Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [116]
Each of these three categories of workers was then assigned one of three categories of prison regime: privileged, light, and “first-order,” or heavy. Then they were meant to be examined by a medical commission, which determined whether they were able to carry out heavy work or light work. After taking into account all of these criteria, the camp administration would then assign each prisoner a job. According to how well they fulfilled the norms of that particular job, each prisoner would then be assigned one of four levels of food rations: basic, working, “reinforced,” or “punishment.”88 All of these categories would change many times. Beria’s orders of 1939, for example, divided prisoners into “heavy-work-capable,” “light-work-capable,” and “invalid” categories (sometimes called groups A, B, and C), the numbers of which were regularly monitored by the central administration in Moscow, which heavily disapproved of camps which had too many “invalid” prisoners.89
The process was far from orderly. It had both formal aspects—imposed by the camp commanders—and informal aspects, as prisoners made adjustments and bargained among themselves. For most, their first experience of the camp classification process was relatively crude. George Bien, a young Hungarian picked up in Budapest at the end of the Second World War, compared the selection process he went through in 1946 to a slave market:
Everyone was ordered to the courtyard and told to strip. When your name was called you appeared before a medical team for a health inspection. The exam consisted of pulling the skin of your buttocks to determine the amount of muscle. They determined your condition of strength by the muscle content, and if you passed you were accepted and your documents were put in a separate pile. This was done by women in white coats, and they had little choice from this group of living dead. They chose the younger prisoners, regardless of muscle.90
Jerzy Gliksman also used the expression “slave market” to describe the segregation process that took place in Kotlas, the transit camp that supplied prisoners to the camps north of Arkhangelsk. There, guards awoke prisoners during the night and told them to assemble, with all of their belongings, on the following morning. Every prisoner was forced to attend, even the seriously ill. Then, all were marched out of the camp, into the forest. An hour later, they arrived at a large clearing, where they were formed into columns, sixteen men abreast:
All day long I noticed unknown officials, both uniformed and in civilian clothes, wandering among the prisoners, ordering some to remove their fufaykas[jackets], feeling their arms, their legs, looking over the palms, commanding others to bend over. Sometimes they would order a prisoner to open his mouth and peered at his teeth, like horse traders at a county fair . . . some were looking for engineers and experienced locksmiths or lathe operators; others might require construction carpenters; and all were always in need of physically strong men for work as lumberjacks, in agriculture, in coal-mining, and in the oil wells.
The most important consideration of those doing the inspecting, Gliksman realized, was “not to let themselves be duped into inadvertently acquiring cripples, invalids, or the sick—in short, persons who were good only for eating up bread for nothing. This was the reason that special agents were dispatched from time to time to select the proper prisoner material.” 91
Right from the start, it was also clear that rules were there to be broken. Nina Gagen-Torn went through a particularly humiliating selection at the Temnikovsky camp in 1947, which nevertheless had a positive result. Upon arriving in the camp, her convoy was immediately sent to the showers, their clothes put in the disinfection chamber. They were then marched into a room, still dripping wet and naked: there was to be “a health inspection,” they were