In 1940, Gustaw Herling was arrested after he joined an underground Polish army that fell into Russian hands. He was sent to a northern Russian labor camp, where he spent the two most terrible years of his life. In A World Apart, he tells of the people he was imprisoned with, the hardships they endured, and the indomitable spirit and will that allowed them to survive. Above all, he creates portraits of how people - deprived of basic human necessities and forced to worked at hard labor - can come together to form a community that offers hope in the face of hopelessness, that offers life when even the living have no life left.

Should be published and read in every country. -Albert Camus

In psychological and moral penetration and artistic power A World Apart equals Fyodor Dostoyevsky's House of the Dead, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. -Louse Begley, New York Times Book Review