Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [172]
Tarasyuk: What are they getting?
Kogan: They are all receiving the anti-pellagra ration established by the Gulag Health and Sanitation Department (and he specified the quantity of proteins in calories).
Tarasyuk: How many of them will go out to work in the forest, and when?
Kogan: Well, none of them will ever go to work in the forest again, of course. But now they’ll survive and it will be possible to use them for light work within the compound.
Tarasyuk: Stop giving them any anti-pellagra rations. Write this down: these rations are to be given to those working in the forest. The other prisoners are to get the disability rations.
Kogan: Comrade Colonel! Obviously I didn’t explain clearly. These people will only survive if they are given a special ration. A disabled prisoner receives 400 grams of bread. On that ration they’ll be dead in ten days. We can’t do that!
Tarasyuk looked at the upset doctor, and there was even a sign of interest in his face. “What’s the matter? Do your medical ethics prevent you from doing this?”
“Of course they do . . .”
“Well, I don’t give a damn for your ethics,” said Tarasyuk calmly, and with no indication whatsoever of anger. “Have you written that down? Let’s move on . . .”
All 246 died within the month.96
Such conversations were not unique, nor apocryphal, as archives show. One inspector, reporting on the conditions of prisoners in Volgostroi during the war, complained that the camp’s administration was “exclusively interested in producing wood . . . and was not even slightly interested in the feeding or clothing of prisoners, sending them out to work without regard to physical fitness, never worrying about whether they were clothed, healthy, and fed.”97 Accounts also record the following comment, made at a meeting of Vyatlag officers in January 1943. Speaking in the purely neutral language of statistics, Comrade Avrutsky made the following proposal: “We have 100 percent of our workforce, but we cannot fulfill our program, since Group B continues to grow. If the food which we gave to Group B were given to another contingent—then we wouldn’t have Group B at all, and we would fulfill the program . . .”98 The phrase “Group B,” of course, referred to weaker prisoners, who would indeed cease to exist if they were not given any food.
If camp commanders had the luxury of making such decisions far removed from the people who would actually be affected, proximity did not necessarily make those lower down the hierarchy feel any more sympathy. One Polish prisoner, Kazimierz Zarod, was in a column of prisoners marching to a new camp site. Given virtually no food, prisoners began to weaken. Finally, one of them fell, and was unable to get up again. A guard raised a gun at him. A second guard threatened to shoot:
“For God’s sake,” I heard the man groan, “if you will only let me rest for a while I can catch up.”
“You walk, or die,” said the first guard . . .
I saw him lift his rifle and take aim—I could not believe that he would shoot. The men in the column behind me had by this time regrouped and my view of what was happening was obscured, but suddenly a shot rang out followed by a second, and I knew the man was dead.
But Zarod also records that not all of those who fell while marching were shot. If they were young, those too exhausted to walk farther were picked up and thrown onto a cart, where they “lay like sacks until they recovered . . . The reasoning, as far as I could see, being that the young would recover and have work left in them, while the old were not worth saving. Certainly those thrown like bundles of old clothes into the provisions carts were not there because of any humanitarian