Gulag Handbook), a sort of self-help survival handbook in the form of a dictionary, he found it was rejected by publishers who feared its frank description of horrors would make it unsaleable. It was not until 1996 that he was able to find a publisher, the modest but reputable Le Cherche Midi. His book became a great success, and the same publisher issued his other works Qu'elle était belle, cette Utopie! ("What a Beautiful Utopia", 2000 - an ironic title) and Pour mémoire du Goulag ("Record of the Gulag", 2002).

Born in 1909, Rossi had been brought up in a Polish aristocratic family. His mother was French, so they spent some of his early years in Paris. The family was wealthy, so they also led a luxurious life in Warsaw. But, as he grew older, this social round did not appeal to Jacques Rossi, a highly intelligent youth with a gift for languages: he was already fluent in French and English, and also learned several other foreign tongues, including German, Greek, Spanish and Hindi.

At the age of 17, he joined the clandestine Polish Communist Party, in protest against the stultifying economic conditions of peasants and industrial workers. He was over-enthusiastic, and got arrested by the secret police. He was charged with crimes against the state, including having encouraged young soldiers to rise up in armed revolt.

On release he was recruited by the Comintern. He travelled all over Europe under false identities, with secret documents concealed about his person. But then, in 1937, he was recalled to Moscow while he was working behind Franco's lines in the Spanish Civil War. Rossi was later to comment:

Never at any time during this period did I feel I was a spy. I only wanted good for all humanity, for which I willingly risked my life as a secret agent.

When he arrived in Moscow, he was shocked to be arrested, tortured and forced to make the sort of "confession" the Communist junta demanded. He was bewildered when he was condemned by the judges to the Gulag, on trumped-up charges of spying for France and for Poland. He spent two years in the infamous Butyrka prison in Moscow and then was transferred to the notorious "white hell" of Norilsk, a Siberian camp beyond the Arctic Circle. During the years to come, he was transferred to various hellholes in the wastes of the Siberian archipelago.

He describes all those grim, overcrowded and insanitary dungeons with a keen eye for absurdities and an ineradicable sense of humour. But among what he calls his "intimate nightmares", he tells us of a prisoner roasted alive on a red-hot sheet of metal, and of a young escapee slaughtered in the snow who became the only food of prisoners trying to run away across the tundra. He describes how one prisoner, defiant to the end, was dragged away screaming at his sadistic guards:

You'll all be wiped out completely! The day will come when grandmothers will warn their little grandchildren: "If you don't behave, the Communists will come back and take you away!"

Solzhenitsyn writes in Ivan Denisovich (1962) that he had never seen an Estonian being degraded by the filth and terror of camp life. Rossi tells us the same thing about the Japanese he met there, including Prince Konoe Fumitaka and the future Professor Gosuke Ichimura, later to become famous in Japan for his books on the Gulag.

On the other hand, the many Chinese were more demonstrative, sometimes to a grotesque extent, as when one man, about to be transferred to another jail, pulled down his pants, squatted on the floor and drove a large nail through his scrotum and into the ground.

Jacques Rossi was liberated only many years after the death of the "Little Father of the Peoples". After being condemned to spend his limited freedom on a sheep-raising kolkhoz in Samarkand, where he was held until 1961, he was able to return to Poland, where he taught French Civilisation at the University of Warsaw.

The French authorities never made any attempt to get Rossi released from the Gulag, even long after the end of hostilities. He describes how, after he was liberated from the camps in 1956, he managed to infiltrate himself into the French embassy in Moscow and was immediately hustled out by a woman member of the staff shouting: "You'll make a mess of these parquet floors!"

He courageously returned to Norilsk years later, in 1996, to make a documentary film in which he recites with relish the inscription on the monument to Polish victims of the Gulag: "If ever I should forget them, may the Good Lord forget the miserable wretch I should be!"

James Kirkup