As I was going through the index of the book “Till My Tale is Told,” by Simeon Vilensky, I was writing down every prison or camp to make sense of it and tease out what I could that might be in Kazakhstan. Here’s a fitting poem I came across that goes along with the poem “We’re Alive, We’re Alive!”
“I write in the name of the living,
That they, in turn, may not stand
In a silent, submissive crowd
By the dark gates of some camp.”
Taganka – Moscow prison
Lubyanka – headquarters for Soviet Secret police in central Moscow
Lefortovo – Moscow prison
Butyrki – largest Moscow prison
Solovki – special camp north of Moscow
Kazan – southeast on the Volga
Kolyma – Magadan, Sea of Okhotsk, Vladimir prison
Suzdal – like Solovki, a former monastery, northeast of Moscow
Verkhneuralsk prison
Elgen – women’s camp, 500 miles northwest and inland from Magadan
Serpantinka
Narym – central Siberia
Yaroslavl prison
Shapalerka prison
Mariinsk camp farther west from Kolyma
You get the idea that there were LOTS of campus throughout the former Soviet Union. An oft spoken saying among those women in gulag camps after living through tedious drudgery day after day: “It may be worse, but at least it’ll be different”
p. 112 – “What you suffer is not as important as what you learn from the experience.”
p. 271 – “…Eleanor Roosevelt knew about huge numbers of political prisoners in Soviet Union, had come to the country and asked to visit the camps and see for herself. This request had been categorically refused.”
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