Gulag

Many survivors of similar transports have tried to explain this grotesque mistreatment of prisoners at the hands of young, inexperienced convoy guards, who were far from being the trained killers deployed in the prison system. Nina Gagen-Torn speculated that “it wasn’t evidence of evil, just the complete indifference of the convoy. They didn’t look at us as people. We were living cargo.”⁶⁴ Antoni Ekart, a Pole arrested after the Soviet invasion of 1939, also thought that the lack of water was not deliberately to torture us but because the escort had to put in extra work to bring it and would not do so without an order. The commander of the escort was not at all interested in this matter and the guards were unwilling to escort the prisoners several times a day to the wells or water taps at stations owing to the risk of escape. ⁶⁵

Yet some prisoners reported more than indifference: “In the morning, the boss of the convoy came into the corridor . . . he stood with his face to the window, his back to us, and shouted insults, swear words: ‘I’m bored of you!’”⁶⁶

Boredom—or, rather, boredom mixed with anger at having to carry out such a degrading job—was also Solzhenitsyn’s explanation for this otherwise inexplicable phenomenon. He even tried to think himself into the minds of the convoy guards. Here they were, so busy and understaffed, and then to have “to go carry water in pails—it has to be hauled a long way, too, and it’s insulting: why should a Soviet soldier have to carry water like a donkey for enemies of the people?” Worse, he went on,

It takes a long time to dole out that water. The zeks don’t have their own mugs. Whoever did have one has had it taken away from him—so what it adds up to is that they have to be given the two government issue mugs to drink out of, and while they are drinking up you have to keep standing there and standing, and dipping it out and dipping it out some more and handing it to them . . .

But the convoy could have borne with all that, hauled the water, and doled it out, if only those pigs, after slurping up the water, didn’t ask to go to the toilet. So here’s the way it works out: if you don’t give them water for a day, then they don’t ask to go to the toilet. Give them water once, and they go to the toilet once; take pity on them and give them water twice—and they go to the toilet twice. So it’s pure and simple common sense: just don’t give them anything to drink.⁶⁷

Whatever their motivation—indifference, boredom, anger, injured pride—the effect on the prisoners was devastating. As a rule, they arrived at their camps not only disoriented and degraded by their experience of prison and interrogation, but physically depleted—and ripe for the next stage of their journey into the Gulag system: entry into the camp.

If it was not dark, if they were not ill, and if they were interested enough to look up, the first thing the prisoners saw on arrival was their camp’s gate. More often than not, the gate displayed a slogan. On the entrance into one of the Kolyma lagpunkts “hung a plywood rainbow with a banner draped over it which read: ‘Labor in the USSR is a Matter of Honesty, Glory, Valor and Heroism!’”⁶⁸ Barbara Armonas was welcomed to a labor colony in the suburbs of Irkutsk with the banner: “With Just Work I Will Pay My Debt to the Fatherland.”⁶⁹ Arriving in Solovetsky in 1933—it had by then become a high-security prison—another prisoner saw a sign reading: “With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness!”⁷⁰ Yuri Chirkov, arrested at age fourteen, was also confronted with a sign at Solovetsky which read “Through Labor—Freedom!”—a slogan which is about as uncomfortably close as it is possible to get to the slogan that hung over the gates of Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei—“Work Makes You Free.”⁷¹

Like the arrival in prison, the arrival of a new étap in camp was also attended by rituals: prison inmates, exhausted by transport, now had to be turned into working zeks. “On arrival at the camp,” remembered Karol Colonna-Czosnowski, a Polish prisoner,