AID TO THE CHURCH IN NEED FR. MICHAEL SHIELDS, JOHN NEWTON & TERRY MURPHY Strength am d Suffering StrengthTHE MARTYRS am OFd SufferingMAGADAN Martyrs of Magadan - Memories from the Gulag © 2007 Aid to the Church in Need All rights reserved Web version: Strength Amid Suffering - The Martyrs of Magadan © 2015 Aid to the Church in Need All rights reserved Testaments collated by Fr Michael Shields Text edited by John Newton and Terry Murphy Design by Ronan Lynch Via Crucis images courtesy of ACN Italy. Photographs courtesy of Patrick Delapierre/Church of the Nativity of Christ, Magadan, Russia and the private collections of survivors of the camps. Published by Aid to the Church in Need (Ireland) www.acnireland.org FR. MICHAEL SHIELDS, JOHN NEWTON & TERRY MURPHY Strength am d Suffering “People died by the tens, hundreds and thousands. In their place always came new silent slaves, who laboured for some food, a piece of bread. “They died and they were quietly buried. No one had a burial service for them, no family or friends paid their last respects. They did not even dig graves for them, but rather dug a communal trench. And they tossed the naked bodies in the snow and when spring came, wild animals tore apart their bones. “We who managed to survive mourned them. We believe that the Lord accepted these martyrs into the heavenly kingdom. “May all these peoples’ memory live on forever.” OLGA ALEXSEIEVNA GUREEVA Prisoner in the gulag camps for 11 years THE MARTYRS OF MAGADAN AID TO THE CHURCH IN NEED “In this unmarked grave our lives have ended. Who could forget about us if he is a human being?” 2 Strength am d Suffering Contents Foreword by Neville Kyrke-Smith ................................2 Introduction by Father Michael Shields ...................4 THE MARTYRS OF MAGADAN 1 Bronislava Bronislavovna Klimavichute ....................8 2 Olga Alekseievna Gureeva .................................................... 26 3 Andrei Vasilievich Kravtsiv ........................................... 44 4 Stepan Prokopovich Mudrii ........................................ 56 5 Anna Korneevna Portnova........................................... 64 6 Yuri Aleksandrovich Portnov ...................................... 84 7 Polina Vasilevna Ens .....................................................100 8 Sofia Ivanovna Kononenko ........................................110 9 Ivanna Petrovna Lebedinskaia .................................124 10 Maria Ivanovna Vatsyn ................................................134 11 Evgenia Alexandrovna Vadova .................................144 12 Eve Romanovna Anishin .............................................168 13 Anna Ivanovna Zhuk .....................................................184 14 Anastasia Semenovna Lexnik ...................................194 15 Anton Vasilievich Voloshin ........................................202 Glossary of Terms ..........................................................210 THE MARTYRS OF MAGADAN 1 AID TO THE CHURCH IN NEED Now we can read their stories. Strength Foreward by Amid Suffering - The Martyrs of Neville Magadan is a testimony of faith in the face of brutal, inhuman treatment. That Kyrke-Smith these people could live through the frozen hell of the Kolyma prison camp and still cling to their faith is a miracle. AITH HELPS PEOPLE ENDURE SUFFERING. In Soviet times, Historically, Russia has been a crucial F Stalin’s communist regime area of the work of Aid to the Church in sought to drive God’s spirit out of a Need. Father Werenfried van Straaten, faithful people – to create a frozen the charity’s founder, saw the desperate spiritual wasteland in Siberia to mirror need of a faithful forced to endure cruel the cruel, harsh terrain where the gulag communist oppression, and he himself prison camps were established. took great risks to work to preserve the Faith behind the Iron Curtain. Today Aid Hundreds of thousands of innocent to the Church in Need supports Catholic, people were seized – from their homes, Russian Orthodox and ecumenical their villages, even their churches. They projects in Russia, in response to Pope were subjected to torture, beatings and John Paul II’s exhortation that to help interrogation, before being banished our Orthodox brethren is “an imperative to forced-labour camps, often without of charity”. trial. Their alleged crime? They were enemies of the state – an atheistic and The rebirth of the Faith in Russia would totalitarian regime. have been unthinkable without the courage, endurance and unswerving The true extent of what took place faith of hundreds of thousands of in the Soviet labour camps has long these survivors of persecution. Let been veiled from the world’s eyes. The us pray that their example may be an authorities were determined that the inspiration to us all. world should never know the stories of suffering and inhumanity; and the silence of collusion has made the stories hard for Russians to tell. For those who survived, recalling their horrifying experiences was too distressing to NEVILLE KYRKE-SMITH contemplate. National Director Aid to the Church in Need UK 2 Strength am d Suffering FOREWARD BY NEVILLE KYRKE-SMITH The ‘Mask of Sorrows’ memorial to the ‘repressed’, Magadan THE MARTYRS OF MAGADAN 3 AID TO THE CHURCH IN NEED them had been arrested in their early Introduction by twenties because they believed in Father Michael God, which made them “enemies of Shields the people”. I stayed behind in the chapel with Marie Javora, the head of the Madonna House T HAPPENED AT THE END OF community, to listen to the testimony of the 1990s, after the 8 o’clock Olga. She wanted to rehearse her talk. I Saturday morning Mass, It would be the first time she would which was offered every week for publicly witness to the brutality of her those who had suffered and died in 20 years in the prison camps. The words the former prison camps of Stalin were so simple and direct that they hid in the Kolyma, in the far-flung east in their simplicity a depth of pain that is of Russia. Olga from Ukraine and beyond imagining. Bronislava from Lithuania, two Catholic women who by some miracle As she began, her voice quivered. survived the inhuman treatment and Then pausing and holding back her conditions of these infamous camps, tears, she quietly said: “It is so painful were to give their testimony at the to remember.” I felt as if a sword went Marian Congress in Irkutsk. Both of into my own heart, and for one split 4 Strength am d Suffering INTRODUCTION BY FR. MICHAEL SHIELDS second, I seemed to be sharing in her So we must remember. We must listen to pain. She continued: “Only those who their stories and share in their suffering. lived through it can really know what it The pain in my heart has grown for these was like. The hunger, the freezing cold, 10 years of serving the ‘repressed’ (a exhausting labour, a regime beyond word in Russian that is used to describe our strength, the taking away of those who suffered in the camps). This privileges... It was only God who saved pain carries the mark of tragedy but us. Never once did I doubt him. I never more than that it carries the mark of cried or blamed him for what had triumph. It is the Cross. These interviews happened to me. Faith never left me. are the stories of the Cross. It was prayer alone that strengthened my soul and body.” God has given me the privilege here in far-east Siberia of serving these martyrs I have lost count of how many times I of Magadan, these witnesses of faith. I have heard that painful cry from the have been forever enriched and have heart of the camp survivors: “It is so fallen in love with the Cross of Christ painful to remember.” But we must because of them and their stories. remember that these women and men are living examples of Christian faith Olga said: “At night as soon as the and of how prayer strengthens the door to our cell opened and someone heart to bear the harshest realities, was led out to be interrogated, the even the cold suffering of the Siberian rest of us started praying. We prayed prison camps. passionately with confidence in the power of love, the power of God, to How many died in the camps in save us.” May I learn – may we learn Russia is unknown. They died while – from them how to pray and how to being tortured in the interrogation believe in the saving love of God in the prisons before they could be sent on midst of our suffering so as to find the elsewhere, deported in railway cars. triumph of the cross and the power of They died packed like animals on the God’s love to save us. trans-Siberian railway or in the hulls of ships holding the freezing and diseased. In Magadan alone maybe one and a half million people died, maybe more. Yet here are men and women who survived by faith and show us how evil did not FR MICHAEL SHIELDS conquer them. Pastor of the Church of the Nativity of Jesus, Magadan, Russia THE MARTYRS OF MAGADAN 5 AID TO THE CHURCH IN NEED Bronislava Bronislavovna Klimavichute WAS ARRESTED IN 1948. It was the July 13th, the feast of St. An- I tonas. My older sister’s husband was named Antonas, Antoni that is, and we celebrated his name day. Two of his brothers came, as well as two neigh- bours. And I, of course, helped my sister and spent the night with them. At four o’clock in the morning they BORN November 6th 1927 came. Lots of soldiers surrounded the WHERE Zukai, Sakiai region, house. They woke everyone up and Lithuania performed a thorough search, ransack- ARRESTED July 13th 1948 ing everything. They shook everything. SENTENCE 8 years hard labour One came out and said: “Here, I found RELEASED August 1st 1954 it. I found anti-Soviet proclamations.” REHABILITATED 1994 “Is this yours?” they ask. interrogation. I was not involved in any- My sister’s husband answers: “No, it is thing, so I just asserted that we were not mine.” completely uninvolved.