Chapter Ninety-Six: Hell to Purgatory
The shelling was mainly aimed at the first trench, but the second trench was also shelled, but because of the role of the anti-artillery hole, there are no soldiers now, casualties, but for these new recruits on the battlefield, this shelling still makes them feel unbearable, there is an anti-artillery hole in the trench here, and the soldiers who dug the trenches at that time and did not forget to pray are complaining that the Germans are really crazy, coming to this battlefield, they are afraid that they have no chance to go alive, but thinking of the life of the Gulag, They would rather die on the battlefield, at least they don't have to live the days of no one and no ghost in the Gulag, and when they saw that their companion was still holding their cross, the comrade next to him spoke, "Ivan, don't be so nervous, the Germans' shells can't blow up." Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 The warrior named Ivan spoke: "Yakov, I am not afraid, but I am reminded of the comrades who worked with us in the Gulag. Hearing Ivan's words, not only Yakov, but also the soldiers next to him felt a sense of concern, remembering that life in Gulagri began every day with the dispatch of the prisoners, the process of assigning work to the prisoners' formations, and then they went out to work in a procession. A whistle or other signal wakes them up. The second whistle told them that breakfast time was over and labor was about to begin. The guards and dispatchers who follow the team first check that the prisoners are present, and if they do, the prisoners are escorted to work. The prisoners still lined up in five columns and marched in unison to the place of labor. If the road is far away, they will be escorted by guards and police dogs. The process of returning to the camp in the evening was almost the same. An hour after dinner, the prisoners lined up again. The guards also had to count the number of people again and again. Then, another whistle sounded, and it was time for bed.
These regulations and timetables are not set in stone. On the contrary, camp rules change over time and often become more stringent. Throughout the forties, the camp rules became more and more stringent, the working hours became longer, and the rest days became less and less. Irregularities continued, especially when the demand for production increased during the war.
In September 1942, after the German invasion, the Gulag General Administration officially extended the working day of the prisoners who were building the airport facilities to twelve hours, with an hour's lunch break. This provision is applicable throughout the country. During the war, the recorded working day in the Vyatka camp was 16 hours.
And what is eaten for such heavy labor is a half-liter prison vegetable soup served once or twice a day, and the taste is disgusting; It's always as thin as water, and what's in it is suspicious. Remember Galina? The soup, Lyvinson wrote, was made with "rotten cabbage and bad potatoes, sometimes with a little lard, sometimes with a few herring heads." Barb? Amonas recalls that the soup was made with "fish or animal offal with a little potato." Lazar, the head of the Dmeter labor camp? Kogan also complained that "some of the cooks behaved as if they would rather cook pig food than Soviet food." Hunger, however, has a powerful driver: under normal circumstances, the soup may be difficult to swallow, but in the labor camps, where most people are constantly hungry, they eat with relish and simply not enough, and the filthy, overcrowded and poor sanitation conditions lead to an infestation of bed bugs and lice. In the forties, the gulag chiefs recognized the deadly danger of typhus infection from lice, so they made it mandatory to take a bath every ten days. When prisoners enter the camp and at regular intervals thereafter, all their clothing should be steamed and disinfected in a disinfection department to eliminate all pests. As we have already seen, when prisoners enter the camps, the barbers of the camps shave off their entire bodies and give them regular haircuts in the future.
At the same time, there is a group of people in the Gulagri, and that is the law thief. They are all scum who eat people and do not spit out bones, and they are the ultimate scum, because of the endless civil war, many places fell into an order vacuum, and the armed gangs grew up more vigorously, and in some places they were even able to control all aspects of social life. However, by the 20s, when the Bolsheviks gained a foothold, these older generation of criminals were exterminated by the secret police of the "Cheka". Bandits were loaded into trucks and sent to the Gulag, where they spent their long prison sentences. This group of people is the ancestor of the Soviet mafia in later generations, this group of armed bandits who make a living by killing and robbing from beginning to end, their opponents from the Cheka to the current Ministry of Internal Affairs to the KGB later, once Dzerzhinsky's Cheka fighters threw them to the cold Siberia, thinking that the cold of Siberia could drive out this group of scum, but in fact, this lack of supervision is the soil that the thieves are most suitable for, and ordinary prisoners will soon be ridden on their heads when they enter, The so-called labor reform has never worked on the legal thief, there is discipline in the legal thief group, and he will never compromise with the government, and he will never accept the labor reform!
The thief does not work and does not accept the labor reform, and the other prisoners must work more to complete the overall labor index, and the great thief is actually similar to the administrator of the Gulag, but only a management labor task. A group of inmates who are managed. For this group of legal thieves who resolutely do not cooperate with the government, in fact, even the guards of the Gulag have no good way. After all, the Gulag is a labor reform institution, and if the production task is to be completed, it is okay to shoot one or two. Shooting a group will not meet the labor target, and the confrontation between the two sides has continued until now.
Once upon a time, the Ministry of Internal Affairs thought it had won and wiped out the group, and that was because the thieves had changed the way they fought them. Many people are willing to join the army because even if they die on the battlefield, it is better than suffering in the Gulag, and the merit can be pardoned, and no matter how bad they have experienced the baptism of war, they will not be afraid of those bastards!
Andrei, who was observing here, also had the Gulag in mind, remembering that, according to an angry NKVD inspector, the prisoners who arrived in the Caspian labor camp in Azerbaijan in December 1940 also "slept in the open on damp ground." Until 1955, some prisoners in the labor camps were still living in tents. Even when the prisoners built barracks, they were unchanging, very rudimentary wooden houses. Moscow made hard rules on the design of barracks, rectangular barracks made of wood, with no mortar walls, cracks clogged with mud, and rows of equally inferior beds. Sometimes there's an improvised table, sometimes there's none. Sometimes there are several benches to sit on, sometimes there are none.
In Kolyma and other areas lacking timber, prisoners built barracks with the same haste with the same cheap stones. In those places, there is no insulation to use, so the old methods can only be used. The barracks in Vorkuta, taken in the winter of 1945, are barely visible: the roofs of the barracks are sharp and angled, but they are very low, so that the snow around the barracks will help protect them from the cold. Barracks are often not formal houses, but cellars or "holes in the ground".
The Gulag is a veritable hell, and the tragic battlefield in front of him is a purgatory, but at this time, Andrei didn't know that he would end the history of the Gulag with his own hands in the future, but now Andrei only thinks about fighting.