Dear editorial staff, I was unable to contain myself, and finally I, a simple woman from the countryside, decided to write to you. Since long I had the intention to do that, however, I was unable to spare the necessary time. If you live in a village you have to work from morning till night – either in the vegetable garden or in the cowshed. Late in the evening you usually find an our or two to read the newspaper and watch TV, and when you have seen all the news and go to bed trying to doze off, you will notice that your mind is in agony, that you will have another sleepness night. Our country is like a ship on the high seas which happened to get into a tempest. I am afflicted with sleeplessness and recall all the bitterness of my hard life …
I brought up six children. They all became good souls and learned how to work diligently. One of my daughters lives in town, the others live in the countryside. Thy have many children, too. I have 25 grandchildren. Our family is a quite international one. My parents were Germans from the Volga Region. My grandfathers experienced the time of the dekulakization, after which their families were deported to Omsk Region. In 1937 my father was arrested. He was executed in 1938 and rehabilitated in 1959. He left our mother and five children behind. Then they chased us away from our apartment for being enemies of the people … Soonafter, the war broke out. And this is when the time of expiation had come for me, as well.. In October 1943 my contemporaries and I were loaded on freight cars and deported to Vorkuta. They detained us in a prison camp – there were barbed wire fences, watch towers and barracks with permafrost below the floor boards. We were mobilized to do hard labour – we had to work in a mine. We lived on iced fodder beets, salted fish heads and bread – 400 grs a day. Once a month we had to get registered with the commandant’s office; there were questionings and they used to beat us.
In 1955 I was returned my identity papers against receipt. On the receipt I had to sign that I obligated myself to keep silent for a period of 25 years about what I had experienced and seen. And I had seen a lot … Piled up corpses with labelled tabs around their feet, which were buried by those prisoners who had survived in the following spring. I witnessed, how they beat up a man in the middle of the road, who, after having finished his shift in the mine, had yet worked for the canteen and taken along one sole little herring for his ill, hungry mother.
Having finished their shift the workers went down like flies from weariness and exhaustion.
At he exit of the camp zone, however, the commandant would in many cases wait for them to chase them further to the airfield to shovel snow. And those worn out people were hardly able to make another step yet. And then they were brutally beaten up for having been disobedient..
In 1955 they forced me to obligate myself to observe secrecy. Someone obviously was very afraid of being punished for having commited all these barbarious crimes.
Having acquitted myself of this nightmare I returned to Siberia. Under Khrushchevs rule, too, we had to cope with hard living conditions – high taxes, misery, hunger. At home I had my little children; I was working as a milkmaid. No, I never lived in easy circumstances. We have always been working, struggling, and also educated our children in this spirit. Nowadays they quite often talk about how many people in our country live in great poverty. And at the same time they are showing beauty contests on TV.
23.06.1990
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