Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Gulag, pp. 246-247:
In fact, little is known of Serpantinka, largely because so few people emerged to describe it. Even less is known about punishment lagpunkts set up in other camps, such as Iskitim, for example, the punishment lagpunkt of the Siblag complex, which was built around a limestone quarry. Prisoners worked there without machines or equipment, digging limestone by hand. Sooner or later the dust killed many of them, through lung disease and other respiratory ailments. Anna Larina, Bukharin's young wide, was briefly incarcerated there. Most of Iskitim's other prisoners--and Iskitim's dead--remain anonymous.
They have not, however, been forgotten altogether. So powerfully did the suffering of the prisoners there work on the imagination of the local people of Iskitim that, many decades later, the appearance of a new freshwater spring on a hill just outside the former camp was greeted as a miracle. Because the gully below the spring was, according to local legend, the site of mass prisoner executions, they believed the sacred water God's way of remembering them. On a still, freezing day at the end of the Siberian winter, with a meter of snow still covering the ground, I watched parties of the faithful trooping up the hill to the spring, filling their plastic cups and bottles with the clean water, sipping it reverently--and occasionally glancing, solemnly, into the gully below.