What is your ordinary day like? Are you coming back from work exhausted? Or maybe you love what you do? Women sent to Siberia and to labor camps talk about a reality in which the most ordinary day was a struggle for survival. With climate, hunger, fellow prisoners, a blunt cleaver, horse dung and no soap.
An old proverb says that hunger is the best cook. However, it is difficult to find culinary imagination when there are no ingredients for even the simplest dish, and you have to save yourself from starvation by nibbling on dried animal bones or looking for carrion in the steppe.
Stinky Fish from the holidays
Alina recalls that in the Siberian labor camp in Vorkuta there was a "spit" soup for breakfast and a thimble of oil with the smell and consistency of machine grease. For making a high standard you got a piece of bread. Stefania also remembered wet, heavy bread that looked and tasted like a piece of clay. In the morning, a rare soup cooked in weed for cattle was added to it. After work, you could refresh yourself with a spoonful of groats with a little oil and soup. There was smelly salty fish from Christmas.
The prisoners knew that behind the fence there was an endless amount of Siberian emptiness waiting for them (photo:Gerald Praschl, CC BY-SA 3.0).
Barbara recalls that the tannery used to eat greasy scrapings of tanned leather with a piece of stale bread. "I was terribly disgusted with this fat" - recalls the heroine of "Girls from Siberia" by Anna Herbich. - "Despite the hunger that consumed my guts, I was unable to take this stuff in my mouth." She ate gourts more often , that is, salty pieces of stone-hard cheese. You had to hold them in your mouth for an hour. Only then did they hardly get bitten.
Stefania and her friends from the labor camp decided to organize a symbolic Christmas Eve. A spoonful of porridge with oil was used for kutia, and the black camp bread pretended to be a wafer. Someone reported her out of jealousy and she was jailed. On the other hand, Weronika, who was sent to a labor camp in Krasnoyarsk and every day received inhuman rations of bread with steamed oats - as for horses - baked Easter pies from last year's potatoes found in a field near a German colony.
Even keep an eye on the potty
The law of the stronger was in force in the labor camps, and the thefts spread like lice and bedbugs. Stefania was robbed to her shirt the very first night, and shortly thereafter someone at night even dragged her poor camp onuces off her feet. Her bast paws were worn on bare skin.
Virtually everything has been stolen. For example, an ordinary potty - white, with a blue border, which Janina's grandmother took with her from Poland. The first night they put him outside, and someone got hung up on him. Janina regained it years later and took it with her, returning to Poland with her sister. Only the two of them survived, and the potty was their only possession.
In turn, Alina in the Vorkuta camp got her first valances eight sizes too large. She had to stuff them with underwear and shirts to keep them from falling off her feet in the snow drifts. It bothered her at first, but it was the only way to keep her belongings, because all the others had been stolen from her. Barbara was regularly robbed by Soviet prostitutes. Complaints were unsuccessful, you just had to get used to it.
Stalin watched the prisoners even while they were sleeping (photo:The New York Public Library Digital Collections, public domain).
Every ear count
The ordinary day of Siberian exiles is also work for the "homeland of the world proletariat". The range of activities ranged from both less strenuous and beyond human strength.
Grażyna came to Siberia as a teenager, so she was not assigned to the toughest jobs. Together with her sister Zosia and cousin Jasia, she made samanu , i.e. the local building material made of dried manure, straw and clay. They also made kiziak - bricks from cow dung that were used to burn in the oven.
Unfortunately, the girls had nothing to wash up after work - soap was an unattainable luxury on exile. So they washed themselves with lye. Adult women whose ordinary days were spent on murderous work in collective farms and labor camps were in a much worse situation.
At the beginning, Stefania worked in the labor camp, mowing the grass "Ivan Czaj", which resembled corn and reached above her shoulders. It was used to make cattle feed and soup for prisoners. It was cut down with blunt cleavers, and the working day was at least twelve hours. It was possible to return to the camp only after performing as much of the standard as possible, which was carefully verified with a scale. There was two hundred kilos of weed per head daily.
Barbara did a similar job:during the haymaking, she loaded the hay into carts. After twelve hours a day, she collapsed from her legs, and her hunger rations did not allow her to recover. She also worked in an amazing stench in a tannery, where she had to transfer dried, incompletely cleaned animal skins on her head to a huge wooden drum.
A scary word:winter
But the worst was yet to come. Winter was the time of logging, and work was done in waist-high snow and biting frost. Trees crushed people, crushed their limbs.
The Siberian taiga is a good place for reindeer, perhaps, but not for hungry, badly dressed and tired people (photo:peupleloup, CC BY-SA 2.0).
As if that was not enough, you had to have eyes around your head, because you could get hit in the head with an ax. Stefania was saved because it was not her, but a prisoner standing just a few meters away, who fell under a fatal blow. Urka , i.e. a criminal, decided to rest in a warm cell from the hardships of labor camp life, so she killed a random woman.
Alina was sent to unload coal. Years later, my husband did not believe the stories about several-kilogram bags carried on the back. It was also possible to remove snow from railway tracks. Men and women used pickaxes to break the chunks frozen to stone, boring a tunnel in a blizzard. In the roaring wind and blinding snow, the speeding train was noticeable only at the last moment. Not everyone managed to dodge in time.
Not any better:Summer
Summer in Siberia was not much lighter than winter. The road to the Urals was being built. Soviet engineers - guided by some inconceivable logic - designed it through the swamps stretching to the horizon. They were covered with gravel and stones, using only shovels, pickaxes and wheelbarrows. Women were also sent to this work. Without water, but accompanied by swarms of mosquitoes and fluff that chewed the conjunctiva to the blood.
It might seem that this is not a women's job. In workers' paradise, however, it was considered otherwise (photo:The New York Public Library Digital Collections, public domain).
Devilish flies that ate people alive, she remembered, among others Zdzisław. It was directed to clearing forest paths that were to turn into roads in the future. After trying to escape, she was sent to the Kola Peninsula, where she was working on building roads under German fire. As we read in Girls from Siberia Anna Herbich:
It was a real ordeal. I had to carry boards from the lake - they were floated to it by the river - to the construction site. These boards were very long and heavy. You had to put them on your shoulder and rest them in such a way that they protruded at the front and back just as much. Then, bending under their weight and struggling to balance, drag them a long way. We were also ordered to stack large stones that were broken from solid rock by men. All of this took place in the setting of a blooming northern tundra.
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An ordinary day in Siberia was marked by a desperate fight - against hunger, against diseases, and against the harsh northern climate. Despite everything, there was a place for love, friendship, and a smile. The protagonists of Anna Herbich's book fought for their own dignity, for their relatives, but above all for survival and return to the country. And they were never broken.
Source:
- Anna Herbich, Girls from Siberia , Znak Horyzont, Krakow 2015.