Gulag (29 page)

On the boats, the situation was worse. Elinor Lipper, who made the journey to Kolyma in the late 1930s, described how the politicals “lay squeezed together on the tarred floor of the hold because the criminals had taken possession of the plank platform. If one of us dared to raise her head, she was greeted by a rain of fish heads and entrails from above. When any of the seasick criminals threw up, the vomit came straight down upon us.”
⁵³

Polish and Baltic prisoners, who had better clothes and more valuable possessions than their Soviet counterparts, were a particular target. On one occasion, a group of criminal prisoners turned out the ship lights and attacked a group of Polish prisoners, killing some and robbing the rest. “Those of the Poles who were there and remained alive,” wrote one survivor, “would know for the rest of their lives that they had been in hell.”
⁵⁴

The consequences of the mixing of male and female prisoners could be far worse even than the mixing of criminals and politicals. Technically, this was forbidden: men and women were kept separately on the boats. In practice, guards could be bribed to let men into the women’s hold, with drastic consequences. The “Kolyma tram”—the shipboard gang rapes—were discussed throughout the camp system. Elena Glink, a survivor, described them:

They raped according to the command of the tram “conductor” . . . then, on the command “
konchai bazar
” [“stop the fun”] heaved off, reluctantly, giving up their place to the next man, who was standing in full readiness . . . dead women were pulled by their legs to the door, and stacked over the threshold. Those who remained were brought back to consciousness— water was thrown at them—and the line began again. In May 1951, on board the
Minsk
[famous throughout Kolyma for its “big tram”] the corpses of women were thrown overboard. The guards didn’t even write down the names of the dead . . .
⁵⁵

To Glink’s knowledge, no one was ever punished for rape on board these ships. Janusz Bardach, a Polish teenager who found himself aboard a ship to Kolyma in 1942, concurred. He was present as a group of criminals planned a raid on the women’s hold, and watched them chop a hole in the iron grille that separated the sexes:

As soon as the women appeared through the hole, the men tore off their clothing. Several men attacked each woman at once. I could see the victims’ white bodies twisting, their legs kicking forcefully, their hands clawing the men’s faces. The women bit, cried and wailed. The rapists smacked them back . . . when the rapists ran out of women, some of the bulkier men turned to the bed boards and hunted for young men. These adolescents were added to the carnage, lying still on their stomachs, bleeding and crying on the floor.

None of the other prisoners tried to stop the rapists: “hundreds of men hung from the bed boards to view the scene, but not a single one tried to intervene.” The attack only ended, Bardach wrote, when the guards on the upper deck blasted the hold with water. Several dead and injured women were dragged out afterward. No one was punished.
⁵⁶

“Anyone,” wrote one surviving prisoner, “who has seen Dante’s hell would say that it was nothing beside what went on in that ship.”
⁵⁷

There are many more stories of transports, some so tragic they hardly bear repeating. So horrific were these journeys, in fact, that they have become, in the collective memory of the survivors, a puzzle almost as hard to understand as the camps themselves. By applying more or less normal human psychology, it is possible to explain the cruelty of camp commanders, who were themselves under pressure to meet norms and fulfill plans, as we shall see. It is even possible to explain the actions of interrogators, whose lives depended on their success at extracting confessions, and who had sometimes been selected for their sadism. It is far more difficult, however, to explain why an ordinary convoy guard would refuse to give water to prisoners dying of thirst, to give aspirin to a child with fever, or to protect women from being gang-raped to death.

Certainly there is no evidence that convoy guards were explicitly instructed to torture prisoners being transported. On the contrary, there were elaborate rules about how to protect prisoner transports, and much official anger when these rules were frequently broken. A decree of December 1941, “on improving the organization of the transport of prisoners,” heatedly described the “irresponsibility” and sometimes “criminal” behavior of some of the convoy guards and employees of the Gulag: “This has resulted in prisoners arriving at the designated place in a state of starvation, as a result of which they cannot be put to work for some time.”
⁵⁸

An indignant official order, of February 25, 1940, complained not only that sick and incapacitated prisoners had been put on trains to the northern camps—which was in itself forbidden—but also that many more had not been fed or given water, had not been given clothes appropriate to the season en route, and had not been accompanied by their personal files, which had therefore gone missing. Prisoners arrived in camps, in other words, where no one knew their crime or their sentence. Out of 1,900 prisoners sent in one transport to the far north in 1939, 590 were of “limited work capacity” upon arrival, being either too weak or too ill. Some had only a few months left to serve of their sentences, and some had finished them altogether. Most were without warm clothes and “poorly shod.” In November 1939, another 272 prisoners, none of whom had winter coats, were driven a distance of 500 kilometers in open trucks, as a result of which many fell ill and some later died. All of these facts were reported with suitable outrage and anger, and negligent guards were punished.
⁵⁹

Numerous instructions regulated the affairs of the transit prisons as well. On July 26, 1940, for example, an order described the organization of transit prisons, explicitly demanding their commanders to construct baths, parasite disinfection systems, and working kitchens.
⁶⁰
No less important were the safety and security of Dalstroi’s prison fleet. When, in December 1947, dynamite exploded on two of the ships moored in Magadan’s harbor, resulting in 97 deaths and 224 hospitalizations, Moscow accused the port of “criminally negligent behavior.” Those held responsible were tried and received criminal sentences.
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The Gulag’s bosses in Moscow were well aware of the horrors of prisoner boat travel. A report by the prosecutors’ office inspectorate in Norilsk in 1943 complained that prisoners who arrived by boat—they came up the Yenisei River on barges—were “frequently in poor physical condition . . . of the 14,125 prisoners who arrived in Norilsk in 1943, about 500 were hospitalized in Dudinka [the Norilsk port] on the first or second day after their arrival; up to 1,000 were temporarily unable to work, as they had been deprived of food.”
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Despite all of the bluster, the transport system changed very little over time. Orders were sent out, complaints were made. Yet on December 24, 1944, a convoy arrived at Komsomolsk station in the far east in what even the deputy prosecutor of the Gulag system thought was an execrable condition. His official account of the fate of “echelon SK 950,” a train composed of fifty-one wagons, must stand as some kind of low point, even in the nightmarish history of Gulag transport:

The prisoners arrived in unheated wagons which had not been prepared for prisoner transport. In each wagon, there were between 10–12 bunks, on which no more than 18 people could fit, yet there were up to 48 people in each wagon. The wagons were not supplied with enough cannisters for water, as a result of which there were interruptions in water supply, sometimes for whole days and nights. The prisoners were given frozen bread, and for 10 days got none at all. The prisoners arrived dressed in summer uniforms, dirty, covered in lice, with obvious signs of frostbite . . . the sick prisoners had been rolled onto the wagon floors, without medical help, and had died there and then. Corpses were kept in the wagons for long periods . . .

Of the 1,402 people sent on echelon SK 950, 1,291 arrived: 53 had died en route, 66 had been left in hospitals along the way. On arrival, a further 335 were hospitalized with third- or fourth-degree frostbite, pneumonia, and other diseases. The convoy had, it seemed, traveled for sixty days, twenty-four of which they had spent not moving, sitting on side tracks “due to poor organization.” Yet in this extreme case, the leader of the echelon—one Comrade Khabarov—received nothing more than a “censure with warnings.”
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Many survivors of similar transports have tried to explain this grotesque mistreatment of prisoners at the hands of young, inexperienced convoy guards, who were far from being the trained killers deployed in the prison system. Nina Gagen-Torn speculated that “it wasn’t evidence of evil, just the complete indifference of the convoy. They didn’t look at us as people. We were living cargo.”
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Antoni Ekart, a Pole arrested after the Soviet invasion of 1939, also thought that the lack of water was not deliberately to torture us but because the escort had to put in extra work to bring it and would not do so without an order. The commander of the escort was not at all interested in this matter and the guards were unwilling to escort the prisoners several times a day to the wells or water taps at stations owing to the risk of escape.
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Yet some prisoners reported more than indifference: “In the morning, the boss of the convoy came into the corridor . . . he stood with his face to the window, his back to us, and shouted insults, swear words: ‘I’m bored of you!’”
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Boredom—or, rather, boredom mixed with anger at having to carry out such a degrading job—was also Solzhenitsyn’s explanation for this otherwise inexplicable phenomenon. He even tried to think himself into the minds of the convoy guards. Here they were, so busy and understaffed, and then to have “to go carry water in pails—it has to be hauled a long way, too, and it’s insulting: why should a Soviet soldier have to carry water like a donkey for enemies of the people?” Worse, he went on,

It takes a long time to dole out that water. The
zeks
don’t have their own mugs. Whoever did have one has had it taken away from him—so what it adds up to is that they have to be given the two government issue mugs to drink out of, and while they are drinking up you have to keep standing there and standing, and dipping it out and dipping it out some more and handing it to them . . .

But the convoy could have borne with all that, hauled the water, and doled it out, if only those pigs, after slurping up the water, didn’t ask to go to the toilet. So here’s the way it works out: if you don’t give them water for a day, then they don’t ask to go to the toilet. Give them water once, and they go to the toilet once; take pity on them and give them water twice—and they go to the toilet twice. So it’s pure and simple common sense: just don’t give them anything to drink.
⁶⁷

Whatever their motivation—indifference, boredom, anger, injured pride—the effect on the prisoners was devastating. As a rule, they arrived at their camps not only disoriented and degraded by their experience of prison and interrogation, but physically depleted—and ripe for the next stage of their journey into the Gulag system: entry into the camp.

If it was not dark, if they were not ill, and if they were interested enough to look up, the first thing the prisoners saw on arrival was their camp’s gate. More often than not, the gate displayed a slogan. On the entrance into one of the Kolyma
lagpunkts
“hung a plywood rainbow with a banner draped over it which read: ‘Labor in the USSR is a Matter of Honesty, Glory, Valor and Heroism!’”
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Barbara Armonas was welcomed to a labor colony in the suburbs of Irkutsk with the banner: “With Just Work I Will Pay My Debt to the Fatherland.”
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Arriving in Solovetsky in 1933—it had by then become a high-security prison—another prisoner saw a sign reading: “With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness!”
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Yuri Chirkov, arrested at age fourteen, was also confronted with a sign at Solovetsky which read “Through Labor—Freedom!”—a slogan which is about as uncomfortably close as it is possible to get to the slogan that hung over the gates of Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei—“Work Makes You Free.”
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Like the arrival in prison, the arrival of a new
étap
in camp was also attended by rituals: prison inmates, exhausted by transport, now had to be turned into working
zeks.
“On arrival at the camp,” remembered Karol Colonna-Czosnowski, a Polish prisoner,

[w]e spent a long time being counted . . . That particular evening there seemed no end to it. Innumerable times we had to form five abreast and each row was told to advance three paces which several worried-looking NKVD officials would call aloud, “
odin, dva, tri
. . .” and laboriously write down each number on to their large clipboards. Presumably the number of those alive, added to the numbers of those who had been shot
en route
, did not produce the expected total.
⁷²

Following the count both men and women were taken to the baths and shaved—over their entire bodies. This procedure, carried out under official orders for the sake of hygiene
⁷³
—it was assumed, usually correctly, that prisoners arriving from Soviet jails would be covered with lice—nevertheless had an important ritual significance as well. Women describe it with particular horror and distaste, and no wonder. Often, they had to remove their clothes and then wait naked, under the full gaze of male soldiers, for their turn to be shaved. “For the first time,” recalled Elinor Olitskaya, who was a participant in this ceremony on her arrival in Kolyma, “I heard wails of protest: Women remain women . . .”
⁷⁴
Olga Adamova-Sliozberg had suffered the same experience in a transit prison:

We undressed and handed over our clothes for treatment and were about to go upstairs to the washroom when we realized that the staircase was lined from top to bottom with guards. Blushing, we hung our heads and huddled together. Then I looked up, and my eyes met those of the officer in charge. He gave me a sullen look. “Come on, come on,” he shouted. “Get a move on!”