My Father, A Man of Courage and Perseverance, A Survivor of Stalin’s Gulag, Rubina Peroomian Minassian (softcover)

This book relates the life story of Baghdassar (Baghdik) Minasian, who was abducted by the Soviet NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB) from Tabriz, Iran, during the waning years of World War II. The book reconstructs his incarceration, interrogation, and sentence of 10 years of hard labor in Siberia from 1944 to 1954, when he was released under the general pardon issued after Stalin’s death to war prisoners and all victims of Stalinist purges. The book contains the English rendering of unfinished memoirs he began to write late in life when he felt himself ready to relive and relate his traumatic experience of the Gulag.

Baghdik returned physically broken, fraught with the effects of years of unspeakable suffering in the notorious Norilsk hard labor camp, but in good spirits. He returned to his family, his “widowed” wife and two orphan girls, to rebuild his own and his family’s shattered life, but not everything went smoothly. He had more challenges to overcome as he reintegrated into the society he was forcibly removed from more than a decade before.