Buchenwald to Kolyma

Soviet Russia was on trial.

In a glittering hall of Brussels' Egmont Palace, six black-robed men and one woman sat in judgment over an entire regime. They had been chosen by the International Commission Against Concentration Camp Regimes, an organization of 100,000 survivors of Nazi camps, to decide whether the Russians run a similar system. Said Prosecutor David Rousset, a French writer and former Nazi prisoner: "For the first time, the men who lived at Auschwitz and Buchenwald are going to hear men who lived through Kolyma and Magadan."

For four days the judges, all laymen and former Nazi camp inmates, worked through mountains of documents and 300 written depositions, quizzed 25 witnesses with knowing questions: "How many hours a day did you work? . . . What kind of work did you do? . . . How were hygienic conditions?"

Witness Vladimir Andreev, a former Russian camp inspector, estimated the Russian slave-labor population'at between 12 million and 14 million; the total number of prisoners at 20 million. Sixty percent of these, he thought, were political prisoners.

After a week's sifting of evidence, presiding Judge Alfred Balachovsky last week read the tribunal's verdict: Forced-labor camps, recognized by Soviet criminal law, exist in Russia; the concentration-camp system is widespread; liberated prisoners can never return to normal life; living conditions in the camps systematically dehumanize the prisoners.

Balachovsky scrupulously pointed out differences between the Russian and German camps: the Reds do not perform scientific experiments on the prisoners, do not practice racial extermination; the possibility of release does exist. But, he concluded: the court "condemns before universal public opinion the Soviet concentration camps . . . already condemned by history."

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