Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [204]
The maloletki—“juveniles”—inspired little sympathy among their fellow inmates. “Hunger and the horror of what had happened had deprived them of all defenses,” wrote Lev Razgon, who observed that the juveniles gravitated naturally toward those who seemed the strongest. These were the professional criminals, who turned the boys into “servants, mute slaves, jesters, hostages, and everything else,” and both boys and girls into prostitutes.110 Their horrifying experiences failed to inspire much pity, however; on the contrary, some of the harshest invective in camp memoir literature is reserved for them. Razgon wrote that whatever their background, child prisoners soon “all displayed a frightening and incorrigibly vengeful cruelty, without restraint or responsibility.” Worse,
They feared nothing and no one. The guards and camp bosses were scared to enter the separate barracks where the juveniles lived. It was there that the vilest, most cynical and cruel acts that took place in the camps occurred. If one of the prisoners’ criminal leaders was gambling, lost everything and had staked his life as well, the boys would kill him for a day’s bread ration or simply “for the fun of it.” The girls boasted that they could satisfy an entire team of tree-fellers. There was nothing human left in these children and it was impossible to imagine that they might return to the normal world and become ordinary human beings again.111
Solzhenitsyn felt the same:
In their consciousness there was no demarcation line between what was permissible and what was not permissible, and no concept of good and evil. For them, everything that they desired was good and everything that hindered them was bad. They acquired their brazen and insolent manner of behavior because it was the most advantageous form of conduct in the camp . . .112
A Dutch prisoner, Johan Wigmans, also writes of the young people who “probably did not really mind having to live in these camps. Officially they were supposed to work, but in practice that was the last thing they ever did. At the same time they had the benefit of regular means and ample opportunity of learning from their cronies.”113
There were exceptions. Alexander Klein tells the story of two thirteen-year-old boys, arrested as partisans, who had received twenty-year camp sentences. The two remained ten years in the camps, managing to stick together by declaring hunger strikes when anyone separated them. Because of their age, people took pity on them, gave them easy work and extra food. Both managed to enroll in camp technical courses, becoming competent engineers before being let out in one of the amnesties that followed Stalin’s death. If it had not been for the camps, wrote Klein, “who would have helped half-literate country boys become educated people, good specialists?”114
Nevertheless, when, in the late 1990s, I began to look around for memoirs of people who had been juvenile prisoners, I found it very difficult to find any. With the exception of Yakir’s, Kmiecik’s, and a handful of others collected by the Memorial Society and other organizations, there are very few.115 Yet there had been tens of thousands of such children, and many should still have been alive. I even suggested to a Russian