My name is Tatiana Bulygina. I am 87 years old now. And for most of my life I didn’t tell anyone about what happened to me that winter of 1943. Not to my daughter, not to my husband while he was alive, not even to the doctors who asked why I couldn’t sleep on my back. Because what the Germans did to us was not included in any report.
There are no photographs or official evidence. There is only memory and pain. I was 25 when I learned what it meant to stop being human. It didn’t happen instantly. There was no bullet, no blow. It was slow. It was in the cold. It was upside down, with the blood rushing to my head so hard it felt like it was about to explode, and the German soldiers laughing on the other side of the steel door.
I was born in 1918 in a small town near Smolensk. My parents were picares. Father always said that bread is sacred. It feeds the body, but also dignity. I learned this early and learned that there are things worth dying for. When the German offensive began in 1941 , I was a young woman. I saw German columns entering our cities as if they already belonged to them.
I saw the fear in the eyes of my neighbors, I saw the silence that covers people like a disease. I didn’t want to join the partisan movement. Nobody wants to. But in 1942, when I saw two soldiers dragging a Jewish girl down the street, something inside me broke. My father said that bread is sacred, but so is human dignity.
I started little by little, passing messages, carrying fake documents under my clothes , helping families cross the front line to the partisans. Small things, but at the time they gave me the feeling that I was still human. until we were betrayed in November 1943 . It was 4 a.m.
when they knocked on the door. I heard the boots before I heard the scream. I already knew what it meant. They didn’t let me put on my coat. They dragged me out into the cold, in just a nightgown, barefoot along the icy porch. The mother screamed from the window. The father tried to get out, but the soldier pushed him back into the house and locked the door.
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I never saw him again. I was thrown into a truck with six other women. All young, all scared. Among them was Margarita. She was only 17. She couldn’t stop crying. I held her hand, not out of kindness, but out of fear. I needed to hold something myself . We were taken to an abandoned textile factory, which the Germans had converted into a secret camp.
He did not appear in any documents. It wasn’t on the maps. It was a place where they did things they didn’t want to leave traces of. When we were taken out of the car, it was night again. The air smelled of dampness, rusty iron, and something worse, something I only realized later. The smell of human despair.
We were met by a German officer, tall, with light eyes, speaking Russian with a strong accent. He said that we were traitors and our fate depended on our obedience. We didn’t yet understand what it meant, but we soon realized we were separated. They put me in a cell with Margarita, with the teacher Simona and with the nurse Klavdia.
The corner of the chamber was occupied by a rusty bucket. On the floor lay an old mattress, torn and soaked in urine. There were no blankets or pillows. On the first night we thought we would survive [the music], but on the third day everything changed. At this point, in the original , the explanation from the external narrator begins.
I keep it in third person and bold it. What Tatiana experienced in the following week cannot be explained by the usual logic of war. It wasn’t just torture, it was a methodical deprivation of human dignity, which no historian has written about for decades . Because what the Germans did to Soviet female prisoners in similar factory camps left no trace, was not recorded, and did not exist officially.
But I have to continue myself, because no one but me will tell it. On the third day they came for us at midnight. I remember the sound of boots, the click of a key, the creak of an opening door, the sharp beam of a flashlight in my eyes. The same officer said something in German, and then repeated it in Russian in a cold, almost satisfied voice.
You will learn what it means to betray the Reich. We were taken out into a huge empty workshop. Ceiling beams, chains, metal hooks, the kind used to hang animal carcasses. I thought: “This is where will kill us.” But they made it worse. The officer gave the command. Two soldiers grabbed Margarita.
She screamed, struggled, but they were stronger. They tied her ankles with a thick rope, lifted her up and hung her upside down. Her hair almost touched the floor. She cried, called for her mother, begged. Then they hanged Simone, then Claudia, then me. The blood rushed to my head so sharply, that the world turned red.
It seemed like my eyes would burst. My temples were pounding as if a hammer was hitting them. The arms hung useless, heavy. It became more difficult to breathe. And the worst thing is the laughter of the soldiers. They laughed, smoked, talked as if we didn’t exist. The officer leaned so close to me that I could feel his breath.
This is how you will spend the night, and tomorrow we will see if you want to talk. They turned off the lights. In the darkness I heard only crying and hoarse prayers. It was only the first night. I don’t know how long we hung that night. It’s 3 o’clock. Time ceased to exist. There was only the pressure of blood in the head, nausea, dizziness, a painful feeling that you no longer belonged to your body.
Margarita tore it out. Vomit was running down her hair. She cried, whispering through her sobs for God to take her. Simone tried to rock, to look for a less painful position, but there was none. Claudia prayed without stopping. I don’t know if she believed that anyone could hear her, but prayer was the only thing that kept her conscious.
I didn’t pray, I just tried to breathe, not to lose consciousness, because if I do, I might not wake up. At dawn they returned, they took us off. We fell to the floor like sacks of meat. My legs wouldn’t obey, my head was spinning, black dots were splashing before my eyes. They dragged us back to the cell, doused us with cold water and left.
We thought it was a punishment, that it was the only one. But that same night they came again and again hung us upside down and again laughed and again left us in the darkness. This went on for 3 weeks. every night without exception. They didn’t want to kill us. They needed to break us. Margarita was the first to break down.
She stopped talking, just sat in the corner of the cell, hugging her knees, looking through us with empty eyes. When the soldiers came, she no longer resisted. Her body became soft, like a rattlesnake doll. Simone tried to commit suicide. She made a loop from a piece of fabric torn from her own skirt.
Klavdia and I managed to stop her, but I still don’t know whether it was salvation or cruelty. Sometimes death seemed like the lesser evil. It’s not the pain itself that still haunts me, [the music], although it was hellish. Not fear, not humiliation, but the silence that came after.
In the original, it is here that the words of the external narrator appear again . I keep them in third person and bold them. After the liberation of the factory camp, when Soviet troops entered the cities and collected evidence, no one mentioned what happened in such secret places. No report has spoken of such methods.
The archives were empty, as if these women had never existed, as if their bollerta from history. But I remember, even now, on December 15th the Germans left the camp. It wasn’t because they lost, the front just shifted and they were ordered to retreat further west. The factory no longer mattered.
They went away and left us to die. There were 11 of us, only six survived. Two died of pneumonia, one of a cerebral hemorrhage after hanging upside down for too long. Another one hanged herself at night. Another one just stopped breathing quietly, for no reason, as if her body had decided enough was enough.
Margarita was alive, but she was no longer herself. She didn’t speak, she did n’t look. Her eyes were glassy, like those of a broken toy. When she was given water, she drank, bread, she ate. But all this was automatic. At night she rocked back and forth, hitting her forehead against the cold wall. Simona lost 20 kg.
Her hair was falling out in clumps. She coughed up blood every night, every hour. The small, trepid handkerchief she held in her hand was soaked with dark red stains. Claudia was in a terrible state. Her leg became more and more inflamed every day. The smell of gangrene grew stronger: sweet, viscous, rotten. The leg was swollen.
purple, with red lines going up to the thigh. She moaned at night, trying to do it quietly so as not to wake us. I stood on my feet, but I didn’t know how. The next day after the Germans left , our local partisans found the camp. They were looking for weapons, supplies and did not expect to see us.
I remember the face of the first man who entered our cell. Young, about 20 years old , with a rifle over his shoulder. He froze when he saw us, opened his mouth, but made no sound. Then shouted, called the others. They pulled us outside, gave us water, bread, covered us with blankets, tried to talk, but we couldn’t answer.
Our voices seemed to disappear. One of the men, an older man with a grey beard, knelt down in front of me and put his hand on my shoulder. What did they do to you? Simone tried to answer, but instead of words, only a deep, tearing sob came out . She collapsed into the arms of a young partisan, who jumped up to her and tried to hold her back.
She hung on him like a child. Margarita did not react at all. Claudia turned away, clenching her teeth in pain. I said quietly, almost in a whisper. They hung us up every night for weeks. The young partisan looked at me with incomprehension. Hanged, how is that? I showed him my ankles. The skin was black and blue, torn, with bloody marks.
upside down until we lost consciousness. He turned pale, took a step back and only whispered: “God, but it wasn’t horror for us, it was horror in front of us, because we no longer looked like women. We were broken creatures, a reminder of what a person is capable of, when no one sees him.
” We were taken to a small monastery nearby. The road stretched on forever. Claudia moaned with every thrust. Simone coughed up blood. Every breath was torture. Margarita looked out the window, but it was clear that she saw nothing: no snow, no trees, no people. Her gaze penetrated everything.
The nuns received us in silence. They didn’t ask what they did to us, they didn’t ask any questions. They just looked at us with such sadness that I wanted to turn away. One of them, an old, wrinkled woman with grey eyes, saw my ankles and burst into tears. She whispered a prayer softly, then carefully applied ointment to the wounds.
Her hands were shaking, but there was a warm human care in them, the kind I had almost given up hope for. But some wounds could not be healed. Claudia died on the third day. The infection has spread too far. The doctor was brought late. He looked at her leg and said, “It needs to be amputated.
” But he added it almost immediately, although she is too weak, she won’t hold out. Klavdiya heard [the music], smiled, was tired, almost grateful, and whispered: “And good, I don’t need this leg anymore.” She died quietly that night, without making a sound. In the morning she was found with her eyes open, as if she was looking into a place where we couldn’t look.
We buried her behind the monastery in a small cemetery where the snow fell softly and evenly. The sisters sang a hymn. Simone was crying. Margarita stood motionless, like a statue. I placed a handful of soil on her grave and silently asked that she would find peace where she had none in her life.
After two weeks, Margarita was transferred to a psychiatric hospital. She still did not speak and did not recognize people. Her hands were shaking. The look was empty. The doctor said it was a severe war injury. On the day she was taken away, I held her hand for the last time. “Forgive me, Margarita,” I whispered.
She didn’t answer, she just looked through me, the same way she looked at the snow outside the window. She was taken away and I never saw her again. She died in 1957, at the age of 33. Without saying a word, without remembering who she was. Simone survived. The monks did not look after her for months.
In the spring of 1944, she was able to return home to her hometown near Minsk. I went back to school, started teaching again, got married, had two children, but never got back to me again. I think she didn’t want to go back to that winter, and I understand her. I returned to my mother in January 1944. When she saw me, she burst into tears.
My father didn’t recognize me. My mother whispered that he was not the same after my arrest, that he was fading with each passing month. He died 2 months later. Heart. I never told him the truth. How could I? After the war, I tried to give evidence. wrote letters, went around offices, spoke to journalists, tried to find survivors, but no one really wanted to listen .
They said that it sounded implausible, that there was no mention of such camps in German documents, that without material evidence it was impossible to confirm my words. One day in 1952, a military historian invited me into his office, listened to me, and made a couple of notes.
closed the notebook and said: “I understand that you have experienced terrible things, but the war has created a lot of trauma. Sometimes memory distorts events. Without documents, without other witnesses, I cannot include this in the research.” And at that moment I realized: any can really disappear if no one wants to hear it.
That day I stopped telling stories. I hid this story in the back of my mind, got married, had a daughter, lived life. But I could never sleep on my back again, I couldn’t have anyone touching my ankles, I couldn’t look at the hooks in the butcher shops. Every time I felt sick. Years passed.
I was silent for 62 years. In 2003 I had a stroke. I was 85. The doctors said I was lucky to be alive. But I didn’t feel lucky. I felt tired. tired of the nightmares, of falling headfirst in my sleep, of the heavy silence I’ve carried with me all my life. My granddaughter Matilda came every day, accompanied me to doctor’s appointments, held my hand when I was lying under the machines, read books to me when I could no longer hold them myself.
One day she asked: “Grandma, why do you always scream in your sleep?” I was silent for a long time. always protected her daughter from this story. I didn’t want her to know, I didn’t want her to carry this burden. But Matilda is a different generation, and perhaps the time has come.
I told her, “I experienced so much in the war that I could never tell you about.” She looked at me with her dark eyes. She was 23. She studied history at university. Tell me, Grandma. And for the first time in six decades, I told her everything: from beginning to end, the nights hanging upside down: the pain, the humiliation, Klavdia’s death, Margarita’s madness, the silence after the war.
Matilda cried, hugged me and said, “You have no right to take this to your grave. The world must know. Thanks to her, I agreed to give an interview. She found the documentarians. She insisted that my voice was important, that the truth must live. I refused at the beginning, I said that it was too late, that no one would believe it, that it was easier for a historian to turn away than to change what was written.
But she said, “If you don’t tell, this story will disappear, and then they will win.” And she was right. I gave an interview in 2005. I was 87. Matilda sat next to me, holding my hand. Whenever I stopped or lost my breath, she would squeeze my fingers and quietly say, “Keep going, Grandma, you’re almost there.
” A lot has changed since that interview came out. Historians [of music] have begun to review the archives. Indirect references to such factory camps appeared: fragmentary entries in German documents, individual phrases in reports, those untruths between the lines. Some of the women survivors, who had been silent all this time, began to speak little by little, half a sentence, but it was enough to understand that we were not an exception.
What did to us, they did to others too. A senior nurse who was interrogated in 2007 admitted to hearing about the method of hanging upside down in unofficial detention centers. She refused to say more, but her confession alone was enough. In 2010, a memorial plaque was installed on the site of that factory . Matilda and I went there.
I was 92. I could barely walk, but I had to be there. The snow then fell slowly, in large flakes. People stood silently. Someone held a candle, someone a piece of red cloth, a symbol of memory. The plaque read: “In memory of the women partisans held and tortured here in 1943.
Their names have been erased, but their courage never has.” I ran my fingers over the cold metal, closed my eyes and for the first time since 1943 I felt like I could take a deep breath. In the original, it is here [the music] that the text transitions to the narrator talking about her death and the consequences. I keep the third person and bold those parts.
Tatyana Bulygina died in 2013 at the age of 95. Her testimony became key evidence of the existence of an unofficial camp on the territory of a former textile factory near Smolensk. In 2015, three more women came forward. Their voices, suppressed for a long time, began to sound again. But before [the music] dies, I wanted to say the main thing.
Not for pity, nor for glory, nor for revenge, but so that silence no longer wins. Because silence is a weapon, stronger than a shot, stronger than a blow. She erases, hides, covers up. That camp was created precisely for the sake of silence, without lists, without photographs, without reports, because blows leave traces, bullets, wounds, but hanging upside down , it leaves nothing, only a broken memory and years of silence.
The Germans knew what they were doing. They chose methods that could be denied, that could be called fiction, that could dissolve in archival dust. And for decades they succeeded. Today, in 2025, there are almost no of us left. The survivors are leaving one after another , and with us are leaving the last direct witnesses of what happened.
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But Matilda continues. She does this for me and for all the women whose stories disappeared in the snow of that winter. She speaks at conferences, writes articles, searches for documents, even if only shadows remain of them . She knows that I’ve carried this for 62 years. alone. She will not let this truth die.
Silence protects the executioners, not the victims, she said at one of her performances. I listened to her recording and cried because she was right. When people ask if everything I told you is true, is it true that we hung upside down at night? Is it true that there were 11 of us and only six remain? Is it true that no one wanted to listen to us? I always answer: “Why did I stay silent for 60 years if it’s not true? Why did I speak up at 87 if I could have taken it with
me? Why did I have to go through that pain again?” There is only one answer: because it happened, it is real. It happened, and if I had kept quiet, no one would have known. I leave this story to the world. I leave it to you, those who are listening. reads, tries to understand. Maybe you have doubts? Maybe you ask yourself: “Am I exaggerating? Have I distorted my memory of events, have I made something up to fill the voids? I’m not offended. It’s easier to doubt than to accept the
truth. The truth is sometimes too heavy. But answer yourself, why did I wait 60 years? Why was I silent while my body was aging and my soul was screaming in my sleep? Why am I speaking only now, when I have almost nothing to lose? Because the truth doesn’t disappear.
Even if they try to bury it, even if no one wants to hear it, the truth still breaks out through words, through tears, through the trembling hands of an old woman, who is already tired of being afraid. What will you do with this story – your business, will you believe it or not? Tell others or forget, but know one thing: as long as someone remembers, They did not win. And I remembered until the very end.
Tatyana Bulygina passed away on March 12 2013 at the age of 95. Her testimony has become part of recognized history, proof that some camps and methods of torture existed outside the official documents. Her voice, buried in silence for many years, now sounds further through those who decide to listen.
Matilda often says that memory is our last defense, that history is not made up of dates and reports, but of human voices, of those who dared to tell the truth when no one wanted to listen. If this story touched you, tell someone about it , so that what we experienced is not lost in the void, so that the women who died within those walls do not vanish without a trace.
And if you are reading these lines, Thank you. Thank you for making it to the end. Thank you for listening. Thank you for giving me what I’ve been missing my entire listening life.
