Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [107]
Even those who did receive that one cup a day were tormented. Evgeniya Ginzburg recalled the excruciating decision prisoners had to make: whether to drink their whole cup in the morning, or try to save it. “Those who took occasional sips and made it last all day never had a moment’s peace. They watched their mugs like hawks from morning until night.”25 If, that is, they were lucky enough to have mugs: one prisoner remembered to the end of her life the tragic moment when her teapot, which she had managed to keep with her, was stolen. The teapot had held water without spilling, enabling her to sip throughout the day. Without it she had nothing to hold water in at all, and was tormented by thirst. 26
Worse were the recollections of Nina Gagen-Torn, who was on a transport train that stopped for three days outside of Novosibirsk in midsummer. The city’s transit prison was full: “It was July. Very hot. The roofs of the Stolypin wagons began to glow, and we lay on the bunks like buns in an oven.” Her car determined to go on a hunger strike, although the guards threatened them with new, longer sentences. “We don’t want to get dysentery,” the women shouted back at them. “For four days we are lying in our own shit.” Reluctantly, the guards finally allowed them to drink a little bit, and to wash.27
A Polish prisoner also found herself on a train which had ground to a halt—but in the rain. Naturally, the prisoners tried to catch the water coming off the roof. But “when we held our mugs between the bars of the windows, the guard who was sitting on the roof cried that he would shoot, for such behavior was forbidden.”28
Winter journeys were not necessarily better. Another Polish deportee remembered having nothing but “frozen bread and water in the form of ice” during her train journey east.29 Summer or winter, other deportees experienced special torments. When one exile train stopped, unusually, at an ordinary station, the prisoners dashed out to buy food from local people. “Our Jews made a dash for the eggs,” recalled a Polish passenger. “They would rather starve than eat non-kosher food.” 30
The very old and the very young suffered the most. Barbara Armonas, a Lithuanian who had married an American, was deported along with a large group of Lithuanians, men, women, and children. Among them was a woman who had given birth four hours earlier, as well as a paralyzed eighty-three-year-old who could not be kept clean—“very soon everything around her was stinking and she was covered by open sores.” There were also three babies:
Their parents had great problems with diapers since it was impossible to wash them regularly. Sometimes when the train stopped after a rain the mothers would jump out to wash diapers in the ditches. There were fights over these water ditches because some wanted to wash dishes, some to wash their faces, while others wanted to wash dirty diapers, all at the same time . . . the parents made every effort to keep their children clean. Used diapers were dried and shaken out. Sheets and shirts were torn up to improvise diapers and sometimes the men tied the wet diapers around their waists in an effort to dry them more quickly.
Small children fared no better:
Some days were very hot, and the heavy smell in the cars was unbearable and a number of people fell sick. In our car, one two-year-old boy ran a high fever and cried constantly because of pain. The only help his parents could get was a little aspirin which someone gave to them. He grew worse and worse and finally died. At the next stop