Gulag

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.³²

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.³³

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.³⁴

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.³⁵ 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.”³⁶

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.” ³⁷