John H. Noble "The John Noble Story" His Voice - His Words - His Message LP
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Description
John H. Noble (September 4, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American survivor of the Soviet Gulag system, who wrote two books relating to his experiences after being permitted to leave the Soviet Union and return to his native United States.
In late 1945, 22-year-old American-born Noble was arrested together with his father by Soviet occupation forces in Dresden, Germany and incarcerated in a former German concentration camp that was then under Soviet control. The arrest came about after a newly appointed local Soviet commissar decided to appropriate the Noble family's Practica brand Kamera-Werkstaetten Guthe & Thorsch factory and its stocks of quality cameras. A trumped-up allegation of spying against the Soviets was levelled against the two male members of the family. However, subsequently, the commissar did not provide sufficient numbers of the cameras to his superiors, and he also found himself a fellow prisoner. The concentration camp was the former Buchenwald, now renamed Soviet Special Prison Number 2.
Unlike his father Charles A. Noble, who was released in 1952, John was sentenced to a further 15 years in 1950 and transferred to the Soviet Gulag system, when Special Prison Number 2 was closed by the Soviets in early 1950.
During his transfer through Russia he saw the English phrase scrawled on a cell wall reading "I am sick and don't expect to live through this - Major Roberts". The inscription was dated in mid-August 1950 and believed to have been written by the American soldier Major Frank A Roberts who is recorded as Missing in Action during World War II. Soon afterwards, Noble's journey continued and he was sent to the Vorkuta Gulag, at the northernmost Urals railhead in Siberia.
Filling a variety of menial jobs during his imprisonment, the highest being a uniformed lavatory attendant for the staff, he took part in the Vorkuta uprising of July 1953 as a prominent leader. According to Noble the Vorkuta camp and many others nearby had been previously taken over by the inmates, including 400 purged Soviet ex-World War II military men who opted to desperately march their way several hundred miles west to Finland. Apparently making it half way en route, those inmates were intercepted and either killed in battle or executed immediately afterwards. All the camps soon returned to state control.
Noble eventually managed to smuggle out a postcard loosely glued to the back of another prisoner's. The message addressed to a relative in West Germany was passed to his family, who by then had returned to the United States. The postcard was passed to the U.S. State Department who formally requested the Soviet government to release Noble. He was finally released in 1955, together with several American military captives, after the personal intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower
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