My name is Vasilisa. I’m 83 years old and I live in a small apartment on the outskirts of Novosibirsk, where the windows look out onto a gray concrete courtyard that looks like the walls I’ve been trying to forget all my life. I was silent for 45 years. I didn’t tell my husband, whom I met after the victory, or the children I raised, trying not to pass on my fear to them.
They know I was there. They saw the number tattooed on my arm, the faint, blurred digits that time tried to erase but could not. They [the music] know I was in the same pants, but they don’t know about the photos. Nobody knows about that shower day except me and those who are already dead. I kept it inside me like rotten fruit, afraid that if I opened my mouth, shame would choke me, that people wouldn’t understand, that they would judge us too.
as the Germans condemned at the time. But now, as my life comes to an end, I realize that taking this with me to the grave would be the final victory of those guards. They wanted us to feel dirty. If I die in silence, then I have agreed with them. So, I acknowledged that our friendship, our survival, was something shameful.
That’s why I’m speaking now. I say this into the recorder while my hands are shaking. not from the cold, but from the memory, which turns out to be sharper than any German bayonet. Before the world went crazy , I was a different person. It seems to me that I am talking about a stranger when I remember that Vasilisa who lived in Voronezh in 1941 .
I was a biology student , studying botany. I loved plants more than people. There was logic in them, there was order. I remember the smell of old books in the university library and the smell of damp earth in the greenhouse where I spent hours replanting rare ferns. I was a tall, gangly girl with dirt-stained fingers who dreamed of discovering a new kind of medicinal herb.
I had a family, a father who taught history and a mother who baked the best cabbage pies on the whole street. We lived modestly, but our house was always warm. This is something I can’t forget. Feeling of warmth. Not just air temperature, but human warmth, the warmth of safety. I didn’t know what real hunger was.
I didn’t know what real cold was, the kind that penetrates into your bone marrow and makes you forget your name. I was naive. I thought war was something far away, something that happened in the history books my father read. When German troops approached the city, I did not run away. I stayed to help at the hospital, thinking it was my duty to be useful.
This decision cost me everything. I was captured during a roundup in July 1942. I didn’t even have time to say goodbye to my parents. We young women were herded into trucks like cattle. I remember the dust, the screams and that terrifying sound of the closing side, which cut us off from our past life.
Then there were trains, cattle cars , packed with people so tightly that you couldn’t sit down. We stood there for days, suffocating from the stench, from the smell of urine, sweat and fear. It was there, in this darkness, to the sound of wheels counting down the kilometers to the west, that I first saw Evdokia.
She stood next to me, pressed against the dirty wooden wall of the carriage. She was completely different. If I was angular and sharp, then Evdokia was soft, as if [the music] was made of different stuff. She was from the village of Pod Kurskom, from a deeply religious family of Old Believers. She had long blond hair, which she tried to hide under a scarf, and large blue eyes, full of horror, but at the same time some kind of childish trust.
She cried quietly, silently. The tears just rolled down her cheeks, leaving clear tracks on her dirty face. These tears irritated me . It seemed to me that crying was useless, that I needed to save my strength. I nudged her with my elbow and rudely told her to stop getting wet or we would all drown here.
She looked at me, wiped her face with her sleeve and suddenly smiled. She smiled weakly and scaredly . She took a small piece of dry bread from her pocket, stale and covered in dust, and handed it to me. “Take it,” she said. “You look hungry.” This gesture disarmed me. In hell, where everyone was for himself, where people were ready to bite each other’s throats for a sip of water, she gave me her food.
We shared this cracker, and from that moment on we became inseparable. I found out that her name was Evdokia, but I started calling her Dusya. She told me about her home, about the apple orchard, about how she was afraid that God had abandoned us. I, an atheist [musician] and biologist, told her that there is no God.
There is only survival of the fittest. How wrong I was. Only the weak survived in the camp . Those who survived were the ones who had someone to live for. Dusya became my reason, and I became her protection. Ravensbrück was greeted by the sound of dogs and the shouts of warders.
Schnell, Schnell – this word is etched into my memory, like the blow of a whip. We were thrown out of the carriages into the grey, chilly dawn. The first thing they did was take everything from us. clothes, shoes, photographs of relatives, hidden in underwear and hair.
The shaving procedure was the first act of real humiliation. We stood naked, shivering from cold and shame in a huge room where SS men and guards walked among us, poking sticks into our bodies, discussing us like horses at a fair. For Dusya this was unbearable. She, brought up in the most guarded modesty, where even showing an ankle was considered a sin, now stood completely naked in front of laughing men.
She [the music] tried to cover herself with her hands, curl up into a ball, become invisible. The punisher hit her on the hands with a stick, forcing her to straighten up. I saw something break in Dusya’s eyes. She closed her eyes and whispered prayers as the rough clippers tore at her beautiful hair.
When we came out of there, bald, in striped robes with red triangles on the chest, we stopped being women. We became numbers. But I grabbed Dusya by the hand, her palm was icy and squeezed it. “We’re here,” I told her. “We are alive. Look at me, Dusya. Don’t look at them. Look only at me.
” Camp life was a monotonous nightmare. Getting up at 4 a.m., roll call on the parade ground, which could last for hours. We stood in the rain, in the snow, in the wind that pierced the thin fabric of our robes. If someone fell, they would beat him or set dogs on him.
We learned to sleep standing up, leaning our backs on each other. We learned to eat gruel with pieces of rotten turnip floating in it and consider it a delicacy. We worked in a sewing factory for 12 hours a day, sewing uniforms for German soldiers. My fingers, accustomed to the tender stems of plants, became rough, covered with calluses and cracks that never healed.
The needles dug under my nails, my back was burning, but I could n’t stop. Dusya worked next to me. She was weaker physically, but she had an inner strength that I couldn’t understand. She found beauty even here. One day she found a tiny dandelion that had made its way through the trampled mud of the parade ground.
She looked at him with such delight, as if he were a wonder of the world. “Look, Vasya,” she whispered. “He lives, and we will live.” But the system was built to kill the human in us . Hunger was a constant companion. It twisted my stomach and clouded my mind. We saw women turn into animals, steal bread from the dying, inform on each other for an extra bowl of soup.
But Dusya and I held on, we shared everything equally. If I managed to find an extra potato peeling, I hid it for Dusya. If she got a little thicker soup, she would pour half of it for me. We slept on the same bunks, on a straw mattress, swarming in the sham, huddled together to keep warm.
It wasn’t something sexual , as those perverts later tried to present it. This was the only way to avoid dying from hypothermia. Another man’s body was the only stove we had. We warmed each other with our breath. We whispered at night. I told her about photosynthesis, about how trees drink water.
And she told me biblical stories about Daniel and Barba to the lions, about suffering, which cleanses the soul. I didn’t believe in cleansing. I saw only dirt, but her voice calmed me. We became one whole, two halves of one surviving organism. A year has passed . It was February 1943. The winter was fierce.
The frosts were so severe that birds fell dead in flight. We were exhausted to the limit. Our bodies turned into skeletons covered in grey parchment skin. The eyes were sunken, the cheekbones jutted out in sharp angles. We looked like ghosts. But it was then, in this state of extreme exhaustion, that we came to notice.
It happened during the evening check. We stood in the fifth row. The senior nadratel, an SS officer named Günther, walked along the rows with his retinue. He was handsome in that cold Aryan way they so extolled: tall, fair-haired, with icy blue eyes that had nothing human about them.
He stopped in front of us. I felt Dusya tremble next to me. Her trembling was transmitted to me. They usually didn’t look at us. We were work animals for them, expendable material. But that day, Gunther was watching. He looked at us with some strange, disgusted curiosity. “Look,” he said, turning to the other guards standing behind him.
“These two, they are always together, like Siamese twins.” He came closer and poked the stack into Dusya’s shoulder. She staggered, but did not fall. I discreetly supported her with my elbow. Russian pigs! he continued, grinning. They say that the Bolsheviks have no morals, that they have women in common, that they have no shame.
The other guards laughed. It was a harsh, barking laugh that made your blood run cold. Gunther looked me straight in the eyes. I knew that I couldn’t look them in the eyes. It was considered impudent, but I couldn’t look away. In his eyes I saw not just cruelty, but boredom.
the boredom of a well-fed predator looking for a new toy. “You are dirty,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “You stinks.” It was true. We haven’t washed for months. There was no water in the barracks, and we were taken to the bathhouse only on big holidays or for disinfection, which was worse than torture.
“They need to wash up,” Gunther said, his smile widening into a ascal. “Isn’t that right? Doesn’t the Reich care about the hygiene of its prisoners? He turned to one of his subordinates. Prepare a shower in block number four. Just for these two. I want to make sure they wash themselves properly. Personally, my heart sank.
Block number four was not an ordinary bathhouse. It was a small brick building, which stood alone. Rumors about what was happening there were different, but nothing good was expected from there . Dusya squeezed my hand so hard that her nails dug into my skin. She understood everything .
She sensed the threat with her animal instinct, which had become sharper in the camp. “Follow me,” Günther commanded. We broke ranks. Hundreds of eyes followed us. There was sympathy in them , but more relief. relief that they had not been chosen. It was the terrible truth of the camp. You’re glad when trouble passes you by, even if it hits your neighbor. We walked along the icy path.
Our wooden stocks clattered on the frozen ground. Clatter, clatter, clatter, clatter, like a countdown of time. The wind whipped our faces, but I no longer felt the cold. I was overcome by a sticky, sickening fear of the unknown. What do they want to do? Kill us? If they wanted to kill us, they would simply shoot us on the spot or send us to the gas chamber.
No, there was something else here, something personal. We approached the shower building. Smoke was coming out of the chimney . This meant that they were heating it. Warm. The thought of warmth was so tempting that for a second it eclipsed the fear. Gunther opened the door and, gallantly, with mocking politeness, let us in us forward.
It was humid and hot inside, smelling of corbolin and dampness. It was a small room, tiled in white . Shower heads hung from the ceiling . There were wooden benches in the corner and no one else. Just the two of us and Gunther. He closed the door behind him and bolted it . The click of metal sounded like a gunshot.
“Take off your clothes!” – he said, calmly taking out a cigarette. He lit a cigarette, and the sweet smoke of expensive tobacco mixed with the smell of mold. We froze. Undressing here in front of him, in this cramped room, was not the same as in a huge disinfection hall. There was a crowd, there was impersonality.
Here we were in full view. Well, Gunther’s voice became harsher. Or should I call some helpers to rip this rubbish off you. Dusya started to cry. Her hands were shaking so much that she couldn’t unbutton the buttons on her robe. I walked up to her. “Quiet, Dusya, quiet,” I whispered.
Do what he says, , or we’ll be killed. Just do it. I started unbuttoning her clothes. My fingers didn’t obey either, but I forced them to move. I took off her dirty, smelly robe. She remained in her nails, impossibly thin, with protruding ribs, with bruises on her thighs.
She covered her face with her hands, burning with shame. I quickly undressed myself. I tried not to think about my body, about how ugly it had become. I tried to turn into stone. Over there, under the water. Gunther waved his hand with a cigarette towards the showers. We stood under the watering can. The floor was cold, the tiles burned my feet.
Gunther walked over to the wall and turned the valve. First came the rusty icy water. We screamed and clung to each other. But then Then the water got warmer. It was hot water. Real hot water. For the first time in a year and a half, the feeling of warmth running down my skin was so overwhelming that I almost forgot about the presence of the SS officer behind us. Steam enveloped us.
The dirt that had become ingrained in the vapors began to wash away. The soapy glide of the water felt like a blessing. Dusya lowered her hands from her face. She raised her head to the ceiling, exposing her face to the streams. For a moment, just for a moment, a look of bliss crossed her face .
She looked almost the same as she had in the train carriage when we were sharing a biscuit, [the music] faint but lively. But this bliss was a trap. We relaxed. We allowed ourselves to feel like people. And just at that moment the door swung open. Four more people entered the room. These were officers, friends of Gunther.
They were noisy. cheerful, as if they had come to the theatre. One of them, a stocky man with a red face, had a camera in his hands. A big black Leica with a shiny lens that looked at us like the barrel of a cannon. “Here come our Russian beauties,” shouted one of them. Gunther, you were right.
They are truly inseparable, another one chimed in. The photographer raised his camera. The flash blinded us. Bright white light. which cut through the semi-darkness of the shower and captured our fear, our nail, our vulnerability. Dusya screamed and tried to hide behind me, but there was nowhere to hide.
We were cornered. “Don’t be shy, ladies,” Gunther said, coming closer. He didn’t smile anymore. His face became serious, focused, like a director before an important scene. You’re friends, right? Best friends. Show us how much you love each other. Help each other wash up.
“Come on, wash her back,” the photographer added, focusing. Closer, even closer. I looked at Dusya. Her eyes were full of insane horror. She shook her head, whispering, “No, no, please, no. Do it,” Gunther barked, his voice echoing off the tiled walls. “Or will you only leave here through the crematorium pipe? I realized that the worst thing was about to begin.
Not death, but something worse than death. I reached out to the soul, and my hand was shaking. The camera clicked again. I touched her shoulder. The skin was wet and hot, but under my fingers it shrank, as if from a burn. Evdakia looked at me, and in her eyes I saw a plea. Kill me, but don’t do this. But I couldn’t kill her.
And I couldn’t let them kill both of us. At that moment, in that damned shower, I made a choice. I chose life at any cost, even the cost of her soul. Mine her, – screamed , the photographer, coming almost right up to me. The lens of his camera was the black eye of the abyss, which was pulling us inside.
Gunther stood behind us, his arms crossed over his chest, like an art connoisseur. “ More energetically, ,” he commanded. “Not as if you’re burying each other, as if you enjoy it. You missed a woman’s affection, didn’t you? On your collective farms, they probably taught you that shame is a bourgeois prejudice.
I took a bar of gray, alkali-smelling soap. My hands moved like someone else’s. I began to lather Dusya’s back . She stood there, numb, hunched over, trying to cover her chest with her hands. Every movement I made was accompanied by a flash of a camera and an explosion of laughter. They were having fun. For them, it was a theater, a freak show, where we were the main clowns.
“Turn to face her,” barked one of the officers, a fat man with a red mustache. He came up and roughly turned Dusya to face me. She squeezed her eyes shut, tears mixing with the water from the shower. “Open your eyes, [ __ ]!” he shouted. Dusya opened her eyes. There was such emptiness in them that I became scared.
These were the eyes of not a living person, but a doll. ” Hug her,” Gunther ordered. His voice became quieter, more brief. Show us how you warm each other at night. We know that you do it. All you Russians are the same. Debauchery is in your blood. I hugged her. I pressed her wet, trembling body to me.
I tried to whisper in her ear: “Forgive me, Dusya, forgive me.” But the words stuck in my throat. Flashes hit her eyes. One, two, three. They circled around us like a flock. hyenas, choosing the best angle. They commented on our bodies, what was left of them. They laughed at our protruding ribs, at our scars, calling it Bolshevik beauty.
“Now kiss her,” said the photographer, changing the film. Silence fell in the room. Only the hissing of the water and our heavy, ragged breathing could be heard. I froze. This was the line. The line beyond which human dignity ended and something animal, dark, began. To kiss a friend, a sister in misfortune, at the command of these monsters, to turn a gesture of love and consolation into a dirty spectacle.
I said: “Kiss her,” roared Gunther and slammed the glass against the cafe wall. The sound was sharp, like a gunshot. Dusya shuddered and began to sink to the floor. I caught her. “Do it, Vasya!” she suddenly whispered with her lips alone, without unclenching her teeth.
“Do it, otherwise he will kill us.” And I leaned down. I touched my lips to hers. They were cold and salty from tears. It was not a kiss, it was a clash of two despairs. The flash blinded us. Excellent, the photographer screamed. Passion. What a shot. Soviet love. Let’s send this to Berlin. Let them laugh. They tormented us for another half hour.
They forced us to take poses that made me sick. They forced us to smile at the camera, when everything inside was screaming in pain. When they finally had their fill, Gunther made a gesture with his hand. The water abruptly stopped. The warmth disappeared instantly, replaced by piercing cold. “That’s enough,” he said, yawning.
“The performance is over, you are free to go.” We stood in the middle of the wet room, humiliated, crushed, dripping with water. We started looking around for our clothes, but they were gone. The bench where we had left our robes was empty. “What are you looking for?” Gunther asked with feigned innocence.
“Clothes,” I croaked. My voice broke. “Ah, clothes!” He smiled. “I think they’ve been taken away for disinfection. Unfortunately, it is not possible to return it now . You will have to go to the barracks. “So, so?” I asked again, not believing my ears. It was February outside. -15 degrees, wind, snow, walking naked through the entire camp. That’s right, he confirmed.
Run, maybe you’ll warm up. And don’t forget to smile. You can be seen. He opened the door to the street, an icy whirlwind hit my face. Snowflakes, sharp as needles, dug into my wet skin. There was no choice , we went out. The door slammed behind us , and we heard a burst of laughter inside.
We were left alone in the icy darkness of the camp. I remember that walk to the barracks not as a memory, but as a physical sensation that still lives in my bones. We ran, holding hands. Our feet slid on the packed snow. The cold froze our muscles, turning every movement was torture. But worse than the cold were the looks.
The camp didn’t sleep. People were looking at us from the windows of other barracks, from cracks, from patrols. The beams of searchlights from the towers snatched our white naked bodies from the darkness, turning us into targets. We were like two ghosts running through hell. I heard the guards whistling and jeering.
Look, mermaids, [ __ ] on a walk. Every word was like spit. Dusya ran next to me, stumbling. She couldn’t see anything in front of her. She just mechanically moved her legs. I pulled her along, whispering curses, whispering prayers, whispering incoherent nonsense, just to keep her from falling.
If she fell, she would never get up. When we burst into our barracks, on Silence fell upon us. Hundreds of women lying on the bunks raised their heads. They looked at us. First with incomprehension, then with horror, and then with disgust. Yes, with disgust. Not because they were evil, but because we brought with us the smell of trouble, the smell of a special humiliation that could be infected. We were marked.
We reached our bunks and buried ourselves in the rotten straw, trying to cover ourselves with the pathetic rags that served as blankets. Dusya curled up in the fetal position. She was shaking so hard that her holes were shaking. I hugged her, trying to warm her, but she pushed me away.
abruptly with a force that I did not expect from her. “Don’t touch me,” she hissed. “I “I’m dirty, I’m filthy, don’t touch me.” It was more terrible than a blow. My Dusya, my tender Dusya looked at me as if I were an enemy. The next morning, the second act of this torture began. When we went out to Opelpla Platz, the roll call square, we saw them. The photographs.
They were hanging on the notice board right at the entrance to the dining hall, where each prisoner passed. Huge black-and-white photographs, blown up to a frightening size. In them, there we were, naked, wet, hugging. The camera caught precisely those moments when the fear in our eyes could be mistaken for passion, and our helplessness for debauchery, and the signatures in large Gothic letters in German with a clumsy translation into Russian.
Soviet morality. Party friends. That’s what the Bolshevik women do instead of working. The entire camp passed by these photographs. Thousands of women, Poles, French, Jewish, our Russians. I saw them stop. I saw them whispering. Some giggled nervously, hysterically, some turned away with a blush of shame, some looked with contempt.
“Lesbians,” I heard a whisper behind me, perverts. The shame of the nation. These were our own, the Soviets, those with whom we shared bread. The system had won. It didn’t just humiliate us, it divided us from the rest. It made us outcasts among outcasts. We stood in line, and I felt a vacuum forming around us.
Women moved away from us as if we were lepers. No one wanted to stand next to those the SS laughed at. It was dangerous. It was contagious. I tried don’t look at the board. I looked straight ahead at the gray back of the head of the woman standing in front of me. But I felt Dusya dying next to me.
She wasn’t crying. She stood straight as a string, pale as chalk. Her lips moved, silently repeating the same phrase. I leaned towards her, to hear: “Lord, why? Lord, cleanse me with fire. I grabbed her hand. She didn’t pull her hand away, but her palm was limp, lifeless, like a piece of meat.
“Don’t look there, darling,” I whispered. “It’s just paper. It [the music] is not us. We know the truth. God knows the truth.” But she shook her head slowly, resignedly. God has turned away, Vasya. He saw. We saw everything. Now I stand before the whole world. Shame cannot be washed away, it cannot be washed away.
After that day, Evdokia changed. She stopped speaking completely. She followed commands, went to work, ate mechanically, swallowing gruel without feeling the taste. But her soul left her body. She became a shadow. At night I heard her not sleeping. She lay with her eyes open, looking into the darkness of the barracks.
Sometimes she would start rubbing her skin furiously until it bled. She scratched her arms, chest, neck with dirty nails, trying to tear off herself what she thought had stuck to her in that shower. Dusya, stop it. I grabbed her hands and pressed them to the holes. The wounds festered and did not heal.
She looked at me through me. Her eyes were filled with that same dark, sticky horror that I had seen in the photographs. I tried to fight for her. I stole extra rations for her . I tried to joke, tell stories from a past life, remember our university, her garden. But she did n’t react. She was somewhere else.
Where the camera flashes never went out, [the music] where Gunther was always laughing, where her nail was on display for eternity. She began to fade away physically. She was melting before our eyes. Tiv, who mowed down hundreds of people in the camp, walked nearby, but it was not the disease that killed her.
She was killed by shame, by black and hopeless melancholy. She convinced herself that she had committed a mortal sin, that by her obedience in the shower, by that kiss, she had betrayed her faith, her family, herself. I tried to explain to her that it was violence, that we had no choice, that the sin was on them, not on us.
” Only the dead have no choice,” she answered me one night. These were the first words in 2 weeks. The living always have a choice. I could have died, but I was afraid. I sold my purity for a bowl of soup and warm water. I am a traitor, Vasya, and I dragged you along with me. Her logic was distorted by suffering, but for her it was iron.
I saw how she was preparing neither for escape, nor for a fight, nor for leaving. She stopped hiding bread for a rainy day. She gave her portion to others, the weak, the old. She gave away her meager belongings, a spoon, a piece of rag that she wrapped around her legs. She was saying goodbye. I was angry with her.
I shook her by the shoulders. I shouted at her in a whisper so that the kapa would not hear: “You are not you dare. You don’t have the right to leave me.” We didn’t go through hell to give up now. To spite them, Dusya, live on spitefully. But she only smiled that same terrible, meek smile of a martyr who already sees the light at the end of the tunnel, inaccessible to others. A month passed.
The snow began to melt, turning the camp into a swamp of mud and excrement. The photographs were finally taken down. Apparently, Gunther got bored with this joke or new victims appeared. But the damage was done, irreversible. One morning, in mid-March, we were driven to work.
We had to dig trenches outside the camp perimeter. The ground was heavy and wet. We stood knee-deep in icy mud. The guards were angrier than usual. They urged us on with shouts and blows from their rifle butts. Dusya worked next to me. She barely She was holding a shovel. Her face was grey, transparent.
Suddenly she stopped. She stuck the shovel into the ground and straightened up. She looked at the sky. Low, leaden German sky. Dusya, dig, I hissed, seeing the guard approaching us with a dog. Don’t stand there, they’ll see. She turned her head towards me. There was no longer any fear in her eyes.
There was peace, frightening, absolute peace. Thank you, Vasya, – she said quietly, but clearly. Thank you for being with me, but I can’t be dirty anymore. I’m going to take a real wash. I didn’t have time to understand what she meant . I didn’t have time to grab her. It all happened in one second.
That second that divided my life into before and after. She took a step not towards the trench where we were supposed to dig, and towards the fence, towards the forest, where there were striped posts with Achtung signs. She simply stepped out of line, calmly, as if she were going to church for Sunday service.
I froze with the shovel in my hands. Time stretched out, turning into viscous, slow resin. I wanted to scream, call her, grab her by the robe, but my voice died inside me. I knew I shouldn’t scream. Screaming would attract attention prematurely, and then they could simply beat her and return her to line.
But she didn’t want to go back. She was walking towards her freedom. The guard, a young guy with a pimply face, whom we called a rat for his darting eyes, did n’t even understand what was happening at first. He lowered his machine gun and looked in confusion at this lonely figure, trudging through the mud. away from work.
“Stop!” he finally shouted. His voice broke into his temple. “Halt, or I ‘ll shoot.” Dusya didn’t stop. She didn’t even flinch. She straightened her shoulders. For the first time in many months, she wasn’t hunched over. She walked straight, and the wind blew out her empty, baggy robe.
She raised her face to the sky, exposing it to the wet snow, as if it were holy water. She really was going to wash herself, to wash away the shame with blood. Shoot, I whispered to myself, shoot now, don’t torture her. The guard pulled the bolt. The dry metallic click sounded louder than thunder. Shot. Dusya stumbled, as if she had hit an invisible wall.
She didn’t scream. She slowly, almost gracefully, she sank to her knees, and then fell face down in the black, greasy mud. The snow around her head instantly turned scarlet. I looked at this red spot spreading on the white, and felt nothing. No pain, no grief, only a cold, ringing emptiness.
Something inside me switched off. A fuse burned out. Vasilisa, who loved plants and cried over poetry, died in that very second. Only a shell remained, a machine for digging the earth. “Work!” – the guard yelled, running up to the body. He kicked Dusya with his boot, checking if she was alive. She didn’t move.
He cursed and turned to us, aiming his machine gun. Look at the ground, dig. Whoever raises their head will lie down next to you. And I dug. I stuck the shovel in the ground, throwing heavy clay stones, stabbing them, throwing them rhythmically, mechanically. I didn’t look towards my friend’s body.
I knew that her soul could no longer be humiliated. She was pure. The dirt remained on us, on me, on those who continued to breathe. In the evening they drove us back to the camp. Dusya’s body was left there, in the field. They will take it later along with the other corpses to burn. I couldn’t say goodbye.
I couldn’t read the prayer over her that she loved so much. I just walked in line, rearranging the wooden blocks. And with every step my heart became harder . stone, ice, steel. I decided that I would survive not for hope, not for the future, but for hatred. I will live, to remember. I will become a witness.
I will preserve every detail, every scar, every word, so that one day I could present them with a bill. The next two years merged into one continuous gray nightmare. I became cunning. I learned to steal bread so that no one would notice. I learned to pretend to be sick when I had to work in the cold, and to pretend to be healthy when they were selecting for the gas chambers.
I became friends with a woman in the kitchen, who gave me extra scraps for darning her socks. I became tough. When others died, I took their shoes if they were better than mine. I felt no shame. Shame died along with Dusya in that shower. I was an animal that wants to live. But sometimes at night, when the barracks grew quiet, I closed my eyes and saw the flash of a camera, and I felt the taste of Dusya’s tears on my lips .
In those moments I bit my hand until it bled, so that the physical pain would drown out the mental one. Liberation came in the spring of 1945, but it wasn’t like they show in the movies. There was no music, flowers or joyful hugs. There was chaos. The Germans fled, abandoning the camp. We were left alone behind barbed wire, not understanding what was happening. And then ours came.
The Red Army, tanks with red stars, soldiers dirty, tired, smelling of gunpowder and tobacco. I remember the first Russian soldier I saw. He came into our barracks, looked at us, living skeletons, lying on bunks in our own filth, and burst into tears. A healthy man with a machine gun on his chest sobbed like a child.
We didn’t cry, we had no tears, we just looked at them with empty eyes. “You are free, sisters,” he said . “The war is over.” But for us, the war was n’t over. It just changed form. We, former prisoners, were rounded up and sent to filtration camps. NKVD. Interrogations, endless questions.
Why did you survive? Why didn’t you die like honest Soviet citizens? Collaborated with the Germans, did they recruit you? They looked at us with suspicion. For the Motherland, we were not heroes, not martyrs. We were a stain, traitors who allowed ourselves to be taken prisoner by the enemy. I sat in front of the interrogator, a young lieutenant with clean hands, who had never seen a pair of trousers, and he asked me what I was doing in the camp.
I told him about the factory, about the trenches, but I didn’t say a word about the shower, not a word about the photographs. I knew If I tell, it will be my death sentence. They will send me to Gulak, like a German doormat, or simply infamous throughout the world. I clenched my teeth and lied. I said that I was an ordinary worker.
I erased Dusya from my testimony to protect her memory from their dirty hands. They let me go. I was allowed to return home, but there was no home. My Voronezh was destroyed. My parents died in the bombing in two. I was left alone. I went to Siberia, away from eyes, away from questions. I got a job at the botanical garden in Novosibirsk. Plants.
They didn’t ask questions, they didn’t judge, they just grew, reaching for the light, even if their roots were in manure. I married a good man, an engineer, who also went through the war and also knew how to keep silent. We lived our lives without asking each other unnecessary questions about past.
I gave birth to children, I was a good mother, but I never went to the bathhouse with them. I never had my picture taken if I could avoid it. The sight of a lens pointed at me made me nauseous and panicky. My husband thought that I was just shy. He didn’t know that every time the shutter clicked, I found myself there again, on the cold tiles, naked, humiliated, kissing my dead friend at the behest of monsters.
Years, decades passed. I grew old, the USSR collapsed, the world changed. Archives began to open, books, films appeared, people began to tell the truth. But I remained silent. I was afraid that one day someone would find those photographs, that someone would see them in a museum or in a history book and recognize me, recognize us.
This fear lived inside me, like a splinter under the heart. What if our humiliation became immortal? What if Günther won and we remained forever to the world as perverts from Nazi photographs? And then in 1991, I read an article in the newspaper. It was a small note about a German historian who was working with SS archives captured by the Allies.
He described how he found a box of negatives from Raven with a trouser. Photos from special showers, pictures taken for the entertainment of the guards. He wrote that when he saw these frames, saw the horror in the eyes of the women who were forced to pose, he could not include them in the inventory.
He violated historian protocol. He violated his professional duty. He burned them. He burned the negatives. He wrote in his diary: “These images are not history, they are a continuation of violence. The only way to restore these women’s dignity is to destroy the evidence of their shame. Let no one ever see them as the executioners wanted to see them .
” I read these lines, sitting in my kitchen, and tears streamed down my old wrinkled face. For the first time in 45 years, I cried. I cried openly, loudly, without holding back. These were tears of purification. That German historian, whose name I don’t even know, did what no one else could do. He washed us clean. He washed away that filth. He freed Dusya.
He let her leave in peace, in fire, as she wanted. The negatives burned, and with them, Gunther’s power over us burned. What remains is only our memory. My memory. Now I can speak. Now I am not afraid. I know that those pictures are no longer there. Only the truth remains, which I keep.
The truth is that in that hell we remained human. That the kiss they forced us to give wasn’t dirt. In the end it was a farewell kiss between two sisters facing death. They wanted to make pornography out of it, but it turned out to be an icon of suffering. I look at my hands.
They’re old, covered in age spots, but these are the hands that survived. Hands that planted flowers after the war, hands that rocked children. My name is Vasilisa. I was number 74.509. But I’m not a number, I’m a person. And my friend Evdokia was a person. They could take our clothes, our hair, our lives, but they couldn’t take our essence.
We won, Dusya. Do you hear? We still won, because I remember you. I remember you pure. And as long as I’m alive, you’re alive too. And those who laughed, they’re no longer there. Their laughter faded, but your light remained. That’s all. Now you can turn off the recorder. It’s time for me to rest.
More than 13,000 women passed through the Rasbrück concentration camp. About 50,000 of them died from hunger, disease, and execution. Soviet female prisoners were treated with particular cruelty by guards, often subjecting them to humiliations that went beyond official instructions. These words are a monument to those who were silenced.
To remember means to resist oblivion and not allow the executioners to achieve a final victory. This story is a work of fiction , inspired by the real suffering of Soviet women during World War II. It is a tribute to the memory of millions whose names and fates have faded into history, but whose pain was real. If you watched to the end, write in the comments what city or country you are watching from, and subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss the next testimonies.
