January 23, 1943 at 4:00 am, when the darkness over Ravensbrück was so dense, that it seemed as if the air itself frozen from the cold, Roxana Volkova stood in line at roll call. Her feet, shod in rags, no longer felt the ice under yourself. She heard blood dripping from the broken nose of the neighbor in the barracks, but not turned around.

On this day, unlike others, ss-doctor with gold glasses, whom everyone simply called the doctor, passed past the first three rows without picking up head, and stopped right in front of her. He looked at her hands, roughened, with black fingers from frostbite and something I wrote it down in my notebook. Then he nodded Konrshe.

Roxanne didn’t know what it was means, but when her number sounded through the loudspeaker along with more twelve numbers, she felt that something inside her is breaking. They were taken not to the factory, as usual, but to red brick building at the end of the camp, where the windows were boarded up and the door It only opened from the inside.

There, behind this door, it began that historians later called experiments on survival. But what about Roxanne at that moment? it just felt like the end. Roxana was born in a village near Smolensk, where winter lasts 7 months and people are used to cold in the same way as one gets used to breathing. She was the daughter of a mathematics teacher and collective farmer who sang in church choir.

When the Germans broke into their house in June ’41, my father was shot at in front of the whole family for what he was hiding partisan Mother died of hunger in besieged Leningrad. where did they try reach on foot. Roxana was captured not as a military woman, but as a suspicious one element. She was detained at checkpoint because A note in Russian was found in her bag.

tongue, which she did not have time to eat. She was first sent to a prison camp displaced persons in Poland, then in Ravensbrück, the largest female concentration camp of the Third Reich. There, among 50,000 women from 20 countries. Russians accounted for less than a percent, but exactly they became the object of special attention doctors from the Institute of Racial Hygiene.

The premise was simple and cruel. If Russians survive in their Siberian frosts, which means the body hides them secrets that can be learned for German army fighting in the east front. But the secret turned out to be not survival, but in how long a person can exist on the edge between life and death before ceasing to be person.

In the first week Roxana just watched. Every morning at 6:00 her They woke me up and took me to a white room, where two nurses in white coats were measuring body temperature, pulse, blood pressure, They wrote everything down in thick journals. They don’t spoke to her, did not answer the question and They didn’t even look me in the eyes.

She thought that this is some kind of medical commission. Maybe she will be sent to work in hospital. But in the second week it startedother. They took her to the basement, where they stood 10 bathtubs filled with ice water. Voidis, said the doctor. Roxanne entered. The water was so cold that the air was knocked out of the chest by a blow.

She stood there exactly 3 minutes, then five, then 10. The doctor walked around, looked into bath, felt her skin, looked at stopwatch. When her body stopped tremble and began to slowly pass out, they pulled her out, wrapped her up and measured again. They measured everything: how fast the heart beats, how slowly, how long it lasts consciousness.

In the third week they added more one element. After the bath she was taken to room where there was a stove, heated to red. “Take off your clothes, they ordered. She stood in front of an open fire and they again measured how quickly the skin sweats, how long does the temperature last, how long It takes time for the body to warm up. Then back into the ice, then back into the fire.

The cycle was repeated four times a day. Roxana stopped understanding where The cold ends and the heat begins. Her the skin was covered with strange spots. then crimson, then violet. Hair started fall out in clumps, nails darken and crumbled. But the worst thing was not body, but in the head.

She started to forget names. First, the names of the neighbors in the barracks, then your mother’s name, then yours own. The doctor noticed this and smiled. He wrote something in a notepad. Memory degrades at temperatures fluctuations above 60° difference. useful for studying amnesia among soldiers in the east. Among twelve Russian women, chosen along with Roxana was Anna, a nurse from Kyiv who before the war worked in a maternity hospital.

She was older the rest, she was 38, and she knew that does. When they were first taken to ice baths, she whispered to Roxanne: “Breathe slowly, don’t twitch. Pretend that you’re already dead.” That was the first advice that helped. Anna became their little one’s secret doctor groups. She knew how to signal when the pressure drops, how to pretend, that they faint, to be left in rest for at least an hour.

She was telling to them about her son, whom she managed to send to Siberia to relatives before how the Germans took Kyiv. He will live,” she said. Because I’m here I’ll survive. Every day that I’ll live through – this is another day when he grows. Then there was Lyudmila, a girl from Belarus, who was only 19. She was an artist, painted before the war posters for the collective farm.

At the camp she started draw on scraps of burlap that found it in a landfill. I drew what saw: doctors with their notepads, baths with ice of women standing at the stoves. She hid the drawings in the lining of her slave. “Someday,” she said, “ someone will find them and understand.” There was also Natalia, former physical education teacher, whose body was so resilient that doctors chose her for special tests.

She was forced to run around the icy yard inone shirt until it fell. Then she was picked up again and forced to run. She ran because she knew: “If If you stop, they will kill you.” She was running thinking about his village, about the fields, about how I ran to school in the morning. Her body remembered the movement.

Even when the mind is already wanted to die, and there was Elena, the most young, 17 years old, from Pskov. She’s okay didn’t speak, barely ate, sat in the corner and looked at one point. But one day at night, when Roxanne was shaking from fever after the next cycle, Elena crawled up to her and placed it on her forehead your palm.

The palm was as cold as ice, but it was the first human gesture for all time. Then she whispered: “My grandma said that Russians don’t They die, they just go to sleep for the winter. What they did to Roxana and her comrades, it was not just cruelty individual psychopaths. This was part program that the Nazis called Operation Eastern Front”.

In Berlin in Institute of Racial Hygiene Dr. Sigmund Rashki wrote reports on how the lower races endure the cold that kills German soldiers. His research were financed personally by Himler, who believed that if you find out the secret survival of the Russians, it will be possible to create a super soldier capable of fighting in any conditions.

In camps all over hundreds of similar experiments. Wauswidians studied the effect of phosgene on Poles. B Dakha tested malaria on Italians. In Ravensbrück, Russian women began model for studying extreme temperatures Every morning the doctor collected data sent via encrypted line to Berlin. There them analyzed, made graphs, made conclusions. The conclusions were simple.

Russian the body can withstand 40% more than German. But this did not mean that the Russians stronger. This meant that they could torment longer. This information was used not only for preparation soldiers, but also to develop new methods of torture. In the KGB then after the war found archives that described how it is precisely necessary to freeze people in order to they didn’t die too quickly.

These methods were used in captivity, during interrogations, in the camps. Roxana and her comrades were not just victims, they were prototypes. Their suffering became instructions. First the turn came at the end of February. Doctor announced that the experiment was changing. Now they won’t just withstand cold and heat, but learn to do it.

Every woman had to learn control your breathing so that your heart beat slower. It wasn’t easy test, it was preparation. They wanted so that Russian women learn German soldiers how to survive. Anna, nurse, I immediately understood that they want us to become their instructors, and then they will kill us, so that we don’t tell the truth.

She proposed a plan: pretend that learning, but really learningslow down, pretend not to turns out to be a waste of time. But the doctor was smarter. He began to threaten: “If not learn in a week, your children, oh who you talk to at night will get it same thing.” The second turn happened in March. One day at night, after a particularly tough cycle Elena, a seventeen-year-old girl from Pskova, I didn’t wake up.

She just doesn’t opened her eyes. The doctor came and looked on her, diagnosed: organic amnesia with fatal outcome. He was satisfied. This was the first confirmed case of death from temperature shock. He ordered that the body not be removed, but left in the refrigerator for autopsy. Roxanne saw how her hair covered with frost.

Third turn happened in April. Lyudmila, artist, was caught with drawings. Doctor in person came to their barracks, tore her robe, I found a burlap sack with pictures. He didn’t get angry, he smiled. “Okay,” he said, “Now you will draw what I say.” He forced her to draw women in baths, but not like that, as it really was.

He forced her draw them happy, smiling, as if they were participating in health procedure. Lyudmila refused. He took her hand and put it on the stove stove. Draw or her fingers would burn, she was drawing. Fourth the turn was the worst. In May, Dr. announced that the experiment was moving into final phase.

They chose three women: Roxana, Anna and Natalya for the field test. They were taken outside the camp to forest where an abandoned hunting lodge stood house. There they were stripped naked and left overnight in the snow, and the doctors themselves observed through night vision devices. This was not an experiment, it was a game. They wanted to see which of them took longer will hold out.

Anna fell first, Natalya – second. Roxana was left alone, standing on kneeling in the snow, looking into the darkness somewhere there behind the trees, seeing their lights cigarettes. Roxanne stopped thinking about home, she stopped thinking about the war. She I was only thinking about the next breath. Everyone inhalation was a victory, every exhalation defeat.

She learned to count heartbeat, slow it down by will. She learned not to feel the cold when turning off consciousness, but this did not make her stronger. It made her empty. She looked at Anna, who spoke every night story about her son, and understood that Anna no longer remembers his face. She looked at Lyudmila, who was drawing and I saw that her hand was shaking not from cold, but because she no longer remembers how to hold a pencil.

She looked at Natalya, who was running, and knew that Natalya was running not from them, but from herself, from the memories that slowly dying in her head. Roxana She stopped crying herself. Tears froze on my cheeks and it hurt. She stopped speaking, the words lost their meaning. She stopped being Roxanne.

She became sample 47B. It was the name thatthe doctor gave it to her in his journal. Sample 47B. high stability, loss identity by 73%. She read it one day when Dr. left the magazine open. She doesn’t offended. She just thought 73% that means there is still 27% left. And in these 27% she kept the image of her mother, the smell of bread in their stoves, the sound of snow underfoot.

On that the day they killed their father, she kept it’s like a fire that can’t be fanned, but which cannot be extinguished. Everyone times when the doctor said, “Get up!” She got up because there was still getting up one way to say: “I’m still here, I I still remember.” The last experiment scheduled for June 23, the day of summer solstice.

The doctor collected all 12 Russian women in a white room, where Once upon a time they only measured the pulse. “Today,” he said, “we will check limit.” He explained that they would alternate between an ice bath and a hot oven every 15 minutes without break until someone will die. This was not scientific protocol it was a public performance.

He brought with him three young SS officers, which should have been observed by those who science works. The first cycle went like always, the second one too. On the third cycle Natalya fell and did not get up. Her body They pulled her aside, but she was still breathing. On the fourth cycle, Anna began to cough blood.

She looked at Roxanne and She said with her eyes: “Don’t give up.” On fifth cycle Lyudmila, who was forced stand and watch, she screamed. She screamed in Russian: “That’s enough.” The doctor nodded, and the guard hit her butt in the stomach. She fell silent. On In the sixth cycle, Roxana felt that her body refuses. She saw how the doctor looks at his watch like officers exchange impressions, as one of them laughs.

She realized that This is the last cycle. She stood on the edge baths, looked into the black water, then raised her head and looked straight at the camera that the doctor installed for filming. She said in Russian, slowly and clearly: “I will not die today. I will die, whenever I want.” Then she fell into the water, but she didn’t fight.

She just lay there bottom, looking up, seeing how above her rays of light dance. She counted 1 2t. The doctor began to get nervous. He shouted: “Get her out.” But no one moved. She counted 202122. She saw her mother standing on the shore river, as her father waves his hand to her. She I counted 4344. And then they pulled her out. She wasn’t breathing.

Doctor He leaned over her and put his ear to her chest. And suddenly she opened her eyes and said: “78 – this is my record. She won. But the victory was as empty as hers eyes. After this day experiments stopped. Not out of pity, just because Raschke received all the data, which are needed. He wrote in his final report: “Russian women demonstrate exceptional resistance to temperature shock, but at the same time they lose their human qualities.

It is recommended to use them asinstructors for training elite troops, but not allowed to socialize.” Roxana and the survivors were transferred to ordinary barracks. They were no longer samples, they became simply workers, but they could no longer work. Roxanne is not could hold a spoon in her hands.

Anna doesn’t I could remember how to tie knots. Natalya didn’t run anymore. They just sat there looked at one point and waited. They were waiting not liberation. They were waiting for will finally cease to exist. When did they arrive? Russians in January ’45, they found this barrack is the last. The door was locked from the inside.

When they broke it in, they saw 12 women sitting in a row, dressed in rags, looking into emptiness. They were alive. But when the soldiers spoke to in Russian, not one answered. They they forgot the language, they forgot the names, they forgot yourself. Roxana was sent to hospital in Moscow.

The doctors couldn’t do it for a long time understand what’s wrong with her. Her body was alive, but her eyes were dead. She didn’t react to sound, to light, to pain. She’s just lay and looked at the ceiling. Then through 3 months she suddenly spoke: first the word was cold. Second is mom. Third: “Sorry.” She lived another 40 years, but every winter she asked that the room was no higher than 15 degrees.

Because the warmth reminded me of a stove, and the stove was a reminder of what happened after. She never talked about the camp. She simply said: “That’s where I learned breathe and forgot why.” In the KGB archives, declassified in the nineties, found Rashka’s report. It contained the names of twelve Russian women whom he used in their experiments.

Next to everyone the name was marked: used, disposed of. lost. Roxana Volkova was included in this list as a sample fortyB, but below with the hand of another person was added: survived. Found in Hospital number three Gdina, Moscow. Condition: amnesia, personality degradation. Recommendation: do not allow contact with outside world.

She died in 1985 in his apartment in the Moscow region. On the table there was a sheet of paper on which she wrote one sentence: “I remember that I forgot, but I don’t remember what exactly.” Her buried under the name of Roxana Volkova, but the date was engraved on the monument birth, which she herself chose. 12 July 1921, the day she was born for the second time.

On the day when she I realized that survival is not victory, it’s just a duty. duty remember, duty to tell, duty to not let them win, because that they didn’t just want to kill, they wanted to erase. But memory is not the body. It cannot be frozen, it cannot be burned. She lives in everyone who hears this history and does not look away.

The question is not about how much you can withstand. Question in as long as you can remember. And the answer always one: enough. y