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By Root 1311 0

became more difficult to be Jewish once again. Although even at this time, the degree of anti-Semitism seemed to vary from camp to camp. Ada Purizhinskaya, a Jewish prisoner arrested at the height of the “Doctors’ Plot” (her brother had been tried and executed for “conspiring to kill Stalin”) remembered “no special problems because of being Jewish.”56 But Leonid Trus, another Jewish prisoner arrested at that time, remembered differently. Once, he said, an older zek saved him from a raving anti-Semite, a man who had been arrested for trading in icons. The older zek shouted at the trader: he, a man who had “bought and sold pictures of Christ,” should be ashamed of himself.

Nevertheless, Trus did not try to hide the fact that he was Jewish: on the contrary, he painted a Star of David on his boots, largely to prevent anyone from stealing them. In his camp, “Jews, like Russians, didn’t organize themselves into a group.” This left him without obvious companions: “The worst for me . . . was loneliness, the sense of being a Jew among Russians, that everyone has friends from their region, whereas I am completely alone.” 57

Because of their small numbers, the West Europeans and North Americans who found themselves in the camps also found it difficult to form strong networks. They were hardly in a position to help one another anyway: many were completely disoriented by camp life, did not speak Russian, found the food inedible and the living conditions intolerable. After watching a whole group of German women die in the Vladivostok transit prison, despite being allowed to drink boiled water, Nina Gagen-Torn, a Russian prisoner, wrote, only half tongue-in-cheek, that “If the barracks are filled with Soviet citizens, accustomed to the food, they can tolerate the salted fish, even if it is spoiled. When a big transport consisting of arrested members of the Third International arrived, they all came down with severe dysentery.”58 Lev Razgon also pitied foreigners, writing that “they could neither understand nor assimilate; they did not try to adapt and survive. They merely huddled together instinctively.” 59

But the Westerners—a group which included Poles, Czechs, and other East Europeans—had a few advantages too. They were the object of special fascination and interest, which sometimes paid off in contacts, in gifts of food, in kinder treatment. Antoni Ekart, a Pole educated in Switzerland, was given a place in a hospital thanks to an orderly named Ackerman, originally from Bessarabia: “The fact that I came from the West simplified matters”: everyone was interested in the Westerner, and had wanted to save him. 60 Flora Leipman, a Scottish woman whose Russian stepfather had talked her family into moving to the Soviet Union, deployed her “Scottishness” to entertain her fellow prisoners:

I pulled up my skirt above the knees to look like a kilt and turned down my stockings to make them look knee high. In Scots fashion my blanket was thrown over my shoulder and I hung my hat in front of me like a sporran. My voice soared with pride, singing “Annie-Laurie,” “Ye Banks and Braes o’Bonnie Doon,” always finishing up with “God Save the King”—without translation.61

Ekart also described what it felt like being an “object of curiosity” for Russian intellectuals:

At specially organized, carefully hidden meetings with some of the more trusted among them, I told them of my life in Zurich, in Warsaw, in Vienna and other cities of the West. My sports coat from Geneva, my silk shirts, were most carefully examined, for they were the only material evidence of the high standard of living outside the world of communism. Some of them were visibly incredulous when I said that I could easily buy all these articles on my monthly salary as a junior engineer in a cement factory.

“How many suits did you have?” asked one of the agricultural experts.

“Six or seven.”

“You are a liar!” said one man of not more than 25, and then, turning to the others: “Why should we tolerate such fantastic stories? Everything has its limits; we are not children.”

I had difficulty