Tag #146406 - Interview #95374 (Mark Kabakov)

In summer 1941 the 8th and 9th grades went to summer camps located at Valaam Island on Ladoga lake [about 550 km. to the north-west from Moscow]. Navy was based on that island. Torpedo boats were located there. It was the so called navy base. I remember fantastic cliffs of Valaam, bays and cloister cells. We were ignoramuses. It was raining during our stay, so we lived in the tents. We broke the walls of the adjacent cloister and took the boards to cover our tents without even assuming that the cloister was built earlier than in the 16th century. It was even worse than barbarism. We, the boys, did it under supervision of our ‘fathers’-commanders, who were adults and looked educated.