POW in Russia,

Russian Gulags & Stalags A-P

"Inside the prison cells I saw what had been done to our priests. Crude crosses had been carved into their chests before they were done in. The walls of the cells were spattered with dried blood and there were holes in the walls as if from bullets. In one cell there was a large pool of coagulated blood on the floor. This was a place where many people had been slaughtered. The corpses we uncovered were already decomposing, but we could see that some of these victims had their eyes torn out or their seual organs mutilated, had their faces and bones crushed with rifle butts, men and women alike. ...Some innocents had been dismembered, buchered, mutilated. The stench..." Into Auschwitz, for Ukraine By Stefan Petelycky

Bazar, Executions at Bazar recalled 80 years later
by Danylo Kulyniak
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly
December 9, 2001, No. 49, Vol. LXIX
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

BAZAR, Ukraine - Eighty years ago, on November 21, 1921, in the city of Bazar in the Zhytomyr Oblast of Ukraine, Bolshevik troops executed 359 prisoners of war, members of the Ukrainian Army of the Ukrainian National Republic who were part of the winter campaign against the Communist invaders.

The Ukrainian soldiers chose death over a compromise of their priniciples and beliefs, and turned down a deal that would have saved their lives by refusing to transfer to the ranks of the Communists.

The tragedy was remembered this November 21, at the site where the men were butchered, today marked by two large communal graves ("bratski mohyly"), a large monument and several crosses. Eight decades later some 1,000 Ukrainians who have not forgotten their heroes came by bus from cities across Ukraine - Kyiv, Odesa, Uzyn, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Lviv, Lutsk, Ternopil, Rivne, Ivano-Frankivsk and other cities - to pay their respects.

The monument was erected only last year thanks to contributions by Ukrainians living in Great Britain. The names of the 359 heroes are engraved in gold on the large black marker.

From the perspective of history it is now obvious that the military situation at the time was such that there was little chance the second winter campaign led by Lt. Gen. Yurii Tiutiunnyk of the Ukrainian National Republic would be successful.

Thousands of poorly armed, underdressed and underfed men went forward in the last days before winter to confront the Bolshevik Red Army, which had amassed tens of thousands of troops for battle against the partisans. Merely two weeks after the campaign began, the contingent was destroyed by the Soviet Second Red Cavalry Brigade of Gen. Hryhorii Kotovsky.

Hundreds were killed and hundreds more taken prisoner before the battle ended. The 359 imprisoned were escorted to a field outside the village of Bazar on November 21 to be executed, but first Gen. Kotovsky gave them the chance to cross over and join the Red Army. None agreed to do so and all were shot as they sang the Ukrainian national hymn "Sche Ne Vmerla Ukraina."

Only four years had passed since a similar tragedy had taken place at Kruty, just outside of Kyiv, pitting a force of college and high school students at the beginning of the war against the Bolsheviks. The battles of Kruty and Bazar both ended in tragedy, with the execution of imprisoned Ukrainian patriots. During those four years a whole epoch of Ukrainian history passed; the Bazar tragedy was the finale.

But the tragic history of Bazar does not end there in 1921. In 1941, after Ukrainian patriot and nationalist Oleh Kandyba Olzhych, organized 20th anniversary commemmorations of the event at the site of the executions, German Nazi authorities, who by that time had occupied Ukraine, arrested some 721 people who had taken part in the memorial services. They were executed by the Nazis several days later in Zhytomyr.

Butovo-- Stalin's victims

"...50 years after Stalin's death, his victims have no national memorial. In Moscow alone there are two sites where mass killings were carried out in the 1930s on Stalin's orders, but no memorials to the thousands who died there. In one of them, less than 20 miles south of in a place overgrown with tall weeds. Another, called Butovo, is just outside the city. When I went there last summer, I missed the sign and stopped to ask a policemen and several others. All just shrugged. Imagine losing your way on the road to Dachau and realizing nobody had the slightest idea what you were talking about.

Once on the Butovo site you see no tourists. The space is vast, with the unevenness of the ground hinting at what lies beneath. The place has been handed over to the Russian Orthodox Church, but the church takes a selective approach: Only clergymen are commemorated in a place where more than 20,000 people were shot and buried in 1937-38. There are no other names anywhere."

Brody, Stalino coal mines, Darniza Camp, Bunker camp, Kharkov and Kiev Camp 8,

Memoirs of Roman Stocklein, a German soldier held captive in Russian POW camps
http://home.arcor.de/kr/kriegsgefangene/memoirs/russian_captivity.html Very informative and enlightening. If you ever feel sorry for yourself, read these real troubles.
And other stories: http://home.arcor.de/kr/kriegsgefangene/memoirs/witnesses.html

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GPU Camps in Ural: Looking for survivors

I was a Red Army soldier, I fall (wounded) in German Captivity on July 1941 (at the s.c. "Vitiebskoye Okruzhenie"). I was in German captivity for about 3 1/2 years. I escaped in January 1945 and then I was sent to the GPU Camps in Ural (camp # 4, than camp #245) and finally in camp #0305 in Severouralsk.

I have a diary which I have written at that time (mostly Russian). I would like former inmates (if they are still alive) to write to me. Thank you. Dr. I. Machtey

Kharkov prison:

Grigg, William Norman
Copyright The New American Apr 19, 2004

"Slavomir Rawicz was transferred to an immense fortress prison in Kharkov, Ukraine, where he became the personal project of a huge, muscular - and inventively sadistic - NKVD major known as "The Bull." "He ran his interrogation sessions like an eminent surgeon, always showing off his skill before a changing crowd of junior officers," reflected Rawicz. "His methods were despicably ingenious."

"One of The Bull's preferred methods of breaking his subjects' will was to insert them in a kishka, a chimney-like subterranean cell that permitted a man to stand, but not move. No provision was made for the inmates' bodily functions, and the kishkas were never cleaned. Each day, Rawicz would be hauled out of his tiny cell, hosed off, and sent to The Bull for interrogation and torture. And each day The Bull's profane anger with Rawicz grew as beatings, pistol-whippings, and cunning torments involving water and lights failed to induce the innocent man to sign a confession. "All you have to do is put your name here and I will leave you alone," the torturer frequently bellowed as he shoved a thick finger at the confession."

Kolyma:

"But the most savage death toll came later, in slave camps of Kolyma and Uzbekistan, where inmates, women, men and children never survived longer than two years. In the Kolyma gold mines, the annual death rate of Polish slaves alone rose to more than 50 percent in 1940. After 8 hours of inhumanly hard work, they received a bowl of potato soup and a slice of frozen black bread. My relative survived the Siberian death camp because he ate raw dead owls and small rodents. In the death and labor camps of Kolyma more than 3 million prisoners died between 1935 and 1955. Polish, German, Rumanian and Finnish war prisoners who worked in the gold fields were the third generation of Soviet slaves. Working bulldozers sometimes excavated a huge mass grave and scraped up these stiffened bodies, thousands of bodies, thousands of skeletal corpses, twisted fingers, putrefying toes, frozen stumps, the dry skin scored with blood, and hungry blazing eyes." 50 years on, Stalin casts a shadow over Russia, Agence France-Presse (AFP), Moscow, Russia, March 2, 2003

Luft (Stalag Luft I) in Barth, Germany:

See http://www.merkki.com/

Moscow camp

Norilsk camp

When Stalin died in 1953, Shumuk was one of the leaders of prison uprisings in Norilsk. Outbreaks like those throughout the GULAG led to a wide-ranging release of prisoners; except for those who remained defiant and therefore free, barbed wire notwithstanding.

Andrew Fedynsky is director of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland, Ohio. The museum's website: http://www.umacleveland.org/

PERSPECTIVES, by Andrew Fedynsky The Ukrainian Weekly, Ukrainian National Association Parsippany, New Jersey, Sunday, March 2, 2003:

Danylo Shumuk, now nearly 90 years old, was 19 when he was first arrested and imprisoned in 1934. Eventually, he became the longest-serving prisoner of conscience in the former Soviet Union, spending 42 years in prison or exile. It was in the Norilsk labor camp north of the Arctic Circle in 1945. In the early morning darkness of the Siberian winter, he and his newly-arrived fellows were mustered to watch as the guards dragged two bodies from the disciplinary cell, deposited them in front of the assembled prisoners and sank their bayonets into the half-frozen corpses.

"Smotriti! - Watch well," the commandant shouted at the inmates, who ached from weariness and cold. "This is the only way you'll ever get out of this place!" That, Shumuk said, was the low point of his life.

Failure to achieve that was blamed on the "enemies of the people," who were then put to work building Siberia's infrastructure, where much of the country's lumber, coal, copper, gold and other minerals were located.

Stalin's slaves dug the White Sea-Baltic and the Moscow-Volga Canals, laid railroad track, constructed strategic roads, factories and hydroelectric stations. Danylo Shumuk was in Norilsk to work in the mines, which were supplying the Soviet arms industry with nickel, molybdenum and chrome.

Life outside the camps was better only by degree. Soviet citizens suffered from crowded living quarters, a shortage of consumer goods, oppressive and dangerous labor conditions, and no freedom whatsoever. Social discourse, artistic expression, everything was monitored by the state. Even children were taught to inform on their parents. The CHEKA morphed into the GPU, then the NKVD and finally, the KGB, but it was always the same organization, which existed to terrorize and control.

Pechora camp

Perm-36: History of a Camp

Monday, September 29 -- Friday, October 3, 2003. Russell Senate Office Building Rotunda. Capitol Hill, Washington, DC

The Perm-36 Memorial Museum of Political Repression and Totalitarianism is one of only a few labor camps still standing and the only camp restored as a memorial to the tens of millions of people who suffered and died in the Soviet Gulag.

This exhibit, which will be open to the public, tells the story of the GULAG as it is reflected in the history of the Perm-36 camp near the village of Kuchino in Perm Oblast.

Also, in connection with the exhibit, there will be a roundtable, "The Political Legacy of the Soviet Gulag," on October 1, in the Senate Russell Caucus Room, room 325 of the Russell Building. This roundtable will feature presentations by Anne Applebaum, author of GULAG: A History, and Yuri Dzhibladze of the Center for Development of Democracy and Human Rights in Moscow. Roundtable discussants will include Victor Shmyrov, the director of the Perm-36 Museum, and David Satter, author of Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State.
E-Poshta, September 27, 2003, Vol.4, No. 88
Myroslava_e-poshta-canadaus@yahoogroups.com

Perm-36, Russia by Adam B. Ellick:

Special to the Jewish Times SEPTEMBER 24, 2003
Because of the secret nature of Gulag camps - many locals never even knew of their existence - much of the history of Perm-36 and its adjacent camps, Perm-35 and Perm-37, will never be known. Built in 1946, the three camps housed roughly 1,000 prisoners at a time - mostly Russians, Ukrainians and then Jews.

About 200 prisoners slept shoulder to shoulder in barracks no larger than a two-car garage. The camp's only toilets were outdoors, available only at designated times. The only food was a bowl of broth - every other day.

Intensive labor consisted of sawing, tree chopping and producing a minimum of 522 irons per eight-hour shift. Obedient workers were awarded the opportunity to pace for 30 minutes around a roofless enclosed area about the size of two bathtubs.

Rebellious prisoners, meanwhile, found themselves isolated in tiny cells of frozen concrete. For them, suicide was more common than murder.