Prisoner: Lev Kopelev
“It was unbearably hot and stuffy. We sat on the floor in our underpants. We were all thirsty. The [toilet] bucket could be carried out only when it was full to the brim. There was no shortage of volunteers for the malodorous task: they could stop by a water faucet outside. On the third day there was still no bread. The shouts and wails were louder than ever and the reports of automatic rifle fire more frequent. ‘Shot three of them today,’ said one of the guards who brought us the midday meal. He explained that there was no bread because the bakery had burned down, and they were waiting for bread from another bakery.”
Hunger
No Gulag indignity consumed prisoners like hunger. Prisoners could think of nothing but the search for food. To scrounge an extra bowl of soup made for a great day in the camps. Bread was treated as gold. Eating was ritualized—a holy moment when every prisoner sought to convince himself that he was eating enough. Based on his own Gulag experience, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich reflects on the ritual of eating. “You had to eat with all your thoughts on the food, like he was nibbling off these little bits now, and turn them over on your tongue, and roll them over in your mouth—and then it tasted so good, this soggy black bread.”
Hunger could so destroy human dignity that scenes of prisoners digging through trash heaps in desperate hope of finding something edible became commonplace. Dmitri Panin recalled, “Death from a bullet would have been bliss compared with what many millions had to endure while dying of hunger. The kind of death to which they were condemned has nothing to equal it in treachery and sadism.”