Prisoner: Eugenia Ginzburg
After she was expelled from the Communist party, Eugenia Ginzburg feared that she would be arrested as many of her associates had already been. One day she received a telephone call from the head of the NKVD department for special political affairs and was asked to come in to his office. As she prepared to leave her home, she said only casual goodbyes to her children and considered visiting her mother first, “Perhaps it was just as well not to see my mother either. What must be must be, and there’s no point in trying to postpone it. The door banged shut. I still remember the sound. That was all…I was never again to open the door behind which I had lived with my dear children.”
An Enemy of the People
Those Left Behind
The parents, spouses, and children whom prisoners left behind faced a difficult life. In her poem "Requiem," Anna Akhmatova voiced the pain of those hoping for the slightest news about the fate of loved ones on the far side of the prison wall.
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad
And I pray not for myself alone
but for all who stood outside the jail,
in bitter cold or summer's blaze,
with me under that blind red wall...
And if my country should ever assent
to casting in my name a monument,
I should be proud to have my memory graced,
but only if the monument be placed
not near the sea on which my eyes first opened—
my last link with the sea has long bee broken...
but here, where I endured three hundred hours
in line before the implacable iron bars...
And from my motionless bronze-lidded sockets
may the melting show, like teardrops, slowly trickle...
Poems of Akhmatova, selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward. Boston, 1973.