Microcosm of War

SIBERIAN GARRISON--Rodion Markovits --Horace Liveright ($2.50).

A young lawyer in Budapest, with a wife and infant child, has just recovered from an illness and is looking for a job when the World War breaks out. He unheroically volunteers (he has flat feet). To his great surprise he is accepted, goes to training camp, then to the front, is captured by the Russians, and, in company with thousands of German and Austrian prisoners, is sent from one prison camp to another, finally landing in Siberia. There, for almost six years, he stays.

Rank still counts: this particular camp, in which only officers are allowed, is ruled by the ranking officer with the severe discipline, the stiff etiquette, of the regular army. To pass the time the prisoners write novels, play soundless music on a plank painted like the keyboard of a piano, compose invisible petitions on imaginary typewriters. Amateur theatricals turn the whole camp into a burrow of homosexuality. When the Russian Revolution and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk come, the prisoners plan an escape en masse, nearly run into a massacre, are thankful to get back to their safe prison again. As the Revolution and counterrevolution roll across the country, the prison becomes a self-governing community: rank counts for nothing, money everything. Soon a miniature city is in full swing, with industries, entertainments, police, prostitution and crime. The German prisoners, with great patience and ingenuity, forge banknotes. Gradually, long after the War is over, the camp disintegrates; our hero makes his precarious way home, nearly three years after the Armistice.

Author Markovits writes from his own experience: he was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1915 and spent six years in Siberian prison camps. His book, which made little stir on its first publication in Transylvania, was taken up by Budapest critics, is now being published simultaneously in nine countries.

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