Tag #106544 - Interview #78221 (Daniel Bertram)

There we got these little pink tokens and on that basis we got breakfast and dinner. Only twice a day there was food: before going to work and after coming back. And during the day only work. The next day early in the morning this 'nevalny' woke us up. 'Nevalny' is Russian for 'orderly', and we were called 'zakluchony', which means 'prisoner'. Everyone got a saw and axes. And they took us to the forest, where we had to fulfill a plan. I sawed; we were clearing forestland. We had roll calls as well. It's called 'povyerka' in Russian. Every gang foreman had 16 people. One was called Epstein. He offered us cigarettes; the first cigarette I'd ever smoked in my life. Some of them preferred to smoke than to eat bread; they'd exchange bread for cigarettes. There was a roll call before we went to work, a roll call in the forest, and a roll call after work. And then again in the zone, in the camp, another roll call, to check that no one had escaped.

In Turgenevo there were some who tried to form a minyan. So they got me into the minyan and gave me a prayer book, because I didn't have one. They took my prayer book off me in a search; there were ten searches, you see. They took my prayer book and my tefillin. But they left my tefillin batu, that's this bag for the tefillin, I still have it to this day [Tefillin batim is the cover of tefillin; 'batu' is the local pronunciation of the word]. And then, it was Yom Kippur, this one functionary Russian found my tefillin. And he ripped it out of my hand, took my prayer book off me. We didn't even get a chance to pray on Yom Kippur. 'You're not allowed to pray!' But one old man managed to keep his tallit. So he prayed, put it on sitting on his pallet on the top bunk. And my friend, who I was in Georgia with afterwards, and back then in the camps, saved his tefillin, because he hid it under his knee. I was in Turgenevo for a few months. They sent us out there on 20th July 1940.

Then, in the winter, they took each one of us with a different gang in a different direction. In the next Gulag [13] there were better conditions. The conditions in Turgenevo were harsh, you see, at first you weren't allowed to write letters, weren't allowed to have a pencil. You weren't allowed more than 50 rubles, or jewelry, or a watch, or any sharp instruments. If anyone had jewelry they handed it in, it was put into the safe and they got a receipt. I was the only one who had a watch, hidden on my elbow, wrapped in a kerchief and tobacco. But at first I had it inside my trousers. So they'd say 'Bertram - your trousers!' when they wanted to know what the time was.