ABSTRACT Their Daily Bread: Stories of Suffering and Survival in the Nazi

ABSTRACT

Their Daily Bread: Stories of Suffering and Survival in the Nazi and Soviet Labor Camps

Kody Sherman Jackson

Director: Julie K. deGraffenried, Ph.D.

While my friends complain about many of their classes, they harp on history the most, saying that they would rather spend hours in the lab than read even a short history article. How did so many people come to view history as so boring and even painful to learn? In this paper, I seek to remedy this problem by using personal testimony (in the form of memoir) to examine the daily joys and tribulations of those who suffered through the Nazi and Soviet labor camp systems. Beginning with an analysis of the strengths, flaws, and practicality of memoirs as historical sources, this paper then embarks on a journey through the respective camp systems. In separate chapters on the Nazi and Soviet camps, it explores events like the prisoners’ interrogations, back-breaking labor, and death and themes like religious devotion, moral transformation, and the obligation to testify. Next, it discusses Margarete Buber-Neumann, a survivor who lived through both sets of camps, as a bridge between these two atrocities and a way to bring them together into a comparative history. Finally, this paper discusses how survivors remember their experiences and what that means for all of us who wish to understand the Nazi and Soviet camp systems and to use personal testimony to supplement traditional history.

APPROVED BY DIRECTOR OF HONORS THESIS:

______

Dr. Julie K. deGraffenried, History

APPROVED BY THE HONORS PROGRAM:

______

Dr. Andrew Wisely, Director

DATE:______

THEIR DAILY BREAD: STORIES OF SUFFERING AND SURVIVAL FROM THE

NAZI AND SOVIET LABOR CAMPS

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

Baylor University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the

Honors Program

Kody Sherman Jackson

Waco, Texas

May 2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii CHAPTER ONE You Shot Who in the What Now?: Validity and Memoir ...... 5 CHAPTER TWO Into the Abyss: The Nazi Labor Camp Experience ...... 35 CHAPTER THREE The Same Side of the Fence, the Other Side of the World: The Soviet Labor Camp Experience ...... 77 CHAPTER FOUR When Worlds Collide: Margarete Buber-Neumann in the Nazi and Soviet Labor Camps ...... 134 CHAPTER FIVE The How of the What: Examining the Structures and Similarities of Camp Memoirs158 APPENDIX A Memoirist Index Nazi Camp Memoirists ...... 179 Soviet Camp Memoirists ...... 180 Nazi and Soviet Labor Camp Memoirists ...... 182 APPENDIX B Glossary ...... 183 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 185

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would just like to acknowledge the many academic debts that I have incurred throughout the course of this project. Above all else, I need to thank Dr. Julie

deGraffenried for her work as my thesis director. I cannot think of anyone more

supportive, kind, or knowledgeable who I could have chosen. For better or worse, this

project is what it is because of you, your advice, and your constant editing. Thank you so

much. I hope one day to be able to serve my students in the way that you have helped

me. Additionally, many thanks and much appreciation goes out to Dr. Stephen Sloan and

Dr. Michael Long for serving on my thesis defense committee. Thank you for validating

and improving my work. So many other people in the Department of History, the Honors

Program, Baylor University, and the Baylor Libraries deserve to be thanked and I wish I

could name all of you and maybe even bake you something special. Through all of your

support and wisdom, you shaped who I was into what I have become. Two more groups

still need acknowledgement and I am running out of room here: it is overwhelming to

reflect back on everyone who has contributed to this project. Penultimately, I would like

to thank the community of St. Peter’s Catholic Student Center for their prayers and

support throughout this project. You may never read my work, but you have supported

me throughout this whole process with jokes, listening ears, and prayers. I will forever

remember all of you. Finally, I need to thank my family. I love you more than words can

say. Thank you for who you are and what you mean to me.

iii

To Gray, this paper is more interesting than anything you will ever write. To my parents, now you know what I have been doing with my time in college. To Maddie, I love you, even if I forget to tell you as often as I should. To Joe, Stephen, Drew, David, Aaron, and Audrey, for your constant friendship. To Dr. deG and the two Dr. Sloans, thank you for showing me that professors can be real people too.

CHAPTER ONE

You Shot Who in the What Now?: Validity and Memoir

On the whole, those who live in the United States are obsessed with the

Holocaust. To them, it stands as the supreme example of good versus evil, life struggling against death, and democracy overcoming fascism. Furthermore, not only have they learned about it through their history textbooks, school assemblies, and even class field trips, but also through their popular culture and movies. The United States is a country that has a National Holocaust Museum even bigger than the one in Israel. Yet, despite all this education, despite all this information, despite all this emphasis of knowing the

Holocaust, few of these people actually understand the Holocaust. In their quest to intellectually know, true understanding escapes them. They lack the sort of knowledge that comes from poems, stories, and all those things everybody has to suffer through in

English class. Take the beginning of Primo Levi’s poem If This is a Man as an example:

1 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (London: Sphere Books, 1987).

On the most basic level, this poem describes the working conditions, fights, arbitrariness,

hunger, and death that plagued all political prisoners in the Nazi camps.

This poem’s real strength, however, lies not in its basic descriptions, but in its emotional manipulation of its readers. Through the poem’s structure and our own emotions, Levi shows his readers both what the Jews went through in the camps and how they remembered their experiences. He begins with life as it was meant to be lived, the life of the Jews and even other political prisoners before the Nazi scourge. Here, the unnamed characters have food in abundance and homes of their own. Everyone is happy and in the company of friends; everything is “safe” and “warm.” By painting this heaven on earth, however, Levi only wants to shock his readers more with his descent into the coming hell. For this reason, just as his readers have become accustomed to his rosy language and languid prose, Levi transports them abruptly and without warning into a strange and brutal world. He leaves them disconcerted, disoriented, and disheartened; he wants them to feel as his people did so long ago. How different this life is from the image of the happy home in the stanza before! How can people be full when they fight over a “scrap of bread,” secure when their fate no longer rests in their hands, or happy when they are so far and separated from everything they love? Worse still, how can people “without name, with no more strength to remember,” keep on living? With their lives, futures, and even their personalities taken from them, they have ceased to be

human. The ultimate answer to Levi’s title, If This is a Man, is an unequivocal no. By

presenting us with this dramatic juxtaposition, Levi helps us to not only know what the

Jews (and other political prisoners) went through and how they felt about their

experiences, but also to experience a small bit of the Holocaust for ourselves and

6 understand his suffering on a personal level. The poem’s application and lessons do not apply only to the Holocaust, however.

In many ways, Levi’s work uncovers much about the life of those trapped in another system of concentration camps, the Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei, popularly known as the Gulag. A string of labor camps located throughout the

Soviet Union, the Gulag brought untold suffering to its prisoners. Although they lacked adequate clothing and nourishment, the Gulag forced them to tame wild forest, cultivate the dry steppe, and mine the unforgiving earth. They too worked in filth, fought over the smallest crumbs of bread, and lost most of what made them human. Levi’s poem, therefore, exposes us to not one, but two systems of concentration camps. Although separated by time and physical space, they are united by common suffering and tragedy.

More than that, it reveals the power of testimony in bringing us to understand the past.

It is in the spirit of this poem that this paper continues. Overall, this paper seeks to validate memoir, a different but no less powerful form of testimony, as a historical source and to prove that, whenever examining the history of people’s daily experiences and emotions, historians must include memoirs in their analysis. To that effect, this work first begins with an analysis of memoirs that discusses their strengths, flaws, and practicality as historical documents. Then, using the Soviet Gulag system and Nazi concentration camps as case studies, this paper utilizes memoirs to uncover an average person’s experiences in a historical event. Next, this work discusses Margarete Buber-

Neumann as the sole witness who can link these two atrocities together into a comparative history and uncovers what her story tells us about the distinctive or shared conditions of the camps and prisons. Finally, this paper ends with a discussion that deals

less with the actual camp experiences and more with how survivors recount their stories,

what silences they share, and what that means for all who wish to understand testimony

and the Nazi and Soviet camp systems in particular and historical events in general.

Before embarking on this quest, one need to know what one is examining; one

needs to understand memoirs. A memoir is book that seeks to narrate a specific

autobiographical episode, i.e. to tell a story about a certain period in the life of the

memoirist.2 In most cases, this means that the memoirs will open with a bit of

background information to set the scene and then immediately plunge into their time in

the camps. Because the author depends on his or her memory to share this narration,

readers must first take the imperfect nature of the human memory into account before

they begin examining memoir in earnest.

For several reasons, memory often fails. As anyone who has misplaced his/her

keys or failed to remember an anniversary knows, the first problem of the human

memory is that people forget. Two types of forgetting plague memories: dismissal and

decay. The first act of forgetting, dismissal, is almost instantaneous. Out of the millions

or perhaps billions of little bits of information that people encounters every day, from the

smell of roses to the sound of a bathroom hand dryer, they can only notice, encode, and

remember a small fraction of “distinct episodes,” moments or details that separate

themselves from the general fray of sensation.3 For this reason, people often cannot

remember what color shirt their friend was wearing yesterday or how many stairs are in

2 Francis Hart, “Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography,” New Literary History 1, no. 3 (Spring 1970), 485-511.

3 Daniel Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, The Mind, and The Past (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 16; Alice and Howard Hoffman, “Reliability and Validity in Oral History: The Case for Memory,” in Memory and History: Essays on Recalling and Interpreting Experience, ed. Jaclyn Jeffrey and Glenace Edwall (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 107-135.

the staircase up to their apartment; because the information appears unimportant, they

have no reason to encode it. Without conscious effort, they fail to move these seemingly

insignificant details from their transient working memory into our consolidated long-term

memory, i.e. they dismiss them and forget.

Even once they encode memories, however, people lose access to them over time

through a process known as decay. As men age, all but their most vivid memories

become weaker, more malleable, and harder to access.4 Performing a self-study on

memory, Marigold Linton wrote down three memories each day on note cards and

proceeded to test herself on a yearly basis to see how many she could remember.5 While she remembered all but one percent of the memories at the end of the first year, in the second year her forgetting increased to five percent, and in the sixth year it rose to thirty percent. Even after taking the time to consciously place them in her long-term memory and to use these cards as reminders, she still lost access to many of them. Thus, if people do not forget forget the vast majority of what they experience right away because of dismissal, then, due to decay, they will gradually lose part of what they can remember to the passing of time.

Even the things that man can remember, however, can be distorted. Although many believe their brains function like video-cameras, memory actually involves more of a process of imagination and reconstruction than one of simple replay.6 As mentioned

before, out of the thousands of bits of information that bombard a man’s senses every

4 Schacter, Searching for Memory, 79.

5 Elizabeth Loftus, Mahzarin Banaji, Jonathan Schooler, and Rachel Foster, “Who Remembers What?: Gender Differences in Memory,” Michigan Quarterly Review vol. XXVI, 1 (Winter 1987), 64-85.

6 Jim Patton, Jaime Diaz-Granados, Bradley Keele, Charles Weaver, NSC 1306: Introduction to Neuroscience: Spring Semester 2011 (Waco, TX: Baylor University, 2010), 195.

second, he can only remember a small fraction of them.7 Because of this forgetfulness,

he cannot just rewind the tape in his head and watch himself eat breakfast yesterday, for he most likely never encoded that information in the first place. For this reason, memory takes advantage of a reconstructive process in which “out of a few stored bone chips we remember a dinosaur”: the human mind creatively fill the gaps in its memory with inferences, knowledge of patterns, and sometimes just plain guesswork.8 While this act

of re-creation presents humans with a completed pictures rather than a fragmented one, it

can also lead them to “remember” things differently than they experienced them.

Several factors influence people when they misremember what they had once experienced. First, their current knowledge and beliefs influence their perceptions of the past. Because of the pragmatic space concerns of memory, humans forget things as they become outdated: why would they need to know how they felt about the taste of broccoli ten years ago?9 Because of this tendency, men often fail to remember their past opinions,

attitudes, and knowledge. Memory, however, does not like blank spaces; it wants to

create a seamless whole. Seeing a gap, memory seizes current opinions and

anachronistically projects them into the past in a phenomenon known as “hindsight bias”

or “retrospective bias.” For this reason, when asked about their opinions on abortion five

years ago, most people assumed that, regardless of how they actually felt in the past, their

views on the procedure five years ago would match those that they held currently.10 In

7 David Myers, Psychology. 10th ed. (New York: Worth Publishers, 2010), 319.

8 Schacter, Searching for Memory, 42.

9 Michael Ross and Roger Buehler, “Creative Remembering,” in The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative, eds. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 205-235; Myers, Psychology, 329.

10 Ross and Buehler, “Creative Remembering,” 209.

another famous study in 1987, McFarland and Ross found that people “who fall in love

overestimate their first impressions of one another (‘It was love at first sight’), while

those who break up underestimate their earlier liking (‘We never really clicked’).”11

Since these people’s brains deemed it irrelevant to hold onto their old opinions, they replaced them with the new ones. Because men and women often do not remember how they felt or what they knew in the past, their memories draw conclusions using their current beliefs and knowledge.

Second, the memories that people recall vary with their moods. Much in the same way that current beliefs color past opinions, current emotions influence which memories humans most easily remember from the past.12 In a sort of self-perpetuating

phenomenon, men are primed to recall their best days when happy and their worst ones

when sad. In a 1987 study, Lewinson and Rosenbaum found that, for people battling

with depression, their opinion of their parents depended on their current mood.13 If they

were currently depressed, people remembered their parents as less loving; if not

depressed, these same people remembered their parents as more affectionate and

supportive. A major part of their life, their memories of their parents, shifted with a

simple emotion. Whenever people are remembering, therefore, their current emotive

state will both have an impact what memories they bring forth and how they engage with

and evaluate those memories.

Third, humans notoriously misremember specific information like names,

specifications, dates, and speech. While memories retain the general chronology and gist

11 Myers, Psychology, 329. Author’s original emphasis and formatting.

12 Schacter, Searching for Memory, 211; Myers, Psychology, 317.

13 Ross and Buehler, “Creative Remembering,” 211.

of the things that have happened, they get muddled over the specific details.14 For

example, in 1984 and 1988 researchers re-interviewed a group of Holocaust survivors from Camp Erika in the Netherlands who had been questioned right after their liberation

sometime between 1943-48.15 Afterwards, they compared the two sets of answers.

Although very accurate about the structure of the camp and the types of tortures administered there, less than half of those interviewed could remember their date of entry into the camp within a month. Some even gave the wrong season of the year! In the case of concrete facts like names, dates, chronologies, and quantities, memory fails mankind quite easily.

Fourth, memory can even lead some to remember events that never happened at all. A phenomenon known as “source amnesia” lies at the “heart of [these] false memories.”16 Whenever people imagine something, their brains activate in patterns

similar to those that they would have if they were actually experiencing the event.17 Take a dream for example. After a particularly vivid one, people can wake up confused and questioning the line between their dream world and reality. That confusion only dissipates if they can sort out from where that information came. If people forget the source of the information, however, that imagined experience can become part of their memory simply because it feels familiar. People with particularly malleable minds or questionable memories, especially children and the elderly, can fall prey to this “source

14 Schacter, Searching for Memory, 95; Lynd Forguson, “Autobiography as History,” University of Toronto Quarterly 49, no. 2 (Winter 1979), 139-155; Elizabeth Enstam, “Using Memoirs to Write Local History: Technical Leaflet 145” (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1982).

15 Schacter, Searching for Memory, 208.

16 Myers, Psychology, 327; Schacter, Searching for Memory, 126.

17 Myers, Psychology, 327.

amnesia.” To examine the nature of false memories, Elizabeth Loftus led an experiment

in 1993 that focused on implanting them in children.18 First, she asked the children to imagine what it would have felt like to be lost in a mall. Then, she told their parents to ask them leading questions about the imagined experience: Do you remember that time you got lost in the mall? Were you scared? How long were you lost? And so on. With this prodding, these children created a new memory, one of actually being lost in the mall. The most interesting thing about the study: the children continued to believe the event occurred even after Loftus had explained the whole experiment to them. While seeming innocuous or cute, false memories can be dangerous. As shown by the wave of

“repressed” memories of satanic cults and sexual abuse that peaked in the late 1980s and

90s, false memories have the potential to tear apart families and ruin lives over traumatic events that never actually happened.19 Although these “repressed” memories were especially dramatic cases, the milder form of false memories can seep into testimonies, particularly those about people’s childhood experiences.

Finally, gender differences influence what type of information men and women are more likely to remember. Generally, females are better than males at recalling written or spoken words and recognizing faces.20 Men, on the other hand, score better on

spatial memory, i.e., where things are located in relation to one another. For example, if

shown a recorded lecture, “women might be more likely to recall the appearance and the

conversations involving the lecturer…while men might be better able to generate a map

18 Ulric Neisser, “Self-Narratives: True and False,” in The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative, eds. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1-18, 5.

19 Myers, Psychology, 328; Schacter, Searching for Memory, 126; Neisser, “Self-Narratives,” 5.

20 Loftus et al., “Who Remembers What?”

of the auditorium in which the lecture was given.”21 Researchers need to consider these

results when dealing with memory, for one’s gender can indeed influence how one

perceives (and thereafter report) that information to the wider world.

Although necessary to take into consideration, these flaws do not invalidate the

power of memory. For the vast majority of the time, memories, particularly those people

recall and retell with frequency, rarely change.22 Over the course of a ten year study,

Alice Hoffman tested her husband’s memory of his war experiences three different times.

For the central core of his experience, what the Hoffmans call his “archival” memories,

he gave accounts virtually identical to his previous testimony and the written record.

This study shows that, on the whole, preserved memories are reliable. More than that, it

demonstrates how people overemphasize the flaws of memory while ignoring its amazing

abilities. In a study examining whether people could recall their past salaries, a specific

quantity, researchers found that they were correct ninety-six percent of the time.23

Additionally, researchers can skirt the problems of memory if they adjust their expectations. For example, rather than asking an old soldier to recall the exact temperature on the third day of the Battle of the Bulge, one should ask about his general feelings about the cold during that battle. With that small adjustment, a historian might not learn the exact temperature, but he/she would find out that it was very cold, so cold that the soldier’s toes still do not have any feeling.24 While they can influence stories, the

21 Loftus et al., “Who Remembers What?”

22 Hoffman and Hoffman, “Reliability and Validity in Oral History,” 122.

23 Alice and Howard Hoffman, “Memory Theory: Personal and Social,” in Thinking about Oral History: Theories and Applications, eds. Thomas Charlton, Lois Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless (New York: Altamira Press, 2008), 33-54, 48.

24 Hoffman and Hoffman, “Reliability and Validity in Oral History,” 122.

problems of recall serve less to discredit memories and more to remind researchers that they need to have caution when approaching memory for certain types of information.

Beyond the problem of remembering what actually happened, however, the process of telling our stories adds in certain elements of bias. First, stories have unintentional or human biases. To even begin an autobiographical story, storytellers have to limit the amount of information we present to our audiences. For the sake of brevity, stories give

“selective” pictures rather than complete descriptions.25 If an author tried to

communicate all the information she could remember about the feel, smell, taste, look,

sound, and impression of everything we experienced, her tales would be filled with fifteen minute descriptions of chairs, chalkboards, and fake plants and her audiences

would be sleeping peacefully. Storytellers limit themselves to make their stories more

digestible for others. While a necessary process, this editing naturally adds subjectivity

and bias into the story: the author presents only what she believes is worth knowing. By

their very nature, therefore, stories fail to tell the entire story.

Additionally, people organize tales using cultural and personal narrative

structures. Naturally imitative, they look to the story lines and archetypes that permeate

their culture when they fashion our own stories. Or, to put it in a different way, since

men “understand human affairs in terms of narrative,” they mold our own stories to

resemble those they have heard before.26 Most of the time, these structures help

storytellers to organize what they want to say into something more interesting,

25 Enstam, “Using Memoirs to Write Local History”; Forguson, “Autobiography as History.”

26 Bruce Jackson, “The Perfect Informant,” The Journal of American Folklore 103, No. 400 (Oct- Dec 1990), 401-16.

understandable, and relevant than a dry report.27 Other times, however, narrative forms

fail them. Whether true or not, cultural stereotypes work their way into stories. For

example, those in the United States believe that individual hard work brings success.

From the tales of Horatio Alger to the Space Jam’s depiction of Michael Jordan, these

people have been told time and time again that fame and fortune depends on hard work

above all else. The truth of it, unfortunately, is that “narrative fiction usually has to make

sense but real life is under no such obligation.”28 In reality, our world is full of people

who lucked into their wealth. While “MJ” did practice free throws out back in his yard

for hours at a time, without his amazing opportunities, stellar supporting cast, physical

build, and a whole lot of luck, he would never have been famous enough to be known by

his initials. Cultural stereotypes, therefore, lead men to craft their stories so that they

resemble those that they have heard before.

Furthermore, the ways in which people view themselves, their personal

stereotypes, influence their stories. All men have certain beliefs or preconceived notions

about themselves. Regardless of how much they try to compensate for them, these

beliefs bleed into their stories.29 For example, someone who thinks of herself as helpful

would tend to avoid telling stories that disrupt that preconceived image. She would

choose to tell others about the time she helped an old lady cross the street rather than the

one when she ignored a homeless man begging. With the intent to “explain and justify

27 Forguson, “Autobiography as History.”

28 Bruce Jackson, The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 108.

29 Jerome Bruner, “The ‘remembered’ self,” in in The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative, eds. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 41-54, 46; Bruce Jackson, “What People like Us Are Saying When We Say We're Saying the Truth,” The Journal of American Folklore 101, no. 401 (Jul.-Sep., 1988), 276-292.

16 ourselves to ourselves and others,”30 the stories that people tell about themselves and the way they tell them reflect their “preferred images of [themselves],” who they think they are or how they want to be seen.31 Even though these narrative structures allow men to sort jumbled information into coherent stories, they introduce bias into story-telling.

More than that, people’s stories about themselves do not remain static. Everyone changes over time: one’s current taste buds, personality, and preferences in music differ profoundly from those one held in the far-away past. The knowledge of what came to pass and what did not, an extension of “hindsight bias,” leads men to align their stories with their self-concept of the moment.32 Much of this subconscious editing deals not with the characteristics of the events themselves, but with the emphasis that they place those events, with their significance in the grand scheme of things.33 Think of a young girl’s first heartbreak as an example. If someone asks her about it right after everything fell apart, she would cry, saying that her whole world is ending, no one else could ever measure up, and she might have to go join the convent or do something else similarly drastic. With a little perspective and time, however, she will reevaluate the importance of that event. It did not end her life, she found someone new, and what was once the defining moment of her existence becomes just a few pages in her life story. As perspective changes, “our sense of what mattered, what was big and what was little,

30 Jackson, The Story is True, 8.

31 Ross and Buehler, “Creative Remembering,” 215.

32 Michael Ross and Anne Wilson, “Constructing and Appraising Past Selves,” in Memory, Brain, and Belief, eds. Daniel Schacter and Elaine Scarry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 200), 231- 258, 232; Forguson, “Autobiography as History.”

33 Bruner, “The ‘remembered’ self,” 49.

which words were essential and which words were air” shifts as well.34 If someone were to compare the life stories he told in his teens and the stories about his teen years that he tells as forty-year-olds side by side, they would read quite differently. Because people relate their life experiences after they live through them, they organize our life stories not to reflect the present of the story but the later present in which they are currently living.

Finally, one cannot report anything about oneself without bias. Even when historians write histories about ancient civilizations to which they have no connection, they still struggle to maintain their objectivity.35 When people write stories in which they

themselves are “the subject of history,” that objectivity is, well, objectively impossible.

People hesitate to see themselves at fault because of a “self-serving bias.” In order to

preserve self-esteem, they often blame their tragedies and mistakes on situations beyond

our control.36 For example, unless a teenager intentionally rammed his car into someone

else’s, he would be more likely to blame a wreck on his friends goofing around in the

backseat, that awful Taylor Swift song on the radio, or that delicious, cinnamon-sugar

covered churro that fell into his lap rather than admitting that he made a mistake.

Because of the intimate and naturally sympathetic relationship people have with

themselves, they cannot be fully objective when it comes to communicating their life experiences.

In addition to these unintentional biases, every autobiographical story holds

varying degrees of different intentional biases. As the most authoritative source on

34 Ibid.

35 Forguson, “Autobiography as History.”

36 John deLamater and Daniel Myers, Social Psychology. 7th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth CENGAGe Learning, 2011), 142.

themselves, storytellers have the opportunity to choose exactly what they want to reveal

to others. Because of this immense power, researchers have to approach a memoir

cautiously to discover whether or not the picture it presents is an accurate picture or

simply one that the author wants them to believe. As with most either/or questions, the

answer involves a little of each. Although sometimes an exercise in futility, historians

first have to try to determine the purpose of the memoir. “Storytelling…is never

neutral”: no one would write and publish a hundred plus page book just for the hell of

it.37 Even books that claim to be neutral have some purpose, something towards which its author is seeking to move the audience.38 Some write to correct false impressions of

their past: St. Augustine composed his Confessions to contradict and retract all of his

earlier Manichean writings.39 Others, like those jailed “unjustly” in Texas prisons, seek

to reform the system in which they had been trapped.40 Some fight “against oblivion” so that they might be remembered after they die.41 Still others, politicians in particular, attempt to preserve their legacy and to manage the image that they present to others.42

Although authors may hide these motivations too deep for others to find them,

researchers must try to uncover them to understand the potential biases of the work.

All storytellers adjust their stories depending on their target audience. Speakers

tailor their presentation to make the information they present more relevant, less

37 Richard Kearney, On Stories (New York: Routledge, 2002), 155.

38 Ibid; Hart, “Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography.”

39 Sissela Bok, “Autobiography as a Moral Battleground,” in Memory, Brain, and Belief, eds. Daniel Schacter and Elaine Scarry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 200), 307-324, 310.

40 Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” The American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995), 304-334.

41 Bok, “Autobiography as a Moral Battleground,” 310.

42 Jackson, “What People like Us Are Saying When We Say We're Saying the Truth”

offensive, more moving, and so on.43 For example, one would refrain from telling a racy joke around a group of priests because they, as men of God, are one’s immediate audience and would (most likely) not appreciate such a joke. The same general principle applies to memoirists, but even more specifically. With time to shape and mold their narrative, they deliberately try to reach and impact a certain group of readers.44 For

example, U.S. prison reform literature of the early nineteenth century sought to influence

the white middle-class, a group with liberal concerns and political sway, to lobby for

better jails and greater rights for prisoners.45 To affect these people who had little experience with jails or asylums into taking political agitation, it employed “graphic representations of terrible cruelty and suffering”: these images and descriptions tried to shock them into action. Although some memoirists are quite open about whom they are trying to reach, historians must always ask themselves one question: “for whom were these memoirs written?”46 Only then can they understand how the author might have

downplayed or emphasized certain parts of her story for the greatest impact.

For a variety of reasons, people naturally exaggerate their tales. Some people alter their

memoirs for the sake of a good story. Both in listening and telling tales, people all crave

a good story: this is why the histories of the Alamo and Thermopylae have remained so popular throughout time.47 For this reason, when people narrate, the mountains tend to

43 Jackson, The Story is True, 21.

44 Hart, “Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography.”

45 Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture”

46 Enstam, “Using Memoirs to Write Local History”

47 Jackson, “What People like Us Are Saying When We Say We're Saying the Truth”

be a little steeper and the snow a little deeper. Not only does a good story sound better, it sells better too.48 Whether intentional or not, people do stretch the truth.

Additionally, we need to be cautious of some genre-specific flaws characteristic of Gulag and Holocaust literature. For both classes of memoirs, we face a common problem. The full horror of both of these events, the imprisonment and execution of the

Jews and others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators and the forced deportation and labor of the Soviet Gulag, cannot be fully captured nor communicated by words. Writers from both genres speak of an “abyss” that separates what they have seen from what they have written.49 Their experiences affected them so traumatically that their words have

failed them.

While survivors have problems telling their stories, historians face their own difficulties in comprehending these stories. In Gulag and Holocaust memoirs, the absurd and unthinkable become commonplace and concrete: most cannot even begin to imagine living surrounded by death, plagued by hunger, becoming hardened to human suffering, and making the sort of decisions that no one should ever have to make.50 Our now world

and this past world are just too different, too distant for historians to be able fully

understand these experiences.

Even if researchers can intellectually understand the stories from this foreign

world, they have trouble emotionally engaging with them. In a good book, an easy story

to understand, people can identify with the characters and, for a brief moment, can lose

48 Jackson, The Story is True, 21.

49 Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1991), 42.

50 Ibid., 22.

themselves in them. These memoirs, however, represent something else entirely. It

physically hurts to understand these experiences on an emotional level: men naturally

recoil from the suffering and death that are so commonplace in Holocaust and Gulag

memoirs.51 This pain can prevent historians from fully engaging with the text. Although

dealing with universal human themes like loss, injustice, and even joy, the profound

uniqueness of these two events affects both author and audience. Simultaneously, it prevents memoirists from fully being able to describe their experiences and keeps historians from being fully able to understand what they have written.

For Gulag memoirs specifically, their bias depends on where they were published.

The Soviet government, both by threats and censorship, influenced the memoirs published within its borders. Seeing memoirs as a way to prove that people benefitted

under Communism and therefore legitimize their regime, the Soviet government sought to make all of them conform to the Party line.52 Memoirs could express very moderate criticisms and give voice to legitimate grievances, but certain topics remained completely

off-limits.53 For example, one can see this tension at play in the works of One Day in the

Life of Ivan Denisovich and Doctor Zhivago. Seeking to purge Stalin’s demons,

Khrushchev allowed the former’s publication because it acknowledged Stalin’s excesses without undermining the Soviet state. It was only published, however, because it served

Khruschev’s political agenda. In contrast, Boris Pasternak’s chronicle of the violence and terror of the Russian Civil War and a classic of Russian literature, could not be

51 Ibid., 20.

52 Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Soviet Memoirs as a Historical Source,” Russian History 12, no. 2-4 (1985), 293-326.

53 Ibid.

officially published in Russia until the 1980s because it departed from the socialist

realism style encouraged by the Soviet government and criticized the Bolshevik

Revolution and the Russian Civil War, the twin ideological pillars supporting the current

Soviet State. With its control over the means of publishing and the printing companies

themselves, the government controlled all official publications. For this reason, most

writers in the Soviet Union imposed a sort of self-censorship on themselves.54 For those

authors willing to delve into the world of illegal self-publishing, or samizdat, even greater

risks awaited. In a worker’s utopia, any memoir that critiqued the state “became an action fraught with regime-shattering implications”: publishing a memoir endangered an author, his colleagues, and even his family.55 Understanding that “dissent in the Soviet

Union [was] utterly hopeless,” most authors self-censored and created memoirs that

conformed to Soviet standards of acceptability.56 After all, these memoirists had just

returned from the Gulag and knew the consequences and futility of opposing the state.

For those few still seeking to get their full, unadulterated message out, they had to flee to

the West.

Although it can be almost impossible to determine an author’s true motivations,

historians must be cautious when dealing with memoirs published in the West. Fleeing

Soviets could have written their memoires with fame in mind. Since their works aimed to

tarnish the international image that the self-conscious Soviet state had carefully

constructed for itself, dissenting ex-Soviet citizens worried about the repercussions of

54 Ibid.

55 Stephen Kotkin, “The State—Is It Us? Memoirs, Archives and Kremlinologists,” The Russian Review 61 (January 2005), 35-51.

56 Jay Bergman, “The Memoirs of Soviet Defectors: Are They a Reliable Source about the Soviet Union,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 31/1 (1989), 1-24.

their actions.57 Thinking back to Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico, a world away from

the Soviet Union, some could have become paranoid and fearful of Soviet retaliation. If

they had had such concerns, Soviet memoirists could have written partially to become

celebrities: a high-profile status, they thought, might dissuade Soviet assassins.58 After all, even though Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov criticized the government, they were still alive and not imprisoned in the Gulag. Fame, therefore, could have been a motivation.

Memoirists living in the West could have also exaggerated their tales to discredit communism and the Soviet Union. Leaving the U.S.S.R. profoundly disillusioned with the realities of Communism, these ex-pats could scarcely believe the naivety of some

Westerners. With prominent liberals like Henry Wallace holding up the Soviet Union as an example for all the world to see, those who had fled the Soviet system tried to warn the West about its hidden dangers and “the menace it pose[d] to civilized values.”59

While other survivors remained loyal to communism, its ideals, and Stalin, these survivors often did not flee abroad to publish their works. Because these dissenters wanted their message spread to the broader world, their desire to do so could have influenced the truthfulness of their writing. The motivations of an author are difficult to assess; however, historians must at least be aware of possible biases before confronting a subject material.

57 Kotkin, “The State—Is It Us?”

58 Bergman, “The Memoirs of Soviet Defectors.”

59 Ibid.

Finally, we need to compensate for the fact that, for most of this information, we

can only take the memoirists at their words. In most situations, government documents,

official reports, and newspaper articles help augment the strength of memoirs and temper

their weaknesses.60 In the Soviet Union, however, many government documents and official reports do not exist, have been destroyed, or are still classified; the newspapers

served the state, as well.61 With little outside information to affirm their information,

these memoirs could lead historians astray in their search for the truth.

Researchers confront a different set of problems and concerns when examining

the Nazi concentration camps. Since many see the Holocaust as the incomparable and

ever-unique event, historians must be cautious when analyzing it alongside anything else.

By virtue of this uniqueness, many resent those who try to understand the Holocaust through “a new culture of ‘victimization’ studies, alongside gay and lesbian studies, disability studies, [and] women’s studies.”62 They believe that to lump it in with these

other historical processes would be to belittle its memory. To maintain this respect, they

claim that the Holocaust constitutes an event unique enough to deserve its category. To a

certain extent, their concerns are valid. The deliberate rounding up and killing of six

million Jews and five million other people from non-homogenous groups for the sole

purpose of advancing blood purity had never happened in the past, has not happened

since, and, hopefully, will not come to pass in the future. To prevent comparative history

from examining the Holocaust labor camps, however, would limit what researchers can

learn from the past. So long as historians remember that the Holocaust and the Gulag

60 Bergman, “The Memoirs of Soviet Defectors.”

61 Ibid; Kuromiya, “Soviet Memoirs as a Historical Source.”

62 Kearney, On Stories 51.

were not perfectly parallel, they can learn a great deal about forced labor camps in

general and man’s capacity for both suffering and cruelty. Studying the Holocaust in

comparison to other historical events remains a balancing act. Only with caution can

historians both learn from the Holocaust and avoid insulting its emotionally-charged

memory.

As the Jewish areas of Europe disappeared, so too did a chance to fully understand their history. For most cultures, a physical and communal continuity allows researchers to understand where that culture has been based on what it is now. Practicing this process known as “upstreaming,” historians and anthropologists can learn what documents often fail to reveal. In this way, researchers have gained a greater understanding of the Maya people. Because practices persist over time, these researchers can observe current customs, dress, religious rites, and language and project these findings backwards into the past to better understand a group of people. For the Jewish communities in Europe, however, no such continuity exists: the Nazis uprooted and destroyed their entire world.63 Their people have disappeared. Their ghettos have

vanished. The use of their language, Yiddish, declined precipitously, only flourishing

within scattered Orthodox communities. Holocaust memoirists have nothing but their

stories to connect themselves and their future generations to the time before the

Holocaust.64 Lacking much of a physical, relational, and linguistic connection to the

past, historians have to understand and acknowledge their limitations in what they can hope to learn about the Holocaust.

63Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 27.

64 Ibid., 53.

Furthermore, the writers of Jewish Holocaust memoirs could have had their own motivations for writing down their stories, motivations that researchers have to take into

account in our analysis. First, Jews wrote to be remembered, but a different type of

remembering than that of which most people commonly think. In the Jewish religious

tradition, relatives and friends offer prayers to commemorate the dead on the anniversary

of their deaths; only with this practice can a soul find peace.65 Due to the importance of

this prayer tradition and the disappearance of so many Jews, some survivors could have

wanted to preserve their own stories and ensure that future generations would remember

them and those who did not make it through the camps in their prayers. Therefore, they

could have written against oblivion. Additionally, some Jews did write to guard against

another Holocaust. Using the emotional impact of their testimony in memoirs, in video-

recordings, and in the famous Eichmann trial, many Jews have purposefully presented

their audiences with the full face of human suffering: only then will they be moved to

prevent something like that from ever happening again.66 Anyone who lived through a

concentration camp would never wish that experience on another innocent. So, they also

wrote against repetition. Finally, some Jews could have written to build sympathy for the

State of Israel. Most Jews began to speak and write after the Eichmann Trial of 1961.67

Although the UN had founded the State of Israel in 1948, the new state had to fight continuously for its right to exist. To aid Israel, some Jews published their memoirs with the intention of gaining sympathy from their readers and of reminding the United States and other influential, predominantly European, nations why they had created Israel in the

65 Ibid., 23.

66 Ibid., 69.

67 Ibid., 87.

first place. In the end, therefore, Jews could have written against the oblivion of time, the

repetition of such a horrendous event, and the destruction of their state.

For all their flaws, memoirs serve as invaluable sources for historical knowledge.

For one, they illuminate parts of history that others inadvertently forget or intentionally

avoid. Particularly in places that lack more traditional sources of history like

newspapers, court documents, and official laws, personal memoirs can provide

previously unavailable information.68 Without memoirs, the history of these areas becomes necessarily one-sided: all that survives to reach the future are the legends of old, tales of prominent citizens, and the stories that people remember about their ancestors.

With memoirs, however, historians can both learn about those who, for example, did not leave children behind. Memoirs, therefore, help to fill in the many gaps of historical knowledge left by traditional documents.

Second, for what memoirs lack in specific facts and dates, they make up for by testifying to people’s actual feelings and emotions. So many times, researchers would like to know the personal motivations, doubts, beliefs, qualms, forebodings, and insights that lie behind the actions of historical persons. How did Truman the person, rather than

Truman the politician, feel about dropping the A-bomb? How deliberate was Stalin’s

Great Terror? Did Hitler really believe in the myth of the Aryan race? While ultimately flawed sources because their author can “tell his own story to the world, choosing what to reveal, deciding what to exclude, determin[ing] what he shall highlight in his narrative

68 Enstam, “Using Memoirs to Write Local History”, Alessandro Portelli, The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 15.

28 and what he shall leave in the shadows,” memoirs often provide the only source of this information.69 Their value rests with this uniqueness.

Third, as opposed to other documents, memoirs provide descriptions of daily life in the past. While diaries and letters hold valuable information, they often focus only the extraordinary or immediate events of people’s lives.70 If someone read a diary of a current undergraduate fifty years from now, she would be reading a highlight reel of experiences: his love interest(s), changing plans for the future, and family drama. The same principle applies to letters between two close friends. Why would anyone waste time and paper listing out her daily routine, something with which both reader and writer are familiar? For this reason, letters and diaries often leave gaps in a description of someone’s life. With time for reflection and to gain perspective, memoirs make more of an effort to spell out the much less exciting and more general structures of one’s life.

Writing to “reconstruct a whole way of life,” memoirists record everyday activities and daily routines.71 Few other sources allow such an exposure to the everyday of historical persons.

Finally, and most importantly, memoirs and other testimony-based history tell stories that connect their audiences to the past in a way quite unlike document-based history. Humans naturally understand their world through stories. While there are some

(relatively) normal people who can rattle of a list of Russia’s tsars in order (Ivan III,

Vasily III, Ivan the Terrible, Fyodor I…) or recite the digits of pi to the nth degree

(3.1415926535…), these feats require conscious and continual effort: people have to train

69 Forguson, “Autobiography as History”; Portelli, The Order Has Been Carried Out, 15.

70 Enstam, “Using Memoirs to Write Local History”

71 Ibid.

for months or years to be able to achieve these sorts of things. Stories about people, on the other hand, easily capture one’s attention and stick in one’s memory. For example,

rather than forcing their students to memorize the kilo-, hecto-, deca-, base, deci-, centi-,

milli- progression of the metric system, science teachers tell their students to remember

the pneumonic phrase, “King Henry died by drinking chocolate milk.” For children, the

story makes the metric system memorable. Memoirs cater to this natural predisposition.

When presented with a person, her struggles, and her triumphs, people can emotionally as

well as intellectually engage with her life.72 This quality in memoirs, their inherent

individuality and subjectivity, provides a remedy for and companion to traditionally dry

history.73 Therefore, memoirs are great points of entry into the study of a historical time

period: they can ignite an emotional curiosity that will later propel readers into the more

intellectual study of history.

This emotional aspect of memoirs matters for another reason as well. Nothing demands emotional engagement more than “heavy” subjects like the Gulag and the

Holocaust. When presented with so much suffering, people naturally distance themselves

because they find it unpleasant and even painful to think about such things. The

emotional quality of a memoir, however, draws people in to “experience[ing] the horror

of that suffering as if [they] were actually there.”74 By reminding readers that real people

endured such a tortuous existence and preventing them from putting up their own emotional defenses, these memoirs help them more fully understand the emotional, as

well as intellectual, aspects of their suffering. More easily catching a person’s attention

72 Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, 143; Enstam, “Using Memoirs to Write Local History”

73 Enstam, “Using Memoirs to Write Local History”

74 Kearney, On Stories, 61; Enstam, “Using Memoirs to Write Local History”

and transporting him back in time, these memoirs help him to get excited about the past,

better understand those who once lived there, and remember what he has read long after the actual act of reading.

Before this chapter ends and this paper proceeds to the illustrative examples of the

Nazi and Soviet labor camps, I need to qualify what in my project warrants further

analysis. In course of my research, I came across several questions which, although

interesting and necessary to ponder, dealt with issues beyond the scope of this paper.

Perhaps future projects may be able to answer these concerns. How would a broader

approach to testimony affect my findings? I limited my choices of memoirs in several

ways. Because of language constraints, I did not consider any works without available

English translations. As I can only read Spanish as a foreign language, I was unable to

add in the work of purely German, French, or Russian authors who suffered through these

concentration camps. Additionally, since my project emphasizes the experiences of the

political prisoners rather than all those in the camps, I chose to ignore the memoirs of

those either working as guards, administrators, or imprisoned as criminals. Then, due to

the problems associated with the testimony of young children, I tried to avoid memoirs

by those who entered the camps before the age of thirteen. For the Soviet memoirs

specifically, I only chose ones that fit within the time frame 1937-1941: this period

represents a time after the start of the Great Terror yet before the beginning of the

Russian Front of World War Two. Because the camp policies and procedures dramatically changed in reaction to both of these events, I sought limit my findings to this

time between 1937-1941, a time of relative stability and homogeneity. This way, the

memoirs I examined would describe the same general experience. Finally, I only used

31 memoirs for my analysis. While oral reports, photographs, poetry, short stories, and art would have allowed greater participation in producing a portrait, these sources would have led me to sacrifice focus for inclusivity.

All of these limitations left me with the following demographics for each camp system. For the Gulag, I chose ten memoirs to provide a balanced portrait of the camps.

I used the works of three women and seven men. Four of the memoirists came from

Poland, three from Russia, and one each from America, Ukraine, and Austria. Out of the six individuals who belonged to the Communist Party, only two of these were Russian.

Working as artists, engineers, writers, cavalry officers, professors, economists, and professional Communists, these memoirists firmly placed themselves in the middle class and, for the most part, the intelligentsia as well. The youngest prisoner was nineteen, but most already had established families and professions by the time they ended up in the camps. Of these ten memoirs, five spent the majority of their camp experience in

Kolyma in the Far East, four lived scattered throughout central Siberia, and one suffered in western Russia. I chose six memoirs published in New York or London during the

1950s, one published in Italy in the late 1960s, one from New York in the late 1970s and another in the late 1980s, and the last from Russia in the early 2000s.

For the Holocaust, I selected nine memoirs. Because I wanted to compare the worst of the Soviet camps with the worst of the Nazi camps, I used the memoirs of Jews who had suffered in the camps. For these memoirists, however, it proved harder to exclude the memoirs of those who were children while they went through the camps. I found memoirs whose authors ranged from thirteen to twenty-four at the time of their initiation into the camps. Of the nine, six passed through Auschwitz, one through

Treblinka, and two through lesser known camps. Together, the memoirists come from

Central and Eastern Europe: four from Hungary, three from Poland, one from Slovakia,

and one from Italy. Two were women and seven were men. Being younger at the time of

their imprisonment, these memoirists came from middle-class families and, while few

had real careers yet, most were involved in high-school or post-secondary education.

These memoirists published two of their works abroad in Italy and France in 1958, two

more in New York in the late 1970s, three in the late 1980s and early 90s in the United

States and England, and two in the United States and Canada in the early 2000s. As with

the Soviet memoirs, this breadth of publication time allows for a wider variety of

viewpoints and prejudices to help produce a more accurate and consensus-oriented

picture.

Additionally, although using consensus to test the validity of my memoirs, I did

not verify my findings with other written documents or secondary sources. This paper

seeks to examine memoirs as a pathway to historical knowledge; for this very reason,

secondary sources have little place within its analysis.

Finally, I decided not to examine the history and trends of testimony itself.

Examined by Leona Toker in Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag

Survivors and Annette Wieviorka in The Era of the Witness, memoirs of survivors display

certain trends depending on when their authors composed them. For example, the early

Gulag memoirists wrote their works following the general chronology of their ordeal;

later ones placed memories here and there, choosing a more thematic approach to better

impact the reader.75 The memoirs became more abstract and artistic over time. Because

75 Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 125.

33 this too falls outside of the focus of this paper, however, I fail to examine how the trends of the memoirs themselves affected who wrote what when.

By validating memoir as a historical genre, this section establishes a starting point for an exploration of the Nazi and Soviet labor camps. Whenever researchers encounter a set of information, whether it be statistics, photos, charts, or stories, they bring a certain idea of what they expect to take out of it.76 Especially when they examine testimony, these expectations can lead them astray. Generally, men look to people who have lived through something as an authority on the subject and, to a certain extent, they are. This expertise does not apply to everything, however. Facts, dates, and names can all be forgotten, instances and events can be imagined or misremembered, and layouts and systems can be misunderstood. Researchers have to remember that these memoirists’ authority rests solely on their subjective experience. No one else can tell them what thoughts went through their head as they were being arrested or how it felt to have their toes freeze, blacken, and fall off. For this sort of information, the type that interests this paper, historians can trust memoirs. In these following sections, this paper seeks to use these memoirs to fully understand the past, for only those who lived through events like these can remember them it properly. With this discussion of memoir at a close, this author only has one thing left to do: stand aside and allow these memoirists to begin telling their stories.

76 Interview w/ Dr. Stephen Sloan 9/20/12

CHAPTER TWO

Into the Abyss: The Nazi Labor Camp Experience

When thinking back to the Holocaust, most people begin with a deceivingly

simple question on their minds. How did the Nazis lead the Jews like lambs to the

slaughter? Why did the Jews not resist or, failing that, at least run away? To understand

the answer to this question, researchers must examine the historical context of anti-

Semitism in Europe.

Although, in retrospect, all can see the horrible suffering awaiting them, Europe’s

Jews simply viewed Hitler’s Germany as ushering in another, slightly harsher era of

persecution. By the late 1930s, European Jews had already grown accustomed to living

among hostile Gentiles. Because this discrimination “was always present in the fabric of

life” and “thinly veiled, when it was veiled at all,” the Jews became inured to it.1 Even before the rise of Hitler and his rabid version of anti-Semitism, Gentiles excluded Jews from some facets of life. For example, in Hungary, Jewish students could never constitute more than 6% of the university population.2 Thus, many Jews, like Judith

Isaacson’s extremely gifted cousin, could not attend universities without substantial connections and bribes. In Poland, the Jews faced a more oppressive atmosphere.

Despite their shared Polish citizenship and blood, Gentile Poles considered Jews

1 Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978), 12.

2 Judith Magyar Isaacson, Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 22.

“foreigners” and “verbally abused [sic] and often beat [them] in broad daylight.”3 Polish law placed a special tax on Jewish households and even banned kosher animal slaughter, a measure clearly meant to inconvenience those practicing the Jewish faith.4 These

practices stemmed from deep prejudices: George Salton recalls that Polish Gentiles spread rumors that “the Jews kill[ed] Christian children every spring to get blood to make matzos.”5 By the 30s and 40s, European Jews had habituated themselves to the

discrimination that haunted their people; this process of accommodation colored their

opinions of Hitler. While some saw him for what he really was, the vast majority of Jews

regarded him as only “mildly threatening,” the latest in a long line of anti-Semites.6

Tragically, they would soon come to see, most of them too late, that Hitler was more than

a pretender: in fact he was greatest threat Judaism had ever faced.

Hitler’s success in implementing the Holocaust rested on the gradual nature of his

and allies’ method of persecution. If soldiers had immediately begun executing Jews as

soon as they had occupied an area, thousands would have fought or fled. As the German

government began its slow but relentless march towards extermination, however, few

Jews caught on until the hour for escape had passed. Soon after the Nazis seized control

of an area, they pressured and/or forced local governments to implement racial laws

directed against Jews. As suggested by numerous memoirists, these laws seemed, if not trivial, at least not a matter of life and death. Jews had to identify themselves with the

3 Brandon Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 7.

4 Ibid., 8.

5 George Lucas Salton, The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 7.

6 Jack Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares: Memoirs of a Holocaust Survivor (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 2.

now notorious yellow armbands, those in the armed forces lost their military ranks, and

all Jewish employees received pay cuts. Curfews appeared. Jews had to step off the

sidewalk to allow Gentiles to pass. They faced restricted shopping times and telephone

and travel privileges. Jewish doctors could not treat non-Jews. They had to give their

gold and jewelry to German authorities.7 Filip Müller explains, “Gradually the Jews

were debarred from the political, economic, cultural and social life of the country until

they had been completely excluded.”8 A similar process had occurred in Germany, albeit

earlier. Slowly but surely, the German state assumed more and more control over the

Jews in theirs and dependent countries and transformed them from an upwardly mobile

minority into second-class citizens.

This does not mean that no Jews realized German intentions and took flight;

indeed, some did. Judith Isaacson’s uncle and Samuel Willenburg’s father, seeking the

protection of another religion, falsified their papers to say that they were Christians.9

Others, wanting to avoid another round of pogroms and anti-Semitism, tried to emigrate to Israel, the United States, or Britain with varying success.10 Although some fled, the vast majority tried to hunker down and endure their worsening lives. By the time most grasped the threat that Hitler posed to them, they had no opportunity to escape. Benjamin

Jacobs recalls, “At each Nazi anti-Jewish action, people commonly thought, ‘That’s as

7 Ibid., 33, 54; Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 38; Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 25, 33; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 20; Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 10.

8 Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 105.

9 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 19; Samuel Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 70.

10 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 9; Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 21; Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 9.

far as they’ll go.’”11 Most never saw the threat. Even for those who were apprehensive,

inertia kept them from fleeing. Few wanted to pack up, go abroad, and leave behind

everything they knew and owned just because of an uneasy feeling. After all, the Jews

had weddings to attend, plans to fulfill, careers to develop, and family to look after.12

Without solid proof, most Jews declined to leave. The Nazis trapped the Jews much like

a Cajun chef would cook a frog. If he were to put the frog directly into the boiling water,

it would immediately hop out. If he were to place the frog in cool water and bring it

slowly to a boil, however, that same frog would stay in the pot quite contentedly,

unaware that the bouillon cubes were more than strange rocks, that the warming water

was more than a pleasant bath, and that each and every moment of swimming brought it closer to its death. Thus, by slowly tightening their control over the Jews, the Nazis

trapped most of them in the next stage of the Holocaust system, the ghetto.

With the Jews’ rights taken away, the Nazis sought to deprive them of their homes. While ghettos, racially concentrated neighborhoods, had existed before, the

Nazis began deliberately packing Jews into them in order to gain complete control of their lives. First, Jews faced a forced evacuation to the ghetto. In many cases, they only had a few hours to pack.13 Out of a lifetime of belongings and valuables, Jews could

bring only a suitcase of mementos and supplies. A few Jews actually looked forward to

life inside these ghettos: there, they thought they would be separated from non-Jews, safe from discrimination, and able to exercise limited self-government.14 Overall, however,

11 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 30.

12 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 24.

13 Wiesel, Night, 14.

14 Ibid., 12.

most loathed this cramped and filthy place. George Salton explains, “The wretchedness

of life was evident everywhere. Crowds of people, desperate beggars, and starving and

sickly children were pleading for food.”15 Even here, Nazi control had not fully disclosed

itself. Instead, they ruled through the Judenrat, a ghetto government comprised of Jewish

collaborators. Distributing alms to the poor, meeting German demands, and serving as a

temporary police force, those in the Judenrat often abused their power by appropriating

extra food or protecting friends and family from the transports.16 In the ghetto, the Jews

“were trapped in a maze of violence, poverty, and hunger.”17 Yet, despite this terrible

situation, few tried to escape. The men, those strong enough to escape, chose instead to protect and provide for their families; to do anything else would have been beyond selfish.18 In the face of all these hardships, most people simply “tried to go on with

[their] lives” and make the best out of their situation.19 Their sense of duty and fear of

the unknown kept them rooted in a fatal situation.

Another thing held Jews back from escaping, a disbelief in the Nazi Final

Solution. There was and is something about the Holocaust that defies the imagination:

few Jews knew and still fewer could comprehend the horror that awaited them.20 Time and time again in Holocaust memoirs, Jewish authors recount instances in which they willfully disbelieved what they had heard about the concentration camps. Back in his

15 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 56.

16 Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 130; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 2.

17 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 60.

18 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 99.

19 Ibid., 99.

20 Ibid.

home of Hungary, Elie Wiesel ignored a man telling of a camp where “infants were

tossed in the air and used as targets for machine guns”: he dismissed the man as crazy.21

On his train ride to the camps, Samuel Willenburg heard Polish Gentiles taunting the

Jews and saying that all of them would be made into soap.22 Before the Germans came

and took her, Judith Isaacson heard rumors of camps that held Jews from all over

Europe.23 All these red flags, however, failed to warn the Jews of their impending trials.

Most dismissed the rumors with seemingly commonsense observations. “How could that

many Jews fit into a single camp? They imprison political prisoners only….Why should

they take little children?”24 The rumors seemed too unreal to be true.25 Primo Levi and

Benjamin Jacobs both commented on their willing ignorance. Even when seeing armed

SS arrive at his Italian camp, Levi remembers that he and his fellow prisoners “still

managed to interpret the novelty in various ways without drawing the most obvious

conclusions. A minority of ingenuous and deluded souls continued to hope” for the best.26 Jacobs recalls, “No normal brain could absorb this, and many of us were not even

willing to listen”: it was simply too unpleasant and distressing to consider that the

unthinkable was about to happen.27 As people have done since the beginning of time, these Jews chose not to see an inconvenient truth. Unfortunately for them, however, the

stakes had never before been this high. The Jews either did not understand the warnings

21 Wiesel, Night, 7.

22 Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 42.

23 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 31.

24 Ibid., 36.

25 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 77; Wiesel, Night, 8; Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 42.

26 Primo Levi, If This is a Man (London: Sphere Books, 1987), 20.

27 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 73.

or, citing family, fear of the unknown, or the threat of punishment, chose to ignore them.

Either way, these people, by far the majority of the Jewish population, stayed in the

ghettos and waited for what would happen to them next. The Germans left them waiting

until they had prepped the ghettos for deportation.

The process of deportation itself was extremely chaotic. With only a day or two of warning, the guards dragged groups of Jews, chosen by the Judenrat, out of their new

homes and “herded” them together at gunpoint into the center of the ghetto.28 In this

situation, the Jews felt helpless; compared to the German guards, “[they were] unarmed,

untrained, [they were] children.”29 They felt afraid as well, because they did not know

their final destination. Surrounded by an escort of German soldiers and Jewish police

and bearing their small bundles and suitcases, the deportees marched to the railroad

station. Warning signs soon appeared, however. The guards shot anyone unable or

unwilling to leave.30 When one man fell behind on the way to the train station, Samuel

Willenburg recalls that “they surrounded him, took him out of line, pressed him face

down into a ditch beside the road, pushed a rifle barrel to his head….[and] sent a fountain

of blood splashing onto the earth.”31 Once the Nazis had deposited them at the railroad

station, the Jews awaited the next of their many horrors, the train ride to the concentration

camps.

The train ride was horrible, humiliating, and oftentimes lethal. With around

eighty Jews stuffed so tightly into a cattle car that they could not all sit down at once,

28 Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 38.

29 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 6, 15.

30 Ibid., 4.

31 Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 38.

they actually had to take turns standing.32 With just “two small, barred windows” to let in warm summer air, most of these cars were stuffy and “hot as an oven.”33 In these

moving prisons, the Jews had only a single latrine bucket to serve the physical needs of

everyone in the car. Emptied only once a day, this bucket often overflowed onto the

ground of the car, only adding to the misery of the experience.34 Additionally, the Jews

only received a bit of bread and a ladleful of water a day. The lack of water, especially,

became a major concern. Even with their gnawing hunger urging them on, many found

themselves “too thirsty to eat” because of this pitiful water ration.35 They shouted again

and again, begging the guards for water, but to no avail.36 All the physical discomforts of

this “hermetically sealed cattle car” left a mark, an emotional scar on the Holocaust

survivors.37 Memoirists describe this scene especially colorfully. Salton explains, “The

stench from the latrine bucket, the heat, and our thirst and hunger created a madhouse of

misery.”38 Weiss remembers a “nightmare” in which “old people [were] falling down,

crying, crawling around on their hands and knees.”39 Leitner recalls the cars as places

with “no room to sit…no room to stand…no air to breathe. This is no way to die. It

offends even death.”40 According to Levi, the Jews were crammed together “like cheap

32 Wiesel, Night, 22, 23; Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 144.

33 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 102.

34 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 144.

35 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 59.

36 Levi, If This is a Man, 24.

37 Wiesel, Night, 24.

38 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 144.

39 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 102.

merchandise” into “a human mass, extended across the floor, confused and continuous, sluggish and aching, rising here and there in sudden convulsions and immediately collapsing again in exhaustion.”41 Jacobs felt that, by the time they reached their final

destination, the concentration camps, the Jews, “traumatized, starved, and soaked in

human waste…looked to be the inhuman, useless creatures the Nazis had characterized

[them] as being.”42 The average journey to the concentration camp was traumatic enough

in itself to scar people for life. Because this journey brought so much insult, violence,

and degradation upon the Jews, most thought the worst had passed. In truth, however,

their ordeal was just beginning.

Once the trains arrived at the concentration camps, the camp guards swept the

Jews away from the quiet hell of their cattle cars and plunged them into a swirling vortex

of confusion, violence, and efficiency. When nearing the camps, the caged Jews began to

sense a strange “smell of burning flesh” in the air.43 Although they did not know what

exactly the smell meant, it made many uneasy about their destination and anxious for

their future. As the train gradually ground to a halt, the Jews waited apprehensively to

find out to where they had been brought and why. Then, suddenly, the doors opened.

Strange men roughly herded the Jews out of their cars (they dragged out those unable to

jump down) and welcomed them into an overwhelming sea of activity.44 No one had

time to process anything, much less resist it; the whole camp initiation came at them too

40 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 16.

41 Levi, If This is a Man, 23, 24.

42 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 118.

43 Wiesel, Night, 28; Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 62.

44 Levi, If This is a Man, 25; Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 18; Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 106.

43 fast. With shouts of Schnell, Schnell, ‘quickly, quickly,’ the guards then drove everyone away from the trains.45 Leaving behind their “packages and bundles…cover[ing] the ground like a Technicolor carpet,” the confused and cowed Jews made their way away from the train station and towards the first trial, the selection.46 Ahead, at least for those who passed though Auschwitz, stood the infamous Dr. Mengele who, “with a flick of his thumb and a whistle, [sic] selected who [was] to live and who [was] to die.”47 He rapidly divided the cowed Jews, separating the women from the men, the young from the old, and the weak from the strong.48 Having just been unloaded from a primordial darkness and thrust into the flurry of activity, few understood that, like the wheat and the chaff,

Mengele was saving some and condemning others. Some lucky few, lying about their age or occupation, managed to stick together with their relatives, but the vast majority was not so lucky.49 Their friends and relatives had disappeared “in an instant,” never to be seen again in the world of the living.50 For these unfortunate souls, their journey and lives had come to an end. Those who passed through the initiation alive, however, only continued to suffer.

The Jews then endured another torture, their initiation into camp life. Upon arrival, some Jews wondered at strange men who wore “comic berets” and dressed in

45 Wiesel, Night, 29; Levi, If This is a Man, 25; Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 62; Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 39.

46 Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 40.

47 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 19; Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 106; Wiesel, Night, 31; Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 86.

48 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 106; Wiesel, Night, 31.

49 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 106; Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 65.

50 Levi, If This is a Man, 26; Wiesel, Night, 31.

tattered and dirty clothing and waited silently at the train station.51 Who were they and

why did they look so strange? With a “furious speed [that was] unbelievable,” the Nazis

answered their questions.52 In quick succession, they stripped the Jews of their old

clothing, disinfected them with burning white powder, thoroughly shaved and showered

them, issued camp uniforms to them, and tattooed them with their prisoner numbers.53

They were now proper camp prisoners. Only now, with this physical transformation, did

the new prisoners realize the truth behind the men with the “comic berets.” They were

current prisoners, men who had already gone through this procedure. So changed were

they that many relatives had trouble finding each other in the crowd afterwards.54

Without their long hair, women especially looked different: Judith Isaacson remembers panicking at first, thinking that she was in a crowd of men.55 Only as the shock of their arrival and rapid initiation wore off did the Jews begin to think about their relatives and friends who had failed to make it through the selection.

The Germans relied on this whirlwind of activity and the naivety of the prisoners to make the killing process as efficient as possible. As previously discussed, most Jews did not resist their imprisonment because that they did not know or chose to ignore what awaited them in the camps. Through their use of deception, the Germans encouraged this erroneous belief and continued to keep the Jews in the dark. Throughout the process of deportation, the Germans fed lies to their Jewish prisoners; they told them that they were

51 Levi, If This is a Man, 26.

52 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 25.

53 Ibid. 25; Wiesel, Night, 42; Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 68; Levi, If This is a Man, 29, 37; Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 109; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 120.

54 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 26.

55 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 67.

resettling them in the East, sending them away from the battlefront for their own safety,

or relocating them to an ordinary labor camp.56 The deception only intensified the closer

the Jews got to their deaths. When they pulled up to the camps, many believed that they

had arrived at an ordinary work camp. Jack Weiss remembers that Birkenau looked more

like a summer camp than anything else.57 Above the entrance to the notorious Auschwitz

and several other camps, the Nazis placed deceptive sign reading “Work liberates,”

implying that those who passed through the gates would be working rather than dying.58

After the rough treatment on the train, the behavior of the German guards was

“disconcerting and disarming”: “they looked amiable, they behaved affably, directing people like traffic policemen to get them distributed across the yard.”59 The SS

constructed the experience to avoid giving away any impending danger. At Treblinka,

the Nazis built a fake railway station complete with signs denoting rooms for first class

passengers, second class passengers, and the luggage.60 When prisoners were on their

way to be gassed, they received bars of soap to make their promised shower seem more

likely.61 In Auschwitz, the SS constructed an elaborate gassing facility that included

locker rooms, signs espousing the virtues of cleanliness, and even dummy shower heads

in the gas chamber itself.62 In short, “every single detail was carefully aimed at allaying

the victims’ suspicions and calculated to take them quickly and without trouble into the

56 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 27; Wiesel, Night, 21, 27.

57 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 114.

58 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 27.

59 Levi, If This is a Man, 25; Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 36.

60 Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 107.

61 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 114.

62 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 60, 61.

gas chamber.”63 With this level of deception and the ever-present threat of force, the

Nazis calmly and easily separated Jewish families, sending the fit and young off to the

labor camps and the old and weak off to the crematorium. The survivors only learned the truth later while working in the camps, after their friends and relatives had already been

reduced to ashes.

The survivors’ memoirs often comment on the cleanliness, neatness, discipline,

and efficiency of the Nazis who worked in the camps. Even as they were trying to exterminate their prisoners, the Nazis wanted them to be clean. Above all else, Judith

Isaacson remembers that “the Germans [sic] were hygienic.”64 After their arrival, showering became “a compulsory routine.”65 The SS put their prisoners through nightly

lice inspections and mandatory foot washing.66 A sign in one of the camp lavatories read,

“A louse is your death.” Indeed, many prisoners, at least in the early days, would be

killed simply for failing a lice inspection.67 To this end, Primo Levi remembers two giant

“didactic frescoes” which the Nazis painted in Auschwitz,

The good Häftling [prisoner], portrayed stripped to the waist, about to diligently soap his sheared and rosy cranium, and the bad Häftling, with a strong Semitic nose and a greenish colour, bundled up in his ostentatiously stained clothes…who cautiously dips a finger into the water of the washbasin…Under the first is written…like this you are clean, and under the second…like this you come to a bad end…and lower down…’La propreté, c’est la santé.’” [Cleanliness is health].68

63 Ibid., 61.

64 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 66.

65 Wiesel, Night, 41.

66 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 40

67 Levi, If This is a Man, 45; Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 7.

68 Levi, If This is a Man, 45.

Their old habits died hard in later years. Even when fleeing from the Russians in 1944, the Nazi guards still shaved, deloused, and showered all the prisoners upon their entry into a new camp.69 Cleanliness was so ingrained in their consciousness that, even in that life and death situation, the Germans continued to enforce it.

Germans also stressed neatness. To avoid punishment in the camps, prisoners had to follow several rules and restrictions concerning orderliness. Before leaving the barracks each morning, their beds had to be “perfectly flat and smooth,” their shoes greased, their beards shaved, and their jackets had to have the regulation five buttons on it.70 The SS took these rules seriously. One prisoner, Benjamin Jacobs, recalls receiving five lashes because his coat only had four buttons.71 In the extermination camp of

Treblinka, luggage littered the ground after each transport train of doomed Jews. Unable to stand the mess and disorder, “the cleanliness-loving master race” saved Jews from the gas chambers simply to sort and stack these belongings, ensuring that the camp would be

“spic and span” each day by six o’clock.72 Primo Levi remembers feeling worried when

Auschwitz had a surplus of prisoners, more than could be housed in the barracks, “The

Germans did not like these irregularities and… [we feared that] something would soon happen to reduce our number.”73 For the Nazis, everything appeared to have an order; everything had its proper place. Just because they were in a death camp did not prevent neatness from being the case.

69 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 137.

70 Levi, If This is a Man, 40.

71 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 35.

72 Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 55.

73 Levi, If This is a Man, 130.

In addition to neatness, the SS guards enforced strict discipline on their prisoners.

The roll call, in particular, demonstrated this concern. Three times a day, the prisoners

had to assemble in the main square of the camp. There, the inmates stood at attention in

rows of five until they were all counted. The guards whipped anyone failing to do so.74

Then, to be dismissed, the prisoners had to remove their caps in unison and, with the cap, make a “whip-cracking sound” against their thighs. The guards kept them there, making prisoners stand for hours until it was done right.75 The guards even taught their prisoners

how to goosestep; any who failed to do so faced severe punishments.76 This discipline

permeated all Nazi camps, habituating the prisoners to obey without thinking.

Finally, the memoirists remember the Germans as nothing if not efficient. Leitner recalls, “The Germans were always in such a hurry. Death was always urgent with them—Jewish death.”77 Frustrated by delays in the gas chambers and crematorium, the

Germans sought to perfect the whole extermination process. At first, they greeted the prisoners disembarking from the trains violently, pushing and shoving them until they had been locked in the gas chambers. After the gassing occurred, the living prisoners sorted the tangled belongings into discrete piles, carried the bodies to the crematorium, cut hair and pulled out gold teeth, and prepared for the next transport.78 Over time,

however, the Germans reorganized the gassing system to ensure a “smooth and

74 Ibid.; Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 62; Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 110; Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 1.

75 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 1.

76 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 35.

77 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 18.

78 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 13, 14, 16.

49 continuous operation.”79 Deceiving prisoners with false promises of soup and work, guards politely and calmly instructed them to leave their baggage at the train station, proceed into the showers, and hang up their clothes and shoes neatly so that they could reclaim them more easily after the disinfection process. After the Jews had inhaled the gas and died, separate teams of prisoners took care of different tasks. One group pulled out gold teeth, another sorted valuable into separate piles, another fed bodies to the flames, and another stripped labels and nametags off of luggage and clothes, and yet another sorted shoes into matching pairs. By experimenting with and streamlining the process, the Nazis had transformed the murder of a people into an almost assembly-line process.

These tendencies of the guards point to several realities about the Nazi concentration camps. First, they show that the SS adopted these procedures, in part, to undermine any prisoner resistance. With the roll call, bed-making, and cleaning occupying all of a prisoner’s time, he would be too exhausted to try and escape or cause trouble. Then, even if one had the will, no one had the free time to implement any subversive plans. Furthermore, the Nazis were accustoming the Jews to obedience, a life in which they did not think for themselves but let the guards make all their decisions for them. By constantly drilling them to react like soldiers, the guards hoped to prime their charges to accept whatever fate came to them.

Second, these procedures demonstrate that the camps were understaffed and overworked. On the whole, the SS guards ran the camps well and with few discipline problems; however, they only achieved this by placing so much emphasis on orderliness and efficiency. Since they did not have enough guards to police every barracks and

79 Ibid. 124, 136; Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 50, 55, 56, 66.

supervise every prisoner, the SS chose to rule through terror. They tried to make up for

in psychological acclimatization what they lacked in manpower. Additionally, their

growing concerns with efficiency and finding ever new ways to exterminate the Jews also

points to a labor shortage. With few guards and ever-rising numbers of Jews to be killed, the SS had to improvise and experiment in order to satisfy their superiors. Thus, the well-run camps point to a surprising conclusion: the Nazis only ran their camps as well as they did because their numbers could not sustain any inefficiency.

Third, the length and detail of the memoirists’ descriptions of the discipline and efficiency reveal how much these concerns mattered in a prisoner’s everyday existence.

They write about it so much because the roll calls, bed-making, and punishment

composed a major part of their stays in the camps; to leave out these details would be to

leave out a large part of their camp life.

Finally, the memoirists included these descriptions in order to dehumanize their

guards. When describing their captors, most Jews treat them as cogs in a larger evil

machine, performing small tasks to make the larger genocide possible. Because they do

not sympathize with their torturers, they wish to bring their readers to the same state of

mind. In emphasizing the guards’ love of efficiency, orderliness, and discipline, they

want others to see the SS as evil and condemn them as such. In painting this portrait,

however, many Jews fail to present the other side of the story. Under intense pressure

from their superiors, the SS had to measure up to specific quotas of Jewish dead.80 They

needed to be disciplined and efficiency-minded to be able to complete their tasks on time.

Yet, Jewish authors ignore the human side of the SS guards and instead portray them as

heartless killing machines. While the Nazi guards certainly displayed industriousness

80 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 135.

and orderliness in their killing of the Jewish people, Jewish authors may have

exaggerated these qualities in order to present a more negative and less sympathetic

picture of these men to their readers.

Once integrated into the camp, Jews had to adjust themselves to the realities of

camp life. Constant and overpowering hunger constituted one of the toughest trials of the

camps. Typically, prisoners received coffee in the morning, soup for lunch, and bread for supper. By any standard, the food was terrible; survivors remember clearly the

“overcooked rotting potatoes,” the bread that was “old and stale and tasted of oats,” the

soup that was little more than a “can of hot water,” and the coffee that only resembled

real coffee in color.81 At first, many of the prisoners refused the food of the camps; it made them sick to their stomach.82 As they spent more time in the camp and learned the

true meaning of hunger, however, their squeamishness disappeared. “Bread became an

obsession,” one that trumped all other impulses.83 After working with the

Sonderkommando, burial detail, putting bodies into the ovens all day, Filip Müller remembers that “our hands [were] filthy with blood and excrement, but we did not care:

hunger and starvation had taught us to appreciate a hunk of bread.”84 Food, bread

especially, became imbued with an almost religious significance: Primo Levi described it

as “the holy grey slab which seems gigantic in your neighbor’s hand, and in your own hand so small as to make you cry.”85 Rather than freedom, some prisoners dreamed of

81 Ibid.7; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 34; Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 121.

82 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 77.

83 Ibid.

84 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 20.

85 Levi, If This is a Man, 45.

bread and of the days when they could eat their fill.86 It narrowed ambitions, as well.

Elie Wiesel recounts that “all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of

stale bread. The bread, the soup—those were my entire life.”87 Through the long process

of overwork and starvation, bread had become an object of longing and the source of all

happiness.

Work, too, became an integral part of the prisoners’ experiences in the camps.

Prisoners worked in a variety of capacities, such as with the Sonderkommando stripping

corpses, cleaning grates, burning bodies, sorting through the belongings of the dead, and

taking out gold teeth, in a factory manufacturing war materiel like artillery shells and

aircraft engines, or outside digging ditches, quarrying stone, mining coal, and loading and unloading supplies from railroad cars.88 Although prisoners engaged in such a wide array

of work, certain factors increased a prisoner’s chances of surviving.

First and foremost, work was not an optional activity. As determined as the Nazis were to kill every single Jew, they allowed some to live solely because of their value as

potential slave laborers.89 Eli Wiesel described the one-sided dilemma as “work or

crematorium—the choice [was ours].”90 Further illustrated by the camp infirmaries and

hospitals described later on, a Jew could only survive by being seen as able to work for the German war effort.

86 Ibid. 80; Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 181.

87Wiesel, Night, 52.

88 Ibid. 50, 54; Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 13, 14; Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 50; Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 100; Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 80, 105; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 138.

89 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 54.

90 Wiesel, Night, 39.

Second, those who worked and lived concentrated on saving as much energy as

humanly possible. Ironically, hard work was not rewarded in the German camps:

because of the heavy labor and lack of food, those who tried to labor mightily soon found themselves exhausted, starving, and even closer to death.91 To avoid this fate, most

prisoners instead began “economizing on everything, on breath, movements, even

thoughts.”92 Whenever possible, they looked for easy jobs, found excuses to walk to the

latrine, and mimed hard work rather than actually doing it.93 By putting as little effort

into their work as possible, they saved their energy for themselves and their own survival.

Third, almost without exception, skilled workers had huge advantages over

unskilled laborers. Many of those who survived, like Levi, Jacobs, and Salton, managed

to find skilled work as a chemists, camp dentists, or skilled machinists. These roles saved

them from death. They worked inside, “shielded from the cold, snow and ice” that

drained the life out of other prisoners.94 Their work, while still hard, did not require as

much physical effort as that of the common laborer. When Primo Levi moved into the

chemistry laboratory, he was shocked by his new work washing glass and sweeping the

floor, because, to him, “to work [was] to push wagons, carry sleepers, break stones, dig

earth, press one’s bare hands against the iciness of freezing iron.”95 Additionally,

because the services that they performed were more valuable, camp authorities treated

them less harshly, gave them more autonomy from the dreaded guards, and occasionally

91 Levi, If This is a Man, 42; Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 54; Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 190.

92 Levi, If This is a Man, 138.

93 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 79; Levi, If This is a Man, 75.

94 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 105.

95 Levi, If This is a Man, 145.

54 even did them favors: these prisoners stood out from the masses.96 These more prestigious jobs also accorded prisoners more opportunities to steal something of value in the camps: while working in the lab, Primo Levi “organized” soap and petrol to exchange for food in the camps.97 Finally, by giving the prisoners a sense of purpose, this labor allowed them to hold on to hope. Through their initiation and time in the camps, most prisoners had lost their dignity, their humanity, and their sense of control over their lives. With his job in as the camp dentist, however, Benjamin Jacobs felt like he could do “something useful” for a change.98 In the words of Primo Levi, “[I was] feeling myself a man again.”99 These jobs gave them at least something of which they could be proud and from which they could derive a meaning. Having a marketable skill did not guarantee survival by any means, but by protecting prisoners from the cold, excessive labor, the abuses of the camp authorities, and giving them opportunities to supplement their rations with theft, it made a prisoner’s chances of surviving much more likely.

Whether working or resting, eating or defecating, the prisoners always answered to the Nazi guards and their prisoner accomplices. On his website detailing his famous

Stanford Prison Experiment, Phillip Limbardo suggests that there are three general types of prison guards: the kind, the strict yet law-abiding, and the sadistic. Limbardo’s hypothesis tends to be supported by the memoirists. Occasionally, prisoners encountered kind guards. Benjamin Jacobs remembers Tadek, a Polish guard who, “in the midst of

96 Ibid.; Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 100; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 46.

97 Levi, If This is a Man, 145.

98 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 97.

99 Levi, If This is a Man, 148.

many evil guards…was as helpful as the situation would allow.”100 Tadek not only

allowed his charges to purchase extra bread, but he also brought Jacobs to other camps to

see his brother and sister before they died.101 More often than not, prisoners found their

guards to be of the second type. In trying to fulfill the duties of their jobs, these guards

would hurt prisoners more by their inaction than by their actions. As examined

previously, during the train rides to the concentration camp, prisoners suffered most from

the lack of water.102 As it took effort to distribute water to so many cars of Jews, most

guards simply did not bother with it. They did not go out of their way to hurt prisoners,

but they did not actively work to help them either. Finally, there was a third class of

guards, those who actively and wantonly used the power at their disposal to torture and

kill Jewish prisoners. In the hell that was Treblinka, the guards routinely took prisoners

out of role call to have a little fun. Threatening to shoot them, the guards forced the

prisoners to endure an endless cycle of running, lying down, getting up, jumping, and

turning around. If a prisoner stopped from exhaustion, the guards beat him to death with

truncheons.103 Guards at Auschwitz also made prisoners play a little game called “swim-

frog,” in which prisoners were forced into a pond at gunpoint and had to swim around and croak like a frog until they drowned.104 Salton recounts an instance in which he was

cleaning windows up high on a ladder. When a guard came around to check on his

progress, he kicked the ladder out from under Salton and sent him crashing to the ground.

100 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 95.

101 Ibid., 61, 68.

102 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 59.

103 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 3.

104 Ibid., 142.

The damage to his leg and the resulting infection nearly killed Salton.105 As guards

exercised total control in the camps, a prisoner’s fate did not belong to him, but to his

Nazi overseer.

Oftentimes, the harshest guards were Kapos, camp inmates appointed to rule in

place of the authorities. Many criminals and politicals joined simply because of the privileges, for they received extra rations, better clothes, and the opportunity to supervise

rather than perform hard labor.106 Some even came from among the Jewish ranks. This

connection did not guarantee that they would treat their kin humanely, however.

Tenuously clinging to power and held responsible for the prisoners’ actions, many treated their fellow Jews harshly. Leitner explains how her fellow inmates sank down to that

level, “We drank urine and ate sawdust. You can’t do that for long and remain brave and

human and upright.”107 Kapos often gave into the temptation of privileging their lives

over the lives of others. Thus, no matter where a prisoner turned, he could expect abuse

and harsh punishment with a depressing certainty.

Because the memoirists do not comment on sexual advances from the guards

towards Jewish women prisoners, we could assume that it rarely happened. Although

rape undoubtedly occurred in the camps, the gender-segregated camps, the racial

prejudices, and other, non-Jewish options of the SS guards could have circumscribed this

problem. Male guards often had no access to female prisoners. Women lived in women-

only camps surrounded by women SS guards.108 Because of the discipline among the SS

105 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 116.

106 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 57; Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 80.

107 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 56.

108 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 63.

57 guards, the women guards very well could have protected their charges from the male guards. Because the men were not allowed in the camps, the women guards would enforce that law. Even if they could have gained access to these camps, the Nazi’s racial indoctrination discouraged them from copulating with Jewish women. Rabid racists saw the women prisoners as scum and unworthy of sexual relations with the German master race.109 To the Nazis, “sex between races was the ultimate sin.”110 As they were busy trying to exterminate the Jewish race, the guards presumably did not want to fill the camps with half-Aryan, half-Jewish bastards. Willenburg remembers occurrences of sexual assault, but only rarely.111 Additionally, other women came to inhabit the camps.

Because the Nazis arrested Communists, criminals, pacifistic Christians, and gypsies, the

SS guards had plenty of non-Jewish options if they wanted to sleep around with the prisoners. The racial stereotypes and separation of the genders often prevented the guards from taking advantage of the Jewish women in the camp.

Alternatively, we could posit that sexual advances happened, just too discretely for the memoirists to notice. Since most of the memoirists examined in this paper were men, they could easily have been ignorant of any rapes happening in the camps.

Furthermore, with the prisoners’ limited movement and power, the guards could have kept them in the dark about their actions. While these events are possible, they are certainly not probable.

For the most part, even the women memoirists fail to comment on rape in the camps. While Isaacson recalls having nightmares about “mass rape” by German soldiers,

109 Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 114.

110 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 55.

111 Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 114.

she was worrying more about the guards sending her to the Russian front to pleasure

active-duty soldiers than about the camp guards taking advantage of her.112 Because of

the almost complete lack of commentary about the rape of Jewish women in the camps,

this paper assumes that it did not happen frequently.

In addition to the dangers of labor, lack of food, and abuse by the guards, the

prisoners had to survive periodic in-camp selections. As the SS only wanted Jews able to

work, they continually sought to separate the strong from the weak and dying.113 To this

end, they organized periodic medical evaluations in which prisoners had to pass naked

before Nazi doctors. If they spotted someone horribly underweight or pale-skinned or

just weak-looking in general, the doctors designated them as “crematorium fodder.”114

Prisoners, knowing the ramifications of this selection, tried to deceive their examiners.

Pinching their cheeks or rubbing them with snow, the prisoners sought to simulate the red

glow of healthy skin and therefore “hide their sickly complexions.”115 As they paraded in front their judges, jury, and executioners, many prisoners chose to run: the quicker they passed, they reasoned, the less time the examiners would have to write down their numbers.116 While, with these measures, prisoners attempted to exert some measure of

control on their fate, the in-camp selections reinforced their sense of hopelessness and

prevented them from ever feeling more than a hair’s breadth away from death.

112 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 85.

113 Wiesel, Night, 71.

114 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 37.

115 Ibid. 47; Wiesel, Night, 71; Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 106.

116 Wiesel, Night, 71.

Ironically enough, the camp infirmary often brought prisoners the closest to death.

A trip to the infirmary seemed attractive enough. Those sent there marveled at what they

found: freedom from work, better rations, and, in the case of Wiesel, white sheets.117 In a world where work was mandatory, the food was awful, and sheets were either filthy or nonexistent, the infirmary appeared to be a prisoner’s salvation, his way to avoid work and survive in the camps. Levi even remembers that the infirmary was “the Lager [camp] without its physical discomforts.”118 Yet, despite these temptations, prisoners avoided

the infirmary like the plague. Since “Germany [had] no need of sick Jews,” the selections in the infirmary were carried out much more frequently than in the broader

camp, often every day.119 Once placed in the infirmary, a prisoner only had so many

days before he or she faced liquidation.120 Therefore, one wanted to get out as fast as one

could to escape the selection. The real danger was this: as the infirmaries were often

without proper supplies or even proper medical personnel, those who got sick rarely got better.121 For those sent to the infirmary, the healing process became a vicious race

against the clock; it became an effective death sentence.122 While Levi himself lived and

benefited from the infirmary, his bunkmate, Schmulek, did not survive the process.

Admitted for emaciation, he failed to get well quick enough for the German doctors; they

117 Ibid. 78; Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 60; Levi, If This is a Man, 56.

118 Levi, If This is a Man, 61.

119 Wiesel, Night, 78.

120 Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 88; Levi, If This is a Man, 59; Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 60.

121 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 119; Isaacon, Seed of Sarah 98.

122 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 125.

executed him.123 In the twisted world of the Nazi concentration camps, even the infirmaries were places of death.

With these faux infirmaries, the hard labor, pitiful diet, arbitrary violence of the guards and their functionaries, and camp selections, a sense of profound helplessness pervaded the extermination camps. Prisoners did not control a moment of their time; their bodily functions, their behavior, and their entire lives were regulated by their Nazi overseers.124 The guards could force prisoners to stand at attention at roll call for hours at a time.125 Prisoners owned nothing. Their precious letters, family photos, and even their

names had been taken away.126 Their fates and those of their loved ones were entirely

out of their hands. Jack Weiss could only watch as a truck drove his father off to the

crematoria.127 George Salton remembers that “[his] life had become a constant struggle,

and in most instances [he] was helpless to control [his] fate. One stumble and [he] would

be with the others, waiting for an undeserving death.”128 Faced with this helplessness,

prisoners often took comfort in exerting small measures of control over their lives.

Regardless of the task, most prisoners fought to obtain an unsupervised job: the moments

alone meant that, at least for a few moments a day, they would be free from Nazi

control.129 Others responded to this helplessness more dramatically. Samuel Willenburg

carried around cyanide pills and Isabella Leitner preferred camps with electrified fences

123 Levi, If This is a Man, 58-59.

124 Wiesel, Night, 73.

125 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 42.

126 Levi, If This is a Man, 33.

127 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 141.

128 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 125.

129Ibid. 82; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 90; Levi, If This is a Man, 144.

for the same reason: at least, they thought, they could control when and how they died.130

Unable to make even the most trivial independent decision, prisoners had to fight to

against depression, fatalism, and hopelessness.

Confined within the fences of the concentration camps and trapped in this

atmosphere of constant peril, prisoners began to change physically, mentally,

emotionally, morally, and religiously. Prisoners first transformed physically.

Condemned to heavy labor and starvation diets of around 1200 calories a day, the prisoners’ bodies began to change dramatically.131 One woman who normally weighed

120 lbs now measured in at 40.132 Meeting once a week, Primo Levi and his Italian

comrades had a hard time recognizing each other: each time they met they looked “even

more deformed and more squalid” than the time before.133 Benjamin Jacobs remembers

his father growing “thinner and more sallow” with each passing day.134 In this harsh

regime, people literally “wast[ed] away.”135 The prisoners experienced other

physiological changes as well. Their bodies became lice-ridden and filthy beyond

belief.136 The women stopped menstruating. With closely cropped hair and small, fragile

bodies, the prisoners appeared almost sexless: many prisoners remember having trouble

130 Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 88; Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 52.

131 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 130; Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 54.

132 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 37.

133 Levi, If This is a Man, 43.

134 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 50.

135 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 54.

136 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 2.

distinguishing between men and women in the camps.137 When meeting with people

from the outside, many felt embarrassed because of this profound transformation:

We have a swollen and yellow face, marked permanently by the cuts made by the hasty barber, and often by bruises and numbed sores; our neck is long and knobbly, like that of plucked chickens. Our clothes are incredibly dirty, stained by mud, grease and blood….We are full of fleas…we have to ask permission to go to the latrines with humiliating frequency….[We have] the smell of the Häftling, faint and sweetish….One acquires it at once and one never loses it.138

In the squalor of the camps, Jews’ bodies deteriorated into something new and terrible.

In a way, this deterioration reinforced the Jews’ sense of hopelessness. The Nazis had

already taken their homes, all their earthly belongings, and their freedom, but now their

bodies as well? The transformed physiology of the prisoners testifies to their utter lack of control over their situation; their acceptance of it came to signify their acceptance of living in the camps.

Due to the hard life in the camps, many underwent a mental transformation as dramatic as the physical. Salton illustrates, “Every day blended with the next, filled with hunger, sleepless nights, hard labor and the constant threat of beatings, selections, and executions.”139 With the overwhelming and mind-numbing routine of the camps,

prisoners observed their thought patterns beginning to change.140 Memories of home, visions of the future, and questions of morality were gradually overshadowed by dreams of bread and time spent worrying about work and looking forward to sleep.141 In a way,

prisoners preferred to be preoccupied with “hunger and work and…what they have made

137 Ibid.

138 Levi, If This is a Man, 148.

139 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 117.

140 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 44.

141 Levi, If This is a Man, 42; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 129.

63 us become, how much they have taken away from us, what this life is” because these emotions were less painful than the longing for a home to which they could not hope to return and a future which they might not live to see. As a psychological defense mechanism, therefore, prisoners adjusted their thoughts to only focus on the here and now, the things that would help them survive into the coming spring.

Due to this mental transformation, few prisoners cared about interactions with the opposite sex. Sex and companionship were two concerns that fell by the wayside on the gradual march towards death. After arriving at the camps, only three prisoners, Isaacson,

Jacobs, and Müller, remember even thinking about the opposite sex. As a young man,

Jacobs fell in love with a Polish girl. With his position as an office assistant, he frequently left to see her, converse, and make love.142 Isaacson remembers having sexual fantasies in which she was saved by sexy foreigner laborers and spirited away to

Australia, France, or Belgium.143 Young and enduring raging hormones, these two were the exception rather than the rule. When Müller recalls his eagerness to be chosen to work in the women’s camps, he remembers the desire as “not so much sexual, but simply the need to have someone to care for… [after] all family ties had been forcibly and abruptly severed.”144 Again, this concern is exceptional. Teetering on the edge of death, few prisoners lusted after the opposite sex. Furthermore, even if they did pine for intimacy, men and women usually lived in gender-segregated camps. Thus, with little incentive and even littler opportunity to meet and couple with the opposite sex, few prisoners did so; survival consumed them.

142 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 53.

143 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 102.

144 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 63.

Surrounded by so much pain and suffering, Jews and guards alike gradually succumbed

to a sort of emotional numbness. In the camps, feeling gradually faded away. One

commonly witnessed things that no one should ever have to endure, much less endure over and over again. Müller worked as part of the Sonderkommando in the gas chambers and frequently witnessed the mass-killing of his fellow Jews. At first, they screamed, but these screams gradually gave way to something else:

After some time the noise grew weaker, the screams stopped. Only now and then there was a moan, a rattle, or the sound of muffled knocking against the door. But soon even that ceased and in the sudden silence each one of us felt the horror of this terrible mass death.145

In a women’s camp, Isabella Leitner recounts what happened to the children born of

Jewish mothers in Auschwitz. She speaks to the newborn, as if it could hear her:

Most of us are born to live—to die, but to live first. You, dear darling, you are being born only to die….You belong to the gas chamber. Your mother has no rights. She only brought forth fodder for the gas chamber….As so, dear baby, you are on your way to heaven to meet a recent arrival who is blowing a loving kiss to you through the smoke, a dear friend, your maker—your father.146

When confronted daily with suffering such as this, prisoners could not continue to feel as

they had felt on the outside. To cope with the emotional stress of their life, prisoners shut

down their emotions, became as unfeeling and “robot[ic]” as possible, and instead concentrated on other activities like stealing or fashion or escape.147 Dealing with so

much pain around him, Levi had a hard time remembering the life stories he heard from

his fellow prisoners:

145 Ibid., 34.

146 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 31-2.

147 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 14, 62.

He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, disturbing necessity.148

As much as prisoners wanted to help each other, too much suffering existed in the camps

for one person to alleviate. Levi recalls bringing water and soup to two Italians stricken

with dysentery in the infirmary:

The result was that from then on, through the thin wall, the whole diarrheoea ward shouted my name day and night with the accents of all the languages of Europe, accompanied by incomprehensible prayers, without my being able to do anything about it. I felt like crying, I could have cursed them.149

In this world of the camps, the prisoners became unconscious to the suffering around themselves: to keep feeling as one did in the outside world would lead one to insanity.

Morality within the camps differed greatly from the morality of the outside world. Levi

explains that “The Ten Commandments…did not prevail here: Auschwitz had its own

laws and macabre values.”150 Under this new compact, people served their own self-

interest above all other things.151 Stealing became commonplace; cheating and lying became the norm.152 As true altruism made Nazi rule more difficult, the guards punished

it severely. Müller remembers that, when a man complained about one of their Kapos to the Camp Commander, he was called up in front of the entire roll call and beaten to death.153 The Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have done unto yourself,

mutated into the Rule of Power: “to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will

148 Levi, If This is a Man, 71-72.

149 Ibid., 172.

150 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 2.

151 Levi, If This is a Man, 97.

152 Ibid., 42.

153 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 3.

be taken away.”154 Under this new concept of morality, Kapos took advantage of their

charges, bunkmates stole each others’ precious bread, and sons abandoned their weak and

helpless fathers.155 Only a few were able to keep their dignity and morals, those “made

of the stuff of martyrs and saints.”156 These noble men and women, however, were so far and few between that most memoirists remember the camps as strange places in which conventional morality ceased to exist.

Despite the trend against traditional morality in the camps, prisoners did witness and benefit from occasional instances of altruism. Polish workers and other non-Jewish forced laborers sometimes gave food scraps and encouragement to the imprisoned

Jews.157 Prisoners occasionally banded together to save each other; Samuel Willenburg

and his compatriots hid the sick members of their work teams to protect them from the

selection and allow them to get some rest.158 Even Nazis could be kind; it just did not

happen often. As Salton rode off in a truck to the crematorium, a German supervisor for

whom he had once done a favor recognized him. This supervisor ordered Salton off the

truck, erased his name from the condemned list, and assigned him easier work as a

janitor.159 After Jack Weiss fell unconscious during the infamous Death March, an SS

officer forced two prisoners to carry him until he woke up.160 Without this aid, Weiss

154 Levi, If This is a Man, 94.

155 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 123; Wiesel, Night, 91; Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 6.

156 Levi, If This is a Man, 98.

157 Ibid. 127; Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 126; Wiesel, Night, 53.

158 Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 98.

159 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 120.

160 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 146.

would have been trampled and shot. As the Jews came to see, “even in Hell there are a

few kind souls.”161 While, on the whole, these acts of altruism were far and few between,

they show up with an exaggerated frequency in the memoirs of survivors. Because these

little efforts and courtesies helped them live past the camps and mean so much to them

looking back, survivors include them in their memoires. Additionally, those who did not

receive such favors did not survive the camps. Thus, because most of those who did not

experience altruism died and those who did were favorably disposed to writing about it,

acts of altruism always show up in the memoirs of survivors.

Trapped in such an overwhelmingly depressing and dangerous environment,

many Jews began to doubt their ancestral faith. The Jews were no strangers to

persecution, but these camps, this systematic extermination of God’s Chosen People,

shook their faith to the very core. This was a place in which the unthinkable and unimaginable became mundane: “Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to

recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don’t know whether, during the history of the

Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.”162 As the Jews

looked around the camps, they voiced their questions aloud. “Where was the God that

my father taught me to believe in?”163 “Did God take leave of his senses?”164 The same

God that had promised Abraham that his descendants would be more numerous than the

stars also “kept the six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and Holy

161 Ibid., 128

162 Wiesel, Night, 33.

163 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 93.

164 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 4.

Days.”165 In light of this suffering, some remained faithful and continued to praise Him.

They saw their situation as a divine test, one in which God was purifying His people for

their ultimate salvation.166 They hoped to retain their dignity by remaining steadfast in

their belief: “it’s prayer that makes you a human being.”167 Eating only onions, bread,

and margarine, some very Orthodox Jews even stayed true to their dietary restrictions

within the camp.168 Needless to say, despite their religious convictions, few survived

long on this sort of diet. Others, while ultimately believing in God, wrestled with deep-

seated doubt. For them, prayer seemed pointless. Isaacson recounts that “[she] prayed…but to a God [she] no longer trusted.”169 For Müller, “it seemed pure madness to

pray in Auschwitz, and absurd to believe in God in this place.”170 Although his friends

invited Salton to come say Kaddish for a dead Sonderkommando comrade, he could not bring himself to go to the service: “In this place praying did not seem honest. There was no need for prayers….The terrible deeds committed here should have been enough to evoke God’s mercy or his fury. What good would my prayers do?”171 Even when

fighting these doubts, they faintly clung to their belief in God and never completely gave

up hope.

165 Wiesel, Night, 67.

166 Ibid. 77; Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 81; Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 28.

167 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 28.

168 Ibid., 66.

169 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 60.

170 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 29.

171 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 142.

For some, however, the camps extinguished their faith. Wiesel did not doubt

God’s existence, just “His absolute justice.”172 After being let down so many times,

“[Wiesel had] more faith in Hitler than anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all

his promises, to the Jewish people.”173 To him, the crematorium had become symbolic of

man’s powerfulness and God’s powerlessness:

“Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky….those flames that consumed my faith forever….the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live….those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes…Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”174

Under these circumstances, the real miracle was not how some people doubted God, but

how any continued to believe in Him.

The memoirists chose to share this aspect of their experiences for several reasons,

the foremost of which was their Jewish heritage. As Jews raised on the history of their

people in the Old Testament, even non-religious memoirists looked at their own lives as

continuations of the Jewish story, one in which faith always plays a role. Because of this

relation to their shared past, most memoirs included their religious struggles: it seems so

central to their story that it would not make sense to leave it out. Only by including the

religious aspect in their memoirs can they show God’s goodness, or lack of it, and tie in

their experience to those of the faithful Jews so long ago.

In this place that caused people to lose their faith, survival was, if not impossible,

highly improbable. Although nothing guaranteed survival in the camps, several factors

172 Wiesel, Night, 45.

173 Ibid., 81.

174 Ibid., 34.

gave prisoners a slight advantage. The ability to and type of work made a huge difference in whether a prisoner lived or die. Simply enough, one could not survive the camps laboring in normal camp positions.175 Those who survived generally obtained jobs

that required less physical exertion, provided opportunities to steal, entailed less direct

supervision, and gave them a sense of purpose or accomplishment.176 These advantages shielded prisoners from the worst of the camp experiences.

The ability to supplement rations also determined who lived and who died. To survive, one needed more than the normal camp rations.177 Survivors choked down food no matter how terrible it tasted.178 The camp ration, however, simply did not provide

enough calories; prisoners had to obtain food elsewhere. Either by performing extra

work, stealing food directly, or stealing other goods to barter for food, those who lived

found a way to supplement their pitiful diet.179 Only with this extra food could they have

the strength necessary to endure the camps.

Hardy prisoners also kept up their dignity in the camps. Those who died stopped

caring about themselves; this could be seen by whether they washed themselves or not.

Without soap and with the dirt and filth of the camp, washing in the camps was

“frivolous” and pointless if one was trying to get clean.180 Initially, most prisoners

regarded it as such. In a conversation with a more experienced prisoner, however, Levi

175 Levi, If This is a Man, 96; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 50.

176 Müller, Eyewitnesses Auschwitz 13, 34; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 46, 58; Levi, If This is a Man, 144.

177 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 49.

178 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 75.

179 Ibid. 107; Levi, If This is a Man, 135, 84; Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 62; Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 54; Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 57.

180 Levi, If This is a Man, 46.

learned that, as “an instrument of moral survival,” washing mattered a great deal. So did

cherishing “mere trifles,” such as an azure handkerchief for one’s head or a good-looking

haircut.181 By taking pride in themselves and their appearance, prisoners protected their

“dignity and propriety.”182 Ultimately, these little vanities helped prisoners to maintain

their ultimate sense of worth in a camp system that considered them worthless.

Prisoners also increased their chances of survival by forming some sort of

community. Back in their “former” lives, the Jews had generally lived in tight-knit

communities that contributed to mutual charity and watched out for each other’s welfare.

Those who survived carried some of these ties into the camp. Weiss, Jacobs, and Wiesel

and their respective fathers looked after each other and shared what little food they

had.183 Leitner and her sisters stayed together all throughout the camps; it was their mutual support and aid that brought three out of the four of them out of the camps alive.184 Salton and Willenburg both grew close to their work groups; they shared soup

and bread, sought out each other in the bunks, huddled together to keep warm in the

wind, and nursed each other back to health.185 This cooperation, this sense of

community, however, did not come without a price. As remembered by Isabella Leitner,

“To have sisters still alive, not to be alone, was a blessing too, but fraught with tests daily, hourly.”186 When prisoners spent almost all their energy trying to stay alive

181 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah, 89; Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 62.

182 Ibid., 47.

183 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 118; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 51, 87; Wiesel, Night, 88, 105.

184 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 47.

185 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 196, 201, 193; Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 98, 100.

themselves, to look out for others required an effort and moral strength that almost

seemed insurmountable. All around them, prisoners felt the changed morality of the

camp, one in which dependents came to be seen more as burdens than anything else and

where sons killed their fathers for a crust of bread.187 Yet, the prisoners’ only hope of

survival lay in those very people that they were most tempted to leave behind. At some

point along the way, each prisoner came so near to death as to feel it bearing down upon

him; only the care of his comrades kept him alive.188 Even in the concentration camps,

no man was an island: all needed food, care, and moral support to survive.

A sense of purpose also enabled some Jews to survive. Some harbored anger

against the Germans, a desire for revenge that drove them onwards.189 Some gained

strength from what they saw in the future: George Salton lived because of his hope and

desire to see his brother again.190 Most, however, endured out of a sense of obligation

more than anything else. They felt they owed it to their parents, brothers, friends who

had helped them along the way to emerge from these camps and testify to what they had

witnessed, to what they had experienced, and to those who had died.191 Unable to survive

on their own will alone, these men and women turned to a collective will to give them the

strength to carry on and live past their concentration camp experience.

186 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 35.

187 Ibid.; Wiesel, Night, 101.

188 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 36; Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 191; Wiesel, Night, 88; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 68.

189 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 29; Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 167.

190 Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 111.

191 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 29; Willenburg, Surviving Treblinka, 48; Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 191.

Prisoners had to maintain hope to make it through the camps. As seen throughout

this examination, the camps were awful, terrible, godforsaken places that made survival almost impossible. They were places in which, “one has to fight against the current; to

battle every day and every hour against exhaustion, hunger, cold and the resulting inertia;

to resist enemies and have no pity for rivals; to sharpen one’s wits, build up one’s

patience, strengthen one’s will power.”192 Hope gave them the strength to press on.

Sometimes, prisoners had to build up their hope by appreciating the small things.

Something as little as a slightly bigger slice of bread or a good night’s sleep could

improve a prisoner’s morale infinitely.193 Survivors tried to put their tragedies in perspective. After seeing water trickle out of the showerheads and realizing that he had not been placed in a gas chamber after all, Benjamin Jacobs and his comrades had “[their] only happy moment in Auschwitz.”194 They may have been in a concentration camp,

under the control of the Germans, and scheduled to die soon, but, for that moment, they

were able to appreciate the “new life that had been given to [them].” It was indeed the

little things that saved their hope and, ultimately, their lives.

Even after surviving all these trials and tribulations, Jews and other prisoners

often had to endure a final death march before their freedom. Fleeing the advancing and

vengeful Russians, the SS guards marched their prisoners west. Because of their fear, the

guards forced their prisoners onward at a grim pace.195 The prisoners had a simple

192 Levi, If This is a Man, 98.

193 Ibid. 23; Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 53; Wiesel, Night, 42.

194 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 123.

195 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 143.

choice, “march or die.”196 Anyone not able to maintain the pace of the group was

immediately shot.197 Hungry and tired, the prisoners had to march endlessly, “day after

day, night after night, through town after town, with no chance to rest and nothing to

eat.”198 On the road, many died, and died horribly at that: “beneath our feet there lay men, crushed, trampled underfoot, dying. Nobody paid attention to them.”199 Their

entire bodies cried for rest. Even when they were allowed to rest, however, death still

lurked near. Because of their sheer exhaustion, those who lay down to sleep often never

rose to their feet again: “sleep meant to die.”200 Few prisoners made it through this

ordeal, and those who did were so exhausted that they remember it fuzzily, like one

might a terrible nightmare.201 It is fitting perhaps, that, in such a terrible place as these

concentration camps, the survivors faced their most dangerous trial right before their

release.

Upon liberation, prisoners often did not know how they should react. Almost

universally, they sought out food: their stomachs had been empty for far too long.

Leitner remembers an endless “cycle of eating and shitting”; Salton and his comrades

walked to a neighboring town searching for food and found a U.S. Army depot.202 The emotions of the prisoners, however, were quite different. Jack Weiss had a desire for

196 Ibid., 141.

197 Ibid. 143; Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 169; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 167.

198 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 142.

199 Wiesel, Night, 89.

200 Ibid. 93; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 167.

201 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 144; Wiesel, Night, 87; Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 167.

202 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 82; Salton, The 23rd Psalm, 220.

revenge, to kill Germans in retaliation for what he had suffered.203 Levi felt only an

emotional numbness.204 Jacobs, on the other hand, felt giddy and forgiving with his new

freedom; he and his band even pardoned a former guard who they found in the road.205

Leitner reacted with a primal blend of emotions, a “pent-up hysteria accumulated over

years and pain and terror.”206 Some simply wished to go home; others got out of Europe

as soon as they could.207 Their reactions were as diverse as the people themselves, but, in

the end, it mattered very little, for they were free.

Even after their physical freedom, many memoirists faced a long and difficult

road ahead. Most faced difficulty adjusting to live as they had once known it because, to

some extent, a part of them would always be imprisoned in the camps.208 The Holocaust

did not allow its prisoners to pass through and forget what they suffered; rather, it was an

experience that defined its participants’ past and continued to direct their future. It

became something too terrifying to forget, yet too painful to remember. In fact, this pain

is what inspired some to write. They hoped that, by putting it all down on paper, they

could begin with the “healing-mourning process,” end their nightmares, and be able to go

about their lives.209 In a way, this constitutes perhaps the greatest tragedy of the camps: twenty, thirty, and even forty years after being liberated, many survivors were still trying to escape.

203 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 167.

204 Levi, If This is a Man, 158.

205 Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz, 200.

206 Leitner, Fragments of Isabella, 85.

207 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 181; Levi, If This is a Man, 378.

208 Weiss, Memories, Dreams, Nightmares, 181.

209 Richard Kearney, On Stories (New York: Routledge, 2002), 49.

CHAPTER THREE

The Same Side of the Fence, the Other Side of the World: The Soviet Labor Camp Experience

If the Holocaust killed people through intention, the Soviet Gulag did it by

neglect. Established by the new Bolshevik government of Russia in the early 1920s, the

Gulag had evolved into a sprawling system of camps in which the NKVD was holding

hundreds of thousands of prisoners and supplying the Soviet state with slave labor by the

late 1930s. Prisoners like these ten memoirists did not just magically appear in the

camps, however; the NKVD had to arrest them first. And so, this is where this paper

begins it examination of the journey of those in the Gulag system, a prisoner’s arrest.

For everyone in Soviet society, the Great Terror was, as suggested by the name, a

time of apprehension and fear. Beginning with the 1934 Kirov assassination, this wave

of arrests first targeted famous communists, those heroes of the government like Alexei

Rykov, Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev, and Karl Radek. Steadily and almost

imperceptibly, this “merciless wave of terror” began to trickle down the social ladder and snap up even ordinary Communist Party members and citizens. People were disappearing at night, never to be seen again.1 Fear was universal; people could not trust

their friends and family.2 Looking back, those in the Party could see the net drawing ever

1 Olga Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey: How One Woman Survived Stalin’s Gulag (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 10.

2 Vladimir Petrov, Soviet Gold; My Life as a Slave Laborer in the Siberian Mines (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1949), 4; Elinor Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1951), 3; Nicholas Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1952), 3; Thomas Sgovio, Dear America! Why I Turned against Communism (Kenmore, NY: Partners’ Press, 1979), 121; Evgenia Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind (London: Collins, 1967), 40.

tighter around them; however, in the moment, their confusion, anxiety, faith in the

Communist Party prevented them from seeing the true danger at their doorstep.3 Elinor

Lipper recalls a common stream of thoughts after each comrade had been arrested:

[Each] settled down in his room to brood about the arrest of Comrade Z. Each wondered: Can it possibly incriminate me? But how could anyone imagine that Z, such an old Bolshevik….Of course Z had once been accused of right deviations from the Party line back in 1923….There must be some other reason for his arrest. The NKVD knew what it was about. But what had he done, what had he done? Could people conceal their true selves so thoroughly? After all, Z was an old friend. That was just it; that could get you in trouble. The best thing to do was not to associate with anybody.4

Under this strange mixture of fear and denial, people changed. They stopped talking to

their Communist Party comrades, cut off friendships, and went to great lengths to

publically demonstrate their loyalty to the USSR and to Stalin.5 They avoided

associating with foreigners and even foreign culture.6 At night, no one slept well, for even loyal communists “held their breath at the sound of an automobile driving through the streets after dark, felt their flesh creep at the muffled noise of an ascending footstep on the stairs, and poured cold sweat when a knock came on the door of their communal apartments.”7 They felt trapped, unable to leave behind their homes, their family, and

their communist state yet exhausted by the constant fear of arrest.8 And so, they

struggled mightily to resolve this paradox, unaware of their impending arrest and their

rapidly shrinking window of escape.

3 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 26; Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 3.

4 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 3-4.

5 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 4.

6 Sgovio, Dear America!, 121.

7 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 3.

8 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 4.

A sudden arrest solved the loyal communist’s dilemma. Most, awakened by a knock in the middle of the night, arose and found themselves confronted by agents of the

NKVD.9 After thoroughly searching their apartments, agents carted them off to the local

NKVD headquarters to begin their prison experience. Not all, however, disappeared at

night. The NKVD arrested some, like Thomas Sgovio, in public in the middle of the

day.10 Others even came to the NKVD willingly. Trying to maintain her innocence,

Evgenia Ginzburg went down to the NKVD for a little chat that was supposed to last no

longer than forty minutes; she was released ten years later.11 Regardless of the method of their arrest, these memoirists, like so many Soviets before and after them, fell into the clutches of the NKVD and its prison system.

Even those outside the U.S.S.R. often ended up inside the Gulag system. With its victories in Poland and the Baltic states and influence in Finland after the Russo-Finnish

War, the USSR subjected foreign citizens to Soviet-style justice. Whether they had been involved in the national armed forces or the local Communist Party or simply wanted to

flee abroad, these foreigners found themselves in transit to Russia.12 The Gulag monster

had gobbled them up as well. Although brought to the prison system through different

methods, these foreign prisoners would find their experiences there to be identically long,

trying, and horrible.

9 Ibid., 7; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 12; Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 4; Karlo Stajner,7000 Days in Siberia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 3.

10 Sgovio, Dear America!, 9.

11 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 41, 133.

12 Slavomir Rawicz, The Long Walk (London: Constable, 1956), 3; Antoni Ekart, Vanished without Trace: The Story of Seven Years in Soviet Russia (Ondon: Max Parrish, 1955), 14.

Despite their impending captivity, few prisoners offered resistance. Soviet

initiation procedures gave little indication of what awaited the prisoners. The strip

searches, while thoroughly examining every seam, lining, pocket, foreskin, and vagina,

did not seem too excessive.13 Although their valuables had been taken away, prisoners

received receipts for them; this implied that they would someday be restored. Even the

excessive precautions against suicides failed to warn prisoners of what awaited them.

During the search, NKVD agents removed all buttons, laces, hooks, eyes, belts, watches, metal, and suspenders.14 Few, however, became alarmed at these procedures because

they seemed relatively normal, at least for prison, and because most of the prisoners

believed in the façade of Soviet justice.

Living in a state that publicly and vocally celebrated its commitment to equality

and justice, few Soviets or foreign communists could accept the truth about Soviet

prisons and labor camps. At first, prisoners maintained that their arrest was some sort of

“misunderstanding.”15 Each prisoner thought, “I’ll stay here on the edge of the bunk.

They arrested me by mistake and will quickly release me.”16 After seven days in prison,

Vladimir Petrov recalls feeling more preoccupied about his spring mid-term examinations

at the university than about his fate as a future prisoner: the thought that he might be

13 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 13; Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 24; Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 6; Sgovio, Dear America!, 19; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 13; Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 4.

14 Ibid.

15 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 10; Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 13; Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 36; Sgovio, Dear America!, 20.

16 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 33.

imprisoned for much longer did not even cross his mind.17 This delusion, while keeping

a prisoner convinced of his own innocence, led to an interesting paradox in his thinking.

With their absolute trust in the Soviet government, prisoners often looked on their fellow

inmates with revulsion. Upon arriving in the cell, each communist saw himself alone as

innocent and the rest of the cell as guilty.18 Evgenia Ginzburg explains this sentiment

well, “Although [each prisoner was] caught in the same net, they still thought they could

get out, that their neighbor’s case was worse than theirs.”19 At the same time that a

prisoner protected his own ego, he condemned his cellmates. His case was different, he

was innocent, and the NKVD would soon realize it. These opinions would all change

with the interrogation period.

The truth often began to dawn on prisoners during their interrogation period.

Nicholas Prychodko recalls seeing men with bruises on their faces and asking

incredulously, “Were you actually beaten while you were being questioned? How was

that possible? We thought such a thing was only practiced in capitalist countries!”20

After being insulted by an investigator, Evgenia Ginzburg was aghast. How could they abuse her like this? After all, “this was a Soviet institution where people can’t be treated like dirt.”21 After seeing this almost sacrilegious behavior, many prisoners began to have doubts about their beloved Communist Party.

17 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 17.

18 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 17.

19 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 115.

20 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 14.

21 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 54.

These doubts struck at the core of their faith. In the absence of religious

sentiment, good communists regarded the Soviet Union and its Communist Party as

something almost supernatural: “[these people] were its children; its soldiers,” men and

women who had sacrificed so much to see the dream of communism become a reality.22

Olga Adamova-Sliozberg remembers that devoted communists suffered the most in the

Soviet prisons because they faced such a contradiction.23 Trying to reconcile their

fervent belief with the violent reality of their prison experience, prisoners came up with a wide variety of rationalizations. Some lost faith in the NKVD but kept their faith in the

Communist Party. Stalin, they reasoned, must not know about these abuses; it was all due to the excesses of the NKVD.24 Others still held to the underlying justice of the

USSR. Using expressions like, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” or

“When trees are chopped down—the chips fly,” they justified their own imprisonment as a natural process of affairs, an unfortunate consequence of the fight against sabotage.25

Still others, the unhappiest of all, blamed themselves for “a criminal lack of vigilance.”

Some felt that they deserved to be imprisoned for failing to root out wreckers and

enemies of the people themselves.26 The majority of communists would have to wait for

the tortures of the camp to open their eyes to the true nature of their Soviet-style

government.

22 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 35.

23 Ibid., 34.

24 Ibid., 35.

25 Sgovio, Dear America!, 51; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 115.

26 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 35.

Non-communists bypassed this whole crisis of conscience. Brought in as

prisoners of war and already hostile towards the Soviet regime, they did not have to shake

their belief in the goodness of communism.27 Most already hated the Russians and all

that they stood for. These Poles, Lithuanians, Finns, and Central Asians had lived for

years in fear of the Soviet giant on their borders. Consumed by a mixture of racial

prejudice and loyalty to capitalism, they had fought wars against them in the past. Poles

especially reviled the Soviets; they still remembered the bitter fighting in the 1919-1921

border war. Central Asians resented the Soviet persecutions of their religion, Islam.

Because of this preexisting sentiment, these ethnic minorities did not remain under any

illusions about the Soviet state or its justice; rather, they did not resist because they were

helpless to do so.

In a sense, the Soviet prisons practiced equality: everyone had an equal chance of

ending up trapped in them. Prisoners came from all walks of life: there were Russians,

Poles, Ukrainians, Americans, Spaniards, and doctors, lawyers, communists, professors,

peasants and men, women, and children. The prisoners joked among themselves that “the

Soviet Union [was] made up of three classes: prisoners, former prisoners, and future

prisoners.”28 While anyone could pass through the prisons, a few classes of people were

more likely than others to be picked up by the NKVD. First, the NKVD targeted those

with connections to the Communist Party. The Great Terror had, after all, started as a purge of the Communist Party. Seeing the assassination of Sergei Kirov as the working of an intra-Party conspiracy, Stalin turned the NKVD loose to examine and clean disloyal communists. By the time of the Great Terror, however, this vigilance and these

27 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 12, 18.

28 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 162.

conspiracy theories had gotten out of hand. For this reason, any mark on a loyal

communist’s record, however slight, could lead to an arrest.29 The higher officials

disappeared first, followed by the middling and even lower-level communists.30 Then,

because the USSR viewed offenses against the government as contagious, something that

could spread by contact or even shared blood, the NKVD arrested family members and

friends of imprisoned communists.31 Many wives of communist officials followed their

husbands into prison. The connection was all that mattered, not “whether or not [the wives] had renounced their husbands, whether or not they had lived with them during the years before their arrest, whether or not they had children or were pregnant.”32 Because

of the wave of persecution had begun with them, communists and those close to them made up a large percentage of those arrested.

Second, anyone with connections abroad came under suspicion. Aware of its lonely position in the capitalist world and xenophobic to start with, the USSR paid special attention to rooting out foreign spies. With these suspicions, the NKVD arrested

Soviets who worked for Comintern, an organization that worked to promote communist revolution around the world, as tour guides, and for the East Chinese Railroad. Stamp

collectors and Esperanto enthusiasts likewise found themselves imprisoned.33 Foreign-

29 Ibid., 3.

30 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 9, 29; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 92.

31 Gustav Herling, A World Apart (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 88.

32Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 17.

33 Ibid. 34-35; Sgovio, Dear America!, 25.

born citizens were suspect as well.34 If someone had foreign connections, he or she could

not be allowed to remain at liberty.

Third, the NKVD arrested military officers. With Stalin’s purge of the officer

core in 1937, many high-ranking military officers found themselves thrust into the prisons of the NKVD.35 The purge swept up officers in general, as well. More Soviet

officers died in the purges than in all of World War II combined. As potential threats to the Soviet regime, military officers needed to be controlled; the Gulag provided a means to this control.

Fourth, once the WWII land war had broken out in Europe, the NKVD brought a

substantial amount of Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, and other foreigners into their prisons.

Seeking to pacify newly occupied lands in Poland and Finland and generally restless

areas of the Ukraine, the NKVD arrested former soldiers, suspected spies, and possible

fascists.36 The reasons were often arbitrary. In Poland, Soviet troops rounded up many

schoolboys who played with transistor radios because they might have been transmitting

messages to foreign powers.37 In particular, they arrested those trying to flee from these

occupied countries. Antoni Ekart explains that, for the Poles, “trying to escape from

[their] liberators can be regarded as very anti-social behavior.”38 Thus, because of this

penchant for arresting foreigners and those with foreign connections, the Gulag camps

had many diverse ethnic groups trapped within them.

34 Sgovio, Dear America!, 9.

35 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 42; Herling, A World Apart, 15.

36 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 36.

37 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 39.

38 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 6.

Finally, some people simply had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Some had been arrested simply for telling jokes, others for accidentally rolling a cigarette

with a newspaper photo of Stalin, and others still for failing to show up to work on time.39 In a particularly absurd account, Evgenia Ginzburg tells us about an old peasant woman who had been condemned as a Trotskyite. Not even knowing what a Trotskyite was, this woman thought that she had been imprisoned for being a traktorist, one who rides a tractor: “As God’s my witness I never went near one of them cursed things. They don’t put old women like me on tractors.”40 While humorous to a point, this example helps us see how easy it was to be thrown into the Soviet prisons. If the NKVD could arrest an old woman for a crime she did not even know existed, it could certainly arrest anyone else under its jurisdiction. Preferring to condemn a thousand innocent people rather than let one guilty party escape, the NKVD used its power expansively, arresting communists, those with foreign connections, military officers, and even random citizens with little to no evidence.41 The evidence, they reasoned, would come with time.

Because of this arrest-first-secure-evidence-later mentality, the investigator held

an important role within the Soviet prisons. The rationale went something like this. If a

prisoner was in prison, then he was guilty because the NKVD did not make mistakes. If

a prisoner was guilty, then there must be evidence of his crimes. Therefore, if a prisoner

was in prison, there must be evidence of his crimes, evidence that could lead to even

more collaborators. Their logic became self-justifying. Because of this dire need to find

the evidence that must be present, NKVD investigators employed every method to get a

39 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 33.

40 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 138.

41 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 35.

prisoner to confess to his or her crimes. Most of the interrogations began at night. From

11 PM to 2 AM, guards burst into cells and called prisoners out to see their interrogator.42

The approaches varied by the interrogator.

Some used carrots to persuade. Providing their prisoners with coffee, cigarettes,

and sandwiches, they treated the whole situation like an unfortunate misunderstanding,

one that would be cleared up after a little cooperation.43 Particularly with women, the

investigators promised them that, as soon as they only signed the confession, they would

be allowed to see their children again.44

Others tried to convince prisoners that their resistance was futile. Without hope, they would have no reason to resist. Slavomir Rawicz remembers his investigator’s warning, “You will sign, you know—some day you will sign. I feel sorry for you that you do not sign today. Very, very sorry.”45 By bluffing, they hoped to cajole a prisoner

into confessing.

Investigators also employed subtle tricks to try and trip up prisoners. When writing down answers, they misrepresented what was said.46 For example, Evgenia

Ginzburg’s interrogator changed the transcript of their interview to say: “How long have

you known the Trotskyist Elvov?”47 Her subsequent response to the question, failing to address the Trotskyist adjective, would then mean that she acknowledged that he stood in

42 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 43.

43 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 6.

44 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 57; Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 20.

45 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 6.

46 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 19.

47 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 53.

opposition to the government. Investigators used whatever devious methods necessary to obtain confessions.

To break a prisoner’s spirit, investigators would also bring friends and family to testify against a prisoner. With the shock of betrayal and the feeling of inevitability, prisoners usually caved in and signed a confession. The NKVD often arranged these betrayals: it bullied the witnesses into providing false testimony. Sometimes, this coercion was painfully obvious. When Evgenia Ginzburg tried to explain how stupid and pointless his testimony would be to a friend, the NKVD investigator cut her off, ironically saying, “Accused! Stop exerting pressure on the witness. And you, [witness], behave as told, or you get arrested and go to jail.”48 Although this tactic worked particularly well, because of the time and effort involved many interrogators simply employed torture to obtain a confession.

Generally, investigators only resorted to torture after all of these methods and tricks had been exhausted. In trying to crack the few holdouts, some of the investigators got quite creative with their punishments. Slavomir Rawicz recalls that he was placed into a “chimney-like cell” for days at a time.49 Unable to do anything other than stand, sleep was next to impossible and his legs were in constant pain. He also had to sit on the very edge of a chair for hours until “the muscles of the back and legs seized up in excruciating cramps.”50 Many prisoners remember going through the conveyer, a series of sleepless nights and constant interrogations. In the delusion of half-sleep, many signed

48 Ibid., 74.

49 Ibid., 7.

50 Ibid. 10; Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 60.

the confessions; after all, “there are limits to the resistance of the human organism.”51

Some investigators, however, preferred the old fashioned methods. Nicholas

Prychodko’s NKVD man knocked him unconscious with a chair leg. When he awoke after being splashed with cold water, his investigator beat him senseless again. He remembers that “some of [his] teeth were knocked out and [he] began to choke with blood.”52 These physical tortures reveal the lengths to which the NKVD was willing to

go to obtain a prisoner’s confession. And what lucrative confessions they were!

Investigators often charged their prisoners with fantastically outrageous crimes. In the

eyes of his investigator, Karlo Stajner was a Gestapo agent who had actively recruited

Soviet citizens to help bring down the Soviet regime.53 During one session, Victor

Petrov’s NKVD interrogator accused him of stealing the gold from the dome of St.

Isaac’s Cathedral.54 They indicted Evgenia Ginzburg for her part in a “clandestine

counter-revolutionary terrorist group” that was conspiring to reinstate capitalism in the

USSR.55 The craziest thing of this whole procedure: prisoners often admitted to these

ridiculous allegations. With all of the physical violence, deprivation, and threats thrown

at them by the NKVD, most prisoners would have admitted to being the Queen of

England, so long as it stopped their pain and protected their families.56 Because of their

51 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 39; Rawicz, The Long Walk, 9; Adamova- Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 21.

52 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 55.

53 Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 12.

54 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 30.

55 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 131.

56 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 39.

interrogation methods, perception was reality: once the NKVD had decided that a

prisoner was guilty, they forced that prisoner to admit to their guilt.

But why did the Soviet state place so much emphasis on obtaining a confession?

If they already knew the outcome of the investigation, why did they not just forge

signatures or convict people without due process? Part of the answer lies in the larger

system of Soviet justice. Soviet prisoners had legal rights. The authorities permitted

prisoners to petition anyone from the prison warder all the way up the hierarchy to

Stalin.57 Additionally, prisoners were not just arrested and then sent straight off to the

camps; rather, an actual court had to judge their crime before it sentenced them to prison or Gulag terms. While the courts handled some cases out of sight, a good many prisoners actually stood before an examining committee in trial. Although their time in that court varied widely, from two whole days in one case to three minutes in another, a good number of these memoirists had the opportunity to face their accusers and, however

briefly, protest their guilt.58 So, undoubtedly, part of the reason behind these trials and

confessions stemmed from the traditional rights of Soviet prisoners; and it seemed wrong

to deprive them of these established rights. Yet, the duration and effort put into this

process left prisoners wondering. Slavomir Rawicz recalls thinking, “Why do they waste

all this time on one Pole? Why don’t they just sentence me and have done with it?”59

The memoirists mention three separate and equally important explanations for this

behavior. Karlo Stajner touches on the USSR’s preoccupation with its own image. He

57 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 39.

58 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 131; Rawicz, The Long Walk, 14, 18; Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 74; Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 42; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 77; Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 27.

59 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 20.

explains, “The court procedure is a mere formality designed to maintain the appearance

of principled legal procedure.”60 With the world and its own citizens watching its actions, the USSR wanted to maintain its international image and order in the general

populace.61 If the sham trials and arbitrary imprisonments had become public

knowledge, Russia would have faced international criticism and civil unrest. It was best, therefore, to keep the truth under wraps.

Additionally, the confession and the trials aided in a prisoner’s reeducation.

Although distorted beyond what its creators could ever have imagined, the Gulag had begun as a penal institution meant to redeem prisoners through work.62 Before they could be reeducated, however, they had to formally acknowledge their guilt. Like the

Roman Catholic version, this confession required that prisoners acknowledge their sins before they could begin atoning for them: if prisoners did not admit to the error of their ways, how could they be expected to change them? Thus, by forcing a prisoner to come to terms with his own guilt, the Soviet authorities revealed that, at least in the past, the

Gulag system used to have an underlying concern for a prisoner’s reformation.

Finally, the confession provided an opportunity for the NKVD to find other saboteurs and wreckers. Time and time again, interrogators demanded that prisoners tell

them who else had been involved in their plots.63 Out of desperation, prisoners often named lists of people supposedly working with them to overthrow the Soviet

government. Uncovering an ever-widening web of spies, NKVD agents could prove their

60 Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 27.

61 Sgovio, Dear America!, 250.

62 Ibid., 145; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 158; Herling, A World Apart, 157; Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 103.

63 Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 12.

own loyalty to the Soviet state and protect themselves from being accused of a criminal

lack of vigilance. While these actions helped the NKVD branches achieve their set

quotas of arrests, they continued to trap more and more people in the prison system.

From their arrest until the trip to the Gulag, prisoners spent varying times in the

prisons themselves. The cells were, in both senses of the word, awful. One can only

admire the ability of the Soviet guards to stuff so many prisoners in such a small and

horrible place. Cells built for twenty-four men held ninety-six; fifteen square meters

sufficed for thirty-four men.64 Crammed “like sardines, head to head” or like “herrings

[packed] in a barrel,” the prisoners in the communal cell had to split nights into sleeping

shifts, for they did not have enough room to all lie down at once.65 Nicholas Prychodko

remembers that, to fit four men on each cot, “the end persons [were] tied to the cot with towels, to prevent them falling off.”66 By day, the cell was a “suffocating airless room”:

a metal shield blocked out sunlight and fresh air from the outside.67 By night, a single bulb shone bright, disturbing the sleep of the prisoners and illuminating the walls that were “alive with thousands of bedbugs.”68 A single metal bucket, the parasha, stood in

the corner and served to take care of the prisoners’ physical needs.69 Because of the large

numbers in the cell, this bucket frequently overflowed before the prisoners had a chance

64 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 7; Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 4.

65 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 28; Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 40; Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 17.

66 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 16.

67 Ibid., 17, 25; Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 55; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 148.

68 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 31; Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 77; Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 7.

69 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 25.

to empty it, giving the cells an “awful stench of human perspiration and [urine].”70 In the communal cell, the prisoners’ existence had become dark, dirty, and crowded.

Even those in isolation cells, however, faired terribly. While escaping the crush and stink of the communal cells, they were deprived of all human contact.71 The

boredom, already excruciating, became unendurable; many in isolation eagerly awaited

the large cells. Separated from any fellow sufferers, Ginzburg battled depression and a

constant worry that she had forgotten how to talk.72 She and Petrov both learned a sort of

Morse code to communicate with other isolation cells, but this limited interaction did not substitute for having actual people next to them.73 While escaping the crush of the normal cell, those in isolation faced a bleaker existence: time, already stretched out by life in prison, seemed to stand still.

Life in prison had several common characteristics, no matter where prisoners had been locked up. Politicals in prisons always practiced a simple style of democracy and equality. Within each cell or train car, the prisoners needed a headman to answer the guards and distribute bread and water. Rather than simply appointing someone from each cell, the guards deferred to an old Russian prison tradition, headman by election: the prisoners chose who they wanted to represent them by a simple majority vote.74 It was their right to do so. Additionally, Soviet prisoners organized a system of equity and equality when in the prison system. When a cell was too packed for everyone to lie down

70 Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 4.

71 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 20; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 150; Rawicz, The Long Walk, 26.

72 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 150.

73 Ibid., 50; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 24.

74 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 46, 130; Sgovio, Dear America!, 23; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 214; Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 16.

at a time, prisoners slept and sat in shifts.75 During the cramped ride on the train during

the summer, prisoners could either stand close to the walls where the slits would allow in fresh air or near the center where the stench and claustrophobia reached its peak.76 In

true democratic fashion, they took their turn near the worst of the car and waited patiently

for their time by the best. Furthermore, the Soviet prisoners sought to ensure that

everyone had a somewhat equal share. When trapped in cells together, they allowed the

headman to divide rations as evenly as possible amongst themselves; he even portioned

out their surpluses.77 Once a month, when the prisoners were allowed to buy food from

the prison store, they organized an aid committee that took ten percent of what the

fortunate had purchased and distributed it to those who could not afford extra food. This

charity became a regular part of life; all contributed or became ostracized in the cell.

These practices reveal that the Soviets had a deep-seated sense of democracy and

equality, at least when they stayed in the prisons. Maybe this innate concern for

equitable treatment helped Russia become the first communist country, but that is beside

the point. The Soviet practices of democracy and charity were unique among most other

prison environments.

In prison, life became monotonous and boring. Forbidden to speak above

whispers, play chess or cards, or even sew and only occasionally allowed to check out

books, prisoners had difficulty filling the time. Aside from the ten minutes walk a day

outside and the twice daily walk to the lavatory, prisoners had few excitements in their

75 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 50.

76 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 30.

77 Sgovio, Dear America!, 23, 34; Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 16.

lives.78 Adamova-Sliozberg describes the boredom, “You sit on you forty-centimeter

wide stool that is screwed to the wall and you think and think. It is very difficult to find a

theme to think about, a theme that won’t break your heart.”79 All in all, prison was a

struggle mostly against the “deadly monotony” of life.80 Prisoners coped by engaging in

“mechanical work” like reciting poetry, making up stories, doing math calculations, reading books, or learning foreign languages.81 With a day after day after day routine

that hardly ever changed, time in prison passed with a mind-numbing slowness.

In addition to boredom, the prisoners also struggled with constant anxiety. While

they knew that, at some point, they would be sent off to the Gulag or executed, prisoners

had no idea as to when that would happen. Living in a state of limbo and waiting for the

hammer to drop, they became antsy at any hint of change.82 If they received barley soup

instead of turnip or took their daily walk ten minutes early than normal, prisoners took it

as an omen that something drastic was about to occur. In some sense, this torture almost

eclipsed the interrogations, for, when facing constant boredom and wandering thoughts,

the prisoners gained little respite from the weird mixture of fear of and longing for the

Gulag.

Despite the prisoners’ bleak situation, the Soviet system allowed its prisoners

certain rights and privileges that helped mitigate their boredom. Prisoners especially

78 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 148, 178; Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 67; Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 27.

79 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 56.

80 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 25; Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 12; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 31,33; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 125.

81 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 46; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 31, 33.

82 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 86; Sgovio, Dear America!, 15; Adamova-Adamova- Sliozberg, My Journey, 12.

cherished their daily ten-minute walk in the prison yard. Although forbidden to take their eyes off the ground and look up at the sky and exercised in a yard entirely paved over

with asphalt, they relished the opportunity to be out of the cell. The short trip outside

became, to them, a “brief interval of life.”83 That ten minutes provided them with

“impressions, dreams, and memories” to sustain their bleak existence for at least one more day.84 Soviet laws entitled most prisoners to access to books. Although the

selection was limited, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg remembers that “books were the only

distraction…they were air, bread, and water for a mind that was suffocating.”85 Prisoners

also had access to the prison store periodically. About once every ten days, those who

had received money from their relatives could purchase tobacco, bread, sausage, and

sugar from the prison commissary.86 These ancestral privileges helped break up the

overwhelming “monotony” of prison life; they gave the prisoners something to look

forward to and something that would be remembered as the one of the few bright spots

during their stay in prison.87 These memories would help sustain them during the next

stage of their imprisonment, the transportation to the Gulag.

After such a tense yet dull existence, the prisoners were spirited away from prison

and taken to the great trains that would bear them to the distant world of the Gulag itself.

At the prison, they lined up in a great crush; the authorities arranged for them to travel the

train station in vans known as Black Marias or Black Ravens. Designed to look like

83 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 148; Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 67; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 27

84 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 148.

85 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 56.

86 Sgovio, Dear America!, 34; Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 16.

87 Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 16.

bread trucks and bearing the word “bread” in four languages (Russian, French, English,

and German), these contraptions demonstrate the depth of the deception of the USSR: it

went to great efforts to keep its citizens in the dark about the Gulag system.88 After this

transport, the prisoners arrived at their home for approximately the next month, a train

car, or Stolypin carriage, with grated windows. While the memoirists give various figures

for how many prisoners inhabited each car, all of them agree that the cars were cramped,

filthy, and foul-smelling.89 These cars served as mobile prison cells to transport prisoners

to their new, more productive home.90 On the way, however, prisoners suffered from

excessive thirst. With rations consisting of salt herring, gruel, and only a mugful of

precious water a day, many prisoners became “thirsty beyond endurance”: many were

even unable, despite their great hunger, to eat their full rations.91 To pass the time and

distract themselves from their thirst and the “never-ending acute sensation of a half-

empty stomach,” the prisoners traded stories, discussed politics, and speculated about the

camps to which they were being sent. Perhaps because of the great tradition of Russian

literature, prisoners often took turns reciting their favorite stories or poems from

memory.92 Although divided by social class, political ideology, and even suspected crimes, prisoners, women especially, were united by their love of Pushkin, Nekrasov, and

88 Ibid., 14.

89 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 99; Rawicz, The Long Walk, 27; Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 76; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 141; Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 72; Sgovio, Dear America!, 131; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 215.

90 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 79; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 229; Rawicz, The Long Walk, 29.

91 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 99; Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 79; Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 75; Sgovio, Dear America!, 134; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 220.

92 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 215, 224; Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 73.

Dostoevsky. The prisoners on the trains faced a common fate as well. Although they did not know their final destination, all knew that they were being transported to a labor camp.93 Standing before a common unknown, they pulled together to compare the

rumors and tales that they had heard of each. After all, they had plenty of time to

speculate: the “days of comfortless tedium” often stretched out over a month.94 Although

demanding physically, the journeys generally did not try the prisoners any more than

their regular prisons. If the political prisoners happened to be mixed in with the

criminals, however, their train ride turned into something else entirely.

Favored by the Soviet policymakers and camp administrators, the criminals,

known as urkas or blatnie, bullied, robbed, and terrorized the majority of the political

prisoners. Rather than serving time for treason, slander, or other activities against the

Soviet government, these criminals were murders, bandits, and thieves: their crimes were

not against the state, but other people. In the camps, criminals held several advantages

over the politicals. Whereas guards and administrators regarded the politicals as scum

and treated them as such, they viewed criminals as men capable of redemption because

their crimes were not against the state.95 For this reason, criminals frequently held soft

jobs like working as bath attendants, cooks, brigadiers, and laundrymen.96 As the “camp

aristocracy” with better rations, heated barracks, and more freedom of movement, most

93 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 100; Rawicz, The Long Walk, 27; Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 79.

94 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 38; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 141.

95 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 331; Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 87; Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 159.

96 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 88.

criminals actually preferred life in the camps to life on the outside.97 The attitude of the

camp guards and the Gulag officials protected them from the pain that the politicals had

to endure daily.

In addition, the criminals gained an advantage from their unity. While criminals

frequently fought amongst themselves, they all abided by the same unwritten code.98

Criminals should not perform physical work, rat out others to the camp administration, or be too generous to politicals. Furthermore, this set of laws laid out a hierarchical structure for the criminals. With seniority based on their time in the camps, the seriousness of their offenses, the number of officials friendly to them, and other factors, this concept of seniority helped keep the peace.99 United, they could more easily take

advantage of the politicals. Without the infighting common to political prisoners and

with the extra privileges given to them by the administration, criminals ran the camps.100

They stole the politicals’ clothes and food, protected their favorites, and punished their

enemies. When facing this threat, political prisoners could do little to protect themselves

other than running away: resistance only increased the chances of “death or

mutilation.”101 Because of the power of the criminals, a political often had to submit

himself to the whims of any criminal he confronted.

With the strength of the criminals, the Gulag placed a heavier burden on women

prisoners in particular. In the USSR, women and men were truly equal; although having

97 Ibid., 87; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 331.

98 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 159; Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 72.

99 Herling, A World Apart, 11.

100 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 72; Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 159.

101 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 72.

different quotas, men and women were both expected to perform the same type of

labor.102 Just as frequently as men, women had to chop trees, carry cement sacks, and

plant vegetables. With their naturally weaker physique, women often had no choice but

to sell themselves to the criminals or free officials; they could never earn enough food to

survive otherwise. Seeking extra food or protection, some women freely offered their

bodies. Antonio Ekart remembers two nurse aids, Anna and Lena, who chose to sleep

around in order to gain benefits. For better food, they slept with the cook. For easier

work, they went to the work supervisor. For sturdy shoes, they visited the shoemaker.103

Others, tempted by the offers of food, easy work, favors, and protection, traded away their dignity to ensure their survival.104 Some officials and criminals had whole harems

of women.105 For women desperately clinging to life, “’Butter, white bread,’ [was] the

formula the criminals use[d] in place of ‘I love you.’”106 With these conditions and the

liberties given to well-connected men, “unbridled sexual depravity was the rule [in the

camps]...where women were treated like prostitutes and love like a visit to the latrine.”107

While some of the prosperous women traded away their bodies for comfort and some of

the starving women did it to survive, others were not so lucky as to benefit from their sex.

All women, the principled and unprincipled alike, had to worry about rape.

Vladimir Petrov recalls their predicament, “Everyone has an inviolate right to pick and

102 Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 192.

103 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 211.

104 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 155; Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 80, 97; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 143; Herling, A World Apart, 109.

105 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 143.

106 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 159.

107 Herling, A World Apart, 95.

100

choose any woman prisoners he likes. Resistance is impossible. No one will ever come to the woman’s aid, and if she resists she is simply raped.”108 If a woman wandered

alone at night, she could easily suffer an “accident.”109 Elinor Lipper recalls one such

instance when a woman was lured into the criminals’ barracks:

A few men stood as lookouts at the door of the barrack; the others fell upon her. There were about twenty of them, one after another. Then they let her go. After a while she learned that she had contracted both syphilis and gonorrhea. Her experience was not unique in Kolyma. There was even a common expression for it: ‘She fell under the trolley.’110

Because of the dual threat of starvation and rape, few women managed to make it through

the camps as virgins and without venereal diseases.111 Thus, a woman’s sex was both a

blessing and a curse in the camps, something that could be traded away for food or

forcibly taken for another’s pleasure.

In addition to the moral smut of the camps, physical filth existed in abundance as

well. From their arrival at the camps until their death or release, prisoners lived in a

world of unreal waste. Whether digging ditches, cutting down trees, or working in the

mines, prisoners worked in dirt and accumulated it all over their bodies.112 If a prisoner

wanted to scrub off this film from his skin and be clean for a short while, he had to go to the baths.

Although baths existed in the camps by regulation, in reality they did not lead to greater cleanliness. Generally, the camp officials required that prisoners bathe at least

108 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 142.

109 Herling, A World Apart, 23.

110 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 159.

111 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 99.

112 Ibid., 79; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 258.

101

once a month.113 Ideally, this would have helped clean up the camps, but several

problems stood between this regulation and reality. The baths stood far away from some

camps. Karlo Stajner remembers having to walk eight kilometers to the nearest one.114

Even if they were close, the baths often could not handle many prisoners at a time.115 If the group was larger than that, all the other prisoners had to wait outside in the freezing cold for their turn to enter and begin their bath. More than that, prisoners could not truly clean themselves in the baths. Only allowed a small bucket of warm water, one of cold, and a “small piece of black, evil-smelling soap,” prisoners could only wash their faces.116

Because of the difficulty of actually getting clean and the perils of trying to do so, most prisoners tried to avoid the “ordeal” of the bathhouse.117

A fear of theft also prevented prisoners from visiting the bathhouses. Once a

prisoner had given his precious fitted clothing and coat to the bath attendants for

disinfection, he rarely saw the same clothes again. After baking the clothes to try and kill

the lice, the bath attendants laid out all the articles in big, communal heaps. As soon as

prisoners entered the baths, the rush was on, for the first prisoners to the piles could pick

up the best-fitting and least threadbare clothing.118 Even when prisoners actually

received the clothes they had submitted, the effort at disinfection often proved

ineffective. With the lackluster efforts of the bath attendants and a constant shortage of

113 Sgovio, Dear America!, 175.

114 Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 74.

115 Ibid.; Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 53; Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 83.

116 Sgovio, Dear America!, 175.

117 Ibid., 175; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 311; Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 53.

118 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 311; Sgovio, Dear America!, 175.

102

soap, the clothes remained as dirty as before and yet even more unpleasant. Thomas

Sgovio recalls picking out the “damp, collective underwear filled with lice eggs in the seams” with a special sense of revulsion.119 After their lukewarm bath, the lice crawled around more vigorously: they felt refreshed, “comfortable and stimulated.”120 Because of the ineffectiveness and difficulty of taking a bath, few prisoners did so. And their cleanliness issues often mirrored those of the camps themselves.

Adding to the filth of the prisoners, the barracks housed armies of bedbugs that thrived in the squalor of the camps. These bugs, moving in “long, dark, crawling procession[s],” roamed from prisoner to prisoner, sucking small amounts of life from each as they went along.121 The walls, they seemed alive. Stajner recalls, “I went to the barracks, not to sleep, but to feed the bedbugs, which attacked me before I had settled down on the bunk.”122 Preventing prisoners from even enjoying their sleep, bedbugs added to the trials of the camps. With dirty work, dirty prisoners, dirty clothes, and dirty barracks, the camps were little more than “one huge dirty yard surrounded by barbed wire.”123 Confined to this terribly filthy and depraved environment, prisoners became weakened and sickly, making them easier targets for the ravages of hunger and hard labor.

Prisoners perished for a variety of reasons. Starvation often hit the hardest.

Throughout their entire Gulag experience, prisoners had to endure and overcome the

119 Sgovio, Dear America!, 175.

120 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 88.

121 Ibid., 90; Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 55.

122 Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 189.

123 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 255.

103

constant threat of starvation. Their prison diet, while sufficient to keep most of them

alive, barely met their bodily needs. Although many prisoners initially could not choke

down the “heavy, sour rye bread which makes the stomach turn over,” they quickly

learned the true value of food.124 After a few months, their peckishness disappeared.

When given their daily bread, soup, and gruel, prisoners now ate “greedily,” picking up

any crumbs that fell to the floor, and in complete silence “as if [the meal] were a

ritual.”125 Since food had become one of the most valuable things in their lives, it

deserved some reverence.

While conditions in the prisons tested the prisoners’ endurance, the food of the

camps would break it. There, they still had terrible bread, a “muddy liquid officially

known as soup,” and fatless buckwheat porridge, but they received less of everything.126

In the Soviet camps, a prisoner’s food ration depended on his work output; he had to meet the quota to receive the full ration. The vast majority of prisoners, unable to either fulfill this work norm or to procure food elsewhere, truly had to struggle to survive.

Previously trivial things became matters of life and death:

It is impossible to explain to someone who has not been in camp or prison what the end of a loaf of bread means. The end is crisper, it looks more attractive and it seems to be heavier. But more than that, an end mysteriously fills you more….A middle section is a stab-wound to the heart; it is a confirmation from Providence that you are abandoned for good and all. It is the beginning of a day on which everything will surely go wrong. And you almost always get a middle section.127

124 Sgovio, Dear America!, 14.

125 Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 5.

126 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 58; Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 198; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 262.

127 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 203.

104

Even the criminals would not steal bread. Willing to stake prisoners’ possessions or lives

on their constant games of cards, they designated the bread ration as off-limits.128 Even in the language prisoners used to describe bread, we can see that it took on, to them, an almost religious significance. “[Bread] was to become holy, sacred and sweet, the mainstay of our lives. We were to treasure it, dream of it and kill over it.”129 Bread was as important as “the very air [that] they breath[ed]” and to steal it was an “unpardonable sin.”130 It overshadowed any other pleasures. One day, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg

returned back to the barracks from a hard day’s work. After her brigadier told her that

she had a package waiting from her family, Adamova-Sliozberg began to get excited; she

expected the package to be full of life-affirming bread. Instead, she found three letters

from home lying on her bed. She recalls, “The first feeling I experienced was sharp

disappointment: it was not bread, it was letters!”131 In the camps, bread trumped dignity,

relationships, and morals; it alone became the center of the prisoners’ sad, sad lives.

Prisoners in Kolyma and other Siberian or Far East camps not only had to deal with hard work, terrible rations, and, at best, unfeeling guards, but also the dreaded cold of the Russian north. There, prisoners, literally steaming from their effort, labored until the temperature dropped below fifty or even sixty degrees Celsius.132 There, “it was said

that soup still warm when received in the kitchen would soon become covered with ice

128 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 130; Sgovio, Dear America!, 161.

129 Sgovio, Dear America!, 14.

130 Ibid., 161.

131 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 95.

132 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 312.

105

during the period of time one man would wait for a spoon from another…”133 Ice even

covered even the inside of the barracks.134 In these conditions, frostbite turned into a

serious hazard; indeed, the faces of the dokhodyagas, men on their last legs, soon became

covered by it.135 Vladimir Petrov especially hated the wind, for “the wind, not very

strong but piercingly cold, numbed the whole body, and no clothes offered enough protection.”136 For prisoners, cold became yet another enemy and yet another thing

dragging them down to meet Death.

The heavy physical labor also took its toll, particularly during the frigid winters in

Kolyma or the far north. The Gulag utilized its prisoners to perform all kinds of tasks

from cutting ice to mining for gold. Its camps spanned almost the length of the Russian

state from the European plains to the steppe of Siberia and the frozen taiga of Kolyma.

Almost all of the work, however, had three things in common: it was mandatory, it was

inefficient, and, if continued for long enough, it was deadly. Aside from the hardened

criminals, no one could escape work in the Gulag.137 In fact, if a prisoner refused to

work, which occasionally happened, or even consistently failed to achieve the norm,

which often happened, the camp officials labeled him as a “malicious saboteur” and

either lengthened his term or assigned punishment.138 With these consequences hanging

over their heads, few prisoners risked shirking their work duty.

133 Ibid., 253.

134 Ibid., 204.

135 Sgovio, Dear America!, 161.

136 Ibid., 311.

137 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 207.

138 Ibid., 291.

106

Like all labor in the Soviet Union, what the workers lacked in efficiency they

made up with sheer effort. The USSR officials viewed work as necessary to a prisoner’s

rehabilitation; therefore, there had to be enough work for every prisoner. Whether they

were cutting ice out of the lake or building sheds or “hacking [sic] at the frozen soil of

Kolyma,” the prisoners had to be performing some sort of a task and working for their

freedom.139 Rather than bringing in machines that could have performed these tasks at a

fraction of the cost and effort, the Soviet state employed the “muscle-power of hungry,

half-frozen, brutalized prisoners” to dig ditches and cart around dirt.140 Because of this

desire to maintain full employment, the Gulag officials frequently utilized their labor

force for tasks that were pointless at worst and wasteful at best.

Additionally, Gulag labor failed to be as productive as free contracted labor because of a phenomenon referred to as tufta. With their absurdly high quotas, few prisoners had the strength or the skill to produce the norm everyday and receive their full rations. For example, only experienced lumberjacks could chop down the required eight cubic meters each day; new arrivals could often manage only four.141 Since Soviet

record-keeping never looked at the quality of the goods being produced, only the

quantity, prisoners found previously chopped wood to pass off as their own, stuffed snow

and twigs into the piles to make them seem larger, and chopped down only enough wood

to disguise a pile of brush. With methods such as these, prisoners managed to meet their quota while expending considerably less effort.142 They applied it to every sort of work

139 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 278; Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 81.

140 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 82, 96.

141 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 206; Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 92; Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 149; Herling, A World Apart, 41; Sgovio, Dear America!, 173.

107

as well. No matter whether the task involved washing floors, mining gold, or building

sheds, tufta would be an integral part of it. Only through these deceptions could the

prisoners obtain decent food while maintaining enough strength to survive; however,

these efforts also made the Soviet Gulag system horribly inefficient with its labor.

Attempting to combat this inefficiency, the USSR filled its camps with

propaganda to better indoctrinate and reform its political prisoners. This propaganda was

nothing new, of course, to the citizens of the USSR. In its efforts to transform itself into

a modernized state, the USSR relied on propaganda to spur workers on to ever greater

efforts. It was only natural, therefore, for the propaganda so prevalent outside of the

camps to be present in them as well. The Soviet state took this opportunity very

seriously: every camp had its own Cultural Brigade that offered a library stocked full of

socialist literature, orchestra concerts, plays, and movies, and political education

courses.143 Although the desire to reeducate the prisoners motivated some of this

expenditure, the Soviet state employed these propaganda and cultural activities mainly to

increase worker productivity. Brigadiers, administrators, and painted banners all spouted

the same slogans: “He who does not work shall not eat,” “Honest work is the way to early

release,” “The Way to Freedom is Through Honest Work,” and “Labor in the USSR is a

Matter of Honor, Valor, and Heroism.”144 Camp officials promised new arrivals that

“Soviet justice is capable of forgiveness, and it knows how to reward honest work.”145

142 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 149; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 310; Sgovio, Dear America!, 173.

143 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 68; Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 90; Sgovio, Dear America!, 184; Herling, A World Apart, 157.

144 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 255; Sgovio, Dear America!, 143; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 136.

108

Petrov remembers hearing something very similar, saying that “[They] [sic] had been

brought here to enable [them] to reform [them]selves, to realize [their] crimes, and to

prove by honest self-sacrificing work that [they] were loyal to Socialism and to [their]

beloved Stalin.”146 When going to the camps, Ginzburg hearing Kolyma described as

something of a “Soviet Klondike where anyone with some degree of initiative” would be

able to survive.147 Even the name of the Gulag implies release through work: the word

Gulag is an abbreviation for Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei,

which means the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps. In everything that it

presented to its prisoners, the USSR tried to make them believe that work constituted the

only sure path to release.

Seeking to bait its prisoners even further, the USSR promised special benefits for

those who exceeded their norms. In the camps, the rations given to each prisoner

corresponded to the amount of recorded work he/she had completed: they worked on a

quota system.148 At the top stood the “shock workers” or stakhanovites, those who

surpassed 125% of the assigned quota.149 To set up these workers as examples for the

other prisoners to imitate, the Soviet state increased their pay (if they received any) and their rations and gave them better living conditions.150 Additionally, they promised them

early release; they said they would count days worked at capacities over 120% as more

145 Herling, A World Apart, 157.

146 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 158.

147 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 265.

148 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 123; Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 83.

149 Herling, A World Apart, 35.

150 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 82. Occasionally, workers who achieved their norm received monthly pay. While far under the rate of free labor and only able to purchase a few goods from the camp store, this pay was better than nothing.

109

than one day off a prisoner’s sentence.151 To prove that this level of work was

sustainable and to tempt prisoners with the perceived benefits, the state often

manufactured stakhanovites: they chose a particularly loyal prisoner and artificially

boosted his/her output numbers.152 Through this incentive, the USSR hoped to raise its prisoners’ productivity without having to substantially improve their lives.

Not surprisingly, some prisoners worked their hardest to try and gain these promised privileges and to prove their loyalty to the state. Olga Adamova-Sliozberg and her brigade of intellectuals actually volunteered to work as soon as they arrived at the camps. She recalls their excitement and naivety,

All of my brigade members dream[ed] of showing through labor how honest they are, how eager to work, how really Soviet they are….We don’t understand what nine cubic meters are. We vaguely understand what a fifteen-hour workday means. We are full of enthusiasm.153

Oftentimes, young men would work and double their output with hopes of getting

higher-quality food.154 Gustav Herling explains this trust, “A hungry man does not stop to think, but is ready to do anything for an extra spoonful of soup.”155 Despite their

earlier experiences, by and large the prisoners bought into the promises of the Soviet

state.

Upon adjusting to the Gulag camps, however, prisoners often found that the

concept of shock workers, while attractive in the abstract, proved to be quite unrealistic in

practice. The work was beyond difficult, the increases in rations insignificant, and the

151 Sgovio, Dear America!, 184.

152 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 82.

153 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 77.

154 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 83.

155 Herling, A World Apart, 37.

110

promise of early release a sham. Adamova-Sliozberg’s brigade, one which had been so

full of enthusiasm before, quickly realized that their assigned quota far surpassed their

ability to complete it. In three days of laboring, they accomplished just three percent of

the quota for digging ditches.156 Even if prisoners managed to complete their drudgery,

however, the extra slice of bread or piece of fish failed to replenish the extra energy they

had expended. For example, after working two days nonstop to build a floodwall,

prisoners only received half of a herring and a small packet of tobacco each.157 The

early-release days failed to materialize as well. Despite overexerting themselves all

summer, none of the prisoners in Thomas Sgovio’s camp received any reduction in their

sentence.158 Although the Gulag administration’s promises rang hollow, they continued

to motivate prisoners: new prisoners always arrived to take the place of those who had

become disillusioned or, in a good number of cases, deceased.

Few prisoners could survive the onerous work of the Gulag for long. The camps

filled the days of its prisoners with drudgery and suffering. Working in waist to

shoulder-deep snow, Prychodko, Ekart, Sgovio, Ginzburg, Herling, and Adamova-

Sliozberg all chopped down trees in the forests in their separate camps.159 Daily, they walked three miles or so from the camp to the forests.160 After clearing the snow around

the trees, they sawed the trunk no more than eight inches from the ground until the tree

156 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 80.

157Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 83.

158 Sgovio, Dear America!, 184.

159 Ibid., 167; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 306; Herling, A World Apart, 22; Adamova- Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 92; Ekart, Vansihed without Trace, 58; Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 117.

160 Herling, A World Apart, 41.

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fell. Then, they had to trim off all the branches so that the knots would not show.

Finally, they needed to saw the trees into three to six yard lengths and stack it to be

counted by the foreman.161 Pushed to their limits by this strenuous work, the prisoners

ended each day a little closer to death than they had started. Herling remembers the

scene at the end of each day:

A row of hands, covered with veins and patches of congealed blood, dirty and blackened by the work and at the same time whitened by frostbite, was raised over the fire…the shadows of the flames played on faces numb from pain. This was the end, the end of yet another day. They felt the weight of their hands, the stitch in the lungs from frozen icicles of breath, the contraction of the throat, the pangs of an empty stomach under their ribs, the aching bones of legs and shoulders.162

With this type of work, death was imminent. Herling describes the work and its effects

on the prisoners well, “…the prisoners worked all day under the open sky, up to their

waist in snow, drenched to the skin, hungry and exhausted. I never came across a

prisoner who had worked in the forest for more than two years. As a rule they left after a

year, with incurable disease of the heart...”163 Yet, the prospects for prisoners in the

forest greatly exceeded those of the men working in the mines. Forced to shovel and cart

soil, pan for gold in freezing water, dig drainage ditches to clear the mines, suffer

constantly wet boots, drill into frozen rocks, and inhale noxious fumes from the blasting

caps for up to fourteen hours a day, so many perished.164 In some camps without actual

punishment cells, prisoners were simply assigned work in the mines: few could survive

161 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 118.

162 Herling, A World Apart, 44.

163 Ibid., 41.

164 Sgovio, Dear America!, 147, 155; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 259, 286.

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the inhuman labor required of them in the “pit.”165 To outlive their sentence in the Gulag,

a prisoner needed something beyond general work.

Prisoners with soft work had a much better chance of enduring the trials of the

Gulag. Few men could live for long working outside in fifty below weather; fewer still

could do it for the length of their sentence.166 Even the strong prisoners often fell victim

to a “vicious spiral: less work equals less food, less food equals less energy, less energy

equals less work, and so on until the final collapse.”167 To survive, a prisoner had to

break this “vicious circle.”168 Some, like Sgovio, survived because of their artistic skill:

Sgovio received temporary appointments as a painter with the Cultural Brigade that helped restore his health.169 Lipper, Ginzburg, and Ekart all managed to find jobs inside

the hospital.170 Petrov lived solely because of his skills as a draftsman and a carpenter.171

All of these positions kept prisoners away from the bitter cold and heavy labor and prolonged their life. As a case and point, all of the memoirists managed to obtain these sorts of jobs: if they had not, they would not have survived the camps and lived long

enough to write their memoirs. In addition to allowing prisoners to avoid the mines and

the forests, these functionary positions also gave prisoners opportunities to supplement

their rations. Even though Herling worked outside as a railroad porter and carried large

165 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 316, 386.

166 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 53, 61.

167 Ibid. 60.

168 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 105.

169 Sgovio, Dear America!, 178, 186, 231.

170 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 253; Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 176; Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 198.

171 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 175, 181, 219.

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sacks of flour back and forth from the train all day, he had opportunities to steal flour

while he was carrying it; it could be turned into bread later.172 Skilled prisoners

sometimes received larger rations than unskilled laborers; just by performing their job

they could earn more food.173 Third, this specialized work gave the authorities some

level of respect, or at least toleration, from the camp officials. For example, doctors were

valuable in all of the camps: few had the necessary qualifications to serve, yet all of the

camps desperately needed trained medical personnel to nurse their prisoners back into working shape.174 Finally, these jobs allowed prisoners to become friendly with free

employees and criminals within the camps. Working in the same place as these men and

women with more food, more freedom, and more power, some politicals, like Petrov and

Sgovio, acquired protectors, people who would look after them in the camps.175 The

Gulag was a paradox: one had to work to survive, but, at the same time, work could easily kill. The prisoners who lived either engaged in tufta or found a soft job; there was no other way.

Several other factors helped give prisoners a better chance of survival in the camps. As a rule, prisoners had to bribe their superiors. In addition to controlling the rations, camp administrators determined who worked where. Unless a prisoner possessed an uncommonly useful skill (doctor/carpenter/joiner), he needed to bribe his immediate superiors to receive and keep any desirable job.176 The same principle applied to tufta:

172 Herling, A World Apart, 27.

173 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 72.

174Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 253.

175 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 175, 219; Sgovio, Dear America!, 196.

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knowledgeable brigadiers would only accept it if their palms had been greased.177 This

blat, or bribery, was almost universal in the camps and outside in Soviet society as well;

one needed it to survive. Elinor Lipper recalls, “Anyone who [sic] tried to get along by

acting decently [was] an object of ridicule and a doomed soul.”178 Within the world of

the camps, bribery became almost a positive thing, one that enabled decent men and

women to survive the terrors that otherwise would have crushed them.

Prisoners hailing from foreign nations had a distinct advantage over those ethnic

minorities coming from the USSR. As an American, Sgovio remembers, “many [Soviets

were] awed when they first met a foreigner. It was like seeing a person from a faraway

fairy-tale world.”179 With his stories about John Dillinger and Al Capone, Sgovio received protection and extra food from the camp criminals.180 Elinor Lipper, who hailed

from Poland, benefitted from this phenomenon as well. After mistakenly wandering into

the criminal’s barracks, she feared a swift end to her life. Politicals meant little to

nothing to a criminal; they had no qualms about adding another one to the common

grave. She was incredibly surprised, however. Due to a mixture of “innate hospitality”

and an “almost childish reverence to people from another world,” the criminals kindly

asked her to leave.181 For a people whose government embraced xenophobia and

persecuted foreign connections, the Soviets, at least noted by these two memoirists, had a

176 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 55, 59, 62; Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 203- 4.

177 Herling, A World Apart, 41, 107, 108.

178 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 149.

179 Sgovio, Dear America!, 196.

180 Ibid., 168.

181 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 188.

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strange fascination with distant lands that led them to treat foreigners with more respect than their fellow comrades.

On the most basic level, prisoners needed to find some way of obtaining extra

food in order to live. Starvation caused the majority of the deaths in the camps; to find extra food was to avoid that particular fate. Some managed to get food from the free

citizens near the camps who took pity on prisoners.182 Others, like Sgovio and Ginzburg,

performed services for the criminals. In exchange for his painting portraits, inking

tattoos, and drawing nude figures and her embroidering pillow slips, they both received

bread and favors.183 It did not matter how they came across their extra food, so long as the prisoners increased their caloric intake; in the camps, man did not survive on his rations alone.

Maintaining a sense of purpose helped prisoners endure the worst of the Gulag camps. Ekart explains, “As long as a prisoner retains his will to live and to overcome hunger, torture and exhaustion, he survives. But the moment this is lost, all is lost and the end comes quickly.”184 A sense of purpose kept this small piece of will alive.

Oftentimes, when things looked the bleakest, survivors would focus on why they needed

to make it through the camps and back into the wider world. Many survivors wanted to spread their story, to tell others what they had suffered and warn them about the dangers of communism.185 Others wished to see their families again and retake some of the life

182 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 330.

183 Sgovio, Dear America!, 165, 168, 217; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 276.

184 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 107.

185 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 61; Sgovio, Dear America!, 151

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that had been taken from them.186 One woman simply sought to “survive the tragedy which had befallen our party,” to communicate her experience to “real communists,” and to see the dawn of a purer communism.187 While her feelings are unusual, in the end it

did not matter: her sense of purpose, however strange, gave her the strength to survive the

camps.

By learning to appreciate the little things of life, prisoners managed to keep up

their spirits and endure the painful torture of existing. For Prychodko, monthly letters

from his mother were his “most precious treasure[s].”188 Although short and censored,

this communication with a longed-for world “revived [his] moral strength,” “made [him]

feel lighter at heart,” and awakened his inner humanity. Rawicz recalls that humor saved

him and his fellow prisoners from despair. In one of their “blackest moments”

considering their fates once they arrived at Kolyma, a joker mischievously announced,

“Gentlemen…I shall eat handfuls of gold dust with my black bread, run like hell for

Kamchatka, and cross to Japan. I shall s—t Russian gold and live happily ever after on

the proceeds.”189 With his help, the tense mood had dissipated. Women, in particular,

tried to cherish the beauty around them. After hearing a story that had transported her

and her fellow prisoners out of their horrific reality and into another, more peaceful

world, Lipper felt spiritually renewed. She explains the effects of poetry, “As long as we

could keep alive an awareness of beauty, as long as such feelings could flower at forty

186 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 3.

187 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 134, 316.

188 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 129.

189 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 33. I have included the author’s original censorship.

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degrees below zero, there was nothing that could break us.”190 Ginzburg remembers that the power of reading and poetry gave her the strength to survive the camps.191 Adamova-

Sliozberg recalls a sunset vividly after having been confined in prison for over a year,

“never did a single work of art shake my soul like the beauty of that window through which I could see the sky and the silhouette of a graceful bell tower.”192 These small things gave the prisoners the moral strength that they so desperately needed to make it through the Gulag labor camps.

In general, the less the guards took notice of a prisoner, the better. All in all, the guards held almost total control over all the prisoners in the camps. Just like prisoners, guards came in all shapes, sizes, and temperaments. While some clearly disliked their assigned work and treated the prisoners politely, the majority regarded the prisoners as their “natural enemies” and treated them as such.193 Maintaining harems of women for their pleasure and exploiting the prisoners’ labor for their profit, the guards ensured that they were almost universally hated and feared by their charges.194 Life as a guard, however, was not without its own perils. If a guard abused prisoners too openly or failed to motivate his charges to complete their assigned quota, he could be accused of sabotage and become a prisoner himself.195 Under such intense pressure, the guards drove the prisoners harder and harder, often raining down blows and knocking out teeth in efforts

190 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 224.

191 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 155, 167.

192 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 68.

193 Herling, A World Apart, 38.

194 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 108-9.

195 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 33, 284.

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to spur the prisoners on to great productivity. Because of the unpredictability of the

guards’ behavior, most prisoners found it best to go as unnoticed as possible. Sgovio

followed his own Golden Rule: “Be lower than the grass and quieter than the water.”196

By not drawing attention to himself, a prisoner could escape the worst of the capriciousness of the guards and increase his chances of living to tell others about his camp days.

While not guaranteeing survival by any means, a trip to the hospital gave prisoners a temporary reprieve from the harsh reality of life in the camps. The hospitals certainly provided a tempting opportunity for prisoners barely scraping by. In these magical places, prisoners did not have to work: they just lay in bed and ate normal rations.197 Some even received special, high-calorie food!198 Herling remembers the

camp infirmary as something almost like a return to normal life, for there they had white

sheets, clean floors, and even white bread. The officials and nurses treated them like

persons instead of prisoners.199 The only problem with these hospitals, however, was

getting admitted to them before it was too late. Concerned with the prisoners’

productivity rather than quality of life, Gulag officials intentionally kept these infirmaries

very small and understaffed because, if every sick or weak prisoner was placed in the

hospital, then no one would be left to work.200 For this reason, hundreds of prisoners

196 Sgovio, Dear America!, 191.

197 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 115.

198 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 274.

199 Herling, A World Apart, 100.

200 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 60.

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competed for the few open infirmary beds.201 To be admitted, prisoners either needed broken bones, a high fever, or an obvious physical injury.202 For those relatively healthy

prisoners who managed to luck into the infirmaries, it gave them a few days to regain

their strength. For those who were near death, however, the infirmaries often equaled a

death sentence themselves. Lacking property medical training, equipment, and medical

supplies, the infirmaries could often do little but watch as the most seriously ill prisoners

wasted away.203 Even for those who made it out of the infirmary, the outlook was bleak:

“there is unfortunately no cure for complete physical exhaustion other than good, rich

food and a long rest; the medical hut was no kitchen and the mortuary only allowed very

serious cases.”204 When seeing convalescing patients, Ekart despaired: “These successes

of ours were rather like putting the bandage round the neck of a man after his head had

been cut off.”205 The infirmary saved prisoners from work and starvation, but, because it

treated the symptoms of the illness rather than its underlying cause, their successes were

temporary. In just a few days out in the mines or forests, the same prisoners would be

back in their beds and even worse off than before. Thus, the infirmaries allowed

prisoners a temporary respite, but they did not address the underlying problems of

overwork and starvation.

Trapped in this new environment without anyone from their past lives, many

prisoners naturally segregated themselves into various groups based on common

201 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 270.

202 Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 72.

203 Ibid., 73; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 270; Herling, A World Apart, 100.

204 Herling, A World Apart, 148.

205 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 210.

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languages, ethnic descent, and even shared enemies; indeed, they had to in order to

survive. With its overcrowded prison cells, cramped train rides, and brigade-based work,

the Soviet prison environment naturally built small communities of prisoners who had

common experiences together.206 In the camps, prisoners, particularly foreigners or

ethnic minorities, sought out their kinsmen for protection and reassurance. Sgovio, an

Italian-American, recalls finding and bonding with Americans, Italians, and Canadians;

they shared a common language.207 The same principle applied to Stajner; with his

German descent, he became friends with a Volga German doctor and a man from Vienna.

Ekart explains why Westerners clumped together, “[Among them] there was immediately

a feeling of mutual attraction and loyalty, a feeling of honesty and of mutual respect,”

and a feeling of revulsion and general enmity towards the Soviets.208 “Solid racial groups” formed everywhere.209 Poles banded together with Poles, Germans with

Germans, and even Soviets from Kazan with Soviets from Kazan. They favored each other, gave each other soft jobs and extra food, and provided a link back to their homes.

Ginzburg recalls meeting a man from her hometown who she had never met before in her life: they began “reassuring [themselves] that these poets, scholars, party workers were not figments or our imagination, that there were people in this world who were not policemen, team-leaders, guards, or persons at the point of death.”210 Thus, these groups

not only brought their members physical benefits, but a sense of companionship and

206 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 30, 33, 41.

207 Sgovio, Dear America!, 27, 161.

208 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 47.

209 Rawicz 41, 70; Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 225; Sgovio, Dear America!, 137; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 263; Herling, A World Apart, 27, 124.

210 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 263.

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solidarity in the face of extreme suffering. To belong to a group and maintain that membership helped prisoners avoid some of the perils of the Gulag.

Due to the vicious trifecta of starvation, overwork, and the cold, death was a close and constant companion in the Gulag camps even for those who found soft jobs, got along with the criminals, and outwitted the camp administration. With so many prisoners and such terrible conditions, Prychodko remembers that “life was cheap here [in

Kolyma], for in the taiga countless graves could be dug, and no one would be able to find them under the deep Siberian snow.”211 Under these conditions, death was easy while life was hard. Adamova-Sliozberg explains, “It takes the fullest exertion of will to walk for an hour and a half or two along an empty forest road where each foot weighs a ton, when your knees shake from weakness and hunger.”212 Death promised an end to this suffering and an eternal rest; some prisoners even prayed for it.213 Strained to the breaking point at work, men died suddenly; brigades often had to carry one or two dead back to the camp each day.214 Little things could lead to a prisoner’s demise. If a prisoner failed to achieve his or her quota just once, that reduced bread ration was often

“a straight road to the common grave.”215 So many prisoners died in one camp that the officials organized a twenty-man brigade that spent part of each day carrying frozen corpses out of the camp, “piling [sic] them like logs,” and digging and covering mass

211 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 105.

212 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 93.

213 Herling, A World Apart, 145.

214 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 284.

215 Ibid., 284.

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graves.216 In a place where “it was truer to say that the flies died like people,” life, rather

than death, was the exception.217

Under these conditions, prisoners developed strange habits to cope with the death

surrounding them. They worked against anonymity by making pacts with fellow

prisoners to visit each other’s loved ones if/when they were released, writing to their

relatives at regular intervals and hoped that, if the end did come, they would know that

something had happened to them, and carving their names and dates onto the walls of the

barracks. 218 Having to wrestle with the fear of death that came almost every night, prisoners took comfort in the fact that someone, anyone, would know who they were, what they had suffered, or simply that they had existed. Fearing quite literally for their lives, prisoners changed in more ways than this; the desire to survive began to take

precedence over all other impulses.

From the moment they entered the prison system, prisoners began to experience a moral transformation, one that rewrote the norms and rules of traditional morality.

Coming in, prisoners generally respected each other’s belongings, each other, and the sanctity of life. For the most part, they did not steal, lie, or take advantage of others. As prisoners, however, they learned to value self-preservation above all other things. The transformation happened slowly:

At first [a prisoner] shares his bread with hunger-demented prisoners, leads the night- blind on the way home from work, shouts for help when his neighbor at work in the forest has chopped off two fingers….How could he have supposed...that a man can be so degraded as to arouse not compassion but only loathing an repugnance in his fellow- prisoners? How can he help the night-blind, when every day he sees them being jolted

216 Sgovio, Dear America!, 215.

217 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 294.

218 Herling, A World Apart, 149.

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with rifle butts because they are delaying the brigade’s return to work…how share his bread with a hungry madman who on the very next day will greet him in the barracks with a demanding, persistent stare? 219

In the camps, the suffering of others overwhelmed anyone trying to rescue them; their needs were too great, while a helper’s resources too few. Seeing the futility of trying to carry others through the camps, prisoners tried to focus on their own needs. After all, how could they help their fellow prisoners eat when they were starving themselves?

Other events also pushed prisoners towards self-preservation. For preventing the rape of a young girl, Petrov lost his comfortable job in Magadan and found himself working in the gold mines of Kolyma. From that moment on, he swore to never again help someone else if it caused danger to himself: “Let them kill a child on the spot—and I wouldn’t move a hand to save it.”220 This general apathy applied to prisoners higher up the hierarchy as well. Doctors, bread distributers, and brigadiers rarely went out of their way to help others. Living in a culture that survived by the saying, “If we must all die, then you can die today and me tomorrow,” a vast majority of prisoners became

“unfeeling puppets,” men and women almost entirely devoid of sentimentality or human decency.221 In the camps, the Golden Rule had been replaced by the law of self- preservation.

Physical and mental changes preceded this moral one. When presented with a mirror, Adamova-Sliozberg and Ginzburg struggled to recognize their own reflections; all each saw was the “tired sad eyes of my mother, her hair streaked with gray, the

219 Herling, A World Apart, 68.

220 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 188.

221 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 204; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 258.

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familiar sad lines of her mouth.”222 With their dirty and patched rags wrapped around

them to keep in warmth, their long hair, and their thin bodies, prisoners had a hard time

distinguishing people in the camps; Soviet justice had indeed made all of them equal.223

Their thoughts changed in addition to their appearances. Sgovio remembers being shocked when he saw two women walking into a NKVD gala and felt absolutely no sexual desire for them. If given a choice between the women and a loaf of bread, he would have preferred the latter.224 Instances like this were typical among prisoners.

When tormented by hunger, exhaustion, and freezing temperatures, their minds, as well as their bodies, adapted to prepare them for survival.

Some prisoners transformed dramatically into sub-human creatures known as

“wicks” or dokhodyagas.225 Beaten down physically and mentally by incessant hunger

and chronic overwork, these were men inhabited a sort of strange purgatory that lay in between life and death. Frequently, these prisoners were former intelligentsia who simply could not adjust to the hard labor of the camps and had lost all will to survive.226

Sgovio recalls identifying these dokhodyagas easily, “It was written all over their faces,

their manner. They neglected themselves, did not wash—even when they had the

opportunity to do so…. [their faces were covered with] huge, black blood clots [from

frostbite].”227 Petrov also discovered that, for the wicks, their physical appearance

222 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 74; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 240.

223 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 75; Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, 87.

224 Sgovio, Dear America!, 194.

225 They became known as wicks because, just like candle wicks, they were near the end of their existence.

226 Sgovio, Dear America!, 160.

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reflected their mental state. He explains, “The men had starved, worn-out faces, quiet

voices, were completely absorbed in themselves and uncommunicative. Their range of

interest was limited to work and food, and more food, and food again.”228 The harsh life

of the camps had fundamentally changed these men’s identities. Before, they had been

distinguished professors, intellectuals, lawyers, but now, now they were men who rooted

around in kitchen refuse piles looking for scraps, pitifully begged the cooks for extra

food, barely reacted to the blows of the guards calling them out to work, stood so close to

the fire that it scorched their already tattered clothes, hardly recognized their friends, and even stole the “holy, sacred bread portion.”229 When facing the tests of the camps, these

men had unequivocally failed; “they were all equally dirty, famished, tattered, broken

down and reduced to the lowest level of humanity.”230 Without food, without friends, and without something bordering on a miracle, these wretches of men would soon die.

Even in these desperate straits, few prisoners tried to escape. Surrounded on all sides by the taiga, possessing trained dogs, and aided by native tribes in the area, many

Gulag camps made escape nearly impossible.231 Even if he could avoid getting caught,

how could a prisoner on the verge of starving and barely surviving the cold in camps

hope to pass through the barren steppe and live? Furthermore, even if a prisoner were to

make his way back to European Russia, how would he be able to hide from the NKVD?

227 Ibid., 160.

228 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 254.

229 Sgovio, Dear America!, 160, 162; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 264, 271; Herling, A World Apart, 54.

230 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 282.

231 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 118.

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Townspeople naturally regarded foreigners and newcomers with suspicion.232 The

conditions of the wider USSR made escape look like a suicide mission.233 While Rawicz

and others are a few notable exceptions, prisoners on the whole did not try to escape.

The experience of Adamova-Sliozberg and her fellow women prisoners demonstrates this

point quite well. When the door to their car swung open while their train was moving, no one jumped out. In fact, some called for the guards to come close the door. She explains,

“Not one person wanted to run….what, for example, could I do if I were given freedom but no passport? My dreams went no further than [my] apartment…and anyway they would take me from [there] the next day and return me to prison with a doubled sentence.”234 They, like most prisoners, understood the ultimate futility of escape. For

this reason, most prisoners stayed in the camps until they were released either by the

Gulag officials or, in most cases, by death.

Even religion failed to offer prisoners an escape. Because of the Soviet

government’s campaign against religious and the traditional anti-religious attitudes of the

intelligentsia, few prisoners turned to God while in the Gulag system. Although religious

dissidents would tell a different story, for the intelligentsia, the vast majority of

memoirists, religion did not feature prominently in their stories of the camps.235 In fact,

they remember that those who prayed or believed often suffered “vicious insults” from

the camp administration and criminals.236 While some small communities of nuns

232 Ibid., 119.

233 Rawicz, The Long Walk, 71.

234 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 73-4.

235 Sgovio, Dear America!, 139, 150, 183; Rawicz, The Long Walk, 68.

236 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 335.

127

existed in the camps, these comprised a very small part of the camp population.237 Few prisoners openly practiced religion because they feared even further persecution.

Lacking faith initially, few prisoners developed it while they were in the Gulag system.

Just because they did not believe in God, however, did not mean that the prisoners did not believe in something. For many communists, loyalty to the Communist Party and its state had supplanted religion long ago. This belief in communism, while initially strong in the prisons, quickly weakened in the terrible conditions of the Gulag. Petrov explains, “The farther I moved towards the concentration camp the paler was the redness of the prisoners.”238 With their back-breaking work and pitiful rations, few prisoners could hold on to the dream that their arrest had just been a misunderstanding or a mistake; they came to doubt the promises of communism. The books of these memoirists testify to their changed stance on the USSR. Out of the six memoirists who were communists before being imprisoned, only two of them, Ginzburg and Stajner, retained their faith in communism as a whole. Blaming the Gulag on the excesses of Stalin and his “cult of personality,” Ginzburg claimed to still be a “rank-and-file communist.”239

Stajner writes similarly. Although blasting Stalin for perverting Lenin’s legacy, he does not want his book to be used as a weapon against socialism: he still subscribed to the ideology.240 These two, however, are exceptions, possibly the only exceptions. And their

claims appear to be truthful: because they published their memoires outside of the USSR,

they had no reason to support communism without an actual belief in it. For most,

237 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 143.

238 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 49.

239 Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 316.

240 Stajner, 7000 Days in Siberia, xviii.

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however, their belief in the Communist Party and the USSR died in the camps. By the

end of their imprisonment, they all had “an unshakable, irreconcilable and all-embracing

hatred of all that bears the name Soviet, or Communist.”241 They had suffered too much

at the hands of a Socialist government to continue to embrace its underlying values. And

so, deprived of their former faith and purpose, many lived only for freedom and for the

hope of seeing their long-lost families once again.

Liberation, while welcomed enthusiastically, brought its own problems, ones that would continue to hound released prisoners until they either died or left the USSR. After

being trapped so long away from life outside the camps, they often had trouble

readjusting, for everything they knew had changed and everything they loved had passed

away. Adamova-Sliozberg recalls the mixed emotions accompanying her release:

For twenty years this moment has seemed as though it would be a step into a radiant future. But with the joy has come the feeling of being an outcast, of being something inferior. No one can give back the best twenty years of my life. No one can bring my dead friends back to life. No one can tie together the broken, lifeless threads binding us to our closest relatives.242

In some senses, prisoners felt as if their life had been put on hold. They wished to return

to where they had left off in their careers, their families, and their lives, but they found

themselves hopelessly out of step with the rest of the world and condemned to always

feel like an outsider. Theirs was a lonely existence. Adamova-Sliozberg continues:

You have no roof over your head, no money, no physical strength. Your place has been taken, because life abhors a vacuum….Your parents have died and your children have grown up without you. For twenty years you have not worked in your profession. You have fallen behind and can only work as an apprentice while your comrades have become masters. And being an apprentice is difficult for someone fifty years old….It would seem as though you are bankrupt.243

241 Ibid.; Petrov, Soviet Gold, 43; Sgovio, Dear America!, 287.

242 Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 3.

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In a sense, whether or not a prisoner survived the camps, his old life had died regardless:

wherever he went, she/he had to construct a whole new life. This reconstruction, however, proved difficult, especially with the limitations placed upon prisoners by the

USSR.

Even after a prisoner’s release, the Soviet state still held control over his or her life and movement. After their release, prisoners received something known as a “wolf’s

passport.” While freeing them from the confines of the camps, these new documents

prohibited prisoners from leaving the USSR, living near the capital city of any region,

any important industrial towns, the sea, or within sixty miles of the border.244 Clearly,

the Gulag administrators wanted to avoid future opportunities for escape to the West or

future sabotage. These passports made it difficult to find work or continue education as

well, for few bosses or headmasters looked upon prisoners without a mixture of suspicion

and fear; they hired them last. Additionally, any time a new wave of arrests began;

former prisoners were the first to be rounded up because of their blemished pasts. Thus,

even after their terms had expired, most released prisoners again found themselves in the

camps serving a second term, particularly during the waves of arrest after war broke out

with Germany in 1941 and near the war’s end in 1945. Due to these limitations and the

difficulty of readjusting to life back on the mainland, as prisoners sometimes referred to

European Russia, many prisoners actually stayed near the camps as free workers.

Herling notes that this situation benefitted both the camps and the prisoners. For the camps, it provided a cheap labor force already accustomed to the rules and regulations of

243 Ibid.

244 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 413; Sgovio, Dear America!, 201; Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 177.

130

the Gulag and prevented former prisoners from venturing out into the wider world.245

For the prisoners, it was something familiar that offered guaranteed employment.246

Vladimir Petrov remembers feeling “pretty much the same” after his release: he still lived in Magadan and worked in the same drafting house as when he was a prisoner. The only difference was that, as a free man, he received 1400 rubles a month instead of 80 and did not have to live in a prisoner’s barracks.247 While Herling, the only one to expressly

comment on this phenomenon, does not comment on the actual number of prisoners who

stayed near the camps they had inhabited, he notes that “many,” in some sense, never left

the Gulag system.248 While their shackles were not quite as visible, freed prisoners were

still tied to the camps from which they had been liberated and still constituted a source of

labor that the State could exploit.

Only those who fled abroad were truly free from the Soviet system. Knowing

this, the Soviet authorities made this option only available to foreigners who had been

held in the USSR and, even for them, only after a long delay of processing. Even after

the war and after his official release, Sgovio could not leave for Italy until thirteen years

after he had been released from the camps.249 Until her flight from Soviet-occupied

Germany to America, Lipper never truly felt free.250 Many Poles attempting to return to

their native land were detained for at least six months in a border camp, waiting for their

245 Herling, A World Apart, 107.

246 Ibid., 108.

247 Petrov, Soviet Gold, 424.

248 Herling, A World Apart, 107.

249 Sgovio, Dear America!, 286.

250 Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 310.

131

government to negotiate for their release.251 Wishing to avoid arrest and to be able to

“live and work and speak freely, without fear and in fellowship with his fellow-men,”

Prychodko escaped to Canada.252 Although free from the Soviet Union, these prisoners

did not leave without sacrifice. They said goodbye to the graves of their family, their

native nations of birth, and everything that had made up their lives for the past decade or

more.

Yet even after leaving behind so much, neither group of prisoners could extricate

themselves from the duty of testifying. The memoirists wanted to testify to their friends

back home, to their kids who would ask questions about their experiences, and to the

future members of the Communist Party.253 Above all else, however, they felt obligated

to speak for those who did not make it out of the camps alive. Without these memoirs,

their memory would have died altogether. Antoni Ekart explains it best:

There is always before my eyes an inscription scrawled in rusty liquid on the walls of the camp latrine at Kotlas in 1946, by someone who had nothing more to lose: ‘May he be damned who, after regaining freedom, remains silent.’….the MVD erased it the same day….but they could not wipe it from my memory, where it stands before me and reminds me of my duty towards those who shared prison life with me, reminds me of the millions of dull, apathetic, suffering shadows of humanity, hovering on the threshold between torture and death; these millions, who are still living, suffering and dying, at the moment when I write these words.254

One can feel the burning desire to witness even today, at this time so far removed from

the Soviet Gulag. Even after their freedom, this obligation affected the rest of the

survivors’ lives: one does not write a three hundred page memoir of suffering and despair

251 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 314.

252 Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, 233.

253 Sgovio, Dear America!, 151; Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey, 3; Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 316.

254 Ekart, Vanished without Trace, 12.

132

just for the hell of it. In the end, this testimony only has one purpose: to guard the

memories and experiences of the Gulag from the passage of time. With their works still

moving audiences and provoking discussion today, I would daresay these memoirists

have been successful. After living through a life of such torment, they can rest easy, knowing that, at least for the moment, their stories will endure and continue to touch future generations of our human race.

133

CHAPTER FOUR

When Worlds Collide: Margarete Buber-Neumann in the Nazi and Soviet Labor Camps

This paper has touched on the horrors of the Holocaust; it has testified to the

destructiveness of the Gulag. Individually, each camp system reveals much about the societies from which they spring, the political climate of Nazi Germany and Soviet

Russia, and the capacity for human suffering. As isolated events, however, they lack a sense of universality and closure. Only by comparing and contrasting the two camp systems can researchers come to a greater understanding and analysis of the subtle differences and similarities between them. As with the previous chapters, however, this paper needed a guide, a witness to lead it through these experiences. For this reason, it

now turns to Margarete Buber-Neumann, a survivor of both the Soviet Gulag and the

Nazi Holocaust, who wrote a memoir describing her remarkable journey and miraculous

survival.

With her meteoric rise and sudden fall, Buber-Neumann mirrors the fate the

German Communist Party itself. Growing up in Germany during the upheaval and radicalism following the end of the First World War, the collapse of the German

monarchy, and the flowering and floundering of the Weimar Republic, she, like many of

her peers, drifted towards the communist movement.1 She became a part of its youth organization in 1921. Attracted by its “emotional appeal” more than its dialectical materialism or Marxist theory, Buber-Neumann idealized communism and the Soviet

1 Margarete Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler (London: Pimlico, 2008), viii.

134

Union because both promised to help the poor and downtrodden.2 Her communist

activity, however, was merely a side project, something that played second fiddle to her career as a school teacher, her husband, and her two young daughters at home. This all changed with her bitter divorce in 1928. Losing her husband and stripped of her

daughters after the custody suit, Buber-Neumann began working for the German

Communist Party, the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands or the KPD, fulltime as a

journalist for the Communist International, or Comintern. Even arranging her social

activities around Party events, Buber-Neumann was fast becoming an all-out radical. Her

common-law marriage to Heinz Neumann, a rising star in the KPD, sealed her

commitment to communism in 1929.3 She and her husband lived happily, directing high-

level communist activity in Germany and even visiting the USSR in 1931 as KPD representatives.4 For them, life had truly become better; life had become more joyful.

This idyllic portrait shattered with the infighting of the German Communist Party.

Branded as a traitor by his chief rival in the KPD, Heinz Neumann lost most of his power and prestige within the communist movement.5 From this moment onward, his star faded

fast. Placing Neumann “on probation,” the Comintern sent him away from his allies in

Germany to work in Spain and then Switzerland. Yet Buber-Neumann stayed by his side.

Even after the Swiss police arrested her husband and he faced deportation to the USSR,

Buber-Neumann remained committed to him. In 1935, the couple moved to the Hotel

2 Ibid., ix.

3 Ibid., x.

4 Gary Ulmen, “Obituary: Margarete Buber-Neumann,” The Independent, November 10, 1989.

5 Ibid.; Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators, xi.

135

Lux in Moscow to work as translators for the Comintern.6 At this time, however,

Moscow was even more dangerous than Switzerland, particularly for foreign communists in exile. Caught up in the xenophobia and paranoia of the Great Terror, the NKVD sought out and arrested any suspicious persons. With his foreign ties and questionable political record, Neumann became a prime target; they arrested him in 1937.7 Buber-

Neumann, as a foreigner and the wife of a traitor, knew that her arrest was only a matter of time. The NKVD came for her a year later in 1938. Her life had reached a new stage, captivity.

Buber-Neumann endured two years in the Gulag system of prisons and camps.

Managing to survive because of her soft jobs and luck, she endured the constant hunger, hard labor, and general deprivation of the Gulag and to carve out a life that was, if not comfortable, at least not desperate.8 This all changed, however, with the Nazi-Soviet

Non-Aggression Pact of 1939.

In a goodwill gesture to the Third Reich, Stalin recalled German Communists from the depths of the Gulag and transferred them into Nazi hands in 1940.9 Having already lived through the Gulag, Buber-Neumann then suffered through the German concentration camps. While not Jewish, she lived in a camp with many Jewish women.

Due partially to this fact, she survived through hardships and selections from 1940-1945 until her release by the German authorities.10 Her trials, for the most part, ceased.

6 Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators, xii.

7 Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators, xii.

8 Ibid., xiv.

9 Ibid., xvi.

10 Ibid., xvii.

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But the experiences never left her. As the star witness of the libel trial between

the weekly magazine Les Lettres Françaises and Victor Kravchenko in 1949, the author of Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler in the same year, and as a political activist in post-war West Germany, Buber-Neumann continued to testify to what she had endured and to make sure that that the horrors of her past did not continue on into the future.11 As the only known survivor of and witness to both the Nazi and Soviet labor

camps, Margarete Buber-Neumann alone can help us place these two camp systems side-

by-side and guide us towards a more nuanced understanding of their structures, their

prisoners, and their histories.

Despite a few minor differences, the Nazi and Soviet prisons largely functioned in

the same way. They served the same purpose, holding the prisoners until their

interrogations could be finished, their sentences could be pronounced, and they could be

shipped off to the concentration camps. In the Soviet experience, life became

monotonous: prisoners turned to sewing, smoking, illegal chess matches, and daily

exercise to combat the boredom and frustration of living in a packed, dirty, and

communal cell.12 As Buber-Neumann fails to mention much of her daily routine in the

Nazi prisons, we can assume that her existence in these differed little from her time in

those of the NKVD. She remembers the Nazi prisons as less crowded, less dirty, and,

possibly, less strict. When talking of her cell, Buber-Neumann recalls it as “moderately

lousy, but after Butirka [the Russian prison] a few bugs meant nothing to me.”13

Although it held up to ten women in a cell for four, this was a far cry from the extreme

11 Ibid., xix, xx.

12 Ibid., 32, 33.

13 Ibid., 187.

137

crowding of the Soviet prisons, where one hundred and ten women shared a cell meant

for twenty-five.14 From the Nazis, at least they received blankets and mattresses. The cells even had “proper water-closet[s],” a “luxury” to the prisoners accustomed to the parashas, latrine buckets, of the Soviet prisons.15 Buber-Neumann suggests that, in

addition to housing them more comfortably, the German prison regime treated its

prisoners a more humanely as well. She points to the prisoners’ daily walks to illustrate

this slight change of philosophy: “When we went out into the yard for exercise, it was

just as bare and depressing [as the Soviet prisons], but there were no shouts of ‘Hands

behind your back!’ ‘Eyes down.’”16 Here, wardresses did not shout orders like in the

USSR, but rather treated the prisoners in a “friendly and considerate” manner.17 While

possibly revealing the greater kindness and humanity of the Nazis, Buber-Neumann’s

observations more accurately demonstrate the danger of generalizing from one person’s

experience. While none of the other memoirists who suffered under the Nazis spent time

in actual prisons, their experiences at the hands of the Nazis belie Buber-Neumann’s claims. These same Nazis that were so brutal in the camps were, according to her, quite humane within the prisons. Thus, while this finding could illustrate broader trends, it

more likely reflects her isolated experience with a select group of Nazi prison wardresses.

The two prison systems practiced similar deceptions to avoid exposure. When transporting men and women, the NKVD did not use prison buses like we have today, but

Black Marias. These vans, painted to look like a baker’s delivery truck and sporting

14 Ibid., 33, 187.

15 Ibid., 153.

16 Ibid., 153.

17 Ibid.

138

“Bread, Rolls, and Cakes” in gold letters on their sides, carried her and other memoirists from prison to prison while keeping the general population in the dark.18 The Nazis

engaged in similar practices. Transported in “Hospital Trains” from Poland to Germany, moved in covered police lorries through the streets of Berlin, and all the while referred to

as “returned emigrants,” Buber-Neumann and her fellow Nazi prisoners were hidden

from the public eye.19 With their preoccupations with secrecy, both of the camp systems

tried to keep outsiders in the dark. For the most part, this secrecy worked well; those

outside the camps either failed to notice or willingly ignored the massive transfer of prisoners. The mutual concern for hiding the numbers of prisoners suggests two possibilities: each of the camp systems acknowledged deep down that what it were doing was wrong and/or that each knew what the truth would bring to its wider society. If the

NVKD and Gestapo were arresting people according to the due process of law, why would they put so much effort into hiding their efforts? If they were arresting truly dangerous enemies of the state, they should have paraded them around to demonstrate their own vigilance. Much in the same way that strip clubs rely on dark lighting and adult video stores sport blacked out windows, the Nazis and Soviets could have sought to conceal actions that they knew were wrong: they knew the general public would

disapprove and even revolt if knowing the truth. Their efforts to conceal these arrests could demonstrate their guilty consciences. Additionally, their concerns over secrecy could point to their political acumen. If the knowledge of these arrests had become common knowledge, widespread panic might have ensured and opposition parties would

have been strengthened. Public knowledge of the arrests would have threatened their

18 Ibid., 26.

19 Ibid., 150-52.

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control of their populations. Regardless of the true motivation, these camps devoted

enormous resources to keep the camps and their activities as secretive as possible.

Interrogations and confessions, while similar in form, served different purposes

within each of the prison systems. Both the Nazis and the Soviets placed a huge weight on the confessions of their prisoners: they would beat prisoners “black and blue,” hold them in prison for months, bring in family members to testify against the prisoners, and painstakingly build cases to sentence them to the concentration camps.20 In a state of terror and war, neither of these countries could allow its enemies to go unpunished or its foreign spies to be left untouched. Because a confession assured a prisoner’s guilt and unveiled further guilty parties, it became highly important in their respective judicial processes. The prison police emphasized these respective confessions, however, for different reasons. For the NKVD, the confessions were simply a process that had to be followed, a box that had to be checked.21 Rather than searching for the truth, the Soviet

investigators looked to confirm a prisoner’s guilt.22 Having to meet quotas themselves,

the NKVD agents indiscriminately tortured and bullied Buber-Neumann and other memoirists into signing manufactured and condemning confessions. A slightly different

system existed in the Nazi camps, at least from Buber-Neumann’s perspective. Because

she was the only non-Jew of the Nazi memoirists, Buber-Neumann benefitted from a

more legal entrance into camp life: since she alone went through actual prisons, she alone

encountered real Nazi interrogations. While still biased, Nazi investigators, at least

according to Buber-Neumann, practiced more fairness and objectivity. They sought to

20 Ibid., 35, 37, 44, 148, 157.

21 Ibid., 45.

22 Ibid., 158.

140

build an actual case against her, one that looked to uncover the truth of the situation

rather than rely on her predetermined guilt.23 She claims that, although happening only

rarely, Nazis would release prisoners against whom they were unable to build a case.24

Interestingly enough, she attributes this difference in interrogation aims to her underlying stereotypes about the German and Russian people. In contrast to the barbaric Soviets,

“the Gestapo men…were still bound, if ever so loosely, to the judicial traditions of a civilized country.”25 This prejudice could have colored her recollections or come from

her actual camp experience; however, we cannot determine which played more heavily

into her assessment. Either way, her observations show that all prisoners, with the

exception of Jews in the Nazi camps, had to go through this interrogation procedure

before they departed for them camps.

Different types of prisoners filled the ranks of the respective camp systems. The

Soviets chose their prisoners for almost entirely political reasons. Improper comments, jokes about Stalin, failing to report others who violated the rules, refusing to repent of

political deviations, or being the relative of a political offender could easily leave one

accused of the crimes of “counter-revolutionary agitation,” “preparation for armed

insurrection,” or “espionage.”26 Because of these far-reaching criteria, even completely

innocent and loyal citizens, found themselves trapped within the Gulag system. While

communists, foreign communists in particular, faced a greater danger of arrest, by and

large, everyone in the Soviet Union had an equal chance of ending up in the Gulag. The

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 158.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 30, 37, 48.

141

Nazi Gestapo, on the other hand, practiced racial profiling to a greater degree than the

NKVD. The Nazis imprisoned many politicals and communists, the religious, and

criminals inside their camps, but just as many prisoners were placed there for racial

“offenses” as political ones.27 Although originally constructing concentration camps in

the 1930s to hold communists, the Nazis expanded these camps and built new

extermination camps to deal with the problem of Jews, gypsies, and Poles.28 And they did not stop with these nationalities: because they wanted to exterminate certain races, they had to widen their search. Nazi memoirists agree, recalling a whole class of

prisoners guilty of sleeping with these “sub-humans” and tainting themselves with

impure blood.29 Thus, while the Gulag and Holocaust camps both held real political

prisoners and potential political prisoners and arrested whole families, the Holocaust

camps alone contained prisoners whose sole crime was their race and its incompatibility

with the dawning Third Reich.

In both camp systems, Buber-Neumann encountered committed members of the

Communist Party. In the Gulag, prisoners were most idealistic while still in prison.

Claiming “Trotskyite slander” and pointing to their record of loyal service to the Party,

they regarded the whole thing as some giant misunderstanding, one that would be cleared

up quickly. The Soviet memoirs are replete with these devoted communists: they almost

become an archetypal character. Sure of their own innocence and the ultimate justice of

the Party, they looked upon their cellmates with derision. Buber-Neumann remembers

27 Ibid., 163.

28 Ibid., 159, 216.

29 Benjamin Jacobs, The Dentist of Auschwitz (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 55.

142

one such woman who claimed that “they [the NKVD] haven’t arrested half enough yet…We must protect ourselves from the traitors. And what if there are a few really innocent ones amongst them? You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.”30 They believed the Party to be inviolable and unquestionable. For the most part, however, this undying loyalty to the Party waned as prisoners spent time in prison, wavered as they received their sentences, and vanished as they experienced the horrible life of the Gulag proper. In time, the prisoners’ fanciful illusions of equality, justice, and brotherhood gave way to the reality and horrors of communism in action: it took the experience of

living through the Gulag itself to destroy their faith in the Party.

Conversely, communism flourished within the Holocaust camp system. For those

arrested because of their communist activities, their Party affiliation took on new

meaning. Already dedicated communists before their arrest, they began to think that “the

fact that they were now in a concentration camp was proof of their danger to National

Socialism.”31 Their imprisonment actually validated their beliefs. For others,

communism provided an attractive alternative to the fascism of their captors. Regardless

of their motivations, many prisoners in the Nazi camps were or became staunch communists. Buber-Neumann remembers countless women who spoke of the USSR as a heaven on earth, a haven that would end all their sufferings.32 On the verge of death, one

devoted Czech communist “spent her [last] days raving and shouting, ‘Stalin, I love

you.’”33 Their belief was strong and it died hard. Buber-Neumann recalls three instances

30 Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators, 34, 35.

31 Ibid., 184.

32 Ibid., 148.

33 Ibid., 213.

143

in which German and Polish communists condemned her and other Gulag survivors

because they had negative opinions of the Soviet Union and communism.34 One group of

camp communists even branded her a Trotskyite as soon as she arrived in Ravensbrück.35

Separated from the Soviet Union and only engaging with the ideas, not the realities, of communism, communists in the German camps generally persisted in their beliefs.

Buber-Neumann’s recollections stand alone on this point, for all of the other memoirists lived in Jewish-only camps. Despite this fact, her assertions seem likely, especially after looking at the reactions of western communists to stories from the Gulag, i.e. the Victor

Kravchenko trial. Because none of the German or Polish communists had been surrounded by the contradictions of communism in practice, the prisoners of the Nazi fascists were often, and ironically, more communist than those imprisoned in the

Worker’s Fatherland.

Criminals occupied different roles within the Nazi and Soviet camps. In both,

they filled the lower-rungs of the camp leadership; as brigadiers in the Soviet camps or

Kapos in the Nazi ones, they led work gangs. This labor system immensely benefitted

the criminals. Because these labor bosses alone decided whether a prisoner met his/her

work quota, “the opportunity both for favoritism and chicanery was great.”36 Blessed

with this advantage, the criminals in the Gulag lived very well. Organized and powerful,

they monopolized the lower official positions and the less labor-intensive jobs.37 The

camp administration, regarding politicals as scum and treating them as such, generally

34 Ibid., 148, 169, 212.

35 Ibid., 169.

36 Ibid., 74.

37 Ibid., 62.

144

gave the criminals carte-blanche to do whatever they wanted. Using their power,

impunity, and unity, they terrified, extorted, and, if necessary, killed the political

prisoners to improve their own lives.38 While not recalling guards favorably either,

Gulag memoirists remember criminals as their primary tormentors, as the people who

brought their camp experiences to new lows. With a unified front and privileges from the

camp administration, criminals in the Gulag lived comfortably by exploiting and

victimizing the politicals. Even with this advantageous position, however, criminals

within the Nazi concentration camp system did not live well: they scraped along almost

as badly as the politicals and the Jews. Lumped in as “sub-humans” with everybody else

in the camps, the criminals, or Asocials, received little in the way of favors, besides their

positions, from the camp administration.39 Worst of all, they lacked unity amongst

themselves: “thieving, mutual accusations and denunciations were everyday affairs.”40

Stealing each others’ possessions and squealing on each other to the Block Seniors or the

SS Block Leaders, these criminals failed to achieve the sort of domination that their

comrades in the Gulag camps exerted over their politicals: memoirists remember guards, not criminals, as their primary foes. For these two reasons, criminals in the Holocaust camps generally eked out a meager existence while those in the Gulag lived like camp royalty.

Women’s experiences in the Nazi and Soviet camps reflected varying policies on gender segregation. Women both suffered and benefitted from the presence of men in the

Gulag and the absence of them in the Nazi camps. The Soviet camps mixed the sexes.

38 Ibid., 61, 106.

39 Ibid., 159.

40 Ibid., 173.

145

With this arrangement, women could obtain extra food by sleeping with criminals,

officials, or freedmen. Prisoners remember prostitutes, in particular, benefitting from this

trade: they got ahead simply by practicing their profession.41 Even ordinary women

could exchange their sex for tobacco, protection, or, most importantly, food. On the other hand, because of their constant contact with men, women often faced the very real danger of being raped. In an experience quite often described by the Gulag memoirists, a criminal expected Buber-Neumann and her comrade Grete to perform sexual favors for

him after they had accepted his bread and butter.42 This transaction happened so many

times in the camps that he had grown accustomed to it. With their roles as newcomers,

Buber-Neumann and her comrade highlight the absurdity of this arrangement, a system of

exchange that everyone else seems to take for granted. Because of its gender segregation,

however, the Nazi camps changed the dynamic to which Buber-Neumann had become

accustomed. There, women did not have to worry about getting raped, but they also

could not benefit from extra food brought in with their feminine wiles. Prostitutes, in

general, suffered the most from this, for prostitutes had been sent to the Nazi camps to be

“broken in to regular work” and “taught discipline,” not to provide a service or live

comfortably.43 The presence or absence of men, in sum, compromised a double-edged

sword for the women of the camps. When present, they offered rewards and perils; when

absent, they brought neither.

A prisoner’s daily work differed little from camp to camp. Hard labor was

ubiquitous. In the Gulag, Buber-Neumann unloaded coal and fifty-pound sacks of sugar

41 Ibid., 172.

42 Ibid., 60.

43 Ibid., 172.

146

from railroad cars.44 She hacked three thousand yards of weeds a day in the “broiling

sun.”45 She carted sheep dung and ended each day “bathed in sweat, aching in every limb

and covered with dust.”46 Her jobs in the Nazi camps differed little from these. Forced

at different times to knit impossible quotas of socks, to dig ditches and cart coal, and to

unload “hard, rough bricks [that] quickly tore [their] soft hands to pieces,” Buber-

Neumann and other women wore down into a state of “undernourishment and

exhaustion.”47 In both sets of camps and memoirs, a prisoner’s hope for survival rested

on finding and holding onto easier work, work that did not grind down their bodies each

and every day. In the Gulag, Buber-Neumann’s salvation lay in easy work in the office

or the garden, where she could rest from the physical hardship and steal extra

vegetables.48 Then, as a Hut Senior in the Nazi camps, Buber-Neumann exempted herself from work for her first years in detention.49 Simply having to oversee bed-

building, locker tidying, and food and cloth distribution, she saved her physical strength.

As portrayed by Buber-Neumann and, without exception, every other memoirist, the hard labor of the Gulag and the Holocaust never brought prisoners closer to salvation or the end of their sentences: it only brought them nearer to the common grave.

While neither the Soviet nor the Nazi hospitals really helped prisoners, those in the German camps posed a much greater threat to their prisoners. In both of the camp

44 Ibid., 65.

45 Ibid., 76, 79.

46 Ibid., 98.

47 Ibid., 174, 208, 215.

48 Ibid., 66, 68, 100, 110.

49 Ibid., 168, 171.

147

systems, space in the hospital was precious. For one, it was valuable: as a place of

recuperation, it could mean the difference between life and death. To survive, prisoners

needed a few days of respite.50 More than that, few received these spots. Because both

camps revolved around forced labor, the camp authorities limited the number of patients

convalescing at any given time: if everyone were to be in the hospital, none of the work

would be finished.51 Despite these advantages, however, both of the camps’ hospitals

posed a great threat to the prisoners. With their poor supply lines and overcrowded

camps, the Gulag hospitals lacked everything: qualified personnel, medicine, and medical

equipment.52 Other memoirists comment on this too: they lament that a “doctor’s” patient often died because he could not do anything to cure them. The hospitals in the

Holocaust camps, on the other hand, took an active role in killing their patients. Rather

than promoting life, they furnished death: other memoirs confirm this fact. When

seriously sick prisoners entered the hospital, they received narcotics for two days. If they

failed to get better after this grace period, the doctors administered a lethal injection: the

German camps would not tolerate any dead weight.53 With this same philosophy, the

hospitals arranged abortions for pregnant women.54 Seeking to get some use out of their

prisoners, doctors sometimes treated sick ones like lab mice. In multiple camps and

memoirs, the German hospitals tested venereal treatments, tetanus strains, and

“experimental transfers of bone and muscle” on sick prisoners that left many of them

50 Ibid., 109.

51 Ibid., 109, 216.

52 Ibid., 108.

53 Ibid., 216.

54 Ibid., 217.

148

hobbled and unable to walk correctly, mentally deranged, or dead outright.55 Thus, while

prisoners in the Gulag hospitals often died by accident or neglect, their comrades in the

Nazi camp hospitals perished by their doctor’s own and deliberate hand.

On the whole, the German camps appear to have enforced greater organization

and discipline than the Soviet camps. In the Gulag, Buber-Neumann and other Soviet

memoirists had become accustomed to the “lousy, dirty huts,” the swarms of bedbugs and

fleas that permeated her existence, and the “piles of human excrement” lying out in the

open air.56 They were used to the rusting tractors outside of the machine shop and the constant shortages of rations and clothing.57 They had even adapted to its rampant

stealing and inattentive guards. And so, with these expectations, Buber-Neumann entered

into the Nazi camps.

Upon her arrival at the German camps, Buber-Neumann was genuinely shocked,

for what she saw and experienced there contrasted sharply with her years in the Gulag.

She remembers that, upon her arrival in 1940, “everything at Ravensbrück was done with

typical Prussian thoroughness.”58 Its appearance contrasted sharply with the Soviet

camps. With its flowerbeds and neatly-kept plots of grass, Ravensbrück “looked

beautiful—more like a neat holiday camp than a concentration camp.”59 Its barracks, laid

out in neat rows, were neat, clean, and of uniform construction.60 Sporting washrooms,

55 Ibid., 208, 218.

56 Ibid., 61, 69, 73, 85.

57 Ibid., 56, 68.

58 Ibid., 161.

59 Ibid., 162.

60 Ibid., 164.

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real lavatories, basins, tables, lockers, and stools, each of these barracks “seemed a

palace.”61 The showers had white-clothed prisoner attendants, soap, hot water, and towels.62 Every woman received her own bunk, her own identical prison uniform, dining

utensils, bed clothes, sheets, pillows, towels, and a mattress.63 The prisoners even

received fresh laundry each week.64 The food seemed magnificent in comparison to the

Soviet-style gruel and black bread.65 It all seemed so out of place for a concentration camp. When served “sweet porridge with stewed dried fruit,” white bread, sausage,

margarine, and lard all in one meal, Buber-Neumann wondered if the camp was on a holiday or preparing for a special inspection: the Soviet prisoners only rarely received

this sort of faire.66 And the differences and surprises did not stop with the food and

supplies.

Buber-Neumann reported that the Nazi camps maintained a much stricter

discipline than their Soviet counterparts. The SS drilled routine into prisoners early,

requiring roll calls from the moment they entered into the camp. Held twice a day “no

matter what weather, in rain and broiling sun, in the bitter cold and in snow and winter,”

these roll calls required prisoners to stand at attention in orderly ranks for up to one-and-

a-half hours.67 Yet, roll calls were but a small part of the discipline demanded daily from

61 Ibid., 166.

62 Ibid., 163.

63 Ibid., 164, 166.

64 Ibid., 166.

65 Ibid., 165.

66 Ibid., 165.

67 Ibid., 161, 166, 175.

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the prisoners, for a thousand little details weighed on their nerves and dominated their lives. Every day, prisoners had to make their beds in the most painstaking detail:

The straw sack had to be punched, shaken, pushed and smoothed into a mattress- like shape, flat across the top, with flat sides and clearly defined edges….there is a knack about it which has to be learnt….the blankets have to be folded in a particular fashion and laid on top of it as though they were boards. And then the pillow! That has to have a strictly rectangular shape as though it were a wooden box, its edges clearly defined.68

The guards forced them to fold their clothes and arrange their lockers at night, to clean the barracks each day, and to maintain a strict dress code at all times.69 Through these

and other practices, the guards attempted to wear down the prisoners’ morale and to

break their collective spirit.

The Nazis even organized the killing of prisoners. If the Gulag functioned more

like Lord of the Flies where the fittest and luckiest prisoners survived, then the

concentration camps worked more like Gladiator with its rigged Colosseum fights.

Although everyone fought for survival, some had to fight harder than others and some

never had a chance. Those who failed to work, who were too sick to recover, who were

of the wrong race, and who caused problems within the camps were whisked away on the

Sick Transports or brought just outside of the camp and executed.70 Even bringing

orderliness to death, the Nazis made their camps into an entirely different beast than the

Gulag camps.

Buber-Neumann’s commentaries on these activities suggest two reasons behind

the strictness and better conditions of the Nazi camps when compared to those of the

68 Ibid., 167.

69 Ibid., 167, 168, 187.

70 Ibid., 159, 182, 210-11, 213, 215.

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Gulag. First, she attributes a great deal of the organization to the German national

character. At least three times in her memoir, Buber-Neumann refers to “German

efficiency” or “Prussian thoroughness” as the reason for the discipline and order in Nazi

camps.71 As the Germans have traditionally been known for their efficiency, this comes

as more of a confirmation of the stereotype than a surprise. Because people naturally

organize the information they received around existing structures, her memories of the

German camps could have easily affected by her ideas about German orderliness. Buber-

Neumann also alludes to another cause for the cleanliness and organization of the camps,

however. She notes that the Holocaust camps typically held much fewer prisoners than

their Soviet counterparts. Holding only 4200 prisoners in 1940, Ravensbrück had grown

rapidly, too rapidly, in fact, to maintain the same sort of standards in 1942 that Buber-

Neumann had seen when she first arrived.72 She recounts the changing conditions:

…before long three prisoners were sleeping on two mattresses and sharing lockers. Up to 1942 Camp Ravensbrück had been free from lice, but owing to the overcrowding the laundry could no longer cope….There were no longer regular supplies of straw for the mattresses. There was not enough footwear and other articles of clothing to replace worn-out items… [before] no prisoners would have dared to tread on the grass plots, but now when the roll-call was over the women would rush over them, even treading down the flowers….73

The growing numbers undermined the whole organization of the camps, eventually

leading to cramped barrack and open latrine trenches. Buber-Neumann remembers that,

with the influx, “things were declining to a Siberian level, and by the end of 1944 there

was not a great deal of difference between Ravensbrück and Karaganda.”74 With her

71 Ibid., 67, 163, 165.

72 Ibid., 168, 218.

73 Ibid., 218-19.

74 Ibid., 258.

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commentary, Buber-Neumann shows us how the camps started out so differently yet,

with time, gradually became more and more similar in organization and numbers.

While other memoirists generally support Buber-Neumann’s assertions, several

factors could have influenced her memories of the camps. For the most part, other

prisoners comment on the Nazis tendencies towards efficiency, their uniform uniforms,

and the disciplinary activities; however, none mention anything about getting fresh

laundry once a week or how great the food tasted. Clearly, there must be a reason for this

wide discrepancy. Perhaps, because Buber-Neumann came into Ravensbrück during its

early years when everything had an order and a place, she recalls that time more easily

than her later years. After all, during her first days in the camp, she must have been very impressionable. Therefore, her exaggerated memories could stem from the “primacy effect,” in which we tend to remember more strongly our first impressions than our later ones.75 This effect could have colored her recollections to lead her to report on the Nazi

camps with such optimism.

Additionally, her previous experience in the Gulag camps might have overly

influenced her opinion of the German camps. Coming from such an unorganized

hellhole, Buber-Neumann naturally could have exaggerated the neatness and benefits of

the German camps. After all, the grass is always greener on the other side: coming in to

the German camps, she would have emphasized more of their advantages over the Soviet

ones than their pitfalls. Although her testimony may exaggerate the differences between

the two camp systems, it points to the effects of direct contrasts on memory. This same

effect explains why some pretty girls want less attractive friends. Their rationale may be

75 John deLamater and Daniel Myers, Social Psychology. 7th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth CENGAGE Learning, 2011), 129.

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shallow, but it works: with someone ugly enough by her side, Rosie O’Donnell could

look like a beauty queen. Contrast matters. What we see before a certain image, person,

or thing “primes,” or habituates, us to evaluate the next one we view. This effect might

play into why Buber-Neumann evaluates the Nazi camps so positively: her previous life

in the Gulag, while different, profoundly affected her expectations of the food quality and

cleanliness in a labor camp.

Survivors’ memoirs suggest that dramatic personal transformation, born from

suffering and loss, accompanied life in both the Soviet and Nazi camp systems. The first

transformation happened in the prisons, as the imprisoned realized the gravity and peril of

their situations. Upon arriving at her first Soviet prison, Buber-Neumann remembers a new convict, a young girl, who came in smiling and laughing, wearing a summer dress, and sporting a “fresh, healthy complexion.”76 Newly arrived, she had no idea what lay in

store for her; she joked and made light of her situation. After a couple nights of “chain

questioning” and false accusations, this cheery, young girl had changed completely: “her

eyes were…swollen with weeping, her face was smeared, her hair was in disorder and her

nice new summer dress was all creased.”77 This was only the beginning of the

transformation, though.

Life in the camps brought further physical changes. For prisoners who had been

away from the real world for a year or more, “the camp [sic] created a physiognomy all

its own.”78 Enduring perpetual hunger, hard labor, and a constant fear of death, their bodies changed. To adapt to the camps, prisoners’ bodies liquidated unneeded fat and

76 Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators, 24.

77 Ibid., 25, 26.

78 Ibid., 126.

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used it for fuel. Due to these changes, prisoners could easily identify their fellow

sufferers, even on a crowded train, by appearance alone. Who else would have the same

hollow eyes, the same sunken face, and the same emaciated figure?

The intellectual and emotional changes, the stripping off of “their normal civilized

mask,” followed the physical transformation.79 When forced to endure suffering beyond the limit of human endurance, people could not continue to care for others: Buber-

Neumann recalled,

Every newcomer in a concentration camp goes through a terrible period in which she is shaken to the core, no matter how strong her physique, how calm her nerves….[because of this] gradually the interest for the outside world and for the other prisoners declines. The reaction to horrifying events grows less intense and does not last so long. It is a process of hardening, until soon the news of death sentences, executions, floggings and even atrocious tortures causes no more than a faint reaction of horror which is over in a few minutes, and then there is again laughter and talk, and the camp life goes on as though nothing had happened.80

Beyond mere “hardening,” they began to lash out at their fellow prisoners. Based on her

experiences and those of others, Buber-Neumann rejects the old claim of Christianity; she

denies that “suffering ennobles the sufferer.” She points out that, in the concentration

camp environment, “the constant provocations and constant humiliations” demoralized

the prisoners in both senses of the word: they lost their hope and their morals. Envy

became commonplace, greed ubiquitous, and spite rampant. With only a few exceptions,

people degenerated within the camp environment both physically, by wasting away, and

morally, by becoming numb and self-centered. Most telling of all, Buber-Neumann

describes these transformations in the same paragraph, implying that the physical body

79 Ibid., 184.

80 Ibid., 184-5.

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and the moral body were unequivocally intertwined. Regardless of which camp held the

prisoners, it changed them, often for the very worst.

Managing these dual transformations seems to have been a key element of

survival. When commenting on her survival throughout her seven years in Soviet and

Nazi captivity, Buber-Neumann ascribes it to her good physical condition, “well- balanced” nerves, undying self-respect, and “above all, because [she] always found people who needed [her],” both as a friend and as a fellow survivor.81 While it sounds so

simple, this process of survival took skill and luck to pull off. One could only maintain

one’s physical condition through a combination of soft work and improved food, luxuries in the camps. Buber-Neumann managed to achieve this by working as a Block Senior in

the concentration camps and in the vegetable garden in the Gulag.82 To keep up one’s

nerves and survival instinct, one had to adapt oneself to the suffering that was an inherent part of the camps. Buber-Neumann recalled the same change in herself:

I remember that when I was a newcomer in the camp I was shocked and horrified when the women fainted at the roll-call, and in particular when a gipsy [sic] woman suffered the same heart attack each time because she was unable to stand immobile so long. And yet in 1944 when I had to go to the sickbay for some reason or other I calmly picked my way through the dying as they lay in the corridor choking out their lives.83

Emotional distance played a significant role in survival. To guard one’s self-respect, one

had to avoid sinking to the levels of the tormentors. Buber-Neumann, rather than abusing her charges as a Block Senior and making her own life easy, strove to help them as much as possible under the circumstances. She protected them from punishments while at the

81 Ibid., 184.

82 Ibid., 110, 171, 186.

83 Ibid., 185.

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same time ensuring order.84 Finally, maintaining community mitigated the effects of the

camps. One had to have friends, a group or even a single person striving towards the

same goal in order to survive. Through her friends Milena, who snuck her bread and

sugar while she was in the Ravensbrück punishment block, Grete, for whom she procured

a job in the stables in Karlag, her Soviet labor camp, and countless others, Buber-

Neumann kept the flame of her humanity alive and gained the comradeship that helped

support her both physically and emotionally throughout her struggles in the camps.85

Survival was a delicate process, but, through both her natural advantages, the luck of her circumstances, and her ability to adapt to and manage change, Buber-Neumann survived seven years in two sets of concentration camps.

In a way, by surviving, Buber-Neumann won. She outlasted her tormentors and lived her life, achieving the two dreams delayed and imperiled by the camps. More than that, because of her survival, Buber-Neumann was able to compose and publish her memoir, a memoir that uniquely compares two horrific camp systems which sought to control, dehumanize, and obliterate whole classes of people.

84 Ibid., 186.

85 Ibid., 67, 241.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The How of the What: Examining the Structures and Similarities of Camp Memoirs

As this paper comes to a close, it must confront the question of all questions: what

was the point of all this reading? What, if anything, did it discover and how did it do so?

To begin to answer that question, however, this paper will review the path traveled so far.

In the first chapter, it explored the power and pitfalls of using human testimony for

historical research. As everyone knows from his or her own life, human memory can be

unreliable, specifically when dealing with specific figures, chronologies, or dates.

Although these concerns about memory may be in large part overblown, they still need to

be taken into consideration. Additionally, researchers face problems when confronting

human testimony, for, even if a subject remembers the past correctly, he will tell it

imperfectly. Whether arranging testimony to fit our cultural or personal narrative

structures, editing it for better-sounding stories, changing it with our added perspective,

or adjusting it for our target audiences, people naturally introduce some aspects of this

bias into the stories that they tell others. While influencing all forms of historical

documents, these flaws can particularly affect testimony-based history.

For Gulag and Holocaust literature specifically, this paper looked at several other

difficulties inherent in the source materials. Due to the alien worlds that their authors

describe, historians may fail to cognitively or emotionally understand what they have

read. They may come across Gulag literature published under the censorship of the

Soviet Union that misrepresents the fundamental character of the Gulag camps. Gulag

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memoirs published in the West can be troublesome as well, for concerns about fame and political philosophies could have swayed their recollections. These genre-specific flaws apply to more than just the Gulag, however.

Holocaust literature poses a similarly thorny problem for researchers. As a testament to a bygone era, community, and language, this literature often fails to translate to this modern age: researchers have no immediate context that they can look to for further insight. Furthermore, even if they can understand it, these researchers have to be aware of the motivations for writing. Possibly composing their works to fight against oblivion, repetition, or the critics of the Israeli state, Holocaust survivors could have altered their stories to achieve these aims. Historians have to treat all of this memory business with skepticism, extra research, and verification.

Historians cannot allow themselves to throw the baby out with the bathwater, however. For all their flaws, inconsistencies, and concerns, memoirs provide glimpses into an often unseen and unexplored world. They testify to people’s actual feelings, emotions, and stories. They present pictures of everyday life, not just those extraordinary days that stand out in the flow of history. Most importantly, these memoirs and stories allow historians to connect with the path on an emotional level. Oftentimes, history neglects the human side of the past, the story. Yet, as two conduits to the past, one intellectual and the other emotional, history and story very much depend on one another: history allows readers to contextualize and better understand the very stories that inspire them to study history. On one hand, historians need the intellectual side to add depth, breadth, and accuracy to the study of the past. On the other, especially for such emotionally charged events as the Gulag and the Holocaust, they need emotional

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engagement to fully understand the experiences of those who lived through them.

Memoirs are valuable enough to compensate for the many drawbacks of human memory.

This emphasis on personal testimony guided this paper through the Holocaust and

Gulag concentration camps. Along its journey throughout the Holocaust prisons and camps, the memoirists revealed the imperceptibly building prejudice against the Jews of

Europe, the gradually rising tide of national and Nazi persecution, the naivety and immigration quotas that kept the Jews from fleeing Europe for Israel or the United States, and the horribly cramped and desolate ghettos that separated them from broader society.

They described in heartbreaking fashion the train rides that brought them to the concentration camps and the confusing and chaotic procedures and selections when they first arrived. Through their experiences, researchers could piece together the myriad of deceptions that the Germans used to put their prisoners at ease right before they gassed them: polite guards, fake railroad stations, proper locker rooms, false signs, and even dummy shower heads all alleviated the prisoners’ doubts and made them easy prey for the Nazi killing machine. Their tales carried on stereotypes of the German people through their descriptions of the efficient, clean, and disciplined Nazi guards. Their stories also described the importance of bread, soft jobs, community, and luck in a prisoner’s survival; these things alone would help a prisoner avoid the selections. They testify to the many transformations (physical, mental, emotional, moral, and religious) that the prisoners underwent during their time in the camps. Finally, their memoirs show historians that, even after liberation, many prisoners could not move past their time in the camps: some part of them remained there, imprisoned forever.

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While similar in terms of human suffering, the story of the Gulag reads differently from that of the Holocaust. Memoirists’ tales either began with the Great Terror, a time of wild hysteria, constant disappearances, and rampant suspicion and betrayal in the

Soviet Union, or with the invasion of their country during World War II. Their memoirs revealed the almost religious trust that loyal Communists had in their government and the difficulties they faced coming to grips with their true peril. They also detailed the wide variety of prisoners trapped in the Gulag prisons; prisoners ranging from educated

Communists to the politically uninformed, from former generals to common workers, and from foreign politicals to local peasants. Guided by their words, this paper described the process of interrogation and came to understand its importance in the Soviet justice system. Recalling their time in prison, these memoirists brought this paper through the monotonous existence in their cells, their daily walks, and their terrible food. They wrote of their travels on filthy and cramped Stolypin carriages to Siberia and to Kolyma. Their memoirs brought the Soviet criminals and their immense power over political prisoners to life. These memoirists set up the dilemma that a woman faced every day in the camps: she could sell her body for food or maintain her morals and starve. These tales also dramatized the sexual perversion of the camps, places in which women suffered rape and abuse with a depressing regularity. Memoirists exposed the constant, gnawing hunger of the camps, a hunger that transformed a piece of bread into an object of religious significance. The former prisoners recounted their debilitating work in the mines, forests, and frozen tundra all for the promise of extra rations and early release. Memoirs explained the vicious spiral in which less work led to less food and even less work, and so on until death. They revealed that only with food, soft work, purpose, beauty, and

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time off in the hospital, could prisoners hope to survive. They remembered the mindless

and greedy dokhodyagas, those who had sunk so low as to hardly be worthy of their

humanity. Then, through the memoirists’ experiences, this paper came to understand the

limited freedom that followed their time in the camps: while free, their lives still had to

conform to the state’s expectations. Like the Holocaust, the Gulag experience affected

the lives of its victims far beyond their actual years in the camps.

Through her testimony, Margarete Buber-Neumann helped this paper bring these

two worlds together. As the only survivor who experienced both camp systems and lived

to write a memoir about it, she alone holds the key to understanding them within the

context of memoir and testimony. Corroborated for the most part by background

research and the other memoirists, her stories bring out interesting and previously uncovered parallels and disconnects between these two camp systems. She claims that, although separated by thousands of miles and the whole spectrum of political philosophy, the Gulag and the Holocaust put their prisoners through similar prison systems, soul- sucking labor, daily and heart-rending suffering, and gradual transformations. She also

reveals the inherent differences between the two systems of camps, differences that range

from the intentions of the hospital staffs to the fortunes of women in these strange

environments. Enduring both camps, Buber-Neumann stands as a link between these two

worlds, an authority to which researchers can turn for clarifications.

This project reinterprets memoir as a valuable historical source, one that can provide fresh and potentially enlightening perspectives on past events. While weak in terms of describing processes, names, dates, and other very specific information, these memoirs overwhelm these flaws with their strengths. By giving readers a story and a

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protagonist to which they can relate, memoirs connect them to the more emotional, more

personal side of history. Through these human eyes, one can better understand what it

meant to be involved in a historical event, something that traditional history often lacks.

These memoirs are nothing if not accessible; anyone can sit down and read them and,

providing that he or she chooses well, increase their knowledge of the time period and

event in question. Memoirs deserve a place at the table with other, more “acceptable”

historical sources.

Combining a number of memoirs into a one composite picture offers a better

understanding of the broader historical experience of those in these camps. Few works

touch on memoirs and labor camps; for this reason, few people outside of the history

profession have any real idea what life in these camps was like. However, this paper

“provide[s] a medium through which these scattered voices might issue in one

statement.”1 By using so many voices, this paper has eliminated some of the flaws of memoirs: consensus, by and large, fills the silences and corrects the mistakes.

The way in which survivors remember and recount their experiences is significant. While examining the experiences themselves is an important part of this paper, another is uncovering the process of recalling these very experiences of the mid- twentieth century. In addition to understanding the what, this paper wished to gain some sense of the how of these two labor camps: how the memoirists report their suffering, what stereotypes persist in their memoirs, on what topics do they remain silent. Finding similarities between survival scripts, the inability of established language to describe the camps, and the moral hardening of all prisoners, differences between the hospitals in both

1 Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), vi.

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sets of camps and the role of religion in each, this paper uncovers some of the underlying

narrative structures that pervade these memoirs.

Survivors, in some sense experts on the process, describe a similar formula for living through the camps. With others’ experiences and their own, these memoirists

show that survival depended on a combination of several factors. So many

commonalities exist that, at times, a camp memoir reads almost like a script: they arrive

at the camps, they quickly adjust to the new conditions, they find soft work and extra food, community, and people to help them and, because of these advantages, manage to hang on to their humanity while all those around them degenerate into monsters. Their memories agree heartily on the necessity of this process. After all, it happened to them; it protected them when so many were around them, dying.

Memoirists all reported coining new words to properly describe the tragedy of their new environments. Upon arriving at the camps, prisoners found themselves dealing with starvation and desperation, concepts completely alien to their past lives. For this reason, prisoners invented new terms to talk about the horrors of everyday life in the camps. Primo Levi describes the dilemma well:

Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say ‘hunger’, we say ‘tiredness’, ‘fear’, ‘pain’, we say ‘winter’ and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.2

One striking example is the names used to denote those prisoners closest to death. Called

muselmanns and dokhodyagas, words for goners in the Nazi and Soviet camps

2 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (London: Sphere Books, 1987), 129.

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respectively, by their peers, these prisoners stood one step away from the common grave.

When in the camps and situations completely alien to their previous lives, survivors remember supplementing their vocabulary with new words to describe their

surroundings. Clearly, unprecedented suffering requires unprecedented language.

Religion plays a differing role in the two camps of memoirists. For the Soviets,

religion barely factors into their memories. Out of the ten memoirists examined, only

three mentioned religion at all; furthermore, only one of these three, an American, admits

having religious beliefs and praying to God in the camps. How could religion, such a

central part of the human experience, be absent from these memoirs? The answer lies in

the background of the memoirists. As members of the intelligentsia, these memoirists

grew up in households skeptical of and hostile to religious sentiment. They trusted

instead in reason and science to explain man’s nature. In addition to their upbringing,

their belief in communism impacted their attitudes towards religion. In place of religion,

communists turned to Communist Party philosophy to rule their lives, inform their

decisions, and teach them right from wrong. While the Soviet memoirists might have

privately held religious beliefs, these beliefs fail to affect their memoirs because they

were either not deep enough or important enough for them to turn to during times of

extreme stress. Lacking a religious framework for their suffering, they instead focused

on their unfortunate place in an unjust camp system, placing more blame on the Soviet

state than on their own past transgressions.

Memoirs from the Nazi concentration camps, on the other hand, often place their

whole camp experience within a religious framework. With all-Jewish authors, this fact

is not surprising. For practicing Jews, their stories naturally fit within the framework of

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the Old Testament: their lives were part of an ongoing struggle, a constant tension between God and his disobedient children. Even if they were not observant Jews, all of the memoirists chosen, with the exception of Buber-Neumann, came from Jewish households. As at least nominal members of the Jewish faith, they had some exposure to the role of religion in personal history. Steeped in this religious tradition, therefore, they gave religion a large role in their stories: as part of their worldview, it very much affected how they related their stories, sufferings, and survival.

Both sets of memoirists underscore the fact that prejudices and stereotypes persist in memoir narratives just as frequently as in human memory. In the Soviet camps, these stereotypes come out when Westerners describe the Soviet criminals and guards.

Alluding to Asiatic brutality, Russian simplicity, and non-European primitiveness,

Westerners denigrate their Soviet captors. In a similar way, memoirists from all walks of life comment on the cleanliness, discipline, efficiency, and heartlessness of the Nazi camps. Attributing these qualities to the German and Russian national characters, memoirists demonstrate the durability of prejudice, especially in memory. Because people organize their memories around existing structures and patterns, these memoirists recount their memories in line with their past stereotypes.

Testifying to the regret of missed opportunity and one’s desire to explain oneself to others, memoirists often choose to explain how they got caught up in the camps and why they did not escape. The Soviets who endured the Gulag take great pains to depict the mixture of optimism and fear that kept them from believing that they, too, could be arrested. Those from the Nazi concentration camps cite gradually increasing persecution and all that they stood to lose by fleeing. But for what purpose? Why do these

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memoirists take such great trouble to detail what kept them from running away? First, it comprised an essential part of their experience: many spent their nights in the camps pondering that very question. They blamed themselves, looking wistfully back at the past and wondering what could have been. Others sought to understand what had brought them there, what elements of the Nazi or Soviet camp system had prevented them from understanding the true dangers of their situations. Quite naturally, in prison and the camps, memoirists had perhaps too much time to ruminate; these ruminations and regrets come out in their writings. The rest wrote to justify their experiences to others. After all, to an outsider it seems like it would have been obvious to flee and live free. The memoirists write against this hindsight bias and seek to justify themselves, trying to patiently explain how anyone could have gotten caught up in the labor camps.

Once trapped in the labor camps, all the memoirists recall similar transformations in response to similar levels of suffering. Life was bleak in the concentration camps; no one can doubt that. To hunker down and endure, prisoners had to change the way they ate, thought, and acted. Almost to the man, all remember how moral standards so ubiquitous in their previous lives crumbled within the confines of the camps. Thievery and pettiness were commonplace, deception and backstabbing, everyday affairs.

Confronted by this reality, all memoirists remember adapting to survive. They became callous, uncaring in the face of the suffering of others. Petrov remembers,

A man lying next to you dies, a friend. What of it? He dies today, I will tomorrow. Why feel sorry about him? And the one who stays alive…without saying a word about his death to anybody hurriedly searches through the wretched belongings of the dead man in the hope of finding a piece of bread….Those who were more impressionable and sensitive were the first to die, for their strength was undermined not only by the conditions of their life but also by their inner suffering. It was dangerous and almost impossible to think of one’s family and friends, one’s past and future. You had to

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think only of how to survive in this life—how to get an extra amount of calories, to avoid the slightest conflict with the powers that be…3

Like Petrov, they came to accept the norms that had seemed so ridiculous to them

upon their arrival: many came to accept that every man had his price and the only way to

get ahead was to step on the toes of others. Ekart comments on this phenomenon,

proclaiming that his was “a jungle existence. Either you eat somebody or they eat you.

There is not enough food for all, and what there is is unevenly divided. Those that

receive less, die. Neither you not I can do anything about it. It is the way the camp

works.”4 Levi has his own words to add, as well:

In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: ‘to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away.’ In the Lager, where man is alone and where the struggle for life is reduced to its primordial mechanism, this unjust law is openly in force, is recognized by all.5

Whether meant to explain their own heartless and unfeeling actions or simply to describe

their experiences to their readers, all these memoirists place a great deal of weight on this

gradual yet dramatic moral transformation.

Yet, even with this gradual hardening, memoirists tend to see themselves as

uniquely capable and less corruptible than the average prisoner. Although professing

humility, most memoirists confess possessing something a special sort of strength that

helped them to hold on when so many others fell into the abyss. They alone had the

moral fortitude not to degenerate completely in the camps; they retained the last remnants

of their humanity. This exceptionalism could come from several sources. It could stem

3 Vladimir Petrov, Soviet Gold; My Life as a Slave Laborer in the Siberian Mines (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1949), 300.

4 Antoni Ekart, Vanished without Trace: The Story of Seven Years in Soviet Russia (Ondon: Max Parrish, 1955), 61.

5 Levi, If This Is a Man, 94.

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from a need to explain why they survived when so many died. It might reflect a personal pride: people naturally consider themselves as better, faster, and stronger than others.

Finally, this universal sense of hope and strength could reflect intentional silences.

Terrible situations often bring out the worst in people, even wonderful people. For this reason, memoirists could have slanted their stories to make themselves appear less depraved and desperate than they were: why would they want to air their dirty laundry for all the world to see?6 Although historians cannot determine one invariable cause for this

moral exceptionalism, simply knowing that it exists will helps them to remember to

maintain a critical eye when reading memoirs.

All memoirists remember and comment on the newfound power of food within

the camps. Using quasi-religious language to describe something as simple as a piece of

bread, they reveal how much hunger changed their priorities. Bread stood at the center of

their lives: they slept and woke thinking of it. Rather than writing of love, of poetry, of

revenge, memoirists spend so much time preoccupied with bread. On one hand, this

demonstrates their new hierarchy of needs. On the other, it testifies to how much time

they spent thinking of bread. Because it occupied so much of their time each day and

compromised such a major part of their camp experiences, prisoners naturally included

lengthy descriptions of bread in their memoirs.

On the whole, the memoirists portray the guards as heartless, almost soulless,

monsters. Destroyed by the forced labor and starved by the pitiful rations, prisoners

could not love those who enforced despotic rules and cruel punishments. Most prisoners

remember the guards as scum of the earth, cold and greedy people who could have truly

6 Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 94- 95.

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benefited the world more if they had never existed. His vision narrowed by his own

experiences, a prisoner could not appreciate the predicament of the guards: some of them

had private crises of confidence and felt just as trapped and miserable as their prisoners.

No memoirist even comments on this, however. Instead, they wished to differentiate

themselves from the guards and contrast their own humanity with the guards’ lack of it.

Isabella Leitner recalls the guards in her camp,

They have ruddy cheeks, immaculate uniforms, but the sickness of their souls and the stench of death about them are so pervasive that we are not sure they are real. We are pure and beautiful. We have nothing in common with them. They are Germans. We were born of mothers the smell of whose burning flesh permeates the air, but what were they born of? Who sired them?7

By disassociating themselves from their captors, memoirists could assert their superiority

over their captors. While understandable, this reluctance to portray the guards as human

beings narrows our perspective and understanding. Their biases limit us.

Survivors always remember acts of altruism during their stay in the camps

because these acts played such an important part in their lives. When they were at their

lowest ebb, when they were closest to death, they recall someone, either a friend or a complete stranger, who helped them pull through and survive. Whether remembering a piece of bread, a helping hand, or even simple words of encouragement, memoirists always include them: these experiences occupied a central part of their stories. Unlike so many mundane parts of each of our lives, these moments truly mattered: without it, they would have died. For this reason, they make sure to include these in their memoirs. If we take these experiences at face value, however, we might be misled into thinking that these acts of altruism happened to everyone. Precisely because all of our reports come from survivors, we naturally tend to hear of more instances of altruism than probably

7 Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978)

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occurred in the camps. Because they benefitted from the help of others, they were able to

survive long enough to compose their memoirs. Those who did not receive kindnesses

died; no one can tell their stories of callousness, despair, and abandonment. Additionally,

those survivors felt indebted to those people who gave them new leases on life: a desire

to reciprocate leads them to include these stories in their memoirs. Thus, because it enabled their survival and because they, not the dead, retell the stories, historians could be misled into thinking that acts of altruism were ubiquitous in the camps. While they are key parts of these memoirists’ labor camp experiences, they might not generalize to a broader set of prisoners.

By examining these memoirs closely, historians can also tease out the differences in what types of information men and women remember. Men generally concerned

themselves more with escape than women: they devote at least some portion of their

memoirs to this topic. Whether due to the inherent manliness of an escape out of an

armed camp or simply the harsher conditions for men in each camp systems, men recall

themselves and others daydreaming about and sometimes, in the cases of Rawicz and

Willenburg, even carrying out successful escape plans. In contrast to men, women either

failed to mention escape plans or, in the case of Adamova-Sliozberg, openly ridiculed

them as dangerous and futile: they would take them away from those they loved, possibly

forever. Isabella Leitner recalls that her sister came back immediately after escaping, apologizing, “I couldn’t leave you. I can’t live while you die. We must all escape or

perish together.”8 Instead of wasting their time thinking about or writing down these

plans, women tended to spend their hours and pages dealing with a much more important

part of their camp experience, relationships.

8 Ibid., 63.

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The memoirs of women tend to focus more on the need for companionship than

those of the men. This does not mean that men did not make or need friends in the labor

camps; however, women devote considerably more effort to describing both their friends and the effects of these friendships on their overall well-being. Women remember suffering the most in solitary confinement; conversely, they remember celebrating the most whenever that isolation ended. Whereas the men write more about their own struggles, women’s accounts of time in the camps almost always revolve around sisters, friends, or mothers and how those people helped keep them alive. Men were something else entirely. Vladimir Petrov recalls the intense desire for solitude in the camps,

Camp life generally breeds in people an almost morbid desire for solitude, a wish to avoid as much as possible any association with others. The longer a man lives in a camp tent, in unavoidable contact with hundreds of people, deprived of the opportunity to choose his own society, the more he tries, at least for a time, to withdraw from the rest. As a rule this is impossible and therefore Alexeev [his work partner] and I were only too happy to remain alone…We did not ask one another anything, and did not speak about ourselves, silent for the most part, or exchanging occasional brief remarks.9

In contrast to these men, men who remained almost eerily silent as they worked, the women tried, at least tentatively, to make friends, share their stories, and come to a greater understanding of their fellow men and women. Indeed, women are the only memoirists who recall platonic male friends and how much that brightened their camp experiences; male memoirists only rarely mention anything similar to these emotions.10

Based on the sheer amount of words describing these two concepts, researchers can see

9 Vladimir Petrov, Soviet Gold: My Life as a Slave Laborer in the Siberian Mines (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1949), 319)

10 Margarete Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler (London: Pimlico, 2008), 85; Olga Adamova-Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey: How One Woman Survived Stalin’s Gulag (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 88.

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that, while men devoted more time to planning and relating their escape efforts, women more highly valued and documented their relationships.

Relating to this phenomenon, women placed more emphasis on emotional or spiritual well-being than men. For the memoirs of the men, survival was something simple: it involved more food, rest, and hope. The women, on the other hand, still needed to see a sense of beauty in the world. Whether this came from still reciting poetry to those sharing their train cars, reading a good book, keeping their hair safe from the camp barber, or simply wearing a fancy colored handkerchief, an appreciation of beauty helped women prisoners endure the torturous existence lived in a concentration camp.

When recalling their liberations, Nazi labor camp survivors tend to view the future more optimistically than their Soviet counterparts. Certainly the Nazi survivors felt pain and alienation upon their release, but, for the most part, they could look forward to a future free from persecution, free from the camps that destroyed their lives, free from the fear of the Third Reich. Their trial, while harrowing, had definitively ended. For this reason, their stories afterwards, while dealing with post-traumatic stress, reflect a return to life. Soviet memoirists, on the other hand, remember their own liberation with an even mixture of fear and excitement. Despite their freedom, many could not escape the fear endemic to the Soviet camps: the Gulag camps still existed and the Soviet government had a penchant for re-arresting past prisoners. The newly liberated worried about further terms in the camps. Exiled to provincial cities, prevented from having normal jobs, and given a limited-travel passport, they were vulnerable. Because of this fear, most fled the

USSR for the West. Only once they made it to the West do they remember feeling free and safe from the Soviet security apparatus. Thus, due to the continued existence of the

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Soviet labor camps, its former prisoners lacked the sense of closure that blessed those

who had lived through the Nazi labor camps.

Finally, through their use of standard, as opposed to metric measurements, we can

see that some of the Soviet memoirists actively tailored their memoirs to appeal to the

United States. Every country in Europe and the former U.S.S.R. uses and has used the

metric system. Yet, even though only one of the ten memoirists grew up in the United

States, three of them converted all of their kilometers, grams, and liters into miles,

pounds, and ounces; four others alternate back and forth between the two systems. While

we could posit that American publishers made these changes to appeal to their fellow countrymen, English presses published two of these: why would they completely change their units of measurement? The answer, particularly for the memoirs of Ekart and

Rawicz, could lie with the intended audiences, the American people and American politicians. In the post-World War II world, the United States stood as the bastion of freedom and capitalism and the exemplar of prosperity and consumerism. More importantly than that, however, it stood as the leader of the non-Communist world.

Disenchanted by their time in the Soviet labor camps and wishing to make as much of a difference as possible, these memoirists sought to publish their works in the United

States. Here, there were people who would fight the communist menace. Here, there were people eager to confirm their stereotypes about the injustice of communism in practice and the backwardness of the Soviet Union. Here, there were still naïve communists pointing to the successes of the Worker’s Paradise. To reach these three groups, memoirists tailored their units to their audiences in the United States.

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After all this analysis, description, and emotion, this paper will now end where it started, Primo Levi’s poem If This Is a Man.

You who live safe In your warm houses, You who find, returning in the evening, Hot food and friendly faces: Consider if this is a man Who works in the mud Who does not know peace Who fights for a scrap of bread Who dies because of a yes or a no. Consider if this is a woman, Without hair and without name With no more strength to remember, Her eyes empty and her womb cold Like a frog in winter. Meditate that this came about: I commend these words to you. Carve them in your hearts At home, in the street, Going to bed, rising; Repeat them to your children, Or may your house fall apart, May illness impede you, May your children turn their faces from you.

Survivors struggle under the weight of their responsibility. Some allude to it

indirectly; some expressly tell of the pressure that burdens them. After the Nazi camps,

so many had died that only a chosen few remained to bear witness. For the Soviet

memoirists, the government censored, suppressed, and distorted stories to the point that

survivors felt like their memoirs alone could keep the real story alive. Yet, to them, it

was more than just telling a personal story. These memoirists do not testify only for

themselves, but also for the thousands whose bodies crumpled under the weight of the

labor, whose souls shriveled with the lack of bread, and whose stories disappeared in the

crush of time. This fear helps explain Levi’s tone. The audience can not only feel his

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sadness, but also his desperation: he wants all to remember. For this reason, he turns to

drastic measures to ensure that they would do so.

With his religious language, Levi charges us to remember with an authority

greater than his own. At first glance, it is only Levi who urges his readers, all of them, to

“carve” these memories in their actions, their thoughts, and their very souls. The

phrasing of his exhortation, however, reveals Levi’s true intentions. His order mirrors

Deuteronomy 11: 18-19, which speaks of how the Jews should treat God’s

commandments:

You shall therefore lay up these words of mind in your heart and in your soul; and you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise.

With this similarity of structure, Levi takes on the persona of a prophet, someone

speaking for God. He is not asking his readers to please remember the Holocaust and

pass it on to their children; rather, his message reads more like, “Testify or else.” In the

same way that the faithful should meditate on God’s words daily and let them govern

their every action, so should all treat Levi’s memoir. With the weight of Scripture behind

him, Levi raises his work to the level of the divine, implying that, in some way at least,

testifying to the Holocaust should be treated as a religious obligation.

Levi adds to this divine sanction, however. Invoking the God of the Old

Testament, a God of wrath and punishment, Levi warns his audience that, if they fail in

this task of remembering, they will face punishment. At first glance, this charge seems odd, harsh even. How, especially after living through a camp sprung from and fueled by

hate, could someone wish such ill upon others? After consideration, the audience can

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only come to one conclusion: Levi considers silence the most pernicious of the sins. To be silent is to be cowardly. To be silent is to be cruel. To be silent is to be culpable. It

was this same silence that allowed the Nazis to take the Jews from their homes into the

ghettos and concentration camps. It was this same silence that let the NKVD knock on

doors in the middle of the night and take husbands, brothers, and sons away to Siberia,

often never to return. And it is this same silence that will allow atrocities like these to

happen in the future. Levi writes against all of this. With this realization, readers can

come to see Levi’s and even their own place in the cycle of testimony. He, like other

memoirists from these camps, feels an intense pressure to spread the memories of those

who died unknown, unburied, and un-mourned. For this reason, he tries so hard to bring

his readers into the cycle of testimony. And, on some level, he is successful. When

confronted with such suffering and hatred, they cannot remain a passive audience; they, too, have an obligation to testify. Their place may be at the fringes, inviting people to read the work of others, but it is important nonetheless. Memoirs indeed broaden people’s knowledge of the whole human experience, illustrate the very real dangers of racial intolerance and unjustified paranoia, and demonstrate the value of personal testimony as they try to understand the past.

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APPENDICIES

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APPENDIX A

Memoirist Index

Nazi Camp Memoirists

Judith Isaacson Brought into the camps from Hungary at the age of (1925—) 19 with her mother and aunt in 1944, Isaacson survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and Hessisch- Lichtenau until April 1945. She lives in Maine, having retired from teaching and college administration.

Benjamin Jacobs Coming of age in Dobra, Poland, Jacobs had started (1919-2004) dental school by the time of the German occupation. The German police took him and his father to the ghetto, Auschwitz, and camps starting in 1940. There, much like Primo Levi, Jacobs survived because of his professional skills: his dentistry gave him an easy job. He moved to Boston after the war.

Isabella Leitner Taken from her home of Hungary in 1944 by the (d. 2009) Germans, Leitner lived through Auschwitz and two other labor camps until her liberation in 1945. She lived to write four books and to travel and talk extensively about her experiences.

Primo Levi Growing up in Turin, Italy, Levi left his job as an (1919-1987) industrial chemist to join the partisans against the fascist government. Taken to Auschwitz in 1943, Levi survived because of his skills as a chemist. Liberated in 1945, he went back to his job as a chemist and began writing autobiographical works about his camp experiences.

Filip Müller Taken from Slovakia into Auschwitz at the age of (1922—) 20 in 1942, Müller worked in the Sonderkommando, undressing and burning Jewish corpses. Liberated from a sub-camp of Mauthausen by American forces in 1945, Müller today lives in Western Europe.

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George Salton Forced away from his home of Tyczyn, Poland and (1928—) sent to a variety of concentration camps (Rzeszow, Plaszow, Flossenburg, Comar, Ravensbrück, and several others) at the age of 14, Salton survived through the camps until his liberation in 1945. He then immigrated to the United States, worked in the D.O.D., and retired to Florida.

Jack Weiss From Czechoslovakia, Weiss and his father were (1930—) caught up in Auschwitz in late 1944. After his father died in Auschwitz, Weiss was transferred to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945. He left Europe at the age of 17 and moved to Toronto, Canada.

Eli Wiesel Born in Romania, Wiesel was taken into Auschwitz (1928—) in 1944. Surviving the selection process, Wiesel then went to Buchenwald. After liberation in 1945, he went on to become an award-winning author, activist, and university professor.

Samuel Willenburg Growing up in Czestochowa, Poland, Willenburg (1923—) joined the Polish Army at the age of 16 to fight against the invading Germans. Placed in Treblinka in 1942, Willenburg freed himself during a mass revolt and escape in 1943. From there, he went to join the Polish underground and participate in the Warsaw Uprising. He now lives in Italy.

Soviet Camp Memoirists

Antoni Ekart An engineer from Warsaw, Poland, Ekart was (b. 1913 or 1914) captured during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. For the next seven and a half years, he lived and worked in Vorkuta and several other camps. Released in 1947, Ekart traveled home to Poland and settled in Sweden.

Evgenia Ginzburg Born and raised in Moscow, Ginzburg moved with (1904-1977) her family to Kazan, a regional capital. Arrested in 1937, Ginzburg served her term in the prisons and Kolyma camps until 1947. Rearrested in 1949 and held until 1955, Ginzburg then moved to Moscow to write her works, hoping that, with the Thaw, they

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would be published in USSR. They were only published in the West until 1989.

Gustav Herling Hailing from Poland and educated at the University (1919-2000) of Warsaw, Herling was arrested in 1940 for trying to cross the Soviet border. Spending time in camps in Western Russia, Herling secured his release in 1942 when many Poles received amnesty. After fighting in the war for the Free Polish Army, Herling settled in Naples, Italy to write literary and anti-communist works.

Elinor Lipper Originally from Holland, Lipper attended medical school in Berlin. Attracted by the ideas of communism, she journeyed to the Soviet Union in 1937 and was arrested two months later. After spending the next eleven years in prisons and the Kolyma camps, she was returned to Poland and immediately fled to the United States.

Vladimir Petrov From Russia, Petrov was studying at a technical (1915-1999) university in Leningrad when arrested in 1935. Arriving at Magadan in 1936, he was soon sent to the mines in Kolyma. Released in 1941, Petrov journeyed across war-torn Europe to reach Italy, where he spent the rest of the war. After the war, he immigrated to the United States.

Nicholas Prychodko Born and raised in Ukraine, Prychodko worked as a (1904-1980) professor at Kiev University until his arrest in 1938. After spending three years in the Siberian camps, he fled to Germany in 1941 and to Ontario, Canada in 1948.

Slavomir Rawicz Born in Poland and serving in its armed forces at (1915-2004) the time of the Nazi and Soviet invasion, Rawicz was arrested by the NKVD in 1941 and shipped off to Siberia. He and seven other survivors escaped from a camp in Yakutsk in 1942 and walked all the way to India. Coming to Britain to train as a Polish air force pilot, Rawicz never left, dying there in 2004.

Olga Adamova-Sliozberg Raised in the town Samara on the Volga River, (1902-1991) Adamova-Sliozberg became an economist and moved to Moscow with her husband, who worked

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as a professor. Both were arrested in 1936; however, she was sentenced to the Kolyma camps while he was shot. Leaving behind her children, she went to the camps until her release in 1946. Rearrested in 1949, Adamova-Sliozberg returned to Moscow for the last time in 1956.

Thomas Sgovio Originally from Buffalo, New York, Sgovio (1916-1997) immigrated with his mother and sister in 1935 to join his father, who, after being deported from the United States to Germany, had fled to Russia. Arrested by the NKVD in 1938, Sgovio spent eight and a half years in prisons and the Kolyma camp. Although freed for a brief period, Sgovio was rearrested in 1949 sent to Siberian lumber camps until 1954. He and his family escaped the Soviet Union in 1960 by going to Italy and then the United States.

Karlo Stajner A Croatian Communist since 1919, Stajner moved (1901-1992) to the USSR in 1932 to help with the Balkan section of the Comintern. Living and working in Moscow as a foreigner, Stajner was arrested in 1936 and sentenced to twenty years in the Siberian camps. After his release, he returned to Yugoslavia in 1956 to live, write, and publish his book, which was allowed in Yugoslavia in 1971.

Nazi and Soviet Labor Camp Memoirists

Margarete Buber-Neumann Born in Germany, Buber-Neumann became active (1901-1989) in the communist movement there. Leaving with her common-law husband in 1933 for the Soviet Union, she worked in Moscow for the Comintern. Arrested shortly after her husband in 1937, Buber- Neumann spent two years in the Karaganda labor camp. Then, as a result of the Nazi-Soviet Non- Aggression pact, she was handed over to German authorities in 1940. She spent the next five years in the Ravensbrück concentration camp until her liberation in 1945.

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APPENDIX B

Glossary

Blat— Soviet bribery.

Blatnie— Criminals within the Soviet Gulag.

ComIntern— Kommunisticheskiĭ Internatsional. An abbreviation for the Communist International, an organization that worked to promote communist revolution worldwide.

Dokhodyaga— A Soviet prisoner very near to death. Often identifiable by the frostbite on his face, the hungry stare in his eyes, and the general apathy with which he regarded life.

GULAG— Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei. An acronym that served as common shorthand for the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps.

Häftling— A German prison inmate, oftentimes referring to one in a concentration or labor camp.

Judenrat— A ghetto government comprised of Jewish collaborators.

Kaddish— The Jewish prayer for the dead.

Kapo— A work boss in the concentration camps. A role filled by criminals, politicals, and Jews alike.

Karlag— Karaganda Labor Camp in the Soviet Union, home of Margarete Buber-Neumann for two years.

KPD— Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or German Communist Party.

Musselman-- Same as dokhodyaga, but in the Nazi camp system.

NKVD— Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. The Soviet Secret Police Force.

Parasha— A latrine bucket in the Soviet prisons.

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Sonderkommando— A work group of Jewish prisoners formed to dispose of corpses left over from the gassing.

Stakhanovites— Workers who performed 125% of the norm in the Soviet camps. They were often rewarded with extra rations or privileges.

Stolypin carriage— The phrase Stolypin carriage comes from the inventor of these prison trains. Pytor Stolypin, the minister of the interior, was the first to pack prisoners into these small, dark cars. For this reason, they bore his moniker in the time of the Gulag.

Tufta A process of faking work norms in the Soviet camps. Refers to the process and the fake work itself.

Urka— Another name for the Soviet criminals within the Gulag camps.

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