Hanna Lozovyk-Zavadskaya

A few weeks after the trial, Hanna Zavadskaya was transported from Rivne to Siberia. First, she was taken to a transit point in Kharkiv, one of the main transit hubs of the Gulag. In the Kharkiv transit prison, she faced particularly harsh conditions of detention. The cells were desperately overcrowded (“people packed like sardines in a barrel, no room to move”), the air was poisoned by the stench of sewage, and unsanitary conditions prevailed everywhere. A particular shock for political prisoners was the presence of criminal offenders – the so-called “blatnye” (thieves), who formed a separate caste in the camp world. Zavadskaya recalls how her group was initially frightened by the noisy, half-naked women who shouted and laughed in the cell: it turned out that they were criminals who were to be feared. The “blatnye” occupied a dominant position: they were the first to receive food, did not participate in cleaning (“parasha” – a bucket-toilet was placed far from their corner of the cell, and political prisoners were forced to take it out), behaved defiantly and cruelly. Being in transit seemed like hell – prisoners eagerly awaited even being sent to hard labor, just to escape from this filthy mess. In early 1948, Zavadskaya and other women were sent further north. She was placed in a freight car with both political and criminal prisoners—the worst combination. The cars were equipped with several tiers of bunks and a small iron stove, but the frost was fierce (it was winter after New Year's). The criminals took places near the stove and warmed themselves all day long, while the political prisoners huddled in the corners, pressing themselves against each other to keep warm. Hanna describes how the criminals behaved completely lawlessly during the journey: if any of the political prisoners had any food supplies or warm clothes, the criminals took everything and beat those who resisted. They were fed very little—twice a day they were given smelly grub (it smelled like rotten sprats) and a piece of bread, and the criminals were the first to take the food. The car was only opened for inspections and to distribute rations, and the cold air penetrated everyone to the bone. During the long journey (several weeks), most of the prisoners were exhausted; it seemed that this road would never end. Finally, the train stopped – they had arrived in the north. Their first destination was the Arkhangelsk region in northern Russia. The prisoners were unloaded in the snow – endless snow-covered forests stretched out around them. From there, they were marched on foot to one of the Gulag logging camps. In this camp (probably in early 1948), Hanna Zavadskaya began her hard labor with logging. For several months or even years, she worked in the Arkhangelsk taiga, fulfilling her quota for cutting down trees. The work was extremely exhausting, especially for urban and rural women who had never cut down trees before. Despite this, the camp administration did not take people's abilities into account. Prisoners were forced to meet the set quotas at any cost, and failure to do so was punished by cuts to their already meager rations and fines. “From the very first day, they demanded that we meet the quotas,” Zavadskaya recalls of her logging work. “But not everyone could meet the quota, so not only did they give us smaller bread rations, but they also scolded us and called the ‘laggards’ in for a beating.” The campers called the exhausted women “lazy,” “freeloaders,” and “saboteurs,” accused them of deliberately failing to meet their quotas, and even threatened them with a new trial for “violating” their socialist obligations. Zavadskaya bitterly noted that the camp guards treated them worse than cattle: to the prison guards, they were simply soulless mechanisms from which maximum benefit had to be squeezed out at all costs. At the end of 1948, a group of female prisoners, including Hanna, were transferred from the north to another camp further east. There were rumors of a new stage being formed, and soon they came true: all female political prisoners from Volhynia were called to gather their belongings. The only consolation was that this time they were traveling without criminal offenders (in a separate convoy). The journey east (probably in the winter of 1949–1950) was no easier than the previous one—again, cold freight cars, a convoy, and the same meager rations. However, all the women felt some relief because they were among “their own” and could at least talk to each other and sometimes quietly sing Ukrainian songs, which lifted their spirits (although the convoy could severely punish them for this). Their new destination was the Ozerny correctional labor camp (Ozerlag) in the Irkutsk region, near Taishet. Ozerlag was one of the special camps for political prisoners created in 1948 within the Gulag system. It consisted of a whole network of camp sub-units between the cities of Taishet and Bratsk in southern Siberia. Ozerlag held up to 40,000 prisoners at a time, who were mainly engaged in the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (a railway from Taishet north to Bratsk and Ust-Kut) and in logging. There were four women's camp sections, and Zavadskaya ended up in one of them. Her group was brought to the so-called 9th column of Ozerlag. There were already political prisoners of various nationalities there—Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, among others. After disinfection and paperwork, the new arrivals were given numbers – black digits on white patches of fabric that had to be sewn onto the front and back of their clothes. Hanna was assigned number P-733. Without such a number, a prisoner had no right to leave the zone. In Ozerlag, the women from Volhynia quickly mastered the “science” of camp life, although it did not become any easier. They were sent back to the logging site – now as experienced lumberjacks – and from the very first day they were required to meet 100% of the quotas. The quotas were exhausting, and the climate was harsh. No one paid attention to the women's health: “Neither health nor strength mattered, and we had to go to work day after day, even when it was beyond our strength,” writes Zavadskaya. She recalls numerous cases of injuries and illnesses that were ignored by the camp administration. Once, Hanna tore her back while lifting a heavy log—a sudden sharp pain seized her lower back so that she could not straighten up. She was barely brought to the zone and laid in the medical unit, but there they measured her body temperature and, since there was no increase, said, “Go to work, there will be no release.” Still recovering, she had to go to the forest the next day. Her female friends took pity on her and tried to give her as little work as possible, so she gradually recovered from her injury. Another time, she began to suffer from sharp pain under her right rib—obviously, exhaustion and malnutrition were taking their toll. Hanna guessed that it was a liver problem, but she did not go to the medical unit because she did not believe that they would release her from work. Only when her eyes turned yellow and her skin took on a lemon hue did the camp doctors diagnose her with jaundice (hepatitis). Zavadskaya was finally put on a hospital bed in the medical unit, where she lay for at least a month. The treatment was basic, but the main “medicine” was rest from hard labor. Hanna recalled that in the hospital, she was preoccupied not so much with her illness as with how happy she was to simply lie under a roof without having to get up at dawn for forest work. During her years of imprisonment in the camp, Zavadskaya witnessed numerous deaths and tragedies. The number of exhausted and crippled prisoners grew, especially after winter. After 1953 (Stalin's death), the regime softened somewhat, and some of the terminally ill began to be released home — they were “deactivated” by special commissions as unfit for work. In fact, this meant that people were sent to die in freedom so as not to spoil the camp's death statistics. Hanna describes how her fellow countrywoman with a serious heart condition was released: she was genuinely happy to be going home, although others understood that she would not live long. Hanna herself, having survived hepatitis, remained working in the camp's medical unit—perhaps because of her weakened health, she was transferred to lighter work. She helped care for bedridden patients, many of whom could no longer get up. In her memoirs, she recalls an elderly woman whose whole body was contorted by disease (her knees were tucked under her stomach, her arms twisted) — she had to be fed with a spoon, and that is how she died, “without ever straightening up.” Such scenes were forever etched in her memory. Prisoners could only maintain contact with their families through letters, and even then only occasionally. Correspondence was strictly censored, and only family matters were allowed to be written about. Every piece of news from home was worth its weight in gold. It was only in the early 1950s that Zavadskaya learned in bits and pieces that her son Rostislav had survived, grown up, started walking, and uttered his first words. This news gave her the strength to go on living. In the camp, Hanna and her friends cherished one dream: to wait for freedom, return to Ukraine, and see their loved ones — “and then we can die,” they said. Not everyone was destined to do so: “How many of them disappeared in Siberia, my poor friends in misfortune… Not many returned,” she sadly notes. In 1954–1955, after the cult of Stalin was exposed, the Soviet state began reviewing the cases of many political prisoners. A state commission arrived at the Ozerlag to conduct an inspection. Everyone waited for it with great excitement, not knowing which of the prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment would be released and which would remain to serve their sentences. Finally, in 1956, the long-awaited day of liberation arrived. Hanna Lozovyuk-Zavadska was released on July 20, 1956, on the basis of an amnesty decree for political prisoners. At the time of her release, she had served 8 years, 11 months, and 10 days in captivity. Zavadskaya miraculously survived: when she was released, she had a bunch of chronic illnesses—a duodenal ulcer, liver disease, rheumatism, nervous exhaustion—but she was still alive and wanted one thing: to hug her family in freedom. “Isn't it a miracle that I, so frail and weak, not yet recovered from childbirth, survived all that horror, hunger, cold, hard labor, and returned alive, though not entirely healthy,” she wrote later. Indeed, her return was partly a miracle, as thousands of others did not survive Stalin's camps.