The passing of John Noble, Soviet Gulag survivor.

John H. Noble, an American who wrote about his nine-and-a-half-year imprisonment in the notorious Soviet Gulag in his 1958 book, I Was A Slave In Russia, died on November 10 in Dresden, Germany, at the age of 84.

Noble's story was his firsthand account of the living Hell created by the communist slave masters. He believed that the Soviets had arrested many Americans immediately after World War II and as late as 1955--10 years after the war--still held 3,000. The State Department denied that it knew about such American captives.

Noble was in Dresden, Germany, visiting his father's camera company, when the Soviets occupied the city on May 6, 1945. The Nobles were advised by the American military to sit tight because the Soviet Union was "an ally." They did, and John and his father, Charles, were arrested on July 5 as spies. As a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag, his job was to push a two-ton car full of slate by hand in 50-below-zero weather, move it 160 yards, and empty it--70 times a day. After years of such conditions and near-starvation, he was reduced to a 95-pound walking skeleton. He was released from the Soviet gulag in January 1955, after he managed to have a message smuggled to his family and they enlisted the help of a Michigan congressman, pressuring the Eisenhower administration to make inquiries into his whereabouts.

Noble went on a speaking tour for the John Birch Society in the mid-1960s to describe his experiences and warn of the dangers of communism. He was founder and director of the Faith and Freedom Forum, which sold recordings of his books and other educational tools.