Yevgeniya Grinberg was just 4 when her father was taken away.

A neighbor of theirs in Moscow, at the heart of Joseph Stalin’s police state, had overheard him describing Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary, as a “good orator.” That evening, her father, Yefim Englin, was arrested under Article 58 of the criminal code, which was often used to persecute “enemies of the state.”

He was sentenced to five years of forced labor in a gulag near the White Sea. For young Yevgeniya, it was a devastating lesson about life in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s.

“As you might guess, he was part of the intelligentsia,” Ms. Grinberg, who turns 87 next month , said in an interview in her one-bedroom apartment in the Wien House , a subsidized housing complex managed by the Y.M. & Y.W.H.A of Washington Heights and Inwood. After her father’s five years in the gulag were up, he was sentenced to five more for no apparent reason, she said.

“My mother went to see him,” she said, speaking in Russian. “It was freezing where he was by the water, and they were given very thin mittens, and some of them were not given coats. It was inhumane. My father was a political prisoner, but the way they organized the camps, he was mixed in with bandits, murderers and every other type of criminal.”