Gulag Voices (9 page)

“So!? What!?” she yelled. “You want to do another twenty? I can arrange that for you!”

She shot a glance at me, and seeing by my filthy jacket that I was a prisoner, barked, “And what do
you
want?”

I politely explained the reason for my visit, and when she rejected any claims or complaints from the yard, realized that our conversation was over. I was about to bow out, so to speak, and had already opened the door a crack when I felt the urge to make a little mischief. I turned and said, “You know, you and I have met! Do you remember me?”

“Of course I do. You’re a goner.
4
I met you on my very first day.”

“So you’re a free woman now?”

“What do you think?”

“And you’re married?”

“Yes.”

“To whom?”

“Major L., deputy commandant in charge of discipline.”

She spoke with a clear sense of her own dignity and the understanding that from now on she was safe and secure. Major L. was a well-known figure in the camp system. A cruel and evil man who had risen from the ranks in the 1930s, he had left a trail of victims behind him. Rumor had it that he had executed many of them himself.

We had nothing more to say to each other; I turned toward the door. But just as I was about to step across the threshold I cast a glance over my shoulder and froze in my tracks. Two wide-open, endlessly despairing eyes were fixed on me. There was a sheen about them—then again, it might have been my imagination. Another second passed, and her gaze turned calm and hard once more. Her chin shot forward, squared itself; her lips thinned to a thread. I turned and left the office without a backward glance.

1
. These are all Moscow prisons; Malaia (small) Lubianka was used for criminal investigations.

2
. A dining hall restricted to top Party members.

3
. A trusty could not be assigned to “general work” in the forests or mines.

4
. In Russian,
dokhodiaga,
a term used for prisoners who are likely to die quickly.

8.

HAVA VOLOVICH

H
ava Volovich was born in 1916. She worked as a typesetter, then as a newspaper subeditor, in a small Ukrainian town, where she watched friends and family die all around her during the famine of 1932–33. She stayed alive herself only because of the ration card she received at work. She began speaking openly and critically about the damage being done to Ukrainian peasants by the new collective farms and confiscation policies, and as a result she was arrested in 1937. She remained in the camps for sixteen years, until 1953.

After she came home, Volovich held a series of low-ranking jobs—on a pig farm, as a night watchman, as a factory stoker. Her short memoir, plainly but strongly written, appeared in 1989 along with several other women’s memoirs in a much-admired anthology. Published by Vozvraschenie, an organization dedicated to the collection and preservation of Gulag memoirs, the anthology later appeared in English under the title
Till My Tale Is Told
. Even in this extraordinary collection of essays, some by famous writers, Volovich’s story stands out: she, like Elena Glinka, was not afraid to touch on taboo subjects.

To my mind, the excerpt reprinted here is one of the most difficult to read in all of Gulag literature. In just a few paragraphs, Volovich narrates, with heartbreaking honesty, the story of the child born to her in the camp. This kind of story was shockingly common: there were many children born in the Gulag, as well as many children brought into the Gulag by nursing mothers. A 1949 administrative report on the condition of women recorded that of 503,000 women officially imprisoned in the Gulag, 9,300 were pregnant, and another 23,790 had small children living with them.

Because the mothers were prisoners and were supposed to be working, nurseries were created especially to care for the children. Stalin had once declared that “sons are not responsible for the crimes of their fathers,” and thus the state, in theory, meant to take care of even the offspring of criminals. Gulag officials issued stern instructions from Moscow, such as one that decreed that “toys which are not spoiled by washing and boiling, made of rubber, celluloid, and bone, shall be permitted.” Strict breast-feeding schedules allowed women short, twenty-minute work breaks to visit the nursery.

In practice, these places were shockingly inadequate, and many infants subjected to this kind of breast-feeding regime died. Those who made it past the first year were often deeply damaged. Yevgenia Ginzburg, who worked in one of these nurseries, recalled that many of the children had had so little human contact they could barely speak: “Inarticulate howls, mimicry, and blows were the main means of communication.” She did her best to help them, as Volovich did her best to help her own child, but the powerful indifference of the camp administrators meant that many of the children suffered a terrible fate.

My Child

There was only one thing that these stockbreeders from hell could not exterminate: the sex drive. Indifferent to regulations, to the threat of the punishment cells, to hunger and humiliation alike, it lived and flourished far more openly and directly than it does in freedom.

Things that a free person might have thought about a hundred times before doing happened here as simply as they would between stray cats. No, this wasn’t depravity of the kind you might expect in a brothel. This was real, “legitimate” love, with fidelity, jealousy, suffering; with the pain of parting; and with the terrible “crowning joy” of love—the birth of children.

The childbearing instinct is both beautiful and terrible. Beautiful if everything has been done to greet the arrival in the world of this new human being; terrible if this child is condemned, even before birth, to torment and suffering. But our reason was by then too blunted for us to think very carefully about the fate of our offspring.

Our need for love, tenderness, caresses was so desperate that it reached the point of insanity, of beating one’s head against a wall, of suicide. And we wanted a child—the dearest and closest of all people, someone for whom we could give up our own life. I held out for a relatively long time. But I did so need and long for a hand of my own to hold, something I could lean on in those long years of solitude, oppression, and humiliation to which we were all condemned.

A number of such hands were offered, and I did not choose the best of them, by any means. But the result of my choice was an angelic little girl with golden curls. I called her Eleonora.

She was born in a remote camp barracks, not in the medical block. There were three mothers there, and we were given a tiny room to ourselves in the barracks. Bedbugs poured down like sand from the ceiling and walls; we spent the whole night brushing them off the children. During the daytime we had to go out to work and leave the infants with any old woman whom we could find who had been excused from work; these women would calmly help themselves to the food we left for the children.

I believed neither in God nor in the devil. But while I had my child, I most passionately, most violently wanted there to be a God. I wanted there to be someone who might hear my fervent prayer, born of slavery and degradation, and grant me salvation and happiness for my child, at the cost of all possible punishment and torment for myself, if need be.

Every night for a whole year, I stood at my child’s cot, picking off the bedbugs and praying. I prayed that God would prolong my torment for a hundred years if it meant that I wouldn’t be parted from my daughter. I prayed that I might be released with her, even if only as a beggar or a cripple. I prayed that I might be able to raise her to adulthood, even if I had to grovel at people’s feet and beg for alms to do it.

But God did not answer my prayer. My baby had barely started walking—I had hardly heard her first words, the wonderful heartwarming word “Mama”—when we were dressed in rags despite the winter chill, bundled into a freight car, and transferred to the “mothers’ ” camp. And here my pudgy little angel with the golden curls soon turned into a pale ghost with blue shadows under her eyes and sores all over her lips.

I was put to work felling trees. On the very first day, a huge dead pine fell toward me. I saw it begin to fall, but my legs turned to water and I couldn’t move. Next to me was a huge tree that had blown down in a snowstorm, and I instinctively squatted down behind its upturned roots. The pine crashed down right by me, but not even a twig touched me. I had hardly scrambled from my shelter when the brigade leader rushed up and started yelling that he didn’t need sloppy workers in his brigade, and that he certainly wasn’t going to answer for cretins. I let his abuse wash over me; my thoughts were far away from the pine that had so nearly killed me, and the tree felling, and the brigade leader’s bad language. I could think only of my sick daughter in her cot. The next day I was transferred to the sawmill right next to the camp itself.

All that winter I sat on a frozen block of wood clutching the handle of a saw. I got a chill on the bladder and terrible lumbago, but I thanked my lucky stars for the job. I was able to take home a little bundle of firewood every day, and in return I was allowed to see my daughter outside normal visiting hours. But sometimes the guards at the gates took my firewood for themselves, causing me intense anguish.

My appearance at the time could hardly have been more miserable and wretched. To avoid getting lice (a ubiquitous delight in the camps at the time), I had shaved off my hair. Few women would have done that without being forced to. The only time I took off my padded trousers was when I was going to see my daughter.

In return for my bribes of firewood, the children’s nurses, whose own children were also there in the group, would let me see my child first thing in the morning before roll call, and occasionally during the lunch break—besides, of course, at night, when I brought back the firewood.

And the things I saw there!

I saw the nurses getting the children up in the mornings. They would force them out of their cold beds with shoves and kicks. (For the sake of “cleanliness,” blankets weren’t tucked in around the children but were simply thrown on top of their cots.) Pushing the children with their fists and swearing at them roughly, they took off their nightclothes and washed them in ice-cold water. The babies didn’t even dare cry. They made little sniffing noises like old men and let out low hoots.

This awful hooting noise would come from the cots for days at a time. Children already old enough to be sitting up or crawling would lie on their backs, their knees pressed to their stomachs, making these strange noises, like the muffled cooing of pigeons.

One nurse was responsible for each group of seventeen children. She had to sweep the ward, wash and dress the children, feed them, keep the stove going, and do all sorts of special “voluntary” shifts in the camp; but her main responsibility was keeping the ward clean. In order to cut down on her workload and allow herself a bit of free time, she would “rationalize” her jobs: that is, she would try to come up with ways in which she could reduce the amount of time she had to spend on the children. Take feeding, for instance, which I saw once.

The nurse brought a steaming bowl of porridge from the kitchen, and portioned it out into separate dishes. She grabbed the nearest baby, forced its arms back, tied them in place with a towel, and began cramming spoonful after spoonful of hot porridge down its throat, not leaving it enough time to swallow, exactly as if she were feeding a turkey chick. The fact that there was a stranger present didn’t bother her: this “rationalization” had evidently been approved by someone higher up the line. No wonder there were plenty of empty beds in the infants shelter even though the birthrate in the camps was relatively high. Three hundred babies died there every year even before the war started. And how many were there during the war!

It was only their own babies whom these nurses carried around in their arms all the time, whom they fed properly, patting their bottoms tenderly; these were the only babies who lived to see freedom.

There was a doctor working in this House of Dead Babies too. Her name was Mitrikova. There was something odd and unpleasant about this woman: her movements were hasty, her speech was jerky, her eyes were always darting around. She did nothing to reduce the death rate among the infants; she cared only about the ones in the isolation ward, and even that was only for form’s sake. I don’t suppose the “rationalization” with the hot porridge and the loose blankets, when the temperature in the ward was only eleven or twelve degrees above freezing, was done without her knowledge either.

The few minutes that the doctor did spend in the infants’ house were allocated to the groups of older children. These feeble-minded six- and seven-year-olds had somehow conformed to Darwin’s law of the survival of the fittest, and they lived on despite the hot porridge, the kicks, the shoves, the washing in icy water, and the long sessions when they were left sitting on their potties tied to their chairs, a practice which meant that many children began suffering from prolapses of the large intestine.

Mitrikova did spend some time with the older children. She didn’t give them any medical treatment—she had neither the wherewithal nor the skill for that—but she got them to do dances and taught them little poems and songs. Well, it was meant to look good when the time came to pack them off to an orphanage. All the children really learned in that house was the cunning and craftiness of old camp lags. They learned how to cheat and to steal, and how not to be caught doing it.

Before I had figured out what sort of person Mitrikova was, I told her how badly some of the nurses treated the children, and begged her to do something about it. She looked thunderous and promised that the guilty parties would be punished, but things remained exactly as they had been, and my little Eleonora began to fade even faster.

On some of my visits I found bruises on her little body. I shall never forget how she grabbed my neck with her tiny skinny hands and moaned, “Mama, want home!” She hadn’t forgotten the bug-ridden slum where she first saw the light of day, and where she’d been with her mother all the time.

The anguish of small children is more powerful and more tragic than the anguish of adults. Knowledge comes to a child before he can fend for himself. For as long as his needs and wishes are anticipated by loving eyes and hands, he doesn’t realize his own helplessness. But if those hands betray him, surrendering him to callous and cruel strangers, his horror has no limits. A child cannot grow used to things or forget them; he can only put up with them, and when that happens, anguish settles in his heart and condemns him to sickness and death.

People who find nature tidy and readily understandable may well be shocked by my view that animals are like small children, and vice versa—that is, small children are like animals. Both of them understand many things and suffer much, but since they cannot speak, they cannot beg for mercy and charity.

Little Eleonora, who was now fifteen months old, soon realized that her pleas for “home” were in vain. She stopped reaching out for me when I visited her; she would turn away in silence. On the last day of her life, when I picked her up (they allowed me to breastfeed her), she stared wide-eyed somewhere off into the distance, then started to beat her weak little fists on my face, clawing at my breast, and biting it. Then she pointed down at her bed.

In the evening, when I came back with my bundle of firewood, her cot was empty. I found her lying naked in the morgue among the corpses of the adult prisoners. She had spent one year and four months in this world, and died on March 3, 1944.

I don’t know where her tiny grave is. They wouldn’t let me leave the camp compound to bury her myself. By clearing the snow off the roofs of two wings of the infants’ house, I earned three extra bread rations. I swapped them and my own two rations for a coffin and a small individual grave. Our brigade leader, who was allowed out without a guard, took the coffin to the cemetery and brought me back a fir twig in the shape of a cross, to stand in for a crucifix.