Sgovio Thomas Iosifovich

Genus. in 1916 in the USA. His father was a communist and emigrated to the USSR, where the whole family came to him in 1935. In 1937, the father was arrested, and the family decided to return to their homeland. In 1938, while leaving the American embassy, ​​Thomas was arrested. Convicted by the OSO to 5 years in the camps.
He served at five different mines in Kolyma, at the OLP Srednekan ("Valley of Death") and others. the stage from Moscow to Magadan lasted 28 days. Sgovio was sent to the mine to extract gold. He miraculously survived: during one period of his imprisonment he weighed less than 50 kg - he tattooed his name on his skin so that he could be identified after death. What saved him was that he was able to find a job outside the mine - he was an artist and painted propaganda posters.
At the end of his term, he was detained until 1946. In 1948, he was arrested a second time and sentenced to eternal settlement in the Boguchansky district of the Krasnoyarsk Territory. He worked in logging and on collective farms. Released in 1954. In 1960, he and his mother went to Italy. In 1963 he moved to the USA. Died 07/03. 1997 in Mesa, Arizona.

In his memoirs "Dear America! Why I Turned Against Communism (Dear America! Why I became an opponent of communism)", published in 1972, he spoke about his terrible experience and colossal mortality in the Dalstroi camps during the war.
His fate is also described in Tim Tzouliadis's book "The Forsaken (Abandoned)".
Alexander Solzhenitsyn refers to Sgovio's memoirs four times in The Gulag Archipelago and included him in the list of witnesses whose experiences and materials formed the basis of the book.