Gulag Voices by Anne Applebaum Read Free Book Online

for the most part impotent old men. Only one of the three was relatively lucky. The miners’ Party boss chose her for himself, took her for both days. The miners respected him: he was fair, he was straight with them, man to man, politically reliable, morally strong. They accepted him as their leader, and his ride on the tram somehow justified and united them all: just like us, they are, our politruk 7 and our state. Out of respect for him none of his crew even approached the student, and the Party boss even gave her a little gift—a new comb, the rarest of things in the camps.
    Unlike the rest of the women, she didn’t end up screaming, fighting back, trying to pull away: she thanked God that she’d become the property of just one.

4.
    KAZIMIERZ ZAROD
    I n the photograph which precedes the introduction to his memoir, Inside Stalin’s Prisons, Kazimierz Zarod is walking down a prosperous Warsaw boulevard dressed in a wool coat, wool scarf, and hat. Young and handsome, he strides beside an equally young and handsome woman, also wearing a wool coat, hers with a fur collar. Twenty-six years old when the war broke out, Zarod was a Polish civil servant and an army reservist. Along with many others, he fled from Warsaw to eastern Poland after the Germans invaded the country on September 1, 1939. He was then trapped there on September 17, when the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. Arrested as a “refugee” in what was no longer Poland but had been named “Soviet West Ukraine,” Zarod was considered highly suspicious because of his fluent Russian (his family had lived in Russia before the Revolution). After his interrogation, Zarod was sent to a Siberian forestry camp, which he knew only as “Labor Corrective Camp No. 21.”
    The story of Zarod’s arrest was in some ways typical: between the Soviets’ invasion of Poland in 1939 and the Germans’ invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, more than 400,000 Poles were arrested, of which some 108,000 were sent directly to the Gulag (the rest went to exile villages). The story of Zarod’s release was not unusual either: in 1941, following the German invasion, the Soviet Union and Poland concluded a temporary truce, and Stalin agreed to allow a Polish army to be formed on Soviet territory under the command of General Władysław Anders. Zarod marched out of Russia with what came to be called Anders’s Army. Traveling via Tehran, Bombay (Mumbai), and Cape Town, he wound up in Britain, where he joined the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. After the war he stayed in England, married an Englishwoman, and taught Polish and Russian to two generations of British soldiers. He published his memoirs in 1990, after his retirement.
    Zarod was not a literary writer, and his book contains few rhetorical flourishes. Nevertheless, it is extraordinarily useful precisely because he focuses on things that “better” writers often ignored: what prisoners ate, where they lived, where they worked. In the selection that follows, Zarod describes, in his straightforward manner, a typical prisoner’s day.
    A Day in Labor Corrective Camp No. 21
    At 3:00 A.M. each morning reveille was beaten out on a triangle. Dressing was unnecessary as we slept in our clothes for warmth. Tumbling off the hard wooden shelf on which I had spent the night, I joined the queue which was forming near the water bucket in one corner of the hut. By this time we had all acquired soup containers—a round tin with two holes punched near the top through which string or a narrow piece of material or wire was threaded—and, filling the container, I splashed my face with a few handfuls, keeping the rest to drink, as water was scarce. We had no towels; a piece of rag or one’s coat sleeve had to suffice. Soap was a great luxury, the piece we were issued with once a month being so small that we kept it to use in the evenings when we returned from work, really dirty.
    By 3:30 A.M. we were supposed to be in the middle of the