Tag #148641 - Interview #95166 (Semyon Vilenskiy)

I was assigned to the camp on Dneprovskiy gold mine, 200 km from Magadan, where I was kept for almost 5 years since 1949. The camp administration told the criminal inmates that they were expecting enemies of people [27], fascists, who were to be taught how to change.  Political prisoners of the 1930s were literally stupefied by what was happening. Any resistance to the camp administration was out of the question, but the situation in Kolyma was different after the war. These convicts were sentenced to 25 years – the limit sentence. They had seen death and  hardships of the war. The prisoners of war, who had been in military camps, but who did not become traitors, partisans and chasteners, Bandera people. There were also old camp prisoners (most of them invalids), students, teachers and other newcomers in the early 1950s, cosmopolites [28]. There were also Polish, German, Czech and Japanese prisoners at one time. In 1954 they were sent back to their countries.