The Vietnamese Gulag

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Vietnamese Gulag is a book comparing post-war Vietnam to an archipelago of prison camps, along the lines of the description of the Soviet Union in The Gulag Archipelago.

The book was originally written in French by Doan Van Toai. After his escape from Vietnam, he contacted Ed Poor for help translating it into English. Poor had no wherewithal to do this, and Toai got help from David Chernoff who became a co-writer of the English edition.

The book is a harrowing tale of the frightful corruption of Communist society. Despite Toai's enthusiastic support of the expressed ideals of the Communist reformers, their initial embrace of Toai soured when he had a minor administrative tussle with an official and he was punished with prison and had to bribe his way out.

Publishers Weekly described the book as follows:

Toai spent time in jails in South Vietnam for antigovernment activities as a student leader, including a trip to the U.S. to deliver antiwar speeches at California universities. When the Communists took over in 1975, he went to work for the Revolutionary Finance Committee and observed at close hand the workings of the new regime. Then, without warning, he was thrown into prison, where for 28 months he suffered torture, starvation, disease and despair. Just as abruptly, he was released and allowed to leave the countrystill not knowing why he had been arrested. In this effective, absorbing memoir, the authors describe in detail the "insidious inhumanity" of the Communist government ("far worse than that of the foreign oppressors") as it took control in Saigon. Toai, who now lives in California, accurately refers to himself as the first articulate messenger of the new order, and his message is directed at "the Vietnamese community abroad who had supported the revolution, and the foreign antiwar movements that had done so much to bring it about." ISBN 0-671-60350-7

Library Journal said:

Every Communist party in power has established prison systems that mix torture, brutality, starvation, and the use of informants to crush real and imagined enemies. Toai, a Saigon student leader in the 1960s and early 1970s, spearheaded opposition to the pro-U.S. Thieu regime, but failed to cast his lot with the Communist revolutionaries. He was swept into a Communist prison in late 1975, and here tells the story of a would-be Third Force intellectual's struggle to survive over the following two years. His vivid descriptions of prison life are interspersed with memoirs of his days as a student leader. ISBN 0-671-60350-7