Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [141]
Janusz Bardach was caught in a buran in Kolyma as well, while working in a quarry. Along with their guards, he and his fellow prisoners made their way back to camp following the watchdogs, attached to one another by rope:
I couldn’t see anything beyond Yuri’s back and clung to the rope as though it were a life preserver . . . With the familiar landmarks gone, I had no idea how much further we had to go and was sure we’d never make it back. My foot fell upon something soft—a prisoner who had let go of the rope. “Stop!” I shouted. But there was no stopping. No one could hear my voice. I leaned down and pulled his arm towards the rope. “Here!” I tried to link his hand with the rope. “Hold on!” It was no use. The man’s arm fell to the ground when I let go. Yuri’s stern command to move on carried me forward . . .
When Bardach’s brigade returned to the camp, three prisoners were missing. Usually, “the bodies of prisoners who got lost weren’t found until springtime, often within one hundred meters of the zone.” 27
The regulation clothing allotted to prisoners gave them little protection from the weather. In 1943, for example, the central Gulag administration ordered that prisoners were to receive, among other things, one summer shirt (to last two seasons), a pair of summer trousers (to last two seasons), one padded-cotton winter jacket (to last two years), padded winter trousers (to last eighteen months), felt boots (to last two years), and underwear, intended for nine months.28 In practice, there were never enough even of these paltry items. An inspection of twenty-three camps in 1948 reported that the supply of “clothes, underclothes, and shoes is unsatisfactory.” That appears to have been an understatement. In a camp at Krasnoyarsk, less than half of the prisoners had shoes. In Norilsk, in the far north, only 75 percent had warm boots, and only 86 percent had warm clothes. In Vorkuta, also in the far north, only 25 to 30 percent of prisoners had underclothes, while only 48 percent had warm boots.29
In the absence of shoes, prisoners improvised. They made boots out of birch bark, scraps of fabric, old rubber tires. At best, these contraptions were clumsy and difficult to walk in, particularly in deep snow. At worst, they leaked, virtually guaranteeing frostbite.30 Elinor Lipper described her homemade boots, which in her camp were nicknamed “Che-Te-Ze,” the abbreviation for the Chelyabinsk Tire Factory:
They were made of lightly padded and quilted sacking with high, wide tops that reach to the knee, the shoe itself being strengthened by oil cloth or artificial leather at the toe and heel. The sole is made of three cross sections of rubber from worn-out automobile tires. The whole thing is fastened to the foot with string and tied with string below the knee so that the snow does not get in . . . after a day’s use they become all twisted, and the flabby soles turn every which way. They absorb moisture with incredible speed, especially when the sacks of which they are made were used for bagging salt . . .31
Another prisoner describes a similar improvisation: “The sides were open so that the toes were exposed from the sides. The cloth to wrap up the feet could not be secured tightly, meaning that toes were thereby exposed to frost.” As a result of wearing these shoes, he did indeed get frostbite— which, he reckoned, saved his life, as he was no longer able to work.32
Different prisoners had different theories about how to cope with the cold. To recover from the frost at the end of the day, for example,