Leona Toker's comparative study of texts from Soviet and Nazi concentration camps fills a clear void in the literary scholarship and makes a wonderful companion to her seminal work Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000). Despite foundational differences between the carceral regimes’ raison d’être—Nazi camps existed to conduct race-based extermination, whereas Gulag camps focused on the economic and political exploitation of its prisoners—Toker clearly justifies the merit of her parallel study.

Toker limits her analysis to cases in which a comparative context proves useful, and she explores not only the crossover between texts but, perhaps most compellingly, the way the two bodies of literature begin to inform each other. The first two chapters of the book explore these entanglements—both historical and literary—at length. Chapters 3 through 5 deal with specific features of camp life, including hunger, labor, and death. Chapters 6 through 8 explore notes of hope in the literary canon: resistance, faith, and release. The final chapter examines the legacy of survivors, an experience often clouded by shame and guilt.

In spite of their differing teleology, Toker makes the case that the Nazi and Gulag camps are intertwined in their reading of the Other as a threat for resources. This fear is what leads to mass segregation-turned-incarceration, dehumanization, and extermination. Both regimes develop a euphemistic language to articulate (and obscure) their endeavors. Nazi and Soviet camps have a massive prisoner population compared to a small group of staff and guards, and both witness a power struggle between political and criminal prisoners.

Toker ultimately demonstrates that the two camp systems not only share key elements but also affect each other. She makes the claim that the shift in Soviet penal philosophy from “re-education” to secrecy was dependent on the emergence of the Nazi concentration camps—growing awareness of the Nazi camps’ evils spurred the Soviet state to adopt a clandestine approach so as to avoid comparison. Gulag literature, in turn, begins to show an awareness of the Holocaust, with authors such as Varlam Shalamov referencing Dachau and Auschwitz in his literary works. Toker also acknowledges key ways in which the two systems are distinct: the vast difference in mortality rate, the lack of gas chambers and crematoria in the Soviet camps, the near impossibility of escape from Nazi camps.

The volume is at its strongest when there is a concrete, specific parallel between the camps, such as that of the Muselmann (a nearly dead prisoner in the Nazi camps) with the Dokhodiaga (a “goner” in the Soviet Gulag). This unique feature of concentration camp literature underscores the merit of such a comparative study, and the similarity of these figures speaks to the role of hunger in the camps as a technique for both control and cruelty. The characteristic appearance and trademark symptoms of the moribund establish a clear link between Soviet and Nazi camps. Toker's analysis of the desperate-seeming goners allows us to understand the phenomenon in a more complex way, as a type of metaphysical hibernation allowing for connection to the natural world and inner peace.

Conversely, the volume is at its weakest when the through line between Brown and Red camps does not offer much in the way of insights, such as with the chapter “Forced Labor.” Given that Nazi concentration camps did not serve an important economic function and its victims were not alive long enough to engage in significant work, the comparison with the Gulag appears less useful. In addition, there is a lost opportunity in the chapter “Faith” to explore how religious devotion allowed some to weather inconceivable degradation and punishment; instead, the focus is on faith in the communist regime as a sort of misguided belief system and Jewish theological explanations for the Holocaust.

These small considerations aside, Toker expands our understanding of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and Soviet Gulag with this expansive and engaging study. Her comparative analysis brings numerous fascinating bits to light—the Soviet use of gas in railroad cars that predated Nazi Germany's, the haunting similarities between the Muselmann and the Dokhodiaga, the complexities of resistance, and the shame and guilt of having survived such calamities. As readers, we are left with a final question: were these camp systems an aberration or a condensation of the ideology of the regimes in which they were housed?