Dancing Under the Red Star (25 page)

Our camp was part of the Gulag, the network of slave labor camps located mainly in remote regions of Siberia and the Far North. Under Stalin, the unpaid labor of Gulag prisoners made significant contributions to the Soviet economy: the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Baikal-Amur main railroad line, numerous hydroelectric stations, and strategic roads and industrial enterprises in these inaccessible northern regions. Labor camp manpower—prisoners like me—also did much of the country’s lumbering and the mining of coal, copper, and gold.

I had heard that in the camps of the Far North, political prisoners were segregated from the others and were supposedly issued better clothing and better rations. During one especially dismal, wet, cold morning, I decided to go to the head official of the loading department and ask him for a transfer. This official was himself a former political who had remained at the camp after his release, earning his way into a privileged position. I went to see him the next morning at six o’clock sharp.

He asked me what type of work I had done in my civilian life. When he heard that I had experience in tracing blueprints, he immediately sent me to a friend of his who was the head of the Construction Bureau and also a former political prisoner. When I presented myself to this man, he seemed impressed. He instructed me to print a general job application. I did this in minutes, with very little effort, and was hired on the spot. Just four men and I were now working indoors, in a little building with three rooms. I quickly learned that I was far better suited for administrative office work than for hauling logs! These new arrangements were like heaven to me, and silently I thanked God for his grace and the secret divine opening of little doors.

My big problem now was the barracks where I had to live.

One day at work I was standing on the edge of the stove, placing my wet boots on the top shelf to dry. My boss, Yuri, entered the room and spoke to me sternly: “What on earth are you doing up there?”

I told him I was drying my boots. Because we’d had so much theft in the barracks lately, I had to sleep in my clothes with my wet boots under my pillow. Yuri stormed into the other room, went to the phone, called the commander, and arranged for my immediate transfer to the office workers’ barracks.

I could hear him talking from the next room. “Hello, my friend. Yuri here. Tell me, why is my new prize worker still living with the animals?” That’s all he said. Later that night I slept in a whole new world—entirely new quarters, which felt like a luxury hotel.

The contrast was extreme. Now we had a kind, elderly woman who took care of the routine maintenance and chores in the barracks. She always kept everything spotless and well sanitized. This was the camp’s
select
barracks for women, housing twenty-five to thirty of us at any one time. One girl would leave upon completion of her sentence, and a new one would eventually come in. All of us tried to outdo one another in decorating our bunk areas, where we spent what free time we had when our work duties in the camp were finished. It was an undeclared, friendly sort of competition, trying to make something out of nothing. But this was still a forced-labor camp, and despite our tolerable barracks, many women died from natural and not-so-natural causes. A couple of girls mysteriously disappeared, and then others took their place. You couldn’t ask what had happened. Like the seasons, life in the barracks continued in this manner. Considering the likely alternative, I was truly grateful to be here. Sometimes it struck me again that, among the thousands of women prisoners,
I was the only American
in the entire camp.

My work group was assigned to one very big project: the initial design for a new city prison for Gorky. We worked diligently on the drawings for some time. Suddenly one day the officials in charge announced that our work had to be completed one month sooner than scheduled. We had already slaved over this project, and the new deadline seemed impossible to meet. But we were forced to continue, working day and night, not even going to our barracks to sleep and taking barely enough time to eat. We didn’t have much choice in the matter. Stalin constantly increased the number of projects assigned to the NKVD, leading to an increasing reliance on its forced labor. The Gulag camps also served as a source of workers for economic projects independent of the NKVD, which contracted its prisoners to various economic enterprises, as was the case in this instance.

We stayed at our drafting tables around the clock, catching fragments of sleep whenever we could. I woke up one morning about three and looked out the window to see Yuri, our boss, checking to make sure we were hard at work. If one of us had been caught sleeping, the consequences would have been entirely up to him. The guilty one could have been dismissed from her job and sent back to the hard-labor brigade or severely disciplined before she was sent back. Or, if Yuri had been in a good mood, maybe nothing would have happened. I saw all these things happen to others, but thank God, I never was caught sleeping. Yuri held a position of great power, and some of the girls took immoral advantage of that whenever they could. However, we completed the project on time, and the new prison was constructed using my design for much of its interior. It was a truly perverse system, using prisoners to plan new prisons.

The single most difficult factor I had to overcome in the camp was the twenty-four-hour-a-day invasion of personal privacy. Everything else—the grossly inadequate food rations, the poor housing conditions, the difficult and overly demanding work—I adapted to, but my privacy was a different matter. I missed it and longed for it. I had to be constantly alert, on the lookout for thieves and potential rapists. My friend Mikal was no longer around for protection. I wasn’t sure what happened to him; he just suddenly disappeared. Perhaps he was transferred to another camp. But I learned that the tougher you acted, or the tougher you actually were, the easier it was for you. To ward off unwelcome predators or potential offenders, I had to fake a kind of female machismo, and it wasn’t easy.

Before I finally gave up smoking, I actually punched a young man in the nose for attempting to steal my cigarettes. I had to do this, not only to defend myself, but also to set an important personal precedent. I had to mark my territory and set a boundary for the rest of my life in this camp, what I would tolerate and what I wouldn’t. If I hadn’t hit him, who knows what would have come next or what liberties he or any others might have taken. I had to become a good actor. I’d never struck anyone like that before, but I knew I had to, and I hit him really hard.

He promptly hit me back, squarely in my left eye, and I carried around a severe black eye, but he was walking around with two black eyes himself from my boldness and my direct hit to the bridge of his nose. I was actually quite proud of that. One thing of major consequence was established that day: he never approached me again, and, maybe even more important, in the eyes of other spectators, I now had a reputation.

Any woman intending to survive in this labor camp or any other had to display strength, whether real or contrived. There was no other protection from physical abuse, unwanted sexual harassment, and privation. The truth is that only the tough survived, and if you weren’t, you didn’t.

Another day, as I was enjoying the sunshine during a lunch break, I overheard some women talking about a big robbery that had just taken place in the camp. Some juveniles, who lived segregated from the rest of the contingent in a nearby compound, had broken into the
koptyorka.
This was a supposedly well-guarded warehouse in which all the prisoners’ personal belongings were routinely stored. Evidently the intruders were able to topple part of the koptyorka’s fence and overcome the guards so they could heist most of the suitcases and belongings stored there. As it turned out, they got mine as well. I was heartbroken and deeply despondent for some time. I had just lost all my winter clothing, important for survival, including some American sweaters. And they had taken a very pretty dress that meant a lot to me, the one I had worn during my reunion dance with Nikolai.

Several weeks later I was climbing the steps to the dining room, walking behind a camp nurse in her white smock. Under her uniform, I caught a glimpse of the skirt of my missing dress. I didn’t say anything to the woman; instead, I immediately reported it to the guard in charge, describing the dress and drawing him a sketch as he instructed. He then promptly went into the clinic and moments later returned with my dress. It had been abused by careless handling, but I was elated, nonetheless, just to have it back. I never recovered any of my other possessions stolen that day, though—the things I’d carried on my back all the way from Gorky.

After a few days, I settled down from my sorrow over losing my priceless few keepsakes. I still had my memories, and memories, good and bad, are all we really have to take with us anyway. But it was hard for me to get over that someone had robbed me of precious reminders of the good things in my life. In the harshness and struggle of prison life, those little things had linked me to cherished times.

Another reminder of what I had lost arrived at the beginning of summer in 1948. I was watching a column of newly arrived prisoners, and among them I recognized a stooped, sinister figure dressed in dirty black. It was the old woman, Anastasia, the informer from the Gorky jail. A cold sense of bitterness and resentment gripped me, approaching pure hatred, as I stared at her. Her betrayal had sent me here; the sight of her absolutely jolted me and conjured up ugly feelings and dormant anxieties. I now had more than two years of my sentence behind me, and there was no way I was going to deal with her again. My life had changed; I had changed; I wasn’t innocent or helpless anymore. I didn’t need any of Anastasia’s nonsense. I wasn’t going to walk around looking over my shoulder for her, either!

Anastasia recognized me too, and I know she didn’t like what she saw: my angry eyes trying to burn a hole into her skull. As I continued to stare, she quickly turned away, avoiding a confrontation. I knew I had to take matters into my own hands to prevent her intrusions into my life and well-being. I would never allow her to injure me again. She had burned me once, and that was enough.

In keeping with standard camp policy, the unwritten moral code of integrity among us all, I spilled my guts about Anastasia. To all who would listen, I told about her long and tainted history at the Gorky prison, her personal infidelity and dishonor, her lies and betrayal. I let them know exactly what to expect from our new guest. And I didn’t speak anything about her that wasn’t true. I was well connected in camp by now; I had many friends in various places, and I made sure that this traitor was permanently blemished. Stool pigeons were not tolerated among us. Never. In fact, people sometimes mysteriously died in the camp for failing to keep their business
their business.

I did not physically hurt her, nor did I have anyone else harm her, which I could have easily arranged. I just wanted to make sure that Anastasia regretted her past actions against me more than she regretted anything else in her life. No matter what reward Anastasia had received for informing on me, it was trivial compared to the damage she had caused an innocent person. We said nothing to each other. I wanted it that way. I wanted her to stew in shame and condemnation for what she did to me, if she was able to feel such things. And I tried my best to make sure she did.

Later I learned about the freedom that comes through forgiveness—or maybe more appropriately, the conquering of unforgiveness. But not then. I didn’t want to learn it then. I hated Anastasia for what she had done to me, and I wanted to make sure she was marred for life because of it. I wanted her to remember Margaret Werner forever and then some. God alone, and only
if
he saw fit, might forgive her for what she had done, but at this time I simply could not. And I did not. I would not. She had cost me too much, maybe everything.

She had sent me to Burepolom.

Fifteen

THE FAR NORTH

I
thought I had figured out how to survive in Russia’s severe lumber camp, Burepolom, but nothing in the life of a Gulag prisoner was ever permanent. In midsummer 1948, in the middle of the night, I was awakened from a dead sleep.

“Get your things now. We haven’t got much time,” was the stern command of the officer in charge. I was getting used to the perpetual shuffling and relocation of individual people in the camps; it was just the luck of the draw, nothing personal. With every subsequent move, I became less and less surprised, less attached, and consequently less confused and upset. There was no sense in becoming an emotional wreck over something as impersonal as a camp transfer. Still, I had become a bit attached to my relatively privileged life here. I minded being even farther away from my mother, who was hanging on in Gorky, and being separated from my many newfound friends. How would I ever contact them? But there were no advocates here, and there was no place to complain. It was another move, and that was that. God only knew to where.