Mick Hartley

Portrait of a survivor, from English Russia:

[Photo © voxpopuli.kz]

From a photo gallery about a huge former labour camp on the Kazakh plains: part of the gulag, though that word is never used.

His story:

This old man was one of the prisoners. He was arrested for reading a wrong book about the history of Ukraine. In spite of the fact he was just 19 then he had to stay at the camp for 25 years.

‘Guards were very cruel. They killed prisoners without any reasons. Once after another similar incident we refused to work. Criminals were sent to kill us but we resisted. 15 people were killed that time in the fight’.

‘In 1954 we asked to change the guards. They used tanks to get people smashed for that and killed everyone including children. The entire ground was all in blood’.

When we asked him how he managed to survive the old man cried.

‘They wanted to kill us by throwing in a mine. We were hanging above the abyss for 15 minutes while they waited for an order but suddenly changed their minds. That’s how I survived’.