The march of the world
The voices of the gulag (6/6)
Audio 48:30
Roginsky Kizny.
(Courtesy of Memorial-International).
© Tomasz Kizny
By: Valerie Nivelon
3 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.
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From 1939 until the early 1950s, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, German, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian and Romanian families were torn 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 6: The right to memory
“
In fact, what is hardest in a camp is not the absence of women, nor is it the bad food.
For me, and not only for me, the hardest part was the lack of color.
Everything is monochrome.
And that is nightmarish
.
Arseni Roginski was born in prison, in a camp of the Soviet gulag, on March 30, 1946, and he died a free man on December 18, 2017. Arseni Roginski, historian and founding father of the Memorial Moscow association, worked until at the end to establish the list of the names of the millions of Soviet deportees to the gulag.
I remember his lively gaze, his humor and his intelligence.
I remember his dazzling perseverance for the right to memory, as a fundamental human right.
I remember his immense rigor, his immense modesty, and the generosity with which he agreed to tell his personal story in turn, for our sound archives of the gulag.
Acknowledgements
: Memorial France and Memorial Moscow.
© France Memorial / Moscow Memorial
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 the CERCEC (Center for Studies 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
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