My Four Years in Soviet Russia

This is the story of Yitzkhak Erlichson, a Polish Jew who was nineteen years old when he escaped the Nazis by fleeing toward the USSR from his home-town, Wierzbnik. There he hoped to find a land true to its official ideals of justice, equality, and brotherhood. Arrested as an English spy, he was sent to prisons and slave-labor camps, and after his release worked and traveled in the USSR. To his dismay, he found injustice, inequality, and antisemitism equal to that of his native Poland. Attempting to join the Polish army forming in the USSR, he was told it was “only for Poles.” He met and married his wife, Fania, in the Soviet Union. She traveled and worked with him and nursed him back to health after his final imprisonment. They made their way back to Wierzbnik. There he learned that none of his family survived the German occupation.