Prisoner: Eugenia Ginzburg
Ginzburg was sent to Yaroslavl where she spent two years initially in solitary confinement. “To this day, if I shut my eyes, I can see every bump and scratch on those walls, painted halfway up in the favorite prison colors, brownish-red and a dirty white above. Sometimes in the soles of my feet I still feel this or that crack in the stone floor of my cell: Number 3 on the second floor, north side. And I still remember the physical anguish, the despair of my muscles, as I paced the area in which I was henceforth to live. It was five paces long and three across. I was taken out of my cell three times every twenty-four hours: morning and evening to the washroom, and before or after dinner for exercise.”
Introduction
Gulag prisoners suffered from terrible living and working conditions in the Gulag. They froze in poorly heated barracks after working in sub-freezing temperatures; battled against hunger; and suffered from treatment that stole their dignity.
Movie Transcription
Deep, pounding hunger pangs tormented the Gulag prisoner’s every moment. Shoving their way to the cafeteria window, prisoners craved…cried out for food, always knowing but wanting to forget that the thin, watery gruel…that the small hunk of bread (sometimes made of little more than sawdust)…that these pathetic “meals” would never prepare them for the climatic assault of the day.
The pathetic rags, not even worthy of being called “clothes,” no more protected prisoners from the constant cold than the pitiful “food” satisfied their constant hunger. The Gulag, after all, inhabited some of the planet’s coldest places deep in frozen Siberia.
Even the end of the work day brought no respite in this hell. Barely heated, crowded barracks stank of the ill and the dying, though even this was better than the “punished” prisoners who could spend months in a totally unheated, dank punishment cell with no blankets and a sub-starvation penalty food ration.