Gulag Voices (10 page)
Authors: Anne Applebaum
That is the whole story of how, in giving birth to my only child, I committed the worst crime there is.
9.
W
hen he was arrested in 1940, Gustav Herling was, at age twenty-one, already a published journalist and critic. Like Kazimierz Zarod, he was arrested in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland while trying to escape over the border. The NKVD jailed him, interrogated him, and deported him to a camp near Arkhangelsk, in the Russian far North. Finally discharged in 1942 along with other Poles, he left the country with “Anders’s Army,” following it through Persia and Palestine. After the war, Herling remained in Italy, not wanting to return to Soviet-dominated Poland. He made his living as an émigré writer and novelist in Naples, working for the Paris-based Polish journal
Kultura
and occasionally writing for the Italian press. He returned “home” to Poland for the first time only in 1991, after the collapse of the Communist regime.
Herling wrote his Gulag memoir
A World Apart
immediately after the war’s end. In part an account of his own experiences, the book is more accurately described not as a memoir but as an exploration of the different human reactions to life in an inhuman place. It could not be published in Communist Poland, but it did appear in English in 1951, twenty years before Solzhenitsyn’s writings. But although it had a preface by Bertrand Russell and was admired by Albert Camus, Herling’s book never won wide renown in the West. Because its author was a Pole, it was considered too biased, too “anti-Soviet” to be taken seriously. Nevertheless,
A World Apart
did eventually appear illegally in Poland’s underground press, where its impact was little short of revolutionary. Adam Michnik, one of Poland’s best-known dissidents, wrote at the time of Herling’s death that reading
A World Apart
at the age of fifteen had been a “shock”: “All of the Communists’ propaganda was reduced to nothing. I understood that every day, in school, in books, in the newspapers, they are lying to me.”
The selection that follows describes an aspect of camp life which is rarely discussed elsewhere: the “house of meetings,” the special barrack where prisoners were occasionally allowed to meet family members, usually their wives. Although memoirists often describe the world of the camps as separate from the “real” world, there were contacts between the two. Recent research has shown that it was possible to exchange letters more frequently than had long been assumed, at least in some camps and in some periods. Prisoners could also receive packages, and in the worst years a bar of chocolate or a hunk of lard from home might have been enough to save a life. Nevertheless, misunderstandings often arose between Gulag prisoners and their free family members–owing not least to the profound differences in the moral codes inside and outside the camp–and it is these which interest Herling the most.
Dom svidaniy,
literally “the house of meetings,” was the name which we gave to a newly built wing of the guardhouse, where prisoners were allowed to spend between one and three days with their relatives, who had come from all parts of Russia to the Kargopol camp for this short visit. Its topographic situation in the camp zone was to some extent symbolic: our entrance to the barrack was through the guardhouse, from the zone, and the way out was already on the other side of the barbed wire, at liberty. Thus it was easy to think that the house in which the prisoners saw their relatives for the first time after so many years was on the borderline between freedom and slavery; a prisoner, shaved, washed, and neatly dressed, having shown his pass and the official permit for the visit, walked through the partition straight into arms extended to him from liberty.
Permission for such a visit was granted only after the most complicated and trying procedure had been undergone by the prisoner as well as by his family. As far as I can remember, every prisoner was in theory allowed to have one visitor a year, but the majority of prisoners had to wait three, sometimes even five, years for it. The prisoner’s part was limited: when a year had passed from the moment of his arrest, he was free to present to the Third Section
1
a written request for a visit, together with a letter from his family, which made it quite unmistakably clear that one of them wished to see him, and a certificate of his good behavior, both at work and in the barrack, from the camp authorities. This meant that a prisoner who wanted to see his mother or his wife had to work at the level of at least the second cauldron,
2
or full norm, for a year; the inhabitants of the mortuary were as a rule excluded from the privilege of a visit. The letter from the family was no mere formality. Where the connections between a prisoner and a free person were not those of blood but of marriage, the greatest pressure was put on those outside to sever all relations with the “enemy of the people,” and many wives broke down under it. I read many letters in which wives wrote to their husbands in the camp, “I can’t go on living like this,” asking to be freed from their marriage vows. Occasionally, when the prisoner had every hope that permission for the visit would be granted, the procedure suddenly stopped dead, and only a year or two later did he learn that his relatives at liberty had thought better of it and withdrawn the original request. At other times, a prisoner who went to the house of meetings was welcomed not by extended arms, trembling with desire and longing, but by a look of weariness and words begging for mercy and release. Such visits confined themselves to the few hours necessary to settle the fate of the children, while the unfortunate prisoner’s heart withered like a dried nut, beating helplessly within its hard shell.
The initiative in the efforts to obtain permission naturally belongs to the family at liberty. From letters which I was shown by other prisoners I gathered that the procedure is prolonged, intricate, and even dangerous. The decision does not rest with GULAG (the Central Office of Camp Administration), which is concerned only with the administration of the camps and has nothing to do with the sentences or the indictments which produced them, but nominally with the Chief Prosecutor of the USSR, and actually with the local NKVD office in the petitioner’s place of domicile. A free person who is sufficiently obstinate to persist in his audaciousness, undeterred by the initial obstacles, finds himself the victim of a vicious circle from which he can seldom escape. Only a person with an absolutely blameless political past, one who can prove that he is immune from the germ of counter-revolution, can obtain the precious permission. Now in Russia no one would dare enter a hearing of interrogation even with a totally clear conscience; in this case, too, the certificate of political health is demanded by officials who are the only ones with the authority to give it. Apart from this evident contradiction, we find another, even more fantastic. The presence in one’s family of an enemy of the people is in itself sufficient proof of contamination, for someone who has lived with him during many years cannot be free from the plague of counter-revolution.
The NKVD treat political offenses as a contagious disease. Thus when a petitioner arrives at the NKVD office for a certificate of health, that in itself is evidence of his probable infection. But let us suppose that the political blood tests have not shown the presence of infection in the organism, and the petitioner has been vaccinated and remains in quarantine for an indefinite time. If all goes well, he then receives permission for a direct, three-day contact with the sick man, whose very existence seemed at the interrogation to be dangerous even at a distance of several thousand miles. The cruel, discouraging paradox of this situation is that during the hearings at the NKVD the petitioner must do everything to convince the interrogator that he has broken all relations with the prisoner and eradicated all emotional ties with him. And back comes the obvious question: in that case, why should he be willing to undertake a distant and expensive journey in order to see the prisoner? There is no way out of this conundrum. No obstacle is put in the way of wives who ask for a visit to the camp in order to end their marriages, thus freeing themselves from the nightmare of a life in half-slavery, in an atmosphere of constant suspicion, and with the brand of shared responsibility for the crimes of others. Others either give it up or else take the final, desperate step—a journey to Moscow to obtain the permission through special influence there. Even if they do somehow succeed by this method, they will have to face the vengefulness of the local NKVD, whom they have slighted to achieve their object, when they return from the camp to their native town. It is easy to guess how many are brave enough to risk asking for permission under these circumstances.
It is natural to ask why these monstrous difficulties and obstacles are put in the way of a visit, since the contingent of workers has already been supplied to the camps, and the costs of the journey there are covered by the visitor himself. I can only suggest three possible conjectures, of which one at least is accurate. Either the NKVD sincerely believes in its mission of safeguarding the Soviet citizen’s political health; or it attempts as far as possible to conceal from free people the conditions of work in forced labor camps, and to induce them by indirect pressure to break off all relations with their imprisoned relatives; or in this way it is putting power into the hands of camp authorities, which during whole years can squeeze from prisoners the remnants of their strength and health, deluding them with the hope of an imminent visit.
When the relative, usually the prisoner’s wife or mother, at last finds herself in the Third Section office of the particular camp, she must sign a declaration promising not to disclose by even one word, after her return home, what she has seen of the camp through the barbed wire; the privileged prisoner signs a similar declaration, undertaking—this time under pain of heavy punishment, even of death—not to mention in conversation his and his fellow-prisoners’ life and conditions in the camp. One can imagine how difficult this regulation makes any direct or intimate contact between two people who, after many years of separation, meet for the first time in these unusual surroundings; what is left of a relationship between two people if an exchange of mutual experiences is excluded from it? The prisoner is forbidden to say, and the visitor forbidden to ask, what he has gone through since the day of his arrest. If he has changed beyond recognition, if he has become painfully thin, if his hair has turned gray and he has aged prematurely, if he looks like a walking skeleton, he is allowed only to remark casually that “he hasn’t been feeling too well, for the climate of this part of Russia does not suit him.” Having thrown a cloak of silence over what may be the most important period of his life, the regulations push him back to an already distant and dimly remembered past, when he was at liberty and an entirely different man, when he felt and thought differently; he is in the unbearable situation of a man who should be free to speak, to shout even, and who is allowed only to listen. I have no idea whether all prisoners keep the promise given before the meeting, but, taking into consideration the high price which they would have to pay for breaking it, it may be supposed that they do. It is true that the closeness of the visiting relative may be some guarantee of discretion, but who is to say whether the tiny room, in which the two live together during the whole visit, is not supplied with an eavesdropping microphone, or whether a Third Section official is not listening on the other side of the partition? I only know that I often heard sobbing as I passed by the house of meetings, and I believe that this helpless, spasmodic weeping relieves their tension and expresses for the wretched human tatters, now dressed in clean prison clothing, all that they may not say in words. I think, too, that this is one of the advantages of a visit, for a prisoner seldom dares to cry in front of his companions, and the nightly sobbing in their sleep in the barrack proved to me that it could bring great relief. In the emptiness which sealed lips create between the two people in the house of meetings, they advance cautiously like lovers who, having lost their sight during long years of separation, reassure themselves of each other’s tangible existence with tentative caresses until, at the moment when they have finally learned to communicate in the new language of their feelings, they must part again. That is why prisoners after their return from the house of meetings were lost in thought, disillusioned, and even more depressed than before the longed-for visit.
Victor Kravchenko, in
I Chose Freedom
,
3
tells the story of a woman who, after many attempts and in return for a promise of cooperation with the NKVD, was finally given permission to visit her husband in a camp in the Urals. Into the small room at the guardhouse shuffled an old man in filthy rags, and it was only with difficulty and after several moments that the young woman recognized her husband. It is more than likely that he had aged and changed, but I cannot believe that he was in rags. I cannot, of course, make a categorical statement about conditions in the Ural camps, and I can only answer for what I myself saw, heard, or lived through in a camp near the White Sea. Nevertheless, I believe that all forced-labor camps throughout Soviet Russia, though they differ greatly in various respects, had a common aim, possibly imposed upon them from above: they strive at all costs to maintain, before free Soviet citizens, the appearance of normal industrial enterprises which differ from other sections of the general industrial plan only by their employment of prisoners instead of ordinary workers, prisoners who are quite understandably paid slightly less and treated slightly worse than if they were working of their own free will. It is impossible to disguise the physical condition of prisoners from their visiting relatives, but it is still possible to conceal, at least partly, the conditions in which they live. In Yercevo, on the day before the visit, the prisoner was made to go to the bathhouse and to the barber; he gave up his rags in the store of old clothing and received—only for the three days of the visit—a clean linen shirt, clean underwear, new wadded trousers and jerkin, a cap with earflaps in good condition, and boots of the first quality; from this last condition were exempt only prisoners who had managed to preserve, for just such an occasion, the suit which they had worn at the time of their original arrest, or to acquire one, usually in a dishonest way, while serving their sentence. As if this were not enough, the prisoner was issued with bread and soup tickets for three days in advance; he usually ate all the bread by himself there and then, to eat his fill just once, and the soup tickets he distributed among his friends, relying on the food which would be brought by the visitor. When the visit was over, the prisoner had to submit all that he had received from his relatives to an inspection at the guardhouse; then he went straight to the clothing store to shed his disguise and take up his true skin once more. These regulations were always very strictly enforced, though even here there were glaring contradictions which could at once destroy the whole effect of this comedy staged for the benefit of free citizens of the Soviet Union. On the first morning of a visit the relative could, by raising the curtain in the room, catch a glimpse of the brigades marching out from the guardhouse to work beyond the zone and see the dirty, scrofulous shadows wrapped in torn rags held together with string, gripping their empty mess cans and swooning from cold, hunger, and exhaustion; only an imbecile could have believed that the scrubbed, neat man who had been brought to the house of meetings the day before in clean underwear and new clothes had avoided the fate of the others. This revolting masquerade was sometimes comic despite its tragic implication, and a prisoner in his holiday outfit was greeted by jeers from the others in the barrack. I thought that if someone would fold the hands of these living dead, dressed in their tidy suits, over their chests, and force a holy picture and a candle between their stiffened fingers, they could be laid out in oak coffins, ready for their last journey. Needless to say, the prisoners who were forced to take part in this exhibition felt awkward in their disguise, as if ashamed and humiliated by the thought that they were being made use of as a screen to hide the camp’s true face for three days.
