“You are here to suffer.” Women in labor camps were deprived of their dignity, health and life

Łagry were Soviet concentration camps and forced labor camps. They were already established in Bolshevik (in 1918) and were also continued in the USSR until around 1987. All prisoners were sent to the camps – regardless of their age, sex, race or position. They were forced to work beyond their strength, leading to extreme emaciation and death. Since 1930, there were so many labor camps that the GULag system was established to supervise them. Forced slave labor even became an important element of the economy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Men were sent to war and women were sent to labor camps. Production plans had to be made

As Tadeusz Sucharki writes in “Contexts of Culture”, the percentage of women in Stalinist camps increased in the last years of the war. In 1941, female prisoners accounted for eight percent of the total number of people staying in labor camps. At the end of 1944, they already accounted for 28 percent. prisoners – the number of women imprisoned increased three and a half times in three years. The reason was that even men were sent to war with a camp sentence, and the imposed production plans had to be carried out anyway. Women were even sent there for small thefts of food for their starving children.

Women in labor camps were forced to work, which was often too hard even for men. Some of them were sent to logging, and slave labor in very bad weather conditions meant that women prisoners often stayed in labor camps for several weeks. They were dying of hunger and exhaustion, but the guards felt no pity for this. – You can’t, then die – this is how the pleas of women were acknowledged by the man guarding them at the felling (quotation from Anne Applebaum’s book “The Gulag”). – I’m not interested in your work. You are here to suffer – recalls Sussana Petchurd, who was sent by the guard with the dug-up earth because she had already frozen on the wheelbarrow.

Women were also sent to build a canal connecting them to the White Sea. They had to transport huge boulders on wheelbarrows, and the task was not made easier by frost, snow and too light clothing that did not protect against the cold. Women often died in the course of the work performed. “Some of them froze at work, sometimes standing, bending over the wheelbarrow” – reported Elwira Watała in the book “Women around Stalin”.

For the lack of a well-developed, absurdly excessive daily standard, inmates could not count on a full portion and such a very modest meal. So they had to find solutions that would help them survive in difficult and extremely humiliating conditions. They opted for various survival strategies, and inmates did not hesitate to cheat, steal, prostitute or even kill to survive.

Survival strategies in a labor camp. Fraud, self-harm and prostitution

The scams were called tufts, and the younger female prisoners learned them from their older female friends. Yevgeny Ginzburg in “Steep Wall” described that they sometimes managed to trick the controllers into felling trees. The prisoners used trees that had been felled by previous shifts and sawed off the ends of the reels to keep them looking fresh. It was also possible to avoid working beyond strength by self-mutilation – however, it had to be large enough for the guards to conclude that the inmate would actually be unable to work. Ginzburg described one of the women who had pierced her toe right through with a large nail. The prisoners also poured pencil filings into their eyes or injected petroleum under their skin to get sick leave.

Yevgeny Ginzburg in 1977. photo: Wikimedia Commons

Inmates also had to deal with the humiliation they experienced from criminals, thieves, prostitutes and murderers who “ruled” the camp in the evenings. So women had to learn quickly that by being polite they would not be able to defend themselves – they had to behave towards them as they treated them. So violence and insults were the order of the day.

Olga Adamowa-Slozberg wrote in her memoirs that staying in such a place would deprive female prisoners of any emotions. She described how she had watched the hated guardian (who turned the prisoners over to rapists) without being moved when she suffered a heart attack and did not call for help. Jefrosinia Kiersnowska in “How Much Is a Man Worth” added that she once planned to kill a foreman with an ax in the labor camp, but she had no strength to pick up the would-be instrument of the crime from the ground.

The female prisoners only had a body to offer

The women prisoners, who had no valuables, had only their own bodies to offer. When they asked someone for a favor, tried to avoid being transferred to an inferior camp, or asked for extra bread in their food ration, they had to give something back. Sometimes, however, even prostitution did not help. Mira Jakowienko wrote about a prisoner who spent the night with the head of the camp to avoid being transported to another camp. Nevertheless, the next day the woman was sent away because in her place another train came with “a great selection of pure, modest and intelligent women who would not even look at such a man at other times” and now they indulge in him because he has authorities.

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński in “Another World” described the story of Marusia, who was raped by a gang of urks (camp criminals). The next day, bruised, weak and aching, she sat down on the rape initiator’s bunk and pleaded with him. In this way, the girl wanted to protect herself from another act of violence, but Urk’s “care” did not last too long.

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński. Photo taken in the prison in Grodno in 1940 photo: Wikimedia Commons

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the “Gulag Archipelago” mentions that young and pretty prisoners who received union offers from gang “managers” or officers were slightly better off. In return, they were given lighter jobs or slightly larger meals that helped them survive in the labor camp. Elena Mrkova, on the other hand, spoke differently. – Some … services were expected from young girls. They had to do it. For refusal, they were sent to the mine – a former prisoner recalls in an interview with National Geographic.

Yevgeny (Eugenia) Ginzburg in “Steep Wall” also writes about female prisoners who chose so-called “relationships” with higher-ranking prisoners just to get more food, and also out of fear of rape. These, on the other hand, were not so rare in a camp where both women and men were kept. He even describes how groups of men raided women’s barracks in the evenings and raped terrified and defenseless women in them. “I pulled the cotton wool over my head, I curled up, I wanted to disappear, to remain invisible. But there is a jerk … Someone’s animal hand tears my cotton wool coat off me and I feel like I am doomed to slaughter a sheep” – she wrote in the book.

At one point, a rumor spread among the inmates that women inmates who were nursing would be allowed to return home. At that time, women were looking for men, even offering them their food rations – just to get pregnant and return to freedom. However, this information was false, and the wave soon followed. In order to terminate the pregnancy, women ate nails, which led to severe hemorrhages.

Three Kinds of Camp Love. “Someone try to fill his heart with ice himself. We have ice here in the north.”

Barbara Skarga wrote in her book “After Liberation” that there were three types of love in labor camps: religious love (between lawful spouses), zenatikow (“cat’s paw” relationships) and mare (love between homosexual persons of both sexes). The complaint adds that the men found it more difficult to find a girl in the camp because there were simply fewer of them, and each of them had many “candidates” who offered a camp marriage. How did the writer explain love in labor camps?

“Someone will say that it was best not to play in love, there would be no trouble. Let him try to fill his heart with ice himself. We have ice here in the north. (…) But we want to remain human, we want it not to expire in us life, we defend ourselves against death, emotional depletion. We want to think of someone, fear someone, hug someone “- we read in her book. Some couples even entered into marriages, which were administered by priests imprisoned in labor camps.

In places like labor camps, however, there was no room for intimacy. “The dirt is indescribable, completely unheard of. The barrack is neglected, full of stuffiness, bare bunks, without bedding. Officially – men were not allowed to enter there, but no one heeded it and no one wanted to prove themselves. but minors – boys, 12-, 13-year-olds were pushing one another through the other: they were in a hurry to study. He did not extinguish it, it is understandable. Everything was done naturally, everything was in view – in several places in the room at once “- wrote Solzhenitsyn.