Gulag

Equally scathing about camp fashions, another female prisoner wrote that they were given “short padded coats, padded stockings up to our knees, and birch-bark shoes. We looked like uncanny monsters. We had scarcely anything of our own left. Everything had been sold to the convict women, or, more correctly, exchanged for bread. Silk stockings and scarves elicited such admiration that we were obliged to sell them. It would have been too dangerous to refuse.”⁷⁹

Because the ripped clothes seemed designed to rob them of dignity, many prisoners would later go to great lengths to improve them. One woman prisoner recalled that she did not care, at first, about the “very old and ruined” clothes she was given. Later, though, she began to sew up the holes, make pockets, and improve the clothes, “as other women did,” thus making herself feel less degraded.⁸⁰ In general, women who were able to sew or to quilt were able to earn extra bread rations, so coveted were even the slightest improvements to the standard uniform: the ability to distinguish oneself, to look slightly better than others, would become, as we shall see, associated with higher rank, better health, greater privilege. Varlam Shalamov well understood the significance of these minor changes:

In camp there is “individual” and “common” underwear; such are the verbal pearls found in official speech. “Individual” underwear is newer and somewhat better and is reserved for “trusties,” convict foremen, and other privileged persons . . . “common” underwear is underwear for anyone. It’s handed out in the bathhouse right after bathing in exchange for dirty underwear, which is gathered and counted separately beforehand. There’s no opportunity to select anything according to size. Clean underwear is a pure lottery, and I felt a strange and terrible pity at seeing adult men cry over the injustice of receiving worn-out clean underwear in exchange for dirty good underwear. Nothing can take the mind of a human being off the unpleasantnesses that comprise life . . .⁸¹

Still, the shock of being washed, shaved, and dressed as zeks was only the first stage in a long initiation. Immediately afterward, the prisoners underwent one of the most critical procedures in their lives as inmates: selection— and segregation into categories of worker. This selection process would affect everything from a prisoner’s status in camp, to the type of barrack he lived in, to the type of work he would be assigned to do. All of which might, in turn, determine whether he would live or die.

I have not, it must be noted, found any memoirs describing “selections” of the sort that took place in German death camps. That is, I have not read of regular selections which ended in weak prisoners being taken aside and shot. Such atrocities surely took place—one Solovetsky memoirist claims to have survived one such occasion⁸²—but the usual practice, at least by the end of the 1930s and the early 1940s, was different. Weak prisoners were not murdered upon arrival in some of the farther-flung camps, but rather given a period of “quarantine,” both to ensure that any illnesses they were carrying would not spread, and to allow them to “fatten up,” to recover their health after long months in prison and terrible journeys. Camp bosses appear to have taken this practice seriously, and prisoners concur.⁸³