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9b Entrance to a Vorkuta lagpunkt (the sign reads: “Work in the USSR is a matter of Honour and Glory . . .”)

10a Sawing logs

10b Hauling timber

11a Digging the Fergana Canal

11b Digging coal

12a “If you have your own bowl, you get the first portions.”

12b “They surrendered their bronze skin to tattooing and in this way gradually satisfied their artistic, their erotic, and even their moral needs.”

13a “We picked up a wooden tub, received a cup of hot water, a cup of cold water, and a small piece of black, evil-smelling soap . . .”

13b “Having been admitted with advanced signs of malnutrition, the majority would die in hospital . . .”

14a&b Polish children, photographed just after amnesty, 1941

15a Camp maternity ward: a prisoner nursing her newborn

15b Camp nursery: decorating a holiday tree

16a A crowded barracks . . .

16 b . . . a punishment isolator

Chapter 15

WOMEN AND CHILDREN

. . . the prisoner who was our barrack orderly greeted me with a cry: “Run and see what’s under your pillow!”My heart leaped: perhaps I’d got my bread ration after all!I ran to my bed and threw off the pillow. Under it lay threeletters from home, three whole letters! It was six months sinceI’d received anything at all.My first reaction on seeing them was acute disappointment. And then—horror.What had become of me if a piece of bread was worth moreto me now than letters from my mother, my father, my children. . . . I forgot all about the bread and wept.

—Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey¹

THEY MET the same work norms and they ate the same watery soup. They lived in the same sort of barracks and traveled in the same cattle trains. Their clothes were almost identical, their shoes equally inadequate. They were treated no differently under interrogation. And yet—men’s and women’s camp experiences were not quite the same.

Certainly many women survivors are convinced that there were great advantages to being female within the camp system. Women were better at taking care of themselves, better at keeping their clothes patched and their hair clean. They seemed better able to subsist on low amounts of food, and did not succumb so easily to pellagra and the other diseases of starvation.² They formed powerful friendships, and helped one another in ways that male prisoners did not. Margarete Buber-Neumann records that one of the women arrested with her in Butyrka prison had been picked up in a light summer dress which had turned to rags. The cell determined to make her a new dress:

They clubbed together and bought half-a-dozen towels of rough, unbleached Russian linen. But how was the dress to be cut without a pair of scissors? A little ingenuity solved the problem. The “cut” was marked with the burnt ends of matches, the material was folded along the marked lines, and a lighted match was run backwards and forwards for a moment or two along the fold. Then the material was unfolded again and the line was burnt through. The cotton for sewing was obtained by carefully withdrawing threads from other clothing . . .