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I tried to ask Uncle Herz where my father’s grave was. I understood that there were a lot of unknown graves all over Sosva, but I thought that they should have kept at least some kind of record during the burial, i.e., put down the ID number of the prisoner. There were no records, there were even cases when a person was sentenced to death although he had died a long time before that. I did not find out anything about Father’s fate. He died, that I know, but how and where and why I’ll probably never find out.
Those who survived will keep silent until death and will not tell what was happening there. I don’t think that Gulag camps were any better than German concentration camps. What a deception, what hypocrisy! Those wretched prisoners were not killed, they died. None of them was guilty. Hitler’s regime, fascism was condemned by everyone at the Nuremberg trials, but who would remember about the victims of Stalin’s camps and indict criminal communistic ideology?
It was the scariest thing in our live and not only in the extreme conditions – in exile, in the Gulag. That injustice and unavailable law, when the NKVD could do anything to anybody, even to the most harmless people is most dreadful in the life of any person, not only the exiled, but for any free person.
We were considered to be free, but were we really free? We couldn’t leave the USSR – just the boundary of our exile expanded. We couldn’t speak our minds. Good thing that we were not bereft of the right to think. We were pushed to do what the comrades made us do. We were never free in the USSR.
Those who survived will keep silent until death and will not tell what was happening there. I don’t think that Gulag camps were any better than German concentration camps. What a deception, what hypocrisy! Those wretched prisoners were not killed, they died. None of them was guilty. Hitler’s regime, fascism was condemned by everyone at the Nuremberg trials, but who would remember about the victims of Stalin’s camps and indict criminal communistic ideology?
It was the scariest thing in our live and not only in the extreme conditions – in exile, in the Gulag. That injustice and unavailable law, when the NKVD could do anything to anybody, even to the most harmless people is most dreadful in the life of any person, not only the exiled, but for any free person.
We were considered to be free, but were we really free? We couldn’t leave the USSR – just the boundary of our exile expanded. We couldn’t speak our minds. Good thing that we were not bereft of the right to think. We were pushed to do what the comrades made us do. We were never free in the USSR.
Location
Estonia
Interview
Ronny Sheyn-Kuznetsova