Der Nister, who died at Vorkuta in 1950, had been impris-
oned for celebrating their Jewish identity. Yet they found
themselves taunted and persecuted for their ethnic asso-
ciation with the Jewish Bolsheviks such as Genrikh Yagoda,
who had created the Gulag system.
For ten months a year, the intense cold was a constant,
lethal companion of Vorkuta life. ‘Touching a metal tool
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with a bare hand could tear off the skin,’ recalled one prisoner. ‘Going to the bathroom was extremely dangerous.
A bout of diarrhoea could land you in the snow forever.’
And prisoners were woefully badly equipped to deal with
the brutal climate. In Vorkuta, according to camp records,
only 25 to 30 per cent of prisoners had underclothes,
while only 48 per cent had warm boots. The rest had to
make do with makeshift footwear made from rubber tyres
and rags.
The Arctic summer of Vorkuta, when the scrubland
bloomed with scarlet fireweed and the low-lying landscape
turned into a vast bog, was scarcely more bearable.
Mosquitoes and gnats appeared in huge grey clouds,
making so much noise it was impossible to hear anything
else. ‘The mosquitoes crawled up our sleeves, under our
trousers. One’s face would blow up from the bites,’ recalled
a Vorkuta inmate. ‘At the work site, we were brought
lunch, and it happened that as you were eating your soup,
the mosquitoes would fill up the bowl like buckwheat
porridge. They filled up your eyes, your nose and throat,
and the taste of them was sweet, like blood.’
Escape was unthinkable. Some of the remoter camps
had no barbed wire, so unlikely was the possibility of
prisoners ever making it across hundreds of kilometres of
wilderness to freedom. Those that did attempt to escape
did so in threes – the third prisoner coming along as a
‘cow’ – food for the other two in case they didn’t find any
other nourishment.
Former prisoners frequently recall their time in the
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Gulag as a season in another world, one with its own climate, rules, values and even language. As Solzhenitsyn
wrote, the ‘Gulag was a universe’ with its own speech
and codes. For camp administrators, pregnant women
were ‘books’, women with children were ‘receipts’,
men were ‘accounts’, released convicts who remained in
exile were ‘rubbish’, prisoners under investigation were
‘envelopes’, a camp division was a ‘factory’. Tufta was the art of pretending to work, mastyrka, the art of malingering.
There was a rich underground culture of tattoo designs
for politicals, addicts, rapists, homosexuals, murderers.
The slang of the Gulag soon spilled back into mainstream
culture and became the slang of the entire Soviet Union;
the rich vocabulary of Russian obscenity developed mainly
in the camps.
Occasionally, the tormented slave labourers of the Gulag
rose against their masters. The Vorkuta Uprising of July–
August 1953 was one of the bravest, and most tragic, of
such uprisings. Stalin died in March 1953, and his chief
policeman Lavrentiy Beria was arrested shortly afterwards
after a Politburo power struggle. On a warm July day, the
prisoners of one Vorkuta camp downed tools, demanding
that inmates have access to a state attorney and due justice.
Convicts in neighbouring camp, seeing that the mine-head
wheels in the rebel camp had stopped spinning, joined
the strike. Top brass from Moscow was sent in – the State
Attorney of the USSR, and the commander of the Internal
Troops tried to reason with the strikers. On July 26 pris-
oners stormed the maximum-security punitive compound,
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releasing seventy-seven of its inmates who had been kept in solitary cells that spelled death in wintertime. Days later, the authorities finally acted, massing armed troops to open
fire on the rebels, killing sixty-six and wounding 135.
The Vorkuta Uprising changed nothing – but in Moscow,
the political climate was shifting. The winner of the
struggle to succeed Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, ordered the
release of hundreds of thousands of political prisoners.
Later, he would denounce Stalin’s crimes at a secret session
of the Communist Party, and decree the re-examination
of most of the political cases of the Great Terror. By the
end of 1956, over 600,000 victims of the Terror would be
officially – posthumously – pardoned.
Released prisoners were given a small sum of money
and travel orders to other parts of the USSR. The vast
majority remained limitchiki – forbidden to live within 101 kilometres of any major city, largely to limit the political fallout of their stories on the Communist faith or
urban citizens. The remaining foreign prisoners, mostly
German prisoners of war, were finally allowed home. A
few found their way to the US and testified to Congress
about the horrors of the Gulag.
Today, around 40,000 people still live in Vorkuta – many
the descendants of convicts or camp guards, plus a few
hardy nonagenarian women who were imprisoned there
and never left. In Soviet times, Vorkuta miners and
residents enjoyed a generous state subsidy for enduring
the harsh conditions. Those subsidies disappeared with
the end of Communism, but nonetheless most of the
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population stayed. In the 2000s a new gas pipeline was built, bringing new prosperity and a new generation of
workers. Every year on 31 October residents meet at a
monument to the victims – a small space filled with a mass
of rusty barbed wire on the spot where investigative geol-
ogist Georgy Chernov pitched his tent in 1931, effectively
founding the city.
But the most enduring monument to the victims of the
Gulag remains in the printed words of the survivors – the
stories of their lives and their battle not just to live but to retain their humanity. Reading a simple litany of horrors
quickly ceases to be meaningful. As Boris Pasternak wrote
of the man-made famine that killed millions in the Ukraine
in the early 1930s, ‘There was such inhuman, unimaginable
misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness.’ Reading about the Gulag begins to seem like a story
of another planet, too distant for comprehension.
But listen to how Varlaam Shalamov, a writer who
survived seventeen years in Kolyma in the Soviet Far East,
defined what it meant to feel fully human in the Gulag.
‘I believed a person could consider himself a human being
as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself,’ a char-
acter says in one of Shalamov’s ‘Kolyma Tales’. ‘It was this
awareness that provided the will to live. I checked myself
– frequently – and felt I had the strength to die, and thus
remained alive.’ Both he, and Cilka, lived. And that was
their victory.
The last word must go to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. ‘I
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dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it,’ he wrote in the foreword to his classic study, The Gulag
Archipelago. ‘And may they please forgive me for not
having seen it all, nor remembered it all, for not having
divined all of it.’
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Lale Sokolov – you gave me your beautiful story and
shared with me what you knew of Cilka Klein.
Sending you my heartfelt thanks for inspiring me to write
Cilka’s Journey.
Angela Meyer, on a visit to Lale’s hometown of
Krompachy you sat with me on a window ledge into the
small hours of the morning, solving the world’s problems
and drinking Slivovitz. You encouraged me to make Cilka’s
story my next project. You have been with me every step
of the way as my friend and editor in telling this story.
You are simply brilliant, funny, dedicated to telling stories well. From the bottom of my heart – thank you.
Kate Parkin, Managing Director of Adult Trade
Publishing, Bonnier Books UK. How many authors get to
call their publisher a friend? I do. Your guidance, wisdom
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and support past, present and future is with me always.
Thank you so much.
Margaret Stead (Maverick), fellow Kiwi, fellow traveller,
Publishing Director, Zaffre, Bonnier Books UK: Mauruuru.
What a talent, what a person to have on my team.
Ruth Logan, Rights Director, Bonnier Books UK, thank
you for making Cilka’s story fly to all four corners of the
globe, ably assisted by the amazing Ilaria Tarasconi.
Jennie Rothwell, Assistant Editor, Zaffre, Bonnier
Books UK, your eagle eye in producing the highest-quality
content makes my writing better than it would/should
be. Indebted.
Francesca Russell, Publicity Director at Zaffre, and Clare
Kelly, Publicity Manager at Zaffre, thank you for keeping
me busy and arranging for me to share the stories the
team at Zaffre all work so hard to release.
There are others at Zaffre to thank for their brilliant
work in art, marketing and sales. Nick Stearn, Stephen
Dumughn and his team, and Nico Poilblanc and his team.
Thank you all very much. The Slivovitz is on me.
There are many wonderful people at St Martin’s Press
in the United States who have been involved in developing
the story and getting it to print. I need to mention a few
here, with full acknowledgements being given in the US
edition.
A woman who met me at an elevator in New York with
the biggest smile and arms ready for an embrace, the
President and Publisher of St Martin’s Press, Sally
Richardson. Thank you. Thank you. This welcome soon
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extended to publisher extraordinaire Jennifer Enderlin.
Again, my sincere thanks. The rest of the team, please
accept my thanks, your names and roles will be broadcast
in the US edition.
Benny Agius (Thelma), General Manager, Echo
Publishing, you are a shining, bubbling beacon, holding
me together on many occasions. Someone I can laugh
with, share concerns with when my life is pulled in many
directions. Thank you for being there.
Dakujem (thank you), Lenak Pustay. You got caught up
in the spell of learning all you could about Cilka. Your
time, effort and stubbornness to not leave any stone
unturned in the pursuit of this information has been a joy
to be on the receiving end of.
Anna Pustay – Dakujem. You started me on my journey
to Krompachy. You embraced Lale’s story and became
attached to Cilka’s story in the same way. You are a beau-
The people of Košice who knew Cilka, invited me into
their homes and shared stories of Cilka and her husband.
Mr and Mrs Samuely; Valeria Feketova; Michael Klein –
Dakujem.
My friends in Krompachy to whom I have become so
attached, who have assisted me in many ways with Cilka’s
Journey – Lady Mayor Iveta Rusinova; Darius Dubinak,
Stanislav Barbus and the always smiling driver who deliv-
ered me safe and sound to so many destinations around
the countryside, Peter Lacko – Dakujem.
For her outstanding research uncovering life in the
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Gulags, in particular Vorkuta, professional researcher
Svetlana Chervonnaya in Moscow – Thank you.
Friends and family who supported me on my journey
writing Cilka’s Journey who I am so happy to have in my life. I love them all dearly. My big brother John Williamson
who sadly died before the book was released, but whom
I consider a far superior writer to me, and for whose
support to write I am eternally grateful. Ian Williamson,
Peggi Shea, Bruce Williamson, Stuart Williamson, Kathie
Fong Yoneda, Pamela Wallace, Denny Yoneda, Gloria
Winstone, Ian Winstone.
To the people who matter the most to me who sometimes
lose out as I devote time to research, writing and travelling
– my children and grandchildren. Ahren and Bronwyn,
Jared and Rebecca, Azure-Dea and Evan, and the beautiful
little people to whom I am just Grandma – Henry, Nathan,
Jack, Rachel and Ashton. You are my life, my world.
Alyth and Alan Townsend, thank you for providing me
with accomodation in my soul city – Christchurch, New
Zealand, to write Cilka’s Journey. We go back a long way.
And especially the man of my life for forty-six years.
Steve, it seems lately you are missing out the most in this
crazy journey of mine. Thank you for your love, your
understanding, your unquestioning support and yes, I
know, you are my biggest fan.
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