Life in a camp zone was brutal and violent.

That day we each had a bowl of pea soup and half a kilo of fish. All human emotions—love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellow man, compassion, longing for fame, honesty—had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies...“Goners were extremely emaciated prisoners on the verge of death from starvation.

But even with thick soup in a warm stomach there remained a sucking pain; we’d been hungry for too long. A position on your back means all your bones are in direct painful contact with wood... To sleep on your belly is equally uncomfortable. After 264 days working at the Aftai Labor Camp, some of the deportees are loaded up onto another train and make the long trek, 134 days, to create a labor camp in Trofimovsk, Siberia. The Vilkas are sent by train to the Altai Labor camp. “Disembarkation of Lithuanian Exiles onto Trofimovsk Island, 28 August, 1942”. Thank you very much for more information.Hey Barbara. By 1934 the GULAG, or Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps, then under the Cheka's successor organization the NKVD, had several million inmates. Drawing. The caption to the drawing reads: ““They took the men with any strength and sent them to work finishing the NKVD barracks. It was probably stolen from the camp workshop by a prisoner to use as his personal mug.Russian author who was imprisoned in the Gulag for more than 20 years. I was particularly interested in the setting of the Trofimovsk prison camp (or Gulag) from the the book Between Shades of Gray. The majority of the Vilkas family's time is spent at either a labor camp in Altai or near the North Pole. It didn’t matter that it was bit tough; the experience lasted longer because we had to chew. Until you sleep on your right side with your left knee pushed against your chest, you counterbalance the weight of your left hip and relieve the right side of your rib cage. If they survived hunger, disease, the harsh elements, heavy labor, and their fellow prisoners, they might succumb to arbitrary violence at the hands of camp guards. He wrote the celebrated "Each time they brought in the soup... it made us all want to cry. Little by little, the starvation and scurvy started to recede.

Once they leave they travel further into Siberia and stop at … I understand that they went back to their countries and lived under Soviet occupation, but was there an army or group that liberated them and returned them to their home countries? He later published several writings, including his most important, “The Gulag was conceived in order to transform human matter into a docile, exhausted, ill-smelling mass of individuals living only for themselves and thinking of nothing else but how to appease the constant torture of hunger, living in the instant, concerned with nothing apart from evading kicks, cold and ill treatment.”“A lesson to learn: How to distribute your body on the planks trying to avoid excessive suffering? You can follow the links I provided for where I did my research, but they might be academic papers that you need a university login to access, which I no longer have.

Please tell me where I might read more about this. With our bare hands we ripped moss out of the eternally frozen tundra and put it between the bricks in place of concrete: a layer of bricks, a layer of moss. He had been jailed in independent Lithuania for underground communist activities.

In place of a roof we covered the tip of the barrack with boards covering them with moss and sand. Prisoners competed for access to all of life’s necessities, and violence among the prisoners was commonplace. Portion of hand-made spoon from labor camp Bugutychag, Kolyma, 1930s. Originally manufactured as a kerosene measuring cup, this mug is unusually durable. During their non-working hours, prisoners typically lived in a camp zone surrounded by a fence or barbed wire, overlooked by armed guards in watch towers.