The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (30 page)

There were many innocent prisoners in Kolyma who prayed as faithfully as Thomas Sgovio but lost their lives. Why one man is saved and another is lost is a mystery, just as faith itself remains a mystery. Rationally, of course, some would survive, and perhaps it was all just pure luck. Perhaps the real mystery was why the innocent were being killed with such unrelenting cruelty.

 
 
EVERY TEN DAYS the prisoners were forced to endure a visit to the bathhouse, where they noticed the bones poking through their disappearing flesh. With a thousand others, Thomas was forced to stand in the cold, waiting his turn. They were then ordered to undress, their prison clothes thrown into a giant heap while they were given a cup of cold water and a cup of hot water to wash: “And how could you wash? And my hands were just like a monkey’s hands, black, all chapped with blood.” Sexual violence regularly occurred within the bathhouse walls, as the criminals abused the weakest and most vulnerable of the prisoners. Their visits were followed by a fight to retrieve their clothes. The strongest and most brutal grabbed first choice—and their bodies, better protected from the cold, became a little stronger—while the weakest were left with the most worn and fragile remainders from the pile, which only steepened the trajectory of their descent. In the extreme cold of Kolyma, the prisoners’ clothing was as vital as food: “We killed each other. We tore each other’s eyes out for these clothes.”
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Those left without gloves had to fashion their own, and if a prisoner woke in the morning and the man in the next bunk had died, he considered himself fortunate to take the dead man’s clothes and perhaps find a hidden portion of bread. The camp barracks were constructed with sleeping platforms on two levels, with a stove in the middle to provide some warmth. But there was no insulation, and often the roofs were so poorly built the prisoners could see the stars above them. In winter, the temperatures inside could fall below minus forty degrees with no blankets to cover them. Each night Thomas bowed his head and whispered the Lord’s Prayer; using his rag boots as a pillow and his outer jacket as a blanket, he would attempt to sleep knowing that he would have to get up during the night to warm himself by the stove.
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And then a new workday would begin with the morning roll call, when Thomas would stand waiting to shout out his name, year of birth, and sentence under the Soviet criminal code.
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By necessity Thomas’ Russian quickly improved, since very soon there was no one left who could speak English. Of the twelve Americans, or Russian Americans, who had arrived with him on the transport, ten had died within the first year. Overall, three quarters of the prisoners in Kolyma did not survive their first winter. One survivor testified that the
“average lifespan of a convict at Kolyma is usually taken as four months. People with a weaker constitution are, as a rule, finished by the end of the second or third week. For reasons that I do not know, their leg and arm joints soon begin to swell; later on the swelling spreads to the face and in a few weeks they die.
” According to the Polish prisoner Kazimierz Zamorski,
“The number of so-called ‘three year men,’ that is, prisoners who have survived three Kolyma winters, was very small indeed. They could be easily recognized by their dark-coloured cheeks, a stigma of numerous frostbites. They were highly respected by their fellow-prisoners as heroes of the incessant and hard struggle for existence. Every one of them had had at least one toe amputated . . . Generally not more than fifteen percent of the prisoners survived the first winter.”
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The larger men died first, since they needed the most food. Prisoners from the Baltic states, for example, died more quickly than Russians because they tended to be physically larger and needed more calories to sustain their work.
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The most susceptible to the cold and disease were the Central Asian prisoners. Transported from their subtropical homelands into Arctic temperatures, according to one prisoner, “they died like flies. All their vital forces were numbed as soon as they went out into the terrible cold . . . They stood motionless, their arms crossed, their bowed heads hunched between their shoulders, waiting for the end.”
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Only the prisoners who had once been peasants or laborers could withstand the shock of heavy manual labor. Worst off were the intellectuals or former office workers, who were persecuted at every turn by the NKVD guards and doomed by their education to the hardest labor; their mortality was among the highest.
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Such men and women quickly degenerated into
dokhodyagas,
the walking skeletons whose ironic name derived from the Russian verb
dokhodit,
meaning “to arrive.” Within the camps the
dokhodyagas
were those who had “arrived” as the finished citizens of their model socialist society.
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They could hardly be missed: their faces were taut and sharpened by starvation, their unfocused eyes lost deep in the sockets of their heads, their cheekbones protruding, and their gait uncertain, as if their every next step would be their last.
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Such men would collapse and die quite suddenly, often while working. They would swing a pick, stumble, and fall facedown to the ground. Their physical deterioration created a feeling of mutual helplessness and passivity. In this condition, on the threshold of death, it became difficult to distinguish one from another, or even men from women.
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The conditions of camp life were such that even healthy-looking men could be transformed into
dokhodyagas
with startling speed. Michael Aisenstein was one of the first from Thomas’ group to deteriorate. The engineer had been assigned to a different work brigade, and had his American camel-hair coat stolen on the first day. Thomas saw him lurking around the camp kitchen gathering empty plates from the mess tables, his listless eyes scanning them for scraps of food. When Thomas approached, Aisenstein looked right through him as though he did not recognize his friend. That winter, when Aisenstein disappeared, Thomas presumed he had died.
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In the context of the Gulag, grief became a superfluous emotion to those preoccupied with their own survival. Within the camps, the death of their fellow prisoners was normal and to be expected, most commonly dismissed with a shrug and a laconic eulogy learned from the others:
“You die today, I die tomorrow.”
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As the temperatures fell steadily that winter, Thomas felt the stinging sensation on the tip of his frozen nose, and was taught to take his hand from his mitten to cover his nose and warm it a little, careful not to rub it, or the skin and tissue would fall off. Gradually the survivors’ faces became covered in scabs, which they were warned not to touch: “Let them heal by themselves—otherwise you’ll find yourself without a nose in the spring.”
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Worse torments came from the criminals who preyed upon the political prisoners in the camps just as they had in the prisons and along their transport. Within the hierarchy of the Gulag, the criminals were favored by the guards with an ideological status above the “enemies of the people.” The criminals were thus encouraged to act as an internal killing machine. One Kolyma camp survivor, Anatoly Zhigulin, recalled that “their moral impact on camp life was boundless, they beat to death dozens of thousands. They corrupted hundreds of thousands. And those they corrupted equally ceased to be human.” Within the camps, these criminals were not just physically stronger; they hunted in packs and possessed few, if any, moral prohibitions to limit their violence.
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They did, however, possess a peculiarly human weakness, reported time and again in the accounts of the survivors. Starved of entertainment, the criminals loved to listen to stories, not only anecdotes or jokes but whole works of literature, told, if possible, in an educated manner. In the camps there were prisoners who created a niche for themselves as storytellers, recounting the novels of Dumas, Conan Doyle, or H. G. Wells from memory in exchange for an extra ration of bread.
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In this way, too, Thomas Sgovio’s life was saved, as the criminals asked him curious questions about America, and he told colorful stories of famous gangsters such as Al Capone and John Dillinger, or of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. And when Thomas exhausted his gangster tales, he would switch to the stories of O. Henry, which carried a satisfying twist in the tail for his discerning audience.
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Later they taught him how to make tattoos with homemade needles and ink from a chunk of burnt rubber mixed with a little sugar and water. On their bodies, Thomas Sgovio inked the markings of their subculture, from simple scrolls—I LOVE MY MOTHER—to elaborate tableaux of a bottle of vodka, the ace of spades, and a naked girl, Our Ruin.
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The criminals’ tattoos carried an ever-present symbolism created to inspire fear in others. Skulls on fingers counted the number of murders committed, the spires of cathedrals or monasteries the number of years spent within the prison system. On their shoulders, the criminal leaders had tattooed the epaulettes of the White Army, and by this self-identification, a strict hierarchy was enforced.
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In Thomas’ camp, a criminal leader named Goncharov had taken a shine to the young American and offered him some advice: “We give you extra food. Just don’t let your spirits fall. If you live through this first winter, the chances are about fifty-fifty that you’ll survive the next. You’re still young.” With this help, Thomas Sgovio survived his first winter in Kolyma, while others were dying all around.
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To survive long-term was much harder. Each prisoner had to find a way to remove himself from the physical labor in the goldfields. There was a common piece of advice in the Soviet concentration camps—“You can only survive on a function”—which emphasized the necessity of finding a precious job as a cook, a camp clerk, or a medical orderly, or any other role away from the mines, which killed without fail.
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Thomas’ function came when the camp authorities chose to make use of his expertise as a sign painter for their propaganda displays. Transferred to a new camp, he gained temporary respite painting the slogans chosen to boost the morale of the prisoners sent out to work. OUR SELFLESS LABOR WILL RESTORE US TO THE FAMILY OF WORKERS was a typical example of a propaganda slogan inscribed over the gates of the Kolyma camps—it was the Soviet precursor to ARBEIT MACHT FREI.
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Now Thomas was fearful lest he ruin his good fortune by making grammatical mistakes in his rudimentary Russian. The rest of the Americans from his transport were dead, so he was surprised one afternoon when he heard a voice call out “Hello” to him in English. He turned to see the smiling face of Alex Shopik, one of the Pittsburgh miners who had been sent to Kolyma on the same transport as his friend Marvin Volat. Although Marvin had died in the camps, Alex Shopik had survived thus far working in the camp engineer’s office, where he was given the task of translating the instruction manuals for two American excavating machines, newly imported to boost Dalstroi’s gold production. Thomas Sgovio and Alex Shopik’s friendship would, however, prove to be only fleeting. When Shopik’s translation duties ended, he was reassigned to general work and quickly became a
dokhodyaga.
In the ever-worsening conditions, and despite Thomas’ efforts to send him extra food, he soon died.
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In 1931, Alex Shopik had been one of a party of seventy-five American miners emigrating to the USSR from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At the beginning of the decade, their stirring speeches had been reported in the newspaper
Sovietskaya Sibir
:
“We the members of the fifth group of miners which have been exploited by the bosses of Amerika, and thrown out of work for our services into the thirteen million army of unemployed have decided to leave that capitalist country and help the Soviet Union . . . We, ourselves, have come to Soviet Russia not to sleep but to work and work with all our power to help and complete the Five Year Plan.”
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No one counted how many of the seventy-five American miners ever returned home, or how many of their lives ended in solitary deaths scattered in camps across the Gulag Archipelago. In their eagerness, they had all been as innocent as children.

 
 
IN A CAMP HOSPITAL in Kolyma, Elinor Lipper, a young Dutch socialist arrested in Moscow, had gained temporary reprieve as a nurse. With almost no resources, she attempted to help the prisoners regain their strength, but her best efforts were in vain. Their cause of death was invariably starvation or the consequences thereof, which left the body vulnerable to disease or the slightest infection, which would quickly kill.
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Elinor Lipper noticed that the female prisoners seemed to survive in greater numbers than the male, perhaps because they had a greater determination to live, or possibly because they were marginally better treated. But her observation was only relative. The female prisoners also succumbed to starvation and disease, and were subject to executions just like the men.

Of the many women coerced into prostitution to save their lives in the camps, some became pregnant, but they were kept at work until their final month of pregnancy. The mothers were allowed to nurse their babies until they were nine months old, at which point the children’s heads would be shaved before they were transferred to the camp orphanage. Growing up in camp conditions, the children ran wild, unable to speak because they were hardly spoken to, communicating in grunts and howls. There were so many young babies in one orphanage that it took a prisoner-nurse an hour and a half to change all their diapers. Uncared for and deprived of a mother’s attention, the youngest ones died in droves.
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Only very occasionally could it be clandestinely arranged for a mother to see her child. Thus a three-year-old girl whose entire life had been lived within “the zone” was led to see the face of a prisoner through a snow-covered window. And then a very frightened woman spoke to her for the first time: “Daughter, I’m your mother.”
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