The march of the world
The voices of the gulag (4/6)
Audio 48:30
Henry Welsh at the Leninabad orphanage in Tajikistan.
© CNRS/RFI
By: Valerie Nivelon
2 mins
A look back at a little-known story, a story long overshadowed by the Cold War and the division of Europe into two blocks, that of East and West... While the Allies were celebrating the victory against the Nazis in 1945, the Stalin's Russia continued to deport hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to gulag camps and villages.
Europeans for whom Stalin is not a hero, but an executioner.
Europeans for whom the Soviet Union is not the liberating power, but the colonizing power.
Advertising
From 1939 and until the beginning of the 1950s, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, German, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian and Romanian families were uprooted from their homes and diverted from their destiny.
With the researchers Alain Blum and Marta Craveri, we undertook to research them, for five years, to record them and create the sound archives of the gulag*.
Stories of survival and resistance to repression, cold and hunger, stories of young adults and children where the greatest sorrows are mixed, but also sometimes the greatest joys... "A bitter school", according to one of the Klara Hartman survivors.
Episode 4: Jewish Stories
Their names are Téodor Shanin, Rafails Rosental, and Henry Welsh, they are Lithuanian, Latvian and Polish and they embody the most untold story revealed by our major RFI/CERCEC investigation on the Europeans of the Gulag… it is that of the Jews deported by the Soviets to the USSR, and paradoxically saved from the extermination of the Nazis.
Teodor, Rafails and Henry were forcibly removed while still children, because their parents were among the categories considered to be potential enemies.
They therefore found themselves in the gulag in the USSR at the time of the German invasion, which announced the annihilation of their families by the Nazi commandos.
They have had the same experiences: scarcity, cold, hunger, loneliness, but not the same fate.
* Gulag sound archives
This documentary series is produced as part of the project "EUROPEAN SOUND ARCHIVES-MEMORIES OF THE GOULAG © CNRS/RFI":
The sound archives of the gulag are the result of an unprecedented investigation, carried out by a team of 13 researchers of eight different nationalities , coordinated by CERCEC (Centre for the Study of the Russian, Caucasian and Central European Worlds, CNRS/EHESS) in collaboration with RFI.
More than 160 testimonies, or 300 hours of sound in 11 languages, were collected in Central and Eastern Europe, also in Kazakhstan and Siberia, between 2008 and 2010. These archives were born from the common will of Alain Blum, Marta Craveri , both researchers at CERCEC and Valérie Nivelon, journalist and producer at RFI to allow European survivors of Soviet repression to testify.
To read :
- Deported to the USSR. Stories of Europeans in the gulag
, by Valérie Nivelon, Alain Blum and Marta Craveri, published by Otherwise, in partnership with RFI, CNRS and CERCEC.
"Deported to the USSR", directed by Alain Blum, Marta Craveri and Valérie Nivelon.
In partnership with RFI, CNRS and CERCEC.
© Editions Otherwise
Newsletter
Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_EN
Russia
Story
On the same subject
The march of the world
Our gulag years (1/4): the deportation of Europeans to the USSR
The march of the world
Our gulag years (2/4): the love of men, the share of God
The march of the world
Our gulag years (3/4): Irina and Stella in the land of the white bears