At Lake Success one day last week, Assistant Secretary of State Willard Thorp* announced that, by official U.S. estimate, Russia keeps between eight and 14 million people in slave labor camps. Semen Tsarapkin, Russia’s representative to ECOSOC (Economic and Social Council), coolly ignored the charge; no one else seemed to care either. The world had read too many statistics of death and misery.
Slim Blue Book. Next day the A.F.L., a non-governmental consultant to U.N., used a different method to get the facts across. It submitted a slim, blue-covered booklet containing the testimony of twelve men & women who had survived Russian slave labor camps. To read and interpret their story, the A.F.L. picked a veteran German socialist, tiny Toni Sender, whose renowned taunts of Nazi bigwigs had earned her the epithet “Mrs. Big Mouth.” Among the case histories she had gathered:
Gennadi Khomyakov, a veteran of the “isolator” camp on the Solovetski Islands. Standard punishment in wintertime was to send prisoners barefoot down 273 ice-covered steps to haul water from a frozen lake; their feet usually froze into icy stumps . . . and most of the victims died. One crazed fellow prisoner, to escape the logging detail, cut off one finger but was sent back to work. Losing his head completely, he chopped off his entire left hand, and collapsed unconscious. He was later shot for “malicious shirking of work.”
Vasili Kivlenko, who spent part of his five years at Magadan “transit” camp. He recalled: “All those physically weak were doomed; they soon fell sick and never recovered . . . Scurvy was widespread and the tents were particularly foul-smelling from scurvy and frost wounds—sweet from rotting flesh . . .”
Esther L. Witkowska, a Pole, who was deported to work in the Degtyanka copper mines in the Ural Mountains, related: “I was assigned to the Moskva-Komsomol-skaya pits . . . Upon my arrival I found some Polish girls, still in their teens, from a previous transport. . . The girls told me how, when they first came to work in the pits, they cried with fear. The working day [was] eleven hours long. The only meal we had during those eleven hours was black bread and water . . . Punishment for … tardiness was three months in prison …”
“For Their Entire Lives.” Dr. Julius Margolin, of Tel Aviv, whom the Russians arrested in 1940 for “breaking passport regulations” while visiting his native Poland presented the most comprehensive account of conditions in Soviet slave labor camps. He spent five years, successively, at the 48th Square, 2nd Onega division of BBK (Belomor Baltic Canal) Camp in the Karelo-Finnish Republic; the Kruglitsa camp site at Kargopol in the Archangel district; the transit camp site in Kotlas. Reported Margolin: “The entire BBK Camp which spreads from . . . Lake Oneg to the White Sea, embraced in my time several hundred camp sites . . . [All told], Camp BBK held about 500,000 . . . [At BBK] I met prisoners . . . who had been there . . . with intervals, for their entire lives since 1924.”
Most prisoners slept in their clothes on bare boards, 100 to a room—it took Margolin 18 months to get a mattress. They worked nine days out of ten; no Soviet holidays were observed. The only pay was food, and even “100% execution of the work norm was not enough to receive sufficient food.” To cover up what was going on, camp commanders in Camp Kotlas received orders in 1945 to list no more deaths caused by malnutrition.
“To Seek a Protector.” Inside the camps in Russia’s “classless” society, a strict class system developed. At the bottom were dokhodyagi, “persons who had lost resemblance to the human form …” Next came the rabotyagi, “who had not yet lost their strength,” the urki (criminals), finally the predurki, the camp aristocrats who worked in the administration. Though “sexual intercourse … is a punishable offense, the conditions of life give a woman no choice but to seek a protector among the camp aristocracy.”
Toni Sender’s grim bill of particulars stung the Russians hard. Cried Delegate Tsarapkin: “Filthy libel … a dirty pamphlet supplied the State Department by a lackey union.” When Miss Sender suggested that, to determine who was a liar, a survey be made of forced labor in all the United Nations, the Russian snapped: “Traveling in the Soviet Union is forbidden to haters of the U.S.S.R.”
*For other news of Diplomat Thorp, see THE HEMISPHERE.
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