Describing Nazi and Soviet Prison Camps: Frazier and Gorra

Photo by Igor Mikhalev (from Ian Frazier's "On the Prison Highway")

I’m currently reading Michael Gorra’s The Bells in Their Silence (2004), an account of his travels in Germany. In Chapter 1, he writes about “the difficulty of describing” Buchenwald. He says, “None of the ways in which I customarily described a place seemed as if they could apply to a concentration camp.”

Reading Gorra’s words, I immediately thought of Ian Frazier’s “On the Prison Highway” (The New Yorker, August 30, 2010), an extraordinary description of a deserted Stalin-era labor camp. Frazier writes,

The lager lay in a narrow valley between sparsely wooded hills. The gray, scraggly trees, which did not make it to the hills’ higher slopes, grew more thickly near the lager and partly surrounded it; a few small birches had sprung up inside what had been the camp’s perimeter. Their bare branches contrasted with the white of the snow on the roof of the barracks building, whose wall, set back under the eaves, was dark. In the whiteness of an open field a guard tower tilted sideways like someone putting all his weight on one leg. A ladder-like set of steps still led up to it, and two eye-like window openings added to the anthropomorphic effect. In the endless and pristine snow cover I saw no tire tracks, road ruts, abandoned oil drums, or other sign that any human had been here since the camp was left to the elements, half a century before.

At first view, the camp looked as I’d expected. There were the fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s, the ink-black barbed wire, the inch-long barbs shaped like bayonets. Some of the posts leaned in one direction or another, and the barbed-wire strands drooped or fell to the ground; the fencing, and the second line of fence posts, several metres beyond, and the low, shameful barracks, with its two doors and three windows, fit exactly with the picture of a Siberian prison camp that one has in the mind. Sergei had drifted off to the left to videotape the lager from the side. I went in by the front gate, which was standing open. When I was inside the perimeter, the camp lost its generic-ness and became instead this particular Russian structure of its own.

To begin with, the whole place was as handmade as a mud hut. The fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s weren’t factory stock that had been produced elsewhere but plain logs, peeled and smoothed, with narrow boards atop them to complete the L. And the side of the barracks wall, which from a distance had appeared to be stucco, was actually a daubed plastering over thin strips of lath that crossed each other diagonally, like basketwork. I broke a piece of the plastering off in my hand; at one time it had been painted a pale yellow and it crumbled easily. It seemed to be nothing more than a spackle of mud and river sand.

Aside from the nails and the barbed wire, I could see almost no factory-made product that had been used in the construction. Next to the windows were white ceramic insulators that had probably held electrified wire; no trace of mullions or window glass remained. The roof beam ran parallel to the building’s length, and along the slope of the roof at each end a facing board about five inches wide had been nailed. These boards covered the raw edge of the roof and extended from beam to eaves, and at the end of each board a very small swirl of scrollwork had been carved. The embellishment was so out of place it caught the eye. I wondered what carpenter or designer had thought to put a touch of decoration on such a building.

He describes the barracks’ interior:

The floor of the barracks was worn planking, tightly joined and still sound. I saw nothing on it but a few twists of straw and the wooden sole of a shoe. A short, cylindrical iron stove rusted near a corner. Its stovepipe was gone and the hole for it in the plank roof above had been covered over. Prisoners who had lived in barracks like this reported that the stove usually heated a radius of five to six metres. As this building was maybe ten metres from end to end, areas of it must always have been cold. From inside you could see the logs that the walls were made of. The cracks between the logs had been chinked with moss. The barracks space had been divided into several rooms, with bunks set into the walls. The bunks also were made of bare planks—some planed on both sides, some planed on only one. Planks with the bark still on them had been fitted into the bunks so that the bark side faced down.

This interior offered little to think about besides the limitless periods of suffering that had been crossed off here, and the unquiet rest these bunks had held. Often prisoners in places like this had to sleep on the unimproved planking, or on thin mattresses stuffed with sawdust. For covering they might have had a single blanket, or nothing besides the clothes they wore during the day. Mornings began as early as 4 a.m., when the guards would awaken them by pounding with a hammer on a saw blade. That wakeup alarm and the screeching of the guard dogs’ chains on the wires stretched between the watchtowers as the dogs ran back and forth were characteristic sounds of the camps. Before the prisoners went out to work, they were given breakfast—usually soup with a small piece of fish or meat, and bread. Even in 1977, not a lean time, the diet in Soviet strict-regime camps provided only twenty-six hundred calories per prisoner per day, and less in the punishment blocks and sick wards. The international standard for a person actively working is thirty-two hundred to forty-two hundred calories per day. Like almost all labor-camp prisoners, the ones in this barracks would have been hungry almost all the time.

He says,

What struck me then and still strikes me now was the place’s overwhelming aura of absence. The deserted prison camp just sat there—unexcused, untorn-down, unexplained. During its years of operation, it had been a secret, and in some sense it still was. Horrors had happened here, and/or miseries and sufferings and humiliations short of true horrors. “No comment,” the site seemed to say.

He concludes that the camp doesn’t just evoke Stalin; it is Stalin. He writes,

Stalin never saw this or any other Siberian gulag with his own eyes. Once he attained power, he seldom left western Russia, preferring to stay in or near the Kremlin most of the time. Perhaps the unhappy fate of almost every Russian ruler who set foot in Siberia gave him pause. Although he had passed through western Siberia often as a young man (he claimed six escapes), neither then nor afterward was he ever east of Baikal. His underlings must occasionally have shown him charts of this Topolinskaya road and its system of prison camps, and maybe they even showed him photographs. But for him this camp would have been only a point on a map, a detail of a plan. The strange feeling of absence that prevailed in the frozen silence here had to do with the secrecy and evil of the place’s conception, and with its permanent abandonment, in shame, after its author was gone. Now the place existed only nominally in present time and space; the abandoned camp was a single preserved thought in a dead man’s mind. 

That last line is unforgettable.

Describing Buchenwald presents a challenge that Frazier didn’t have to face: it’s a memorial site; visiting it is a mediated experience. Gorra says,

Yet even as one walks through its gate and begins to experience the camp as a physical place, a piece of land, a set of rooms – even here one cannot escape the question of mediation, of the way in which the camp has been presented, the story it has been made to tell.

He finds his way into his description through the camp’s crematorium. He writes,

For me the most affecting part of the camp was its small crematorium. I didn’t count its separate bays or ovens – four, six? – but it could not have handled many bodies at once, maybe no more than a funeral complex in a large city. Even so it represented an enormous increase in the scale of death at Buchenwald: at first the camp had simply used Weimar’s municipal crematorium. The building I saw went up in 1941, and its ovens, made by the Erfurt firm of Topf and Söhne, provided the prototype for those that would later be used at Auschwitz. But it wasn’t just a place to burn bodies – the courtyard outside was regularly used for executions, and so was the basement, where corpses were stacked while waiting their turn for the incinerator. It must have ben convenient, to kill on site that way, a thousand people and more in the basement room, with an elevator to take the cadavers to the fire upstairs. The ovens themselves were roughly cylindrical and nothing about them announced their purpose. They look industrial and inscrutable, and if I hadn’t known otherwise I might have thought they were used for making charcoal or firing a steamship, for any factory process that required flames and a chimney.

Two teenagers came in, a boy and a girl with their hands in each other’s pockets, and stuck their heads inside one of the ovens, calling out to test its echo. I flinched and stepped away from them into the room next door, and then flinched again, for there was nothing inscrutable here. Old yellow tiles on the walls; a display case of rusty surgical instruments and a faucet over a large deep sink; a table, also covered in tiles, that sloped in from the sides to a central channel, and that sloped as well from the head to the drain at the floor. My throat felt as though it were shrinking inside me, shrivelling tight and parchment dry. I have never been in a morgue; I know them only from televised detective shows. But I could recognize a dissecting table, and I knew what kinds of things had been done in this room. It was called the “Pathology Department,” but it didn’t look as though complicated medical tests could be performed here, and there weren’t the refrigerated lockers I’d seen on TV, in  which a corpse might be stored until the coroner was ready. Here there had been no need for either tests or cold storage. The doctors who worked at Buchenwald already knew what their subjects had died of, and they knew as well that there was no need to preserve any particular body for long. There would always be another one ready.