Gulag

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