I read an article by Vitaliy Koschenko, published in the “Krasnoyarsk Labourer” of November 5. Its headline ran “Construction project N° 503 – the road of death”.
The author said nothing about mass mortality when the deported people were unloaded from barges and steamships and left behind on the frosty riverbank, about their being stacked up on the ice of the Yenisey and about when, in spring, the drifting ice carried away the troops right into the open sea. One of these prisoners was the German Ivan Davydovich Gilgenberg. At that time he was a youngster, and the camp cook, “keeping him on the back burner”, catered for him on the q.t., unnoticed by anybody else. Ivan survived. When Stalin died all prisoners were released. Gilgenberg and the cook, however, had meanwhile begot several children.
And then sounded Khrushchev’s call: “Repressed people, become members of the party!” And this is what Ivan Davydovich, in fact, did. Due to the good job he had done, the sent him to the Soviet party school in Krasnoyarsk, where he trained as an agronom.
He arrived in Shushenskoye accompanied by his wife and children. He has been working as an agronom for more than twenty years, he was bestowed upon the title of a “Respectable agronom of Russia” and became an honoraray citizen of Shushenskoye. One of his children left to live in Germany, but Ivan stayed in Russia.
Meanwhile Ivan Davydovich has completed the 76th year of his life. The worst impressions of his life which he every now and then recalls are the unloading of the deported people to the icy embankment and the great number of dead bodies, which had beenpiled up after just one night…
P. FORIS, Shushenskoye
„Krasnojarsk Labourer“, 10.12.2004