The “other Holocaust” has been called the Soviet GULag System under Stalin, often, because it acted at the same time as a destruction machine, in the million people through Hunger, cold, exhaustion, and maltreatment in the death of have been driven. Since the occupants as well as the Survivors, the majority were men, has also been the history of this experience – apart from Jewgenia Ginsburg and her memoirs, “tightrope”, especially by male Ex – detainees told. Therefore, the Barcelona-based writer Monika Zgustova has interviewed after the turn of the Millennium, targeted women with a camp biography.
Kerstin Holm.
editor in the features section.
F. A. Z.
Zgustova, which comes from Prague, after the Prague spring with her family to America, fled, and in Barcelona Russian and Czech literature of the twentieth century, translated into Spanish, gathered for the last time witness reports of an outgoing Generation. Her book “Dressed for a Dance in the Snow” which, according to the Spanish edition, now by the Other Press in an English Translation, with its subtitle, “Women’s Voices from the Gulag”, a tribute to the great collector of Soviet and post-Soviet women’s voices, the Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich. However, while Alexievich was mainly to come from the middle of the company’s words, documented Zgustova, the memoirs of predominantly Jewish representatives of the educated elite.
With the violin to Siberia
their mostly elderly heroines often define themselves by their love of fate, which underlines the author by mythical epithet. For example, is a historian Sajara Wessjolaja, epithet of “Lot’s wife”. The daughter of the 1939 shot writer Artem Wessjoly was arrested in 1949 by the thesis celebration to your little later also convicted sister.
The 21 years old young woman was shipped in a silk blouse, skirt and Pumps straight into the secret service headquarters at the Lubyanka and months later, in the same – their only clothes in a Siberian village. They experienced Hunger and humiliation, must dig through ice and snow to earth. She is also a violinist and artist Nikolai Biletow, plays Mendelssohn and strength. A romantic connection is suggested, but you will be moved and will have to make in order to not a criminal offence, alone, the sixty kilometers to run to the train station. Like Lot’s wife, you’ve turned to Biletow, says Wessjolaja. Although you do not froze, but the image of this man have worn them for a lifetime in the heart.
Life in freedom appears to be shallow
The old women, whom the author mostly in Moscow and, in some cases, in exile in Paris or London met, also as a result of a long lack of food in the GULag, physically obsolete. The abuse they suffered, signs, you, without bitterness, denote the stock of experience, even as a school for the really important things in life that don’t want to miss in retrospect.
Thus, another historian, Susanna Petschuro, which was around 1950, of school friends for the fight for the real Revolution and against Stalin’s delight. Petschuro, which ended up as a seventeen year old girl with pigtails in the Lubyanka basement, because of the allegedly planned bomb attacks six years of storage. With gratitude to you reported by your fellow prisoners, you are taught to survive in spite of ill-treatment, to sleep with open eyes, but also from fish-bone needles. Petschuro admits that it had occurred after their release, the Moscow life is banal and shallow. For Zgustova is a “Penelope in chains”, because she felt her childhood friend, even after he was shot, as her “light”, whose ideas she tried to continue.
