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Gulag Survivor Wages Battle Against Oblivion
Very long but worth it, hit the link for the whole story.KHOLODNY, Russia â In the dying settlement called simply by the Russian word for "Cold," there is one woman left who remembers. Nina Ivanovna Romanova is the last one here who survived Stalin-era camps where millions of slave laborers extracted the riches of the Russian Far North. She is the last one to have panned gold by hand, side by side with female political prisoners who died off in the unbearable winter frost. She is the last to have known what it is to have her father arrested, her son taken away and her own life changed irrevocably because one day in 1946 she sold a dress for food. For that, Soviet authorities branded her a "speculator" and sent her to the camps. She stayed on in the region when the camps closed in the 1950s, as many former prisoners did, and now she refuses Russian government directives to move to warmer areas to the south. "Someone must stay to remember," she said, a gentle 80-year-old with piercing blue eyes and a one-room apartment. This settlement "needs to be preserved." We in the west frequently forget how lucky we are.
Posted by: Steve White 2003-09-14 |
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| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=18678 |