Yossif Grigoryevich was born near Cracow in 1907. In the 1920s he became a member of the German Communist Party in Berlin. As from 1932 he lived in Moscow and worked there for the Comintern.
On the 21 August 1937 he was arrested by the Soviets and put into the Butyrka prison (= biggest prison in Moscow). He did not sign any papers. In accordance with the decision of the OSO (= “Special Board” which administered in absentia sentences) he was sentenced to 8 years (counter-revolutionary activities) and transported away to MARIINSK under escort. On the way, the transport was diverted to JURGA-2, due to an epidemic that had broken out in the Mariinsk distribution point (for newly arrived prisoners). In the summer of 1938 he was in a camp in NORILSK, where he was assigend to work in a mill combinate in the Street of Communists. As from November 1938, until March or April 1939, he was prisoner in the SIBLag in Belogorka in the Altay. There he was forced to fell trees; his food ration consisted of a single soy oilcake. In the spring of 1939 Yossif happened to get to the distribution point in MARIINSK, where the prisoner train was hold up for some time. Among the “old-established” of the Mariinsk deportation there was a rumour going round that Fanni Kaplan and Karl Radek were kept in the Mariinsk prison (the prisoners passed by the building when they were chased to work). The prisoner transport was then lead to Krasnoyarsk and from there, in long lines of barges, further down the river Yenissey to the north. Early in August 1939 the transport reached DUDINKA, and about 500 prisoners were sent to build a new camp sector in a place where there was nothing else but a half-finished bath house.
Through the Comintern organization the cook of this sector, a Chinese, seemed to somehow be acquainted with an orientologist called KRYMOV, who was later taken away to the Gorlag; he was one of the first who received his rehabilitation. He died in Moscow in 1989.
Yossif was assigned to gang labor for a period of one-and-a-half years; the prisoners were chased to the port, where they had to unload ships and barges. Their food rations were not too bad: 1 kg of normal bread, a warm breakfast and lunch.
As from 1941 Yossif had a job in Dudinka, working on statistical materials concerning arriving prisoner transports and the number of prisoners. As far as he can remember, 39 camp administrations were specified in the GULAG handbook for the first half of the 1940s.
He was released on the 17 August 1945 and stayed in Dudinka. He received his rehabilitation in the middle of the 1950s, but continued to work in Norilsk. Later he moved to Moscow.
The GORLag (= State Special Regime Camp) was not a part of the NORILLag. A revolt that later became known took place just in this GORLag, where many high-ranking officers of the Latvian Army were kept prisoners. There was a rumour going round that one day three Latvians, who worked there on the airport, captured a plane and escaped. Nothing is known about their fate.
In Dudinka there lived a certain CHAPLIN, the brother of Nikolay, who was the 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Leninist-Communist Youth Organization. He and his wife died in Moscow in 1986 and 1987 respectively.
In Dudinka BRAGINSKIY (the uncle of Emil Braginskiy, who had been a procuror before his arrest) was put on trial before the camp court, but he succeeded in brilliantly defending himself, so that, in the end, he was acquitted of the charge.
February 1989, recorded by V.S. Birger, Krasnoyarsk, “Memorial” Society