Dancing Under the Red Star (26 page)

Again we were loaded like cargo into cattle cars. There were only fifteen women among us, all political prisoners. The men were also politicals. No one knew precisely where we were going, but we had a hunch they were shipping us farther north, especially when, after the third horrendous day of travel, we woke to find our drinking water frozen solid and no heat in the car. My guess is that from the time I had fallen asleep to the time I woke up, the temperature had dropped at least forty degrees, from the teeth-chattering-but-somehow-bearable cold to now, the unbearable, loss-of-all-sensation, soul-shivering cold. The word
cold
does no justice in defining this condition. It had to be the equal and opposing contrast to hell’s fire. None of us had blankets, so all night we ached with the cold, covering ourselves with everything we owned or could find, trying to become as
small
as possible, then huddling together as tightly as we could. But our train kept moving, going still father north, into more cold.

One of the men, an older and slightly built Italian, was sick and spent nearly the whole night coughing. I couldn’t sleep anyway, so it didn’t matter. No one slept. The cold was agonizing. If I could shut my eyes and clear my mind for a few minutes at a time, that was “sleep.”

The Italian man died during the night. The extreme temperature must have been too much for him. There was no doctor to determine a specific cause of death, but he was no longer covered with the meager blanket he had earlier. Someone had taken it. Two days later a Polish woman died from severe dehydration and pneumonia. No adequate clothing, no water. That’s the way it went. They were only people.

We finally arrived in the city of Inta, Komi, ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic—as it was then known), in Far North of Siberia, only about three hours, by train, south of the Arctic Circle. We had traveled more than a thousand miles in the cattle cars to a region absolutely cut off from the rest of Russia. The city’s primary inhabitants were a native Eskimo-like nomadic people whose mainstay and means of survival were reindeer husbandry and hunting. Reindeer was the common food, the meat in Siberia, as well as the popular mode of transportation for these nomads. The people rode and also ate the reindeer. They had learned how to live in that killing cold.

Some of Siberia’s most notorious labor camps surrounded Inta. The NKVD provided free slave labor to work the numerous coal mines in the area. Coal mining and logging were by far the most difficult and dangerous of all the forced labor in the camps. Only the men worked in the mines. The women were exempt, not because the NKVD believed that the male is the stronger sex, but because the camp officials feared the repercussions of sexual tension created by men and women working together in the dangerous close quarters of the mine. Any possibility of work disruption due to gender distraction could easily lead to mechanical failure, tunnel collapse, or explosion. The mine operators wanted to avoid fatalities in the work force, but even more, they feared having to shut down a mine and lose production time.

I stayed for a few weeks at the medical camp in Inta, a treatment center for prisoners needing extensive care. I was then transferred to a series of camps. For the balance of the year, until 1949, I was assigned to a camp where the women did not have the same work requirements as the men. Instead, they sewed, knitted, crocheted, and embroidered. This was not a recreational pastime but the constant work of repairing old or creating new clothing and bedding for the camp. It was hard and steady toil, with inadequate materials and little time to rest.

Working in this unit, I met Lina Ivanovna Prokofiev, the Spanish wife of the famous Russian musical composer Sergei Prokofiev. The two of us spent many hours together, and we shared many things. I truly admired the integrity of Lina’s heart, her openness, and her lack of pretentiousness. She was refreshing to me, and I believe the feeling was reciprocated. We enjoyed each other’s company immensely. Lina was a true friend.

I listened with interest and sympathy as she shared many details of her fascinating life when she was a singer on the road with her husband. Lina had met Sergei many years ago, while she was in New York on a temporary visa from Spain and singing in the clubs for a living. She told me she had been about to apply for U.S. citizenship at that time, but then “Sergei came along and changed my mind.”

The two were married and traveled extensively as Sergei performed on concert tours throughout the United States, Europe, and other countries. Together, they had lived the lives of the privileged and fortunate few, although she confided that she never felt truly and completely fulfilled inside. Lina often spoke of the strange loneliness she had experienced, the emptiness she felt within, even in the middle of the crowds, the fame, and the tremendous accolades. Their success passed the time, but it failed to fill her heart.

“Margie,” she said to me, “there was always something missing, but I never knew what it was. We had all the money we could spend. Life was glamorous. We had more attention than any two people deserve. They took our pictures everywhere we went. And Sergei was not happy either. We hardly even slept together. We were two different people, and nobody ever knew it. People looked at us and thought our life was grand.”

She had been down a long road since then and told a tragic story of how the sick Soviet system had wrecked the lives of her husband and children as well as her own. Lina too had been officially labeled an enemy of the state—a vrag naroda, a traitor of the worst degree. She too was a political prisoner, banished from her home. And even worse, because of her political and banished status, neither her Russian husband nor her sons would have anything further to do with her. This sensitive and caring woman was completely abandoned by them, entirely cut off from her family’s love. They never visited, and she never received any food or clothing from them.

Lina said that her sons actually had very little to do with it. “What could they do, Margie? Sergei said they had no choice, but I knew that he would never leave Russia—even if he could.”

Under Stalin’s rule, the official reasons for the deportation and imprisonment of all non-Russian peoples included their resistance to Soviet rule, separatism, and widespread collaboration with German occupation forces during the war. In essence, it was a political crime to be non-Russian, as Lina was. Moreover, for true Russians to associate with such people, whether family or not, meant personal, social, and political suicide. The remaining family members of an arrested vrag naroda always had a choice. It was simple, but agonizing. If you continued to support your arrested vrag naroda, you became one yourself. The other choice was to publicly condemn or denounce your loved one, salute Comrade Stalin and the state, and keep your life as before. Self-preservation is a deeply rooted human instinct. Many people took the path of Lina’s family: “Since you’re already there, I’ll just stay here, okay? After all, better you than me, right?”

How could people treat one another like that? I knew my mama would never abandon me, but why had Lina’s family turned on her? Aren’t humans supposed to be created in the likeness and image of God? I asked myself a lot of questions as I witnessed these unspeakable cruelties. But in the inhuman jungle of Russia at that time, no one in power believed for an instant that “we” or “they” were “created” in any such likeness. Godlessness lay behind it all.

Lina was soon transferred to another camp, Vorkuta, which was above the Arctic Circle, a place of the most appalling conditions imaginable. I never saw or heard from her again. I missed her terribly, for we had become the best of friends, like sisters.

Our difficult and repetitious life in camp went on drearily until a woman named Tamara was assigned to us. Things were never the same again! Tamara came to play a major role in my life and in the lives of many others in our camp. She was a ballerina who had graduated from the highly reputed Kirov Ballet School in Leningrad. Until her imprisonment, she had lived in Kiev, where she was soloist for the renowned Kiev City Ballet. During the war she had been captured by the Germans when they occupied the Ukraine. They had sent her to Germany and given her the job of organizing concerts for the returning German soldiers. At the end of the war, she was returned to the Soviet Union. Tamara and many others were falsely led to believe that they were being repatriated, but to their horror, when they arrived in Russia, they were all arrested. All were tried for war crimes, including treason, for “allowing” themselves to be caught by the Germans and for working for them. I could hardly fathom the twisted thinking and injustice of this. And all these “repatriated” Russians were swiftly tried and convicted.

Accordingly, Tamara was shipped out to the Far North with a sentence just like mine: ten years hard labor and five years loss of civil rights. This was a pretty standard sentence until later in the 1950s, when the sentences became harsher still for the same so-called crimes. It was not unheard of for the new convicts to receive a twenty- to twenty-five-year sentence for the same trumped-up charges that had inflicted
only a ten-year sentence
during the prior decades.

Tamara was the most stunningly beautiful girl I had seen in all of Russia, even as a prisoner in a labor camp. From the way she walked into a room to the way she smiled into your eyes, she was irresistible. The cameras were always rolling, Tamara was always acting, and she was always an absolute natural. In a mildly seductive and alluring way, she received whatever she requested from the camp officials. She was not accustomed to denial.

Tamara received permission from the authorities to hold dance auditions for the purpose of creating a theatrical troupe. She had identified several women with artistic talents and experience in theater, song, and dance, and she persuaded the camp bureaucrats to let them stage shows and theatrical performances to entertain the camp contingent and, of course, these same camp officials and their families.

As word went around the camp that something new was happening, I asked myself why I shouldn’t audition for the entertainment group. After all, I was once a gymnast, an acrobat to some degree, an athlete and competitor, and I had always wanted to dance. So I contacted the group’s leaders and officially auditioned. I put some time and effort into a Caucasian dance number from the 1920s, something I remembered from my childhood in Detroit. They seemed to like it. I then did a few acrobatic routines for them as well, and they were more impressed. I was readily accepted into their group.

My camp life changed dramatically. We began extensive daily rehearsals, and for a few hours every evening we were actually able to forget our surroundings. At times it almost seemed like
real life.

Our first performances of a variety program for the camp inmates and the officials turned out to be an overwhelming success. There was enough talent among us to pull it off. Some of the women imprisoned in this camp had been professional musicians, dancers, singers, and actresses, and they inspired the rest of us, even though we had very little in the way of props, wardrobe, and musical instruments. We had no ballet slippers and no orchestra, but we had several capable guitarists and mandolin players. They were excellent and imaginative. We sewed our own ballet slippers out of scraps and adapted our own clothes for the costumes.

Among us was a brilliant seamstress named Eleonora, who became one of my dearest friends. She sewed many of our costumes for the stage and, with her staff, created the most wonderful stage pieces, intuitively making the most and best out of their scant resources. Eleonora had been transferred here with me from Burepolom. Of Polish descent, she had grown up in Byelorussia, also known as White Russia, in Minsk. Early in the war she was taken prisoner by the Germans, transported to the interior of Germany, and forced to work in a factory until they discovered her talents as a seamstress. That ended her factory work, because she was truly fantastic at dressmaking.

At the war’s end, she was arrested, tried for treason, and shipped to Burepolom. There she had a brief (but apparently not too brief) encounter with a young man from her log-felling crew, and when we met in the cattle car on the way to Inta, she informed me that she thought she was about five months pregnant. At the new camp she was placed on a special diet, more suitable for an expectant mother (but only by the harsh, meager standard of the camps). I could not have had a better friend. She shared everything with me, and I always shared my packages with her. I felt particularly sad for her at times, because she had no living relatives.