Columbus immigrant shares story of surviving Soviet labor camp with local crowd
Victor Levenstein, a survivor of the Soviet labor camps of the 1940s, signs a copy of his book Thirteen Nasty Little Snakes for Brenda Lazier of Maplewood following a Tuesday evening presentation at the Logan County History Center. (EXAMINER PHOTO | REUBEN MEES)
On a dark night in May 1944, a 21-year-old Victor Levenstein answered a knock at the door of his Moscow home and stood face-to-face with three members of the Soviet secret police force known as the KGB.
They took him into custody and kept him in a cell with no windows as they accused him of being one of Thirteen Nasty Little Snakes conspiring against the Soviet Union and plotting to kill its ruler Joseph Stalin.
So decades after his eventual imprisonment in Soviet labor camps and immigration to the United States, that is what the Columbus resident named the memoirs of his life.
“I was arrested as part of an anti-Soviet terrorist group and they said to me, ‘You are one of the nasty little snakes planning to assassinate Stalin’,”
Read complete story in Friday’s Examiner.
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