Gulag (28 page)

Even those who did receive that one cup a day were tormented. Evgeniya Ginzburg recalled the excruciating decision prisoners had to make: whether to drink their whole cup in the morning, or try to save it. “Those who took occasional sips and made it last all day never had a moment’s peace. They watched their mugs like hawks from morning until night.”
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If, that is, they were lucky enough to have mugs: one prisoner remembered to the end of her life the tragic moment when her teapot, which she had managed to keep with her, was stolen. The teapot had held water without spilling, enabling her to sip throughout the day. Without it she had nothing to hold water in at all, and was tormented by thirst.
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Worse were the recollections of Nina Gagen-Torn, who was on a transport train that stopped for three days outside of Novosibirsk in midsummer. The city’s transit prison was full: “It was July. Very hot. The roofs of the Stolypin wagons began to glow, and we lay on the bunks like buns in an oven.” Her car determined to go on a hunger strike, although the guards threatened them with new, longer sentences. “We don’t want to get dysentery,” the women shouted back at them. “For four days we are lying in our own shit.” Reluctantly, the guards finally allowed them to drink a little bit, and to wash.
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A Polish prisoner also found herself on a train which had ground to a halt—but in the rain. Naturally, the prisoners tried to catch the water coming off the roof. But “when we held our mugs between the bars of the windows, the guard who was sitting on the roof cried that he would shoot, for such behavior was forbidden.”
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Winter journeys were not necessarily better. Another Polish deportee remembered having nothing but “frozen bread and water in the form of ice” during her train journey east.
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Summer or winter, other deportees experienced special torments. When one exile train stopped, unusually, at an ordinary station, the prisoners dashed out to buy food from local people. “Our Jews made a dash for the eggs,” recalled a Polish passenger. “They would rather starve than eat non-kosher food.”
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The very old and the very young suffered the most. Barbara Armonas, a Lithuanian who had married an American, was deported along with a large group of Lithuanians, men, women, and children. Among them was a woman who had given birth four hours earlier, as well as a paralyzed eighty-three-year-old who could not be kept clean—“very soon everything around her was stinking and she was covered by open sores.” There were also three babies:

Their parents had great problems with diapers since it was impossible to wash them regularly. Sometimes when the train stopped after a rain the mothers would jump out to wash diapers in the ditches. There were fights over these water ditches because some wanted to wash dishes, some to wash their faces, while others wanted to wash dirty diapers, all at the same time . . . the parents made every effort to keep their children clean. Used diapers were dried and shaken out. Sheets and shirts were torn up to improvise diapers and sometimes the men tied the wet diapers around their waists in an effort to dry them more quickly.

Small children fared no better:

Some days were very hot, and the heavy smell in the cars was unbearable and a number of people fell sick. In our car, one two-year-old boy ran a high fever and cried constantly because of pain. The only help his parents could get was a little aspirin which someone gave to them. He grew worse and worse and finally died. At the next stop in an unknown forest the soldiers took his body from the train and presumably buried him. The sorrow and helpless rage of his parents was heartbreaking. Under normal conditions and with medical attention he would not have died. Now, no one even knew for sure where he was buried.
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For arrested enemies, as opposed to deportees, special arrangements were sometimes made, which did not necessarily improve matters. Mariya Sandratskaya was arrested when her child was two months old, and was actually put on a transport train filled with nursing mothers. For eighteen days, sixty-five women and sixty-five infants traveled in two cattle cars, unheated except for two very small, very smoky stoves. There were no special rations, and no hot water to bathe the children or to wash the diapers, which subsequently turned “green with filth.” Two of the women killed themselves, slitting their throats with glass. Another lost her mind. Their three babies were taken over by the other mothers. Sandratskaya herself “adopted” one of them. To the end of her life, she remained convinced that breast milk alone had saved her own child, who contracted pneumonia. There had, of course, been no medicine available.

Upon arrival at the Tomsk transit prison, the situation hardly improved. More of the children grew ill. Two died. Two more mothers attempted suicide, but were prevented from succeeding. Others went on hunger strike. On the fifth day of the strike, the women were visited by an NKVD commission: one of the women threw her baby at them. Only upon their arrival at Temlag—the women’s camp, mostly for arrested “wives”—did Sandratskaya manage to organize a children’s kindergarten, eventually persuading relatives to come and take her child away.
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Bizarre and inhuman though her story may sound, Sandratskaya’s experience was not unique. One former camp doctor has also described being sent along on a “children’s transport,” along with fifteen nursing mothers and babies, plus twenty-five other children and two “nannies.” All had been marched to the station under convoy, placed not on an ordinary train but in a Stolypin wagon with barred windows, and deprived of proper food.
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From time to time, all transport trains made stops, but these stops did not necessarily offer much respite. Prisoners were loaded off the trains, loaded back into trucks, and marched off to transit prisons. The regime in such places was similar to that in interrogation prisons, except that the jailers had even less interest in the welfare of their charges, whom they were never likely to see again. As a result, the transport prison regime was wholly unpredictable.

Karol Harenczyk, a Pole who was transported from western Ukraine to Kolyma at the start of the Second World War, recorded the relative merits of the many transit prisons where he had stayed. In a questionnaire he filled out at the request of the Polish army, he noted that the Lvov prison had been dry, with “good showers” and “rather clean.” By contrast, the prison in Kiev was “crowded, dirty beyond description,” and filled with lice. In Kharkov, his 96-square-meter cell had been crammed with 387 people, and thousands of lice. In Aremovsk, the prison was “almost completely dark,” with no walks allowed: “the cement floor is not cleaned, the remains of fish are on the floor. The dirt and smell and lack of air gives people headaches, dizziness,” so much so that prisoners went about on all fours. In Voroshilovgrad, the prison was again “rather clean,” and prisoners were allowed to relieve themselves outside of the cell, twice a day. In the transit camp at Starobelsk, prisoners were allowed walks only once a week, for half an hour.
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Probably the most primitive transit prisons were those on the Pacific coast, where prisoners stayed before being put on the boats to Kolyma. In the 1930s, there was only one: Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok. So overcrowded was Vtoraya Rechka, however, that two more transit camps were built in 1938: Bukhta Nakhodka and Vanino. Even then there were not enough barracks for the thousands of inmates awaiting ships.
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One prisoner found himself in Bukhta Nakhodka in late July 1947: “Under the open sky they kept 20,000 people. Not a word was spoken about buildings—they sat, lay down, and lived, right there on the ground.”
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Nor was the water situation much improved from what it had been on the trains, despite the fact that the prisoners were still existing largely on salt fish, in high summer: “All over the camp signs were posted, ‘Do not drink unboiled water.’ And two epidemics were raging amongst us—typhus and dysentery. And the prisoners did not heed the signs and drank water which trickled here and there on the grounds of the compound . . . anyone can understand how desperate we became for a drink of water to quench our thirst.”
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For prisoners who had been traveling for many weeks—and memoirists report train journeys to Bukhta Nakhodka of up to forty-seven days
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—the conditions in the transit camps on the Pacific coast were almost unbearable. One records that by the time his transport arrived at Bukhta Nakhodka, 70 percent of his comrades had night blindness, a side effect of scurvy, as well as diarrhea.
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Nor was much medical assistance available. With no drugs or proper care, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam died in Vtoraya Rechka in December 1938, paranoid and raving.
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For those not too incapacitated, it was possible to earn a little bit of extra bread in the Pacific transit camps. Prisoners could carry cement buckets, unload goods wagons, and dig latrines.
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In fact, Bukhta Nakhodka is remembered by some as the “only camp where prisoners begged to work.” One Polish woman remembered that “They feed only those who work, but because there are more prisoners than work, some die of hunger . . . Prostitution flowers, like irises on Siberian meadows.”
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Still others, remembered Thomas Sgovio, survived by trading:

There was one large, open space called the bazaar. Prisoners gathered there and bartered . . . Currency was of no value. Greatest in demand were bread, tobacco, and bits of newspaper which we used for smoking. There were non-politicals serving time as maintenance and service men. They exchanged bread and tobacco for the clothes of fresh arrivees, then resold our clothes to citizens on the outside for rubles, thus accumulating a sum for the day they would be let out into the Soviet world. The bazaar was the most populated spot in the camp during the daytime. There, in that communist hell-hole, I witnessed what was in reality the crudest form of a free enterprise system.
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Yet for these prisoners, the horrors of the journey did not end with the trains and the transit camps. Their journey to Kolyma had to be completed by boat—just like the prisoners traveling up the Yenisei River, from Krasnoyarsk to Norilsk, or on barges, in the early days, across the White Sea from Arkhangelsk to Ukhta. It was a rare prisoner boarding the ships to Kolyma, in particular, who did not feel that he was undertaking a journey into the abyss, sailing across the Styx away from the known world. Many had never been on a boat before at all.
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The boats themselves were nothing out of the ordinary. Old Dutch, Swedish, English, and American cargo steamers—boats never built to carry passengers—plied the route to Kolyma. The ships were redesigned to fit their new role, but the changes were largely cosmetic. The letters D.S. (for Dalstroi) were painted on their smokestacks, machine-gun nests were placed on the decks, and crude wooden bunks were constructed in the hold, sections of which were blocked off from one another with an iron grille. The largest of Dalstroi’s fleet, originally designed to carry huge lengths of cable, was initially christened the
Nikolai Yezhov.
After Yezhov’s fall from grace, it was renamed the
Feliks Dzerzhinsky—
an alteration which required a costly change in international shipping registration.
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Few other concessions were made to the ships’ human cargo, who were forcibly kept below deck for the first part of the voyage, when the ships passed close to the coast of Japan. During these few days, the hatch leading from the deck to the hold would remain firmly shut, lest a stray Japanese fishing boat come into sight.
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So secret were these voyages considered to be, in fact, that when the
Indigirka
, a Dalstroi ship containing 1,500 passengers—mostly prisoners returning to the mainland—hit a reef off the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1939, the ship’s crew chose to let most of the passengers die rather than seek aid. Of course, there were no life-saving devices aboard the ship, and the crew still not wanting to reveal the true contents of their “cargo boat,” did not call upon other boats in the area to help, although many were available. A few Japanese fishermen came to assist the ship of their own accord, but to no avail: more than 1,000 people died in the disaster.
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But even when there was no catastrophe, prisoners suffered from the secrecy, which mandated forced confinement. The guards threw their food down into the hold, and they were left to scramble for it. They received their water in buckets, lowered down from the deck. Both food and water were therefore in short supply—as was air. Elinor Olitskaya, the Anarchist, remembered that people began to vomit immediately on embarking.
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Descending into the hold, Evgeniya Ginzburg became instantly ill as well: “If I remained on my feet it was only because there was no room to fall.” Once inside the hold, “It was impossible to move, our legs grew numb, hunger and the sea air made us dizzy, and all of us were seasick . . . packed tightly in our hundreds we could hardly breathe; we sat or lay on the dirty floor or on one another, spreading out our legs to make room for the person in front.”
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Once past the Japanese coast, prisoners were sometimes allowed up onto the deck in order to use the ship’s few toilets, which were hardly adequate for thousands of prisoners. Memoirists variously recall waiting “2 hours,” “7 or 8 hours,” and “all day” for these toilets.
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Sgovio described them:

A box-like makeshift contraption of boards was attached to the side of the ship . . . it was rather tricky to climb from the deck of the rolling ship over the railing, and into the box. The older prisoners and those who had never been at sea were afraid to enter. A prod from the guard and the necessity to relieve themselves finally made them overcome their reluctance. A long line was on the stairway day and night throughout the voyage. Only two men at a time were allowed in the box.
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Yet the physical torments of life on the ships were surpassed by the tortures invented by the prisoners themselves—or rather the criminal element among them. This was particularly true in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the criminal influence in the camp system was at its height and the political and criminal prisoners were mixed indiscriminately. Some politicals had already encountered criminals on the trains. Aino Kuusinen remembered that “the worst feature of the journey were the juveniles [young criminals] who were given the upper berths and perpetrated all kinds of indecencies—spitting, uttering obscene abuse and even urinating on the adult prisoners.”
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