I read an amazing story this morning, about a woman from the former East Germany, Renate Hong, separated from her North Korean husband Hong Ok-geun some 40 years ago, was granted permission by North Korea to travel to the country with their two sons and visit their husband/father. The children had never met the man, and the woman had exchanged just a few letters with the man, who had lived in Germany as a scientist, since he’d left the country in 1960.

Renate Hong sent her first letter to her husband in the North in March of last year and received the first reply on July 27 last year. It was her 70th birthday.

She said it was the first time in 44 years that she had heard from Hong Ok-geun since her last letter came back with an “address unknown” stamp. Since then, the North Korean scientist has sent four letters to Renate Hong.

I was quite touched by the story. The man remarried and had a family with a North Korean woman. The German woman never did remarry. I’m not one to give North Korea much credit on anything, but this was a surprisingly classy move, a stronger move than the dumb visit to Pyongyang by the New York Philharmonic in the early part of the year. I think North Korea is making slight moves to change — I won’t call it opening yet. It’s still a dictatorial regime, still has death camps, still executes people for attempting to leave the country and attempted to help Syria build nuclear weapons. But this is something…

Ironically, on nearly the same day as a communist broken union was  reconnected,  one of the great literary figures of the 20th century, Alexander Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure. Solzhenitsyn was a crucial  dissident of Soviet Communism and wrote “Gulag Archipelago,” which I read Volume 1 of earlier this year. There’s a fantastic article in the International Herald Tribune, which the JoongAng also ran, by Michael T. Kaufman. It’s a long story, but worth the full read if you have the time.

“Gulag” was a monumental account of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Solzhenitsyn’s calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book led to his expulsion from his native land. George Kennan, the American diplomat, described it as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.”

As a literary giant Solzhenitsyn was deported from the U.S.S.R. in 1974, lived in Switzerland for a short time and eventually settled in the woods of Vermont. But prior to that he endured a life in Soviet labor camps that few of us can even fathom as we watch baseball scores (or worse,  world events) change and blog about it with great importance.

In February 1945, as the war in Europe drew to a close, he was arrested on the East Prussian front by agents of Smersh, the Soviet spy agency. The evidence against him was found in a letter to a school friend in which he referred to Stalin — disrespectfully, the authorities said — as “the man with the mustache.” Though he was a loyal Communist, he was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. It was his entry into the vast network of punitive institutions that he would later name the Gulag Archipelago, after the Russian acronym for the Main Administration of Camps.

His penal journey began with stays in two prisons in Moscow. Then he was transferred to a camp nearby, where he moved timbers, and then to another, called New Jerusalem, where he dug clay. From there he was taken to a camp called Kaluga Gate, where he suffered a moral and spiritual breakdown after equivocating in his response to a warden’s demand that he report on fellow inmates. Though he never provided information, he referred to his nine months there as the low point in his life.

After brief stays in several other institutions, Solzhenitsyn was moved to Special Prison No. 16 on the outskirts of Moscow on July 9, 1947. This was a so-called sharashka, an institution for inmates who were highly trained scientists and whose forced labor involved advanced scientific research. He was put there because of his gift for mathematics, which he credited with saving his life. “Probably I would not have survived eight years of the camps if as a mathematician I had not been assigned for three years to a sharashka.” His experiences at No. 16 provided the basis for his novel “The First Circle,” which was not published outside the Soviet Union until 1968. While incarcerated at the research institute, he formed close friendships with Kopelev and another inmate, Dmitry Panin, and later modeled the leading characters of “The First Circle” on them.

RIP.