Dancing Under the Red Star (27 page)

In camp, she had a way of drawing others toward her, and she always went out of her way to be comforting and kind. She was able to earn a bit of money, food, and tobacco by sewing and altering clothes for the women. The tobacco was a special joy to her; she loved cigarettes. After a while Eleonora was appointed head seamstress within the camp and assigned a staff of ten other women, who produced many beautiful garments for the officials and their families. The camp bureaucrats gladly supplied her with the fabric and thread she needed to weave her magic. Of course this was all
volunteer
work, done in her spare time, after completion of her regular grueling brigade work demands.

Eleonora was a tremendous asset to our theatrical group, and I believe she and her assistants would rival or beat any top costume or wardrobe designer today. She continued working the two jobs far into her pregnancy. One evening after rehearsal we were all standing outside, looking up at a blazing display of aurora borealis, the northern lights, which showed an unusually large band of brilliant red that night. We stared with wonder at God’s dazzling natural spectacle. It was breathtaking and for a moment almost made us forget where we were. As we stood there together, like sisters, Eleonora suddenly clutched her stomach and gasped, “It’s time to go now!”

We were just a few barracks away from the medical clinic and fortunately made it there just in time for her delivery. About five minutes later, she gave birth to a pretty little girl, whom she named Aleesa. Eleonora was ecstatic, but the doctor came out and asked me what she had eaten during her pregnancy, because the baby had many little white spots on her face and body. I recalled that due to the severe heartburn Eleonora experienced throughout her pregnancy, she had eaten enormous amounts of tooth powder—consisting mostly of chalk—believing it to be a remedy. The baby was taken from her mother and placed in a separate room of the clinic, where a nurse took care of her, allowing Eleonora to nurse Aleesa every four hours. Within a few weeks Aleesa’s white spots vanished. I felt very close to this little girl, as if I were her godmother, though I seldom got to see her.

All of us were soon transferred to a much larger camp, designed to house about four thousand women. Aleesa was placed in a special children’s facility there, and Eleonora was allowed regular visits with her. This was a rare humane feature in a new life that was far more brutal than what I had known in other camps. Here women did all the daily hard labor details, the same as the men: constructing roads, hauling containers, and loading train cars—in the most dreadfully harsh conditions imaginable. We worked outside the camp all day long, from morning until night, under the constant supervision of guards and dogs. We dug ditches, freed swamps of tree stumps, and did whatever was necessary to clear the areas for the building of roads. It was extremely difficult, long, and exhausting work in deathly frigid conditions.

Working this far north, we found that the air, coupled with tremendous amounts of snow, was so intensely cold that it sometimes took us nearly the entire night to thaw out. Then, long before dawn, the following day brought more of the same. During these brutal winters, we moved immense, waist-high snowdrifts with shovels jury-rigged of wood veneer. And we had to carry on this depleting physical work under life-threatening conditions with very little food and of the poorest quality.

Many workers collapsed from the nearly unbearable physical demands and the devastating emotional strain of camp life. Some chose death as the better alternative, through either intentional starvation or assisted suicide. The ways of killing oneself were creative and many.

All persons in our camp had to wear ID numbers sewn onto our exterior clothes and also onto the dresses we were issued. My number was C-219. This was our means of identification, and it became our very identity; it was who we were. Long before any friendships were established or anyone here truly knew us by name, we were commonly known and called by the numbers we were issued. This is a well-known military tactic, used in the interest of rapid dehumanization; it is a way of leveling the playing field and preventing individual action. I knew the number 219 better than my own name.

We were only allowed to write two letters per year, each consisting of no more than one side of a standard sheet of paper, but we could receive unlimited letters and packages. I never understood the reasoning behind this. Perhaps there was none. But this strange protocol did allow me to stay in contact with Mama. She was still in our tiny one-room apartment in Gorky, just barely making ends meet, doing any work she could find—odd jobs, physical labor, or work pools—for just a few rubles a month. By extraordinary effort, she was able to send me food packages from time to time, and these sometimes included wonderful things she had received from friends and relatives in America. (After the war, this was again allowed.) Her own needs were great, but my mother, in the purest form of unconditional love, always gladly sacrificed everything she could for me. Had it not been for her staunch dedication and self-denial—along with her letters and packages—I never would have survived this nightmare.

Those food packages helped keep me from starving. Conditions were awful; we were actually happy when the camp increased our daily food allotment to about twenty-eight ounces of bread. Rarely did we eat anything else. Occasionally we would get a bit of smoked venison among the frozen cabbage and turnips, and sometimes a few drops of vegetable oil in our cereal, which was made from cornmeal or millet. We never had fresh potatoes or fresh vegetables, and we never saw eggs or milk. Those would have been highly coveted items, luxuries. Some might have even killed for them. Our ration of about two pounds of sugar per month was traded like a commodity. Most of the kitchen workers were corrupt, so a major portion of the products designated for the prisoners’ meals was always diverted for their trade in money and/or cigarettes.

We lived in large barracks that accommodated about four hundred women in two large halls. Each hall had two coal-burning stoves topped with iron plates, on which we could boil water for tea or coffee. We were not permitted to cook on them, however. Each barracks was also equipped with a separate drying room, where we left our wet work clothes at night and then retrieved them the following morning. The workday was twelve hours long, six days a week.

The camps were surprisingly clean, as the grounds were stringently policed by a designated sanitary crew every month. The worst offenders and intruders, other than the overly aggressive guards with overly adventurous hands, were the bedbugs. Their bites stung, swelled, and stayed painful for many days. In an attempt to destroy these miserable insects, every month we had to remove all of our belongings from the barracks to properly disinfect the place. The customary process of dipping the slats of our bunks into boiling disinfectant got rid of them for a while, but then we’d have to do it all over again. They were our constant enemies, relentless intruders working full time on a year-round basis.

We were kept warm enough in our barracks, mainly because our camp was centrally located in the dead center of the coal-mining region. The mines were worked by the male prisoners, who were housed in the many camps around us. We were the only women prisoners in the Inta region. Our camp was composed of approximately 60 percent Ukrainians, mainly relatives of the army members formerly led by Stepan Bandera. He was a Ukrainian nationalist who, with his entire army, had defected to the Germans early in the war. These family members were still paying the price. The rest of the prisoners were Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Russians, in roughly equal numbers. And once again, among these thousands of women and the tens of thousands of men in the camps around us, it became evident that I was the only American.

Sixteen

THE CULTURAL BRIGADE

I
n the face of these grim realities, we still had our remarkable leader, Tamara, who never ceased to amaze us with her unpredictable exploits in and around the camp. Under these stunningly harsh conditions, she actually convinced the authorities that we
needed
a
permanent
theatrical group to entertain the women. Tamara could get anything she wanted. She was unbelievable. We constructed a fairly large stage in the dining room, which eventually became a second home to us. In whatever
free
time we could muster, we rehearsed endlessly for our performances.

It made no sense, materially. While we still had to work our punishing jobs during the day and had barely enough energy left to fall into our bunks at night, we cared more about our group rehearsals than anything else. We practiced relentlessly, into the wee hours of the morning, just to ensure that our upcoming performances would be as close to perfect as possible. We sacrificed necessary sleep every night in order to make these shows flawless, because that was exactly what we needed. Spiritually, it kept us human. None of us were forced or coerced; it was the only outlet we had that allowed us to feel normal. It dared us to hope again and allowed us to dream, and that was priceless.

Using her gifts of persuasion, Tamara was amazingly successful in getting anything and everything she wanted, even in this Siberian wasteland. We could hardly wait to hear the news of what she had managed to procure next. Not only was she granted special authority to organize a
select
theatrical group, but she also spread the real news: members of this new group would be exempt from all former work assignments! It was incredible, but she did it. In the bizarre world of our Gulag prison, Tamara still did whatever she wanted.

Now our everyday work routine consisted solely of perfecting our craft on stage with endless rehearsals. We worked mainly to satisfy the camp authorities, and if the inmates were also entertained, well, that was a plus. It was a responsibility that we all took quite seriously, and work we did. In fact, all of us probably worked harder at this new opportunity than at anything we had done before. I was now getting much less sleep than ever before and always went to bed exhausted, mentally and emotionally spent, and physically sore. But dreams, regardless of the toil, remain priceless.

With this new opportunity came a new problem. Our relatively privileged arrangement created intense jealousy and rivalry among the other camp women. Some appreciated the temporary entertainment we created for them, but many others deeply resented the advantages we received in stark contrast to them. And who could blame them? It was easy to understand their natural reactions and bitter feelings toward these changes; circumstances were clearly unfair and biased very much in our favor.

We generally rehearsed in the dining room from about eight in the morning until about ten at night, virtually nonstop, seven days a week, receiving small additional considerations such as relaxed curfew rules. Before an upcoming show, it was not unusual for us to work later into the night and even into the early morning hours. We built our own sets, furniture, decorations, special effects, and anything else that would positively impact our shows. We made our own costumes at first and even had a hair stylist, who made wigs and false eyelashes for us. Our newly formed group included a former theatrical set designer from Paris, a musical director from Lithuania, a former actress—who was our drama coach—from the Malyi Theater in Moscow, and a wonderful pianist named Olga, our oldest member. We loved her dearly, and she became a sort of grandmother to everyone. We took our jobs as seriously as would the most highly esteemed performer on a Broadway stage. And we became very good at what we did, and we knew it.

Our group now lived a separate life, segregated from the other women prisoners. Nevertheless, we still had to tolerate the normal indignities imposed on all prisoners. We were not allowed to forget, even temporarily, that we were still political prisoners in a Siberian labor camp. Outside of our performances, the camp officials deeply despised us as traitors, spies, and outcasts. And I always sensed that their feelings and their true sentiments went even deeper against me. They were definitely more hostile to me than the others. I was the only American among them, and the NKVD officials, along with the camp authorities, truly despised me more profoundly than all the others for that reason.