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By Root 876 0

Having incurred the displeasure of his captors, he was sent to a concentration camp at Gross Rosen in Poland, home to 60,000 inmates—Poles, Frenchmen, political criminals, Russians. He quickly learned some of the rules determining survival. He moved everywhere in a group, never alone. He avoided all eye contact with the guards. Friendship was a dangerous luxury. Almost any man would denounce another in exchange for a crust of bread. He consciously sought to suppress all emotion: “I knew that it would be the end of me if I began to give vent to feelings.” Only once did he attract the personal attention of the guards, when he was deemed slow in removing his cap. An SS woman hit him with a gloved fist, breaking three ribs. All his conscious thoughts focused upon food: “We did not think about girls or our families, only about getting that tiny morsel of cheese out of the mousetrap.” Men died every day of starvation or beatings. They knew very little about the progress of the war, save that Stalingrad sent every German into mourning. “After that, Russians were treated just a little better—no worse than other nationalities.” Maslennikov was sustained by a lingering, unbreakable conviction that somehow it would all end soon.

Gross Rosen was not a designated mass-murder establishment. Like most Nazi concentration camps, it was simply a place where people died, usually within six months. It was not a site for sophisticated medical experiments, but prisoners were sometimes used for cruder research, such as testing army boots by marching interminably around the compounds while carrying heavy loads. Wholesale killings took place only occasionally. One day when prisoners returned from the stone quarries, from the window of his barracks Maslennikov saw a chain of wagons rattling past on the narrow-gauge railway to the crematorium, laden with women and children and old people. “The eyes of each bore a different expression,” he said. “I have seen them in my dreams forever after.” In the winter of 1944, there was an escape attempt in Compound 20, which housed political prisoners. A group killed a guard, threw blankets over the wire, scaled it and ran away. Most were swiftly recaptured and killed, in some cases by drenching them in cold water, which froze on their bodies. The next two batches of political prisoners who arrived at the camp were killed immediately, presumably lest they, too, should nurse ambitions of freedom.

At the beginning of 1945, when the camp was evacuated, Maslennikov was transferred to Nordhausen. Here, the rules were simple. Those who could not work were not fed at all. He was employed removing corpses from the compounds and burning them on great pyres: “You arranged a layer of wood, a layer of corpses, a layer of wood, and then poured sump oil on top.” One day, an order came that radio specialists were needed. Maslennikov immediately volunteered, certain that any hazard must be preferable to Nordhausen. His only chance, as for most Nazi captives, was to prove himself useful. He was transferred to Sachsenhausen, where it was intended that he should be employed on the assembly of radio-detonated mines. By the time his group arrived, however, American bombs had destroyed the factory. Instead, gangs of prisoners were sent into the capital, to clear unexploded bombs. This assignment offered priceless opportunities to scavenge for food in wrecked houses, yet it was also highly dangerous. There were days when whole teams disappeared, having been unlucky in their experiences with bombs. Executions were commonplace in the camp, and increased in the last weeks of the war. Compared with Gross Rosen and Nordenhausen, however, Maslennikov felt that Sachsenhausen was “not at all bad.”

Zinaida Mikhailova spent three years in Ravensbrück, because she refused to work in the Mauser armaments factory after being deported from the village near Leningrad where she lived. She was one of eight children of a peasant father, shot by the NKVD for reasons unknown in 1934. Her mother worked at the local railway station. She left school at