An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  He nodded politely to Atsinch and hurried out.

  Later I told Atsinch the story. He shook his head. “They may be lucky and they may not,” he said seriously. “Usually anyone who tries to escape is shot and they throw his body outside the gates for all of us to look at until it rots. Even if they’re not shot, those boys won’t have any fun from now on, and they might have been better dead. It’s hard to say.” injections. thought that I was doing very well with the injections. He asked me if I was squeamish at the sight of blood. I said I didn’t think I was, and he said good, that he would like me to start in the operating room, and learn to assist him in surgery, which was his real specialty. Our first case was a mine injury. A man was brought in with a messy head wound. Several chunks of loose ore had fallen on him. There was a lot of blood, scraps of loose flesh, and a soft depression in the skull itself. I found that I was not sickened by this grisly stuff, but I was very excited and nervous. I tried not to show this. Atsinch handed me a straight razor and told me to shave around the wound while he got instruments and dressing ready. My hands were a bit shaky. I had never used a straight razor before, and I didn’t want to admit this. The man was conscious but a bit dazed and very frightened. That made two of us. He was seated on a chair beside the operating table, facing the back of the chair and leaning on it. When I first applied the razor it cut into a bit of loose flesh. I don’t think he could feel it because the blow must have numbed the whole area, but he sensed my uncertainty and said in a very loud voice, “If you don’t know how to do it, don’t do it!” His manner was very commanding. I looked to Atsinch for help. He quickly took the razor and I watched him shave the man gently and cleanly in about thirty seconds. Then he took forceps and cleaned out the wound and lifted off several bits of flesh, and put on a dressing and sent the man away to a bed. It took only moments. I had begun already to fancy myself a budding physician, but the amazing skill and sureness of my friend’s hands took some of the cockiness out of me. I knew I had a long way to go to achieve that kind of perfection, and probably I did not have the talent to begin with. But I was experiencing the joy of learning all the same, and just about the best companionship I had ever known. Many of the people we operated on had committed mastyrka. There were frequent amputations of fingers or toes.

  Several people came with suppurating arms or legs that showed no wound, and I often talked with them when they were recovering and sometimes got them to admit that they had infected themselves with the thread through the teeth, or in other ways, in order to get a week or two of rest and better food. I asked Atsinch how this met with his standards of morality and survival at almost any cost. He laughed. He reminded me that he had taught me my own mastyrka, and that as long as it did not mean turning away a person who seriously needed help, he could not fault these people and even admired the ingenuity of some of them. “I do think amputation is foolish, though,” he said. “That really does dishonor to the human body. I wish they would stick to infections.”

  There were too many patients in the hospital most of the time, sometimes sleeping three people in two beds, with one poor guy on the ridge between two cots pushed together. The patients kept the place clean, and we had prisoner orderlies assigned to bring meals and clean out the O. R. slop pails and so on, pridurki who were probably stool pigeons, so we were very careful what we said when they were around. They were undoubtedly frustrated at our speaking English all the time. There was a morgue attached to the hospital, and on the third or fourth day Atsinch took me there and began to show me how to make superficial incisions, because the incising and draining of abscesses and phlegmons from mastyrka wounds was so common he thought I should be able to do it on my own. He gave me a handbook of anatomy and began to guide me through it.

  When a patient died, we were able to conceal it through at least two meal periods and collect his ration to be distributed to all the other patients. Atsinch was very scrupulous about this distribution. Then, when the death could no longer be concealed, Atsinch was required to perform an autopsy, and write it up. He insisted I attend. I found the first few unzippings of the abdomen pretty hard to take, especially when one of the first we had to do was a man I recognized from my barracks. But even here Atsinch’s presence and his manner put me at ease. He quietly and lucidly described the pathological conditions he discovered, and as he showed me a diseased liver, a tubercular lung, arterial failure in the heart muscle, emboli, sclerotic blood vessels, and all the myriad manifestations of the body’s disintegration, my distaste and disgust soon gave way to an intense interest. Atsinch quizzed me regularly on everything he showed me. I had a quick memory and I knew that I was a very good pupil.

  All this time my infected arm was kept just active enough to show any visiting MGB, and my colonic irrigations were continued because the diarrhea was very stubborn. My edema began to go down and my muscles to build up. I began exercises again, dynamic tension, and plenty of fast walking up and down the corridors of the little hospital. Atsinch continued to give me intravenous glucose and vitamins, so even though the food ration was not generous I was able to build up some flesh again. When the MVD administrator made his regular visit, J was always in bed looking miserable. Atsinch said that if I was seen making rounds and giving injections, there would be trouble and I would be sent back to the quarry.

  Because Atsinch lives so warmly in my memory, and because he was such a strong personality in his quiet and unspectacular way, I find I am writing about the hospital as though he were the only physician, but that was not the case. Albert Feldman was an ophthalmologist who had trained with Filatov, the man who pioneered corneal transplants in the Soviet Union. Feldman had fifteen years for publicly praising religion (he was an orthodox Jew) and criticizing the official atheism. Feldman was jealous of the English connection between Atsinch and me, and tried to get me to teach him English. He shared the view of many prisoners that war between the Soviet Union and the United States was coming soon, and that the United States would send planes to drop arms to all us camp prisoners. He wanted to be ready to meet the Americans in their own language, and he was not alone, although it was forbidden to study a foreign language in camp and English was particularly taboo. Poor Feldman was a little bit nuts and almost blind, ironically, and he kept vocabulary notes scrawled in huge letters on all sorts of odd scraps of paper hanging out of his pockets and stuck inside his glasses and everywhere. Everyone knew that Feldman was studying English. If it had not been Feldman, who was clearly harmless, he might have had his sentence extended and been thrown into hard punishment cells, because studying English meant you were expecting the Americans and were prepared to collaborate with them. Evidently it was different if you already knew English, because Atsinch and I were not bothered. But Feldman escaped punishment only because he was old and feeble and nearly sightless. The stool pigeons saw his vocabulary notes, the MVD saw them. He was never touched. Yet every time he asked me some question about the language he would say anxiously, “For God’s sake, don’t let anyone find out I am studying English!”

  Feldman taught me a trachoma procedure and a bit about general eye care, but I never spent very much time with him.

  Westerners find it strange that in a prison camp where, life was held in such low value, where people were deliberately overworked, shot without warning if they literally stepped out of line, skull-bashed after they were dead, harassed at every turn of their lives and in every way treated with the utmost contempt, there should have been a hospital at all, and one staffed with dedicated and skilled doctors. I have to explain over and over again that the hospital does not represent any concern over the welfare of the prison inmates. It represents only one concern: that regulations be met. It is laid down in Soviet law that within any prison there must be medical facilities of such and such a character for every so many prisoners; that out of so many prisoners you are permitted a quota of so many bed patients; that a person with a fever of more than 38º C is to be hospitalized, and soon. Someday a bur
eaucrat who wants to find fault with another bureaucrat may investigate to see whether these regulations are being met—so they are maintained purely for bureaucratic reasons.

  My only regret about the hospital was that my comfortable and interesting life there had to come to an end. Despite Atsinch’s benign neglect, my arm infection healed itself. I was by camp standards manifestly healthy to anyone who cared to look. My edema was gone. My dysentery had stopped. Even my heart sounded better, Atsinch told me with some surprise. He could no longer keep me hospitalized, he said, and he had found out that there was no way possible at the moment for him to get me an official job as a feldsher trainee. So rather than create trouble for both of us, he would discharge me. “You’re strong enough to handle a great deal, I think,” Atsinch said. “We will see each other often. I’ll put on your sheet that you are to report for examination every day for the next two weeks, and we can keep some glucose coming. And vitamins. And then we will see what happens after that. Good luck, my friend.”

  And I regretfully packed my little sack and went to the administration office to pick up my new barracks and job assignments.

  Chapter 17

  Because of the enlargement of my heart, Atsinch had been able to get me listed as Category Two for the work assignment, so that I would not be sent to the mines even though my buttocks were now perceptible after all that glucose and rest. They reassigned me to the same barracks and the same brigadier, Vtyurin. I had passed the whole summer at the hospital, and now the days were getting short and the nights were very cold. Vtyurin’s brigade had been assigned to the railroad station unloading bricks and cement and lumber. It was hard work and tufta was difficult to invent. I had lost my friend Gorelov and had not found a way to bribe Vtyurin.

  It was not long before my confidence began to slip again. The work was much too hard for the amount of food and rest we got. People died every day, especially the—older men. As the weather got colder the rate of deaths increased. We were issued gloves and padded jackets and trousers, but they were badly worn and not much protection as the temperature began to drop. My hands were always cold. At those altitudes, with no bodies of water and no vegetation to moderate the temperature, September slips into winter very quickly. Cold, numbed fingers could not hold onto handles and levers and timbers and crates, and there were many accidents, often fatal. One man was crushed when we were rolling logs off a flat car, using two logs as a ramp. He was buried when twenty or more logs let loose at once and he was not fast enough. The guards shoved his body out of the way on the platform and the blood-stiffened mass was waiting for us to carry it home when night came.

  My bowel problems came and went. Friends in the barracks tried to persuade me that it was not fats but the lack of fats that triggered the attacks, and I was given fat bacon from food parcels to try to stabilize myself.

  Now it was dark when we stumbled out of the gates at six o’clock in the morning. The convoy stood around with machine guns cocked. The dogs steamed and barked continually. You had to take off your mittens and open all your padded clothing for a search, no matter how cold it got. Many men collapsed in uncontrollable trembling during the search and had to be dragged along by their fellow prisoners until they could get the blood moving again.

  Another man was pinned under falling logs, and prisoners were forced to carry the screaming, bleeding wreck back to the camp. The camp was referred to as the Zone. Two guards with dogs were sent to escort the makeshift stretcher party to the Zone. The man had a fractured pelvis and multiple internal injuries. Atsinch kept him alive a few weeks and then he died. Many died easily because they had lost the will to live. My will to live was strong but I was afraid I felt the weakness returning, and I saw so much death that it began to seem a real possibility to me.

  The soldiers who guarded us had thick felt boots and sheepskin greatcoats over their padded jackets and trousers. They had thick fur mittens. They would steal wood from construction projects and make fires to keep themselves warm, and when it got down below zero degrees Fahrenheit they allowed us to make fires too, if we could scrounge some wood. The guards did not care where the wood came from. You could steal anything as long as it was not a weapon. Everyone took wood back to camp to eke out the meager fuel ration we were allowed for the barracks stove, and the guards always demanded that twenty-five per cent of what we brought back be turned over to them for their private use. They just picked every fourth row and said, “Hand it over.” We all complied. If we had refused they would have forbidden us to bring any wood for ourselves; they made that perfectly clear.

  I remember a very cold day when we were unloading window frames. Some guards made a fire with the frames, and soon prisoners were doing the same. We burned half a carload of window frames to keep warm that day.

  The cold made it harder than ever to get up in the morning. It made us more fatigued because we burned more food to keep warm and had less left for energy, and of course it was terribly hard to walk out of a barracks that was at least above freezing—if only barely—from body heat plus the glow from our poor stove, into the bitter, dust-laden wind or blowing snow at five or ten above zero. People who stayed in bed only minutes after podyom had their numbers written down and in the evening they would be told to collect their belongings. If they came back from their stint in BUR, the hard punishment barracks where they were taken, they looked terrible and many had bronchial diseases from the prolonged confinement in those unheated cells. Many simply did not come back. New etaps arrived regularly and new living bodies replaced the dead.

  People were taken away to BUR when contraband was discovered; this usually meant hardware that had been or could be converted into a knife or any sort of weapon. Many prisoners made little knives from odd bits of steel. Many were caught, either given away by stool pigeons or discovered in the regular searches that took place when we were away at work. The knives were always concealed around the beds, and often found, and their owners taken away. But people kept on making knives for everyday use, not for weapons. In our barracks there was a Moscow lawyer; some of the illiterates could not tell the difference between a lawyer and a prosecutor, and so they took him for a bad guy, the kind who puts you in prison, and treated him very badly. A group of Ukrainians who were convinced he had been a prosecutor decided to fix him. They just got the idea lodged in their minds that he was bad, and they found great satisfaction in his persecution. They made a long, sharp knife and concealed it in his bunk, without his knowing about it, but in a way that a search would easily discover. The plot backfired though. The knife looked so vicious that when it was found the lawyer was thrown into a cell full of hardened prisoners who had tried to escape or refused to work or been caught in anti-Soviet talks; they were leading a relatively comfortable life in the BUR, with no hard labor and occasional extra bread smuggled in by friends from camp. They were delighted to have a lawyer in their midst and made friends with him in return for lessons in the law. When he was finally returned to the barracks, he pleaded with prisoners going to construction projects to get him a piece of steel so he could make another knife. The Ukrainians were totally baffled by the whole thing but they left him alone after that.

  One night, just at midnight, I was asleep on my top bunk, with a cloth over my eyes. I felt my leg being tugged. It was an MVD. “You Ess Ya 265?”

  I said I was.

  “Get your stuff and come with me.” I said, “I haven’t done anything!”

  “Get your stuff!”

  He took me across the frozen compound. Snow was beginning to blow a lot now. I was shivering when we got to the dining hall. Several MVD were there, including an officer. They made me strip and they searched all my clothes and then made me dress again. I kept saying, “What is this all about?”

  “You’ll see, don’t worry,” was what they said. It was familiar in a distressing way.

  The officer opened a file folder and asked me my prayer. I gave it. “Everything’s correct,” he said. They took me to the
bread window. “Seven days’ allotment,” the captain said. I was given several loaves of bread, ten lumps of sugar in a newspaper twist, and two salted herrings. I realized this meant eta p. and I asked where?

  “None of your business,” the captain Said.

  Eight more prisoners were brought in. Some were given five days’ allotment, some three, some four. I was the only one with seven. I put the numbers together in my mind. Some of them were told they were going to another camp. I deduced I was going to Moscow. This made me terribly excited because I thought perhaps I would be released now. Then I got scared because I also thought they might be taking me there to shoot me. I cannot imagine why I thought that, since shooting was not uncommon right here in Dzhezkazgan.

  I was dying for confirmation of my guess. I said quietly to the captain when he came near me, “It’s the center for me, isn’t it?”

  He smiled then. “Good guess,” he said.

  I said, “In that case I should get the rest of my personal belongings. They’re in the hospital.” That was a lie but I had to say good-by to Arvid Atsinch.

  I was taken across to the hospital. The thin snow had thickened a little. I found Arvid and woke him up and told him. His eyes shone. He said, “Dear Al, dear friend, they’re going to let you out! I know it!” He rustled around and found some tobacco and soap and sausage and matches and made up a farewell package. He embraced me warmly. He said, “Whatever you do, write about us. Tell the world about us. People have to know.” I promised I would. The guard cursed and called from the doorway, and I saluted Arvid and went back to the dining hall.