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Not every national clan had the same character. Opinions differ, for example, as to whether Jewish prisoners actually had their own network, or whether they melded into the general Russian population (or, in the case of the large numbers of Polish Jews, into the general Polish population). At different times, it seems, the answer was different, and much depended on individual attitudes. Many of the Jews arrested in the late 1930s, during the repressions against top nomenklatura and the army, appear to have considered themselves communists first and Jews second. As one prisoner put it, in the camps “Everyone became Russian—Caucasians, Tartars, Jews.”⁵⁴

Later, as more Jews arrived along with the Poles during the war, they seem to have formed recognizable ethnic networks. Ada Federolf, who wrote her memoirs together with Ariadna Efron, Marina Tsvetaeva’s daughter, described one camp where the tailors’ workshop—by camp standards a luxurious place to work—was run by a man called Lieberman. Whenever a new transport arrived, he would go through the crowd calling out, “Any Jews, any Jews?” When he found Jews he arranged for them to work for him in his workshop, thereby saving them from general work in the forests. Lieberman also devised ingenious plans to save rabbis, who needed to pray all day. He built a special closet for one rabbi, hiding him inside it so that no one would know that he was not working. He also invented the job of “quality controller” for another rabbi. This allowed the man to walk up and down the lines of sewing women all day long, smiling at them and praying under his breath.⁵⁵

By the early 1950s, when official anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union began to grow stronger, buoyed by Stalin’s obsession with the Jewish doctors he thought were trying to kill him, it 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: