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Elie Wiesel once wrote of his fellow concentration camp victims: "So as not to betray ourselves by betraying the dead, we can only open ourselves to their silenced memories—and listen." He listens to Stalin's victims with full attention, and he reflects in the tone of the great Russian intimates of suffering: Chekhov, Babel, Mandelstam. Wiesel needs no tract; the yearning of a single martyr can redeem humanity. Paltiel Kossover awaits the Angel of Death in his cell: "I love all the persons I see in the distance, moving in joy and melancholy; I feel sorry for them. They are all mortal and behave as if they were not. I should like to comfort them, help them, save them. I should like to tell them the story of my life." —By J.D.Reed