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They deported me to a camp deep in Siberia, in Kolyma. There is only sky and tundra there. Nothing grows there. In winter only mountains and ice: to have water to boil you have to chop up blocks of ice.
Our camp was just for women. We worked, in very harsh conditions. If anyone has read Solzhenitsyn [20], they know what it was like there. Our camp was 30 kilometers away from the one where Solzhenitsyn was. We were there at more or less the same time.
There were not only Jews there. We were from different places: from cities, small towns, even from the country. There were German women there, too, and one Englishwoman. I remember that Englishwoman well. She had been a language teacher in Moscow. A Russian, an old general, had taken a fancy to her. She didn’t want to get involved with him, so he dealt with her by having her sent to Kolyma. She was so fragile and delicate; she was perhaps 19. My God, how sorry I felt for her.
I was supposed to sit out my ten years there, but they let me out after seven. That was after Stalin died. Khrushchev [21] said then that those eight million innocent people sentenced to Kolyma had to be released. I was released after seven years’ work in hunger and cold, in the most terrible conditions.
Our camp was just for women. We worked, in very harsh conditions. If anyone has read Solzhenitsyn [20], they know what it was like there. Our camp was 30 kilometers away from the one where Solzhenitsyn was. We were there at more or less the same time.
There were not only Jews there. We were from different places: from cities, small towns, even from the country. There were German women there, too, and one Englishwoman. I remember that Englishwoman well. She had been a language teacher in Moscow. A Russian, an old general, had taken a fancy to her. She didn’t want to get involved with him, so he dealt with her by having her sent to Kolyma. She was so fragile and delicate; she was perhaps 19. My God, how sorry I felt for her.
I was supposed to sit out my ten years there, but they let me out after seven. That was after Stalin died. Khrushchev [21] said then that those eight million innocent people sentenced to Kolyma had to be released. I was released after seven years’ work in hunger and cold, in the most terrible conditions.
Period
Interview
Eugenia Berger