Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [225]
Some inmates were quite literally saved thanks to a few words from a medical man. Burning with fever, reduced to a skeleton, tortured by hunger, one doctor diagnosed Lev Kopelev with pellagra, a bowel infection, and a bad cold. “I’m sending you to the hospital,” she declared. It was not an easy journey from the lagpunkt to the camp central hospital, the sanchast. Kopelev gave up all of his property—on the grounds that all camp belongings must stay in the camp—marched through “deep, icy puddles” and crowded into a cattle car with other sick and dying prisoners. The journey was hellish. But when he awoke in his new surroundings, he found his life transformed:
In a blissful half-sleep, I sat in a bright, clean hospital room, on a bunk covered with an unbelievably clean sheet . . . The doctor was a small, round-faced man, whose grey moustache and thick eyeglasses added to his air of kindness and concern. “In Moscow,” he asked, “did you know a literary critic named Motylova?”
“Tamara Lazarevna Motylova? Of course!”
“She’s my niece.”
Uncle Borya, as I came to know him, looked at the thermometer. “Oho! Have him washed,” he told his assistant. “Have his clothes boiled. Get him into bed.”
Upon awaking again, Kopelev discovered he had been brought six pieces of bread: “Three pieces of black bread and—miraculous sight! Three pieces of white bread! I ate them greedily, my eyes filled with tears.” Better still, he was given anti-pellagra rations: turnips and carrots, as well as yeast and mustard to spread on bread. He was for the first time allowed to receive parcels and money from home, and was thus able to buy boiled potatoes, milk, and makhorka, the cheapest form of tobacco. Having been, it seemed, condemned to a living death, he realized he was now destined to be saved.66
This was a common experience. “Paradise” is what Evgeniya Ginzburg called the hospital where she worked in Kolyma.67 “We felt like kings,” wrote Thomas Sgovio of the “recovery barracks” in the Srednikan lagpunkt, where he received a “fresh, sweet roll in the morning.”68 Others write with remembered awe of the clean sheets, of the kindness of nurses, of the lengths to which doctors went to save their patients. One prisoner tells the story of a doctor who, risking his own position, illegally left the camp to procure necessary medications. 69 Tatyana Okunevskaya wrote that her doctor “brought the dead back to life.”70 Vadim Aleksandrovich, who was himself a camp doctor, remembered that “The doctor and his assistant in the camps are, if not gods, then demi-gods. Upon them hangs the possibility of a few days’ freedom from killing work, even the possibility of being sent to a sanatorium.”71
Janos Rozsas, an eighteen-year-old Hungarian who found himself in the same camp as Alexander Solzhenitsyn after the war, wrote a book entitled Sister Dusya, named in honor of the camp nurse he believed had saved his life. Not only did she sit and talk to him, convincing him that it was impossible to die under her care, Sister Dusya even traded her own bread ration in order to procure milk for Rozsas, who could digest very little food. He remained grateful for the rest of his life: “I conjured up in my head two beloved faces, the faraway face of my natural mother, and the face of Sister Dusya. They were amazingly similar . . . I told myself that if, in time,