They worked beyond their strength and lived in conditions that were offensive to human dignity. Their mouths became overgrown with hunger, and if they could, they even ate carrion. They were played at cards, people tried to make them "camp wives", and death was waiting for them at every turn. But they didn't give up.
They were sent to exile on the threshold of adulthood or as teenagers. Janina, Danuta, Natalia, Weronika, Stefania and many other girls and women like them. They ended up in labor camps and kolkhozes because they were Polish, "enemies of the people". Some rode alone, others with their families. Most returned alone to a country that was now completely foreign to them. They survived, although they paid a huge price.
Strup for mouth
The Soviets did not apply any concessions to the youngest. Janina, now 85, went to Siberia as a child. First, she lost her grandmother, then her mother died. The two of them stayed with their sister Ala, forced to survive in exile. They lived in a decaying mud hut and for years suffered terrible hunger. He and his sister ate carcasses and whatever they managed to steal.
For those deported to the "inhuman land", the carcass was the only rescue (photo:Djambalawa, CC BY-SA 4.0).
Janka's stomach was so swollen that she couldn't see her own feet. She was constantly ill:twice with typhus, dysentery and bloody diarrhea, she had attacks of blind bowel, and due to lack of vitamins and malnutrition she suffered from night blindness. Eventually she developed scurvy that almost drove her to her grave. He took on an extremely macabre form: her mouth was covered with one huge scab.
The girl was unable to eat, she only drank through a straw. There was no question of any medical care in the kolkhoz, so only the worst could be expected. Someone took pity on the child and advised Janina's sister to take her… to a blacksmith. This one was old and dirty, but he obviously knew more than shoeing horses. He had a workshop in a run-down dugout, and this is probably not the first time he saw someone with scurvy.
He watched Jance for a long time, muttering something under his breath, then picked up some dirty rag from the floor, soaked it in a bucket full of muddy liquid and, holding the girl by the head, pressed the rag with all his strength into her mouth. Janka howled in pain and in fear she made it under herself but it wasn't over. The blacksmith ordered my sister to bring Janka the next day and repeated the procedure. The "treatments" continued for several days until the scab fell off and the girl recovered.
Cattle cars and operations without anesthesia
Danuta, the daughter of a high-ranking officer, grew up in the Brest Fortress and experienced extraordinary adventures. Love found all the way to Tehran, but the time for that came later. Before she was fortunate enough, she and her mother were deported just before the outbreak of the German-Soviet war in June 1941.
To this day, he remembers the journey in cattle cars and the mass deaths of the weakest from pneumonia, measles or simply from exhaustion. She dreams of dying children at night. He also recalls a simple woman from Polesie, deported with five children only because her eldest son escaped to the territories occupied by the Germans. One by one they died. After the death of the youngest, the mother went mad with despair and pain.
Natalia, who lived a happy life in a manor house in the Białowieża Forest before the war, also found love in the most unfavorable conditions. She fell in love with the labor camp in Vorkuta and married her lover. Before that, however, she ended up in a coal mine, where she carried 100 kg bags on her back. It seems impossible for a woman, but she didn't have much choice.
Operation without anesthesia - the highest standard of camp medical care.
She witnessed one of the wagon prisoners crushing her arm. Natalia tried to rub the terrified victim's hand so that it wouldn't freeze, but it didn't make sense. The hand hung on the skin, everything inside was shattered. The woman's name was Elite, she was from Estonia and was a famous pianist before exile.
Natalia was then sent to a clay mine, where she became seriously ill. Carried to the camp hospital by other camps, she ended up on the operating table due to a blind bowel attack. Of course, the procedure was performed without anesthesia . Most of the time the woman was unconscious, but at the end she woke up and started screaming in pain. The doctor told her to hold on because he hadn't finished suturing the wounds yet.
"What was I supposed to do? I endured. It's really hard to believe how much a person can endure ” - we read in Girls from Siberia Anna Herbich . In addition, she got a fever after the operation and the sutures festered because the instruments were clearly not sterile. And Natalia only had two weeks to return to work.
Moving mountain of dead bodies
Weronika spent a happy childhood in the multicultural Pacewicze. The NKVD caught her in the spring of 1951. She was taken to a prison in Grodno, where she was tortured unconscious every night, and then thrown into a concrete prison full of rats.
Once, the torturers made her kneel with her hands above her head, and a brick was placed in each of her. She fainted from exhaustion, and was woken up by kicks in the stomach and head. Her skull cracked, and the dented bone still compresses the nerve - there was no possibility of surgery. After sixty years, the ordeal is reminiscent of attacks of terrible headaches, and an 84-year-old woman screams at the whole house.
During sleepless nights, images from the labor camp in Vorkuta return to her, too, where she ended up being an "enemy of the people" for 25 years. The horribly emaciated bodies of the prisoners are thrown on trucks like sacks of potatoes. They weren't dead - arms and legs were still shaking, some people were still alive.
One of the faces was staring at Veronica with wide eyes full of suffering and despair. " If God wanted to resurrect all the prisoners of the labor camps, the earth would rise throughout Russia. ”He says bitterly after many years.
If the victims of the Gulag had risen from their graves ... (photo:Oleg-2014, CC0 1.0).
Happiness in cards and in love
It's hard to talk about happiness when life seems to end and everything collapses on your head. Deportation to the camp's hell seemed tantamount to death, and yet happiness and friends could be found there as well.
Stefania came from Vilnius and was sent to a camp in the Komi republic for 10 years under paragraphs 2–11 of the famous article 58 of the Soviet penal code, i.e. for armed counter-revolutionary activity. There she was lost at cards. One of the urkas, the worst type of criminals, accidentally saw her through a window and decided to play for her. As was prison custom, it became his property and he could do with it whatever he wanted.
By a fortunate coincidence, Stefania was friends with an extremely beautiful Estonian nurse, Made. Everyone in the labor camp smacked uppers to her. One of the criminals in love decided to "play" Stefania as a gift for Made, who was greatly saddened by her friend's fate and thus saved the Polish woman's life. Apparently, nothing like this had happened before in the history of the Gulag archipelago, and it has been told and written about for many years.
What to do to get a woman? It was possible to win cards in the labor camp (drawing by Danzig Bałdajew - bezprizorny, who grew up in an orphanage for "children of the people's enemies" and then an NKVD officer and prison service of the Soviet Union. for the past regime, he dedicated to Solzhenitsyn, recently published in the English-language publication "Drawings from the Gulag").
Soon Stefania herself also found an admirer in the Gulag. One night a security guard visited her and took her to the office of a local barber. The latter informed her that he caught his eye and made a proposal for a "camp marriage". He was a good party, offered her food and clothes. Stefania, however, was outraged by the barber's proposal and refused.
“You don't know Polish women. We don't start a family this way. Here, women get married for love, in churches. ” - we read in her own report in Girls from Siberia . The barber laughed and replied that he didn't know life. After that, Stefania also caught the eye of a Soviet prosecutor who tried to kiss her - and she slapped him. She also got away with it, she impressed him with her attitude.
The hell of labor camps, inhuman living conditions, raging diseases and the specter of death by starvation - the protagonists of Anna Herbich's book struggled with them every day. Their hard character, pride and the belief that the exile had to end someday gave them strength. Because a Pole will survive anything.
Source:
Anna Herbich, Girls from Siberia , Znak Horyzont, Krakow 2015.