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White Winter. Ten months of the year Vorkuta is blanketed by snow. El Campesino, the peasant general who fought for the Republicans in the Spanish civil war (one of the few people ever to have escaped from a Soviet prison camp), has described the storms which sweep over the Vorkuta during the winter: "The watch dogs of our guards sensed the approach of a snowstorm before we did; they began to howl and whine, and this would be the signal to start cutting holes into the frozen ground where there was no other shelter. One day a shift of 150 prisoners on its way back to camp was caught in a sudden storm only a few hundred yards from the mine. The guards abandoned them and made their way back to shelter with the help of their dogs. The prisoners dug themselves in. Two days later, when the storm abated, the next shift going to the mine passed small white mounds. Nobody troubled to dig the bodies out. But one of the officers in the camp command said: 'It is a pity we've lost their clothing.' " A typical Vorkuta camp, built around a mine pit, consists of some 30 long, low, Quonset-like barracks made of vertical boards and roofed with hand-reeved board shingles. The cracks are chinked with mud and cinders, and two coal-fed brick stoves supply heat. Rows of double-deck bunks run the length of the building, but frequently prisoners have to sleep on the floor. Buckets provide sanitation.
Prisoners wear quilted uniforms, men in blue, women in black. The uniforms of political prisoners are stenciled, top and bottom, with combinations of numerals and letters which tell prison officials at a glance the prisoner's history. No histories could be more varied. The camps contain Old Bolsheviks who claim acquaintance with Lenin and Trotsky, Socialists, at least 30 Wehrmacht generals and several thousands of German prisoners of war, thousands of Poles, Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians, executioners who worked for the SS in the Ukraine, SS men, thousands of Russian and Ukrainian Jews (some of them victims of the "little pogrom" just before Stalin's death), Armenians. Greeks, Roman Catholic priests, Frenchmen, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetans.
A special group in the camps are the Veruyushchie (believers), prisoners who refuse to work for the state on the grounds of conscience. Among them are the monashki, devoted religious women who normally might have been nuns. Dr. Joseph Scholmer, a German M.D. who spent 3½ years in the camp, attended a religious service in one of the mine pits worked by Lithuanians: "We walked down passages that were full of people and eventually came to a disused gallery which ended in a little crypt. About 20 men had collected there. All were standing in silence: they were sunk in prayer. They felt quite safe here. No soldier who values his life would ever venture down into the pit."