Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [113]
Yet some prisoners reported more than indifference: “In the morning, the boss of the convoy came into the corridor . . . he stood with his face to the window, his back to us, and shouted insults, swear words: ‘I’m bored of you!’”66
Boredom—or, rather, boredom mixed with anger at having to carry out such a degrading job—was also Solzhenitsyn’s explanation for this otherwise inexplicable phenomenon. He even tried to think himself into the minds of the convoy guards. Here they were, so busy and understaffed, and then to have “to go carry water in pails—it has to be hauled a long way, too, and it’s insulting: why should a Soviet soldier have to carry water like a donkey for enemies of the people?” Worse, he went on,
It takes a long time to dole out that water. The zeks don’t have their own mugs. Whoever did have one has had it taken away from him—so what it adds up to is that they have to be given the two government issue mugs to drink out of, and while they are drinking up you have to keep standing there and standing, and dipping it out and dipping it out some more and handing it to them . . .
But the convoy could have borne with all that, hauled the water, and doled it out, if only those pigs, after slurping up the water, didn’t ask to go to the toilet. So here’s the way it works out: if you don’t give them water for a day, then they don’t ask to go to the toilet. Give them water once, and they go to the toilet once; take pity on them and give them water twice—and they go to the toilet twice. So it’s pure and simple common sense: just don’t give them anything to drink.67
Whatever their motivation—indifference, boredom, anger, injured pride—the effect on the prisoners was devastating. As a rule, they arrived at their camps not only disoriented and degraded by their experience of prison and interrogation, but physically depleted—and ripe for the next stage of their journey into the Gulag system: entry into the camp.
If it was not dark, if they were not ill, and if they were interested enough to look up, the first thing the prisoners saw on arrival was their camp’s gate. More often than not, the gate displayed a slogan. On the entrance into one of the Kolyma lagpunkts “hung a plywood rainbow with a banner draped over it which read: ‘Labor in the USSR is a Matter of Honesty, Glory, Valor and Heroism!’”68 Barbara Armonas was welcomed to a labor colony in the suburbs of Irkutsk with the banner: “With Just Work I Will Pay My Debt to the Fatherland.”69 Arriving in Solovetsky in 1933—it had by then become a high-security prison—another prisoner saw a sign reading: “With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness!”70 Yuri Chirkov, arrested at age fourteen, was also confronted with a sign at Solovetsky which read “Through Labor—Freedom!”—a slogan which is about as uncomfortably close as it is possible to get to the slogan that hung over the gates of Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei—“Work Makes You Free.”71
Like the arrival in prison, the arrival of a new étap in camp was also attended by rituals: prison inmates, exhausted by transport, now had to be turned into working zeks. “On arrival at the camp,” remembered Karol Colonna-Czosnowski, a Polish prisoner,
[w]e spent a long time being counted . . . That particular evening there seemed no end to it. Innumerable times we had to form five abreast and each row was told to advance three paces which several worried-looking NKVD officials would call aloud, “odin, dva, tri . . .” and laboriously write down each number on to their large clipboards. Presumably the number of those alive, added to the numbers of those who had been shot en route, did not produce the expected total.72
Following