From Detroit to Dresden to Siberia

John Noble, an American who wrote two memoirs about the decade he spent as a Soviet prisoner, including 3 years in the gulag, died last week at 84, the Telegraph reports. Taken into Soviet custody in 1945, Noble and his father were incarcerated in Dresden, Germany, where they had run a family-owned camera factory. "Justice doesn't exist," a guard warned them.

"The Soviets in Dresden were worse than the air raids," Noble said later. After his father was released in 1952, Noble was transferred to the gulag system; he participated in an inmate revolt in Siberia in 1953 and was freed in 1955 after President Eisenhower intervened in his case. Noble later wrote about finding faith in God through the experience and returned to live in Dresden after the fall of the Berlin Wall. (More John Noble stories.)