Category Archives: USSR

by | 2 April 2005 · 9:23 pm

NKVD Busts Largest Polish Spy Ring Ever, 1937-38

In 1937, the Soviet NKVD began an investigation into the “most powerful and probably the most important diversionist-espionage networks of Polish intelligence in the USSR.”

The operation began with NKVD Order 00485, an order that set the pattern for later mass arrests. Operational Order 00485 clearly listed the sort of person who was to be arrested: all remaining Polish war prisoners from the 1920-21 Polish-Bolshevik war; all Polish refugees and emigrants to the Soviet Union; anyone who had been a member of a Polish political party; and all “anti-Soviet activists” from Polish-speaking regions of the Soviet Union. In practice, anyone of Polish background living in the Soviet Union–and there were many, particularly in the Ukrainian and Belorussian border regions–was under suspicion. The operation was so thorough that the Polish Consul in Kiev compiled a secret report describing what was happening, noting that in some villages “anyone of Polish background and even anyone with a Polish-sounding name” had been arrested, whether a factory manager or a peasant.

But the arrests were only the beginning. Since there was nothing to incriminate someone guilty of having a Polish surname, Order 00485 went on to urge regional NKVD chiefs to “begin investigations simultaneously with arrests. The basic aim of investigation should be the complete unmasking of the organizers and leaders of the diversionist group, with the goal of revealing the diversionist network …”

In practice, this meant–as it would in so many other cases–that the arrestees themselves would be forced to provide the evidence from which the case against them would be constructed. The system was simple. Polish arrestees were first questioned about their membership in the espionage ring. Then, when they claimed to know nothing about it, they were beaten or otherwise tortured until they “remembered.” Because Yezhov was personally interested in the success of this particular case, he was even present at some of these torture sessions. If the prisoners lodged official complaints about their treatment, he ordered his men to ignore them and to “continue in the same spirit.” Having confessed, the prisoners were then required to name others, their “co-conspirators.” Then the cycle would begin again, as a result of which the “spy network” grew and grew.

Within two years of its launch, the so-called “Polish line of investigation” had resulted in the arrests of more than 140,000 people, by some accounts nearly 10 percent of all of those repressed in the Great Terror. But the Polish operation also became so notorious for the indiscriminate use of torture and false confessions that in 1939, during the brief backlash against mass arrests, the NKVD itself launched an investigation into the “mistakes” that had been made while it was being carried out. One officer involved remembered that “it wasn’t necessary to be delicate–no special permission was needed in order to beat people in the face, to beat without limitation.” Those with qualms, and apparently there were some, had explicitly been told that it was Stalin and the Politburo’s decision to “beat the Poles for all you are worth.”

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 137-139

At least one young Pole, Karol Wojtyla–preoccupied in 1938 with his confirmation, his high school graduation, and his enrollment in university–outlasted not just the NKVD, but the Soviet Union itself. He got, if not the last laugh, at least the last beatific smile. May he rest in peace.

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by | 25 March 2005 · 8:12 am

Democracy Guy on Falling Dominoes

I’ve felt little need to post on recent developments in Kyrgyzstan. It’s already well covered by Nathan Hamm, PubliusPundit, and other blogs who are regularly linked to by big blogs like Instapundit. But here’s a bit of historical perspective by Democracy Guy, in a post entitled Dominos Fall Harder from West to East.

When communism fell, it fell literally from west to east. The further east one travels from the Berlin Wall, the less democratic tradition the new democracies had to fall back on. So Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Baltics, were the first to emerge from the rubble intact, free, vibrant, with traditions built on Western European foundations. Slovakia had a harder time, but has turned a corner. Slovenia escaped by the skin of its teeth as Yugoslavia crumbled into ethnic genocide. Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, bled for years. Ukraine rotted for more than a decade before the Orange Revolution. Belarus simply reverted to Stalinism. Russia perpetually teeters on the brink of a return to authoritarianism. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan descended into ethnic conflict and militaristic authoritarianism before Tbilisi tasted freedom once more last year.

And in Central Asia, where Kyrgystan sits in the mountains, a statist fascism of the most extreme kind has taken hold. Kyrgystan was once a breath of fresh air among the near North Korean level of dictatorship in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. But communism’s fall left the most rubble the further east you go from Berlin, and Kyrgystan today groans under the weight, falling ever further away from democracy.

For more, see Dan Drezner’s equivocal blogpost (and comments) on The Fourth Wave of Democratization?–with emphasis on the punctuation at the end of the title.

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by | 7 March 2005 · 7:45 pm

Communists Win/Lose in Moldova

Siberian Light has been tracking the Moldovan elections.

Here’s the breakdown of the three parties that forced their way over the five percent threshold and into 101-seat parliament.

  • Communist Party: 46.1% / 56 seats
  • Democratic Moldova Bloc: 28.4% / 24 seats
  • Popular Party Christian Democratic: 9% / 11 seats

But Publius Pundit has a different headline: Communists lose majority in Moldova.

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by | 16 February 2005 · 9:54 am

Being Foreign in the Soviet Union in the 1960s

David McDuff‘s series finishes off with a few posts about what it was like to be a foreigner in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. The following are only short excerpts from each post.

Going Back IX

Writing this now, nearly forty years later, I’m conscious that much has changed in the world and in Moscow since those slightly eerie days of the mid-Cold War. Back then, the mere sight of anything “Western” – nye nash – on a Moscow street was enough to arouse suspicion, and alert the ubiquitous enforcers of order and discipline as well as those who sought to elude them. If one wore jeans, one was likely to be asked to sell them; if one was discovered to be carrying a bag full of Kellogg’s cornflakes boxes, Kit-Kat biscuits, cartons of sterilized milk and jars of Nescafe (shopping was often done for several members of the group), one was likely to get a similar request, or even simply have the things taken away by an officious “citizen”. At GUM (the large universal department store) or along Gorky Street, it was usual to be approached by touts trying to conduct the illegal exchange of Western currency for rubles. There was therefore quite a strong motivation to remain anonymous and nondescript – being conspicuously Western was not such a good idea….

One morning, while shopping at GUM with a friend, I witnessed something I hadn’t seen before: from a point on the second tier of the balconies around the store, a young woman suddenly threw a bunch of leaflets into the air, and there was a brief flash of metal as she chained herself to the railings. The leaflets fell among the crowd of shoppers below. No one picked them up. Suddenly, I heard two or three voices chanting what later turned to have been slogans. Then the young woman was gone, and the chanting stopped. It was all over within about a minute. The demonstrators were removed by police, and the crowds went on with their shopping as if nothing had happened.

Going Back X

The strangeness and massiveness of the university environment and also of the urban environment in Moscow itself led to a certain degree of alienation, which in turn prompted many of us to withdraw into private rituals. After a morning and early afternoon session at the Library, for example, a few of us would often repair to one of the large hotels in the vicinity – usually the National or the Moskva – for “lunch”. I put the word in quotes, as it was really the Russian obed. For the equivalent of about six dollars, one could eat a perfectly decent four-course meal with Soviet champagne in the vast and almost deserted tourist restaurant of the National, looking out at the snowy square. In the restaurant it was warm and comfortable, and I think we saw it as a kind of escape from the travails of Zone V, where there weren’t even the basic prerequisites of comfort – not even a laundry that was anywhere within reasonable walking distance: clothes were generally washed in the shower, with soap powder brought from the embassy store. So there we sat, while the snow fell outside, and the light began to fail, and we passed the hours in pleasant conversation. It was really a kind of withdrawal.

Going Back XI

I’d met quite a few Russians during my stay – in particular, there were Tolya and Aida: they had links with dissident painters and sculptors, whose studios we visited. I was always struck by the intensity and passion with which Russians discussed art and literature – it was quite unlike anything I had ever come across in the West. There was a genuine hunger for information about life in the West – even “dissident” Russians had many strange preconceptions about it, which was inevitable given the almost total block on such factual matter in the official media, and the lack of knowledge of West European languages: most Russians we met knew practically no English, for example…. In general, the political climate in the Soviet Union climate at that time was such that it was almost impossible to strike up real and lasting friendships with ordinary Soviet citizens. The degree of suspicion and fear was palpable: even on an informal night out, there was always the possibility of being followed and spied on, and I witnessed this on several occasions. It was also generally impossible to discuss Soviet politics, even with those Russians who considered themselves “freethinking”: the reality of eavesdropping and surveillance was everywhere. Only in the more than slightly Dostoyevskian atmosphere of Viktor’s room back at MGU did I ever witness political discussions that were completely uninhibited: but then the participants were often working hand-in-hand with the authorities, and “provocation” was the watchword of the hour.

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by | 11 February 2005 · 9:12 am

Studying in the Soviet Union in the 1960s

David McDuff‘s retrospective on studying in the Soviet Union in the 1960s continues. The following are only short excerpts from each post.

Going Back V

It’s hard now, in retrospect, to recreate or even re-invoke the atmosphere of those years. At home, in Britain, there was a sense of social change, the dropping of old certainties and taboos and also a degree of willingness to experiment with new lifestyles and patterns of living. This was accompanied by the burgeoning pop culture, the new cults of fashion, drugs and sex, the advent of rock music, the Beatles and the Stones, and the Wilson government with its slightly tongue-in-cheek, but none the less real commitment to the “white-hot technological revolution”. It all had an air of adventure, but at the same an innocence whose essence is hard to recapture or understand nowadays. In some ways, as students (our official designation was that of “scholars”) travelling on British Council stipends and the recipients of a Foreign Office briefing, we were, I guess, meant to be representatives of the New Britain, carrying the Western way of life into the heart of the Soviet monolith, in the hope – entertained by some – that some of it would rub off and act as diplomatic grease for the rather rusty state of British-Soviet relations at the time (strangely, perhaps, the installation of a Labour government at Westminster and Whitehall had led to more, not less tension between London and Moscow).

Going Back VI

In the morning, we all left the train with our luggage and were herded into another bus. Our mood was generally cheerful, though also somewhat apprehensive. To begin with, the group was housed at a university hostel (studencheskoye obshchezhitie) on Lomonosovsky Prospekt, with the promise that in a couple of weeks’ time we would be transferred to the main university building. The university district, in Moscow’s south-western suburbs, is a rather characterless and sprawling area of geometrically planned avenues, which also takes in Lenin Hills (Lenskie Gory, now Sparrow Hills, Vorobyevye Gory), and the university skyscraper. Our hostel was a five-storey building, indistinguishable from the other five-storey apartment blocks that stretched for kilometre after kilometre on either side. We were fortunate enough to each receive a room to ourselves, though we soon realized what a luxury this was – most of the Soviet students in the building had to share two, three or even four to a room. For the first day or two we restricted our outside forays to such activities as finding the nearest foodstore – something of a necessity, as the university stolovayas (dining-rooms) were situated some distance away. We got used to queuing for such items as bread, kolbasa (sausage), cheese, and so on, and then joining the second queue at the cashier’s desk, in order to pay. The whole process could take as long as an hour. Back at the hostel, we experimented with cans of pork and salted fish, which we prised open and devoured in the floor’s communal kitchen.

Going Back VII

In the basement of Zones B and V were the stolovayas (dining rooms) and shops and stores. Here we could spend our money. We were fortunate by comparison with our Soviet colleagues, receiving a monthly stipend of 250 rubles, supplemented with a monthly British Council grant of £25 in hard currency traveller’s cheques. Most Soviet students had to subsist on a maximum monthly stipend of 150 rubles, many receiving less than this. At this time, one ruble was supposed to be equivalent to one US dollar. The main stolovaya was a self-service canteen which, for very little money, provided a basic diet of shchi (cabbage soup) or borshch (borsch), kotlety (meatballs, usually served with rice), cabbage and/or carrot salad, sour cream, kumys (fermented mare’s milk), kompot (stewed dried fruit in a tumbler, really a kind of fruit juice), black bread and/or white bread, and tea. This was served for all meals, including breakfast. It could be eaten for two or three days before becoming intolerably repetitive. There was also a coffee bar, which was supposed to serve coffee, though I never saw any during all the time I spent in MGU. There was also a store selling such delicacies as Soviet champagne, wine, cigarettes, Cuban cigars and candy. Outside the main building, on Prospekt Vernadskogo and Kutuzovsky Prospekt there were foodstores (gastronom) which sold staple groceries, and it was even possible to buy fresh meat if one was prepared to queue for a long time. If one was feeling especially extravagant, in certain areas of town there were also the so-called beryozka hard currency stores, earmarked for the use of Communist Party officials and high-ranking bureaucrats, but also open to foreign diplomats and their families. Some of these stores sold fresh fruit (often virtually unobtainable with rubles) and superior quality cuts of meat, and after a little argument one could usually be served by presenting one’s traveller’s cheques to the kassirsha behind the often brutally overcrowded sales counter, though this often involved prolonged arguments about whether one’s signature was genuine or not.

Going Back VIII

Lidiya Prokofyevna, or “L.P.” as we soon began to call her, was in charge of all the foreign “philology” (arts and humanities) students in the building and its environs. Her office was therefore often very busy, and the time spent waiting outside it for one’s appointment, which was sometimes delayed by up to two hours or more, could be considerable. When one did gain access to the inner sanctum, one began to realize why these delays occurred. To begin with, L.P. would fix you with her somewhat steely, but none the less friendly gaze, through thick glasses, and ask you questions about your zayavlenie, or application for research and archive facilities. When she had learned what she wanted to know, she would pick up the telephone and call the relevant authorities – however, the people at the other end of the line usually seemed to be busy or absent: the phone would go and ringing and ringing, and L.P. would sit there looking at you through her glasses. She might then briefly change the subject to the questions of how you were faring in Zone V, or who your group leader was, or some such topic, but would then revert to silent waiting, as the phone at the other end of the line continued to ring and ring. Sometimes this process of waiting went on for ten minutes or more – then she would call another number, with the same result, and so on. Eventually the required information would come through, and L.P. would issue instructions about the appointment with the archive director, librarian or other official. I think most of us found these sessions in L.P.’s office something of a Kafkaesque joke – and what made the joke even funnier was that L.P. seemed to share an awareness of the absurdity of the situation. Eventually one day, the leader (or starosta) of our group and his deputy brought her flowers and chocolates, which finally seemed to break the ice.

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by | 11 February 2005 · 8:42 am

Soviet vs. Western Dissidents

Here’s an excerpt from what A Step at a Time has to say about Cold War dissidents.

In the 1960s and early 1970s there existed an almost complete disparity, a dislocation, even, between the dissident movement in Soviet Russia and the radical movements in the West (those which gravitated around the Paris “revolution” of 1968, for example). While Western radicals sometimes paid lip service to Soviet dissidents – and there was a mild flurry of sympathy for them during the events that immediately followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 – in general there was an almost total lack of comprehension on both sides. Western radicals could not understand the admiration felt by most Soviet dissidents for Western democracy and culture, while most Soviet dissidents were appalled by the disdain and hatred felt by much of the Western radical left for Western society. Later, this dislocation crystallized out in the situation described by Sharansky in The Case for Democracy, where Western “ban-the-bomb” marchers walked side by side with KGB operatives who were bent on exploiting the radical left-wing and peace movements, while in the Soviet Union, anti-nuclear protesters and peace activists languished in jails and prison camps.

Looking back on it now, it’s hard to see how anyone could seriously have compared the two movements – the radical Western left and the Soviet dissidents. While the Western students and activists were free to utter their opinions, hold public demonstrations and even burn down buildings, in the Soviet Union those who resisted the established order were imprisoned, tortured and killed. “Who could turn away from themselves even under enormous strain, after seeing Ginzburg’s tenacious refusal to compromise?” Cali Ruchala writes. Although the dissident movement was by no means homogeneous, and comprised different levels and qualities of disagreement with the power of authority, the example of fortitude, moral sanity and defiance, even under impossible conditions of repression, shown by Ginzburg and others like him was simply over the heads of most Western observers, even those who for their own political and ideological reasons wanted to sympathize with the Soviet outcasts.

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by | 4 February 2005 · 8:44 am

Volga Germans Steer for Home

The invaluable Argus notes a story about Volga Germans in Kazakhstan.

ALMATY, 1 February (IRIN) – For Irina Geisler, a young ethnic German in the Kazakh commercial capital of Almaty, ‘returning’ to Germany, couldn’t be more natural. “I feel German. It’s my dream,” the 19-year-old linguistics student told IRIN. Her application for German citizenship currently awaits approval.

“All my life I’ve heard about Germany. It’s part of my life,” she said with a German accent heavily influenced by the Schwabian roots of her ancestors. Such dreams remain strong for thousands of such ethnic Germans in today’s Kazakhstan, with many of Irina’s friends torn between both countries. “Half of the young ethnic Germans would like to return, the other half don’t want to leave Kazakhstan,” Geisler conceded, describing it as an individual decision many young people like her still face.

“I’ve thought about going to Germany but I’ve finished my education already,” 29-year-old Evgenija Mayer, an employee at the Fredrich Ebert Stiftung in Almaty, told IRIN. “I worry I would have to start all over again.” But starting again is precisely what hundreds of thousands like her have done already. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, more than 900,000 ethnic Germans and their families have emigrated to Germany, the German Embassy in Almaty told IRIN.

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by | 30 January 2005 · 2:10 pm

In the Gulag on the Day Stalin Died

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (Anchor Books, 2003) describes what happened in the camps on the day Stalin finally died.

Throughout the last years of his life, political prisoners hoped and prayed for Stalin’s demise, discussing his death constantly, if subtly, so as not to attract the attention of informers. People would sigh and say, “Ah, Georgians live a long time,” which managed to convey a wish for his death without actually committing treason. Even when he grew sick, they were still cautious. Maya Ulyanovskaya heard the news of what was to be his final illness from a woman she knew to be an informer. She responded carefully: “So? Anyone can get sick. His doctors are good, they will cure him.”

When his death was finally announced, on March 5, 1953, some maintained their caution. In Mordovia, the politicals studiously hid their excitement, which they feared might earn them a second sentence. In Kolyma, women “diligently wailed for the deceased.” In one Vorkuta lagpunkt, Pavel Negretov heard the announcement read aloud in the camp dining hall. Neither the commander who read out the notice of death, nor any of the prisoners, said a word. “The news was greeted with a tomb-like silence. Nobody said a thing.”

In a Norilsk lagpunkt, prisoners assembled in the courtyard, and solemnly heard the news of the death of the “great leader of the Soviet people and of free human beings everywhere.” A long pause followed. Then a prisoner raised his hand: “Citizen Commander, my wife sent me some money, it’s in my account. I have no use for it here, so I would like to spend it on a bouquet for our beloved leader. Can I do that?”

But others openly rejoiced. In Steplag, there were wild cries and yells of celebration. In Vyatlag, prisoners threw their caps in the air and shouted “Hurrah!” On the streets of Magadan, one prisoner greeted another: “I wish you great joy on this day of resurrection!” He was not the only one overwhelmed by religious sentiment: “There was a light frost, and it was very, very quiet. Soon the sky would be turning blue. Yuri Nikolaevich held up his arms and with passion declared, ‘To Holy Russia let the cocks crow! Soon it will be daylight in Holy Russia!'”

Whatever they felt, and whether they dared to show their feelings or not, most prisoners and exiles were immediately convinced that things would change. In exile in Karaganda, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg heard the news, began to tremble, and put her hands over her face so that her suspicious workmates could not see her joy. “It’s now or never. Everything’s got to change. Now or never.”

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by | 28 January 2005 · 8:50 pm

When Germans Threatened the Soviet Gulag

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (Anchor Books, 2003) describes what happened when the German Army’s Operation Barbarossa in 1941 threatened camps full of Soviet prisoners.

The experience of being on a prisoner train during an air raid was relatively unusual, however–if only because prisoners were rarely allowed on the evacuation train at all. On the train leaving one camp, the families and the baggage of camp guards and administrators took up so much space that there was no room for any prisoners. Elsewhere, industrial equipment took priority over people, both for practical and propaganda reasons. Crushed in the West, the Soviet leadership promised to rebuild itself east of the Urals. As a result, that “significant proportion” of prisoners–in fact, the overwhelming majority–who [former Gulag system chief administrator Victor] Nasedkin had said were “evacuated on foot,” endured long forced marches, descriptions of which sound hauntingly similar to the marches undertaken by the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps four years later: “We have no transport,” one guard told an echelon of prisoners, as bombs fell around them. “Those who can walk will walk. Protest or not–all will walk. Those who can’t walk–we will shoot. We will leave no one for the Germans … you decide your own fate.”

Walk they did–although the journeys of many were cut short. The rapid advance of the Germans made the NKVD nervous, and when they became nervous, they started shooting. On July 2, the 954 prisoners of the Czortkow jail in western Ukraine began their march to the east. Along the way, the officer who wrote the subsequent report identified 123 of them as Ukrainian nationalists and shot them for “attempted rebellion and escape.” After walking for more than two weeks, with the German army within 10 to 20 miles, he shot all those still alive.

Evacuees not killed were sometimes hardly better off. Nasedkin wrote that “the apparat of the Gulag in the frontline regions was mobilized to ensure that evacuating echelons and transports of prisoners had medical-sanitary services and nourishment.” Alternatively, here is how M. Shteinberg, a political prisoner arrested for the second time in 1941, described her evacuation from Kirovograd prison:

Everything was bathed in blinding sunlight. At midday, it became unbearable. This was Ukraine, in the month of August. It was about 95 degrees [Fahrenheit] every day. An enormous quantity of people were walking, and on top of this crowd hung a hazy cloud of dust. There was nothing to breathe, it was impossible to breathe …

Everyone had a bundle in their arms. I had one too. I had even brought a coat with me, since without a coat it is hard to survive imprisonment. It’s a pillow, a blanket, a cover–everything. In most prisons, there are no beds, no mattresses, no linen. But after we had traversed 20 miles in that heat, I quietly left my bundle by the side of the road. I knew that I would not be able to carry it. The vast majority of the women did the same. Those who didn’t leave their bundles after the first 20 miles left them after 130. No one carried them to the end. When we had gone another 10 miles, I took off my shoes and left them too …

When we passed Adzhamka I dragged behind me my cell mate, Sokolovskaya, for 20 miles. She was an old woman, more than seventy years old, completely gray-haired … it was very difficult for her to walk. She clung to me, and kept talking about her fifteen-year-old grandson, with whom she had lived. The last terror in Sokolovskaya’s life was the terror that he would be arrested too. It was difficult for me to drag her, and I began to falter myself. She told me to “rest a while, I’ll go alone.” And she immediately fell back by 1 mile. We were the last in the convoy. When I felt that she had fallen behind, I turned back, wanting to get her–and I saw them kill her. They stabbed her with a bayonet. In the back. She didn’t even see it happen. Clearly, they knew how to stab. She didn’t even move. Later, I realized that hers had been an easy death, easier than that of others. She didn’t see that bayonet. She didn’t have time to be afraid.

In all, the NKVD evacuated 750,000 prisoners from 27 camps and 210 labor colonies. Another 40,000 were evacuated from 272 prisons, and sent to new prisons in the east. A significant proportion of them–though we still do not know the real numbers–never arrived.

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by | 28 January 2005 · 8:26 am

Rainy Day Diaries from World War II

Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day blog, whose diary entries were among my first inspirations to start my own blog, has been commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (by the Soviet Army) by posting diary entries from that era. Who wrote the following entries? Rainy Day has the answers. Just scroll down.

  • 4 December 1940 “Watch the newsreel with the Führer, who is very pleased with it. The shots of London burning make a particularly profound impression on him. He also takes careful note of the pessimistic opinions from the USA.

    Nevertheless, he does not expect the immediate collapse of England and probably rightly. The ruling class there has now lost so much that it is bringing up its last reserves. By which he means not so much the City of London as the Jews who if we win will be hurled out of Europe, and Churchill, Eden, etc., who see their personal existences as dependent on the outcome of the war. Perhaps they will end up on the scaffold. We can expect little resistance to them from the masses at the moment. The English proletariat lives under such wretched conditions that a few extra privations will not cause it much discomfort. There will be no revolution, anyway, because the opportunity is lacking. England will thus survive through the winter. The Führer does not intend to mount any air-raids at Christmas. Churchill, in his madness, will do so, and then the English will be treated to revenge raids that will make their eyes pop.”

  • 21 May 1941 “Sonnenstein has long ceased to be the regional mental asylum. The SS is in charge. They have built a special crematorium. Those who are not wanted are taken up in a kind of police van. People here all call it ‘the whispering coach’. Afterward the relatives receive the urn. Recently one family here received two urns at once. We now have pure Communism. But Communism murders more honestly.”

  • 1 July 1942 [Holland] “New measures again. Not only are we not allowed to cycle any more, we are not allowed to ride the trams either. We have to be off the streets by eight, and we are not allowed inside non-Jewish homes. Shopping is restricted for us to the hours between three and five p.m. It’s a mess. I’ve moved back home. I couldn’t stay with the Fernandes’ [non-Jewish friends] any more. I did have a wonderful time there. At my last meal with them last night, I read them a poem of thanks I had written. We were all so moved and depressed because of the new measures, and crying so hard about everything, that we ended up sobbing with laughter. It was a comical tragedy, really.”

  • 22 March 1945 [Bergen-Belsen] “The weather affects the mood of the camp most profoundly. Had it not been such a gloriously fine spring day today, we would all be feeling as dejected as on our worst days.

    Last night a transport of two thousand people arrived from Buchenwald concentration camp. The shouting, abusing, crying, taunting, groaning, cracking of the whips and thuds of the beatings could be heard throughout the night.

    This morning behind Hut 16 we saw hundreds of corpses being dragged onto a heap and stripped of their clothing. They also removed the gold teeth from their mouths. Never has it been as bad as this. All day, the heap of emaciated, naked bodies was left lying in the sun. Their facial expressions are frightening. They seem to know what is being done to them.”

  • 6 May 1945 “Last week I would not go to see the Belsen horror-camp pictures. I felt the ones in paper quite dreadful enough. They were shown again tonight, as requested by someone. I looked in such pity, marvelling how human beings could have clung to life: the poor survivors must have had both a good constitution and a great will to live. What kept them alive so long before they dropped as pitiful skeletons? Did their minds go first, I wonder, their reasoning leaving nothing but the shell to perish slowly, like a house left untenanted? Did their pitiful cries and prayers rise into the night to a God who seemed deaf and pitiless as their cruel jailers?”

And Siberian Light cites a memoir in the Guardian by Yakov Vinnichenko, one of the first Russian soldiers to enter Auschwitz.

Just five survivors remain today from the three Soviet divisions which liberated Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945. I am the youngest – I was only 19 when the war ended. But the events of 60 years ago are as fresh in my memory as if they happened yesterday.

I come from Vinnitsa in Ukraine. But my mother took me to Moscow in 1934 because of famine. In the summer of 1941 I went to help my grandad in Ukraine with his vegetable garden. I arrived on Saturday June 21, and the next day we took his cow to the market. At noon, we heard on the loudspeaker that war had begun. Money became worthless immediately. We could have got twice as much for the cow, but it was too late.

Although I was just 15 years old, I was immediately conscripted. We were kept in reserve, but when I turned 17 I was sent to the front. I had my baptism of fire in January 1943, when we kicked the Germans out of Voronezh. The following month, we liberated Kursk. It was a bloodbath: a whole regiment was killed in three hours. Later, I was badly wounded in the chest in the battle of Kursk. On recovery, I caught up with my regiment, under the command of General Vasily Petrenko, who died not long ago. He was a great commander. Under him we liberated Lvov in the summer of 1944, and on January 19 1945 we freed Krakow, a beautiful ancient city

At about 4am on January 27 we approached Oswiecim (Auschwitz). It is a small town on the Sola river. We didn’t even know there was a concentration camp there.

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