Preface to A World Apart [1951]

Gustaw Herling remembered Russell being rather stiff and aloof at their meeting in Richmond until the conversation turned to Joseph Conrad and George Orwell. On 25 May 1951 Russell informed Stickland that he was looking at the book A World Apart, and it is very interesting. Although Herling was also a highly respected writer of fiction, journalism and literary criticism, A World Apart is easily his most famous work-ranked by Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz as "possibly among the best books on that theme written in any language". Long before Solzhenitsyn, a whole generation of young Poles read A World Apart on sheaves of cheap paper, printed with smudgy ink. Communists and Nazis alike have tragically demonstrated that in a large proportion of mankind the impulse to inflict torture exists, and requires only opportunity to display itself in all its naked horror.