Prisoner: Eugenia Ginzburg
Ginzburg was freed from the prison camp in 1947 after having spent ten years of her life, but had to remain in exile and made plans to go to Magadan where she would work as a teacher. “No sooner had I appeared outside the Elgen free hospital, where I had served out my last two months as a prisoner, than I was surrounded by all the prisoners on the hospital staff. And I could read the same expression in all their faces. They loved me at that moment simply because I personified for them the thought that it was, after all, possible to get out of there!” While in Magadan, Ginzburg was able to send for her younger son, her eldest son and husband had died while she was in prison. In 1955 she was finally allowed to return to Moscow.
Introduction
Survivors of the Gulag often found their former lives torn apart and irrecoverable after leaving the camps. Released prisoners experienced discrimination and alienation making living and working difficult. Those who did survive have contributed immensely to the documentation of the Gulag's history.
Movie Transcription
Across the former Soviet Union, millions lie in anonymous graves. Whether shot in a prison basement, or killed in Gulag camps by exhaustion, starvation, malnutrition-related illness, labor accident, or the violence of fellow prisoners and guards, millions died at the hands of Soviet terror.
Telling the story of the Gulag through the eyes of its prisoners inevitably excludes the stories of those millions who died. These victims did not make it out of the camps to publish memoirs. Their stories are buried beneath the grounds of Siberia, Kazakhstan and the whole of the former Soviet Union.
Even those who survived the camps emerged traumatized and brutalized. Readjusting to life outside the camps would be a struggle. Many former inmates maintained life-long bonds with their fellow inmates after leaving the camps, and many continue to struggle to keep the Gulag’s memory alive to prevent new human rights abuses in the countries of the former Soviet Union today.