For Kristine of Honolulu High School

Tom Holloway (xuegx@CSV.WARWICK.AC.UK)
Tue, 17 Dec 1996 22:16:39 +0000 

>We are sophomores at Kaimuki High School in Honolulu, Hawaii.  We read
>ANNE FRANK in our English class.  We would like to ask you one question.
>Were your experiences in the slave camp in Russia similar to the
>experiences of Anne Frank in a concentration camp?


Hello Kristine and period five students.  I don't know what
is a sophomore but I think you must be older children.

You asked me about my labour camp and the conditions,
whether it was like the camp that Anne Frank was sent to.


No, conditions were different.  The camp was for work, to
cut trees, but there was also a prison inside the camp.

There were 3 classes of people in this camp

1 resettlement - were not allowed to move more than 5
kilometres.  We had KGB Police to be sure we didn't escape.
We were forced to work.

2 were hard labour people.  Guards around perimeter, but
they could move inside the camp.

3 were really in prison, maybe for political offences,
speaking bad things about the government or criticising
Stalin.

As far as I was concerned I was in a settlement camp - but
with hard labour attached to it because my father fought
against the Russians in the 1930s.

Anne Frank and her family were jews and they were in prison.

-----------

Let me tell you more about our conditions.  We were
fortunate because we were put in houses that were already
there.  These were built by other prisoners at another time.
So we had somewhere to live to start with.

Work was terrible, because your conditions and rations
depended on how hard you worked.  We each had 1 pound of
bread every day, but if you could scrape some kopeks you
could buy extra food from a shop.  Stuff called khasha - a
sort of oatmeal - to supplement the diet.

Mostly we just had bread - we could plant potatoes and
collect berries from the forest.  Nothing like butter or
anything else.  We had one tea-spoon of sunflower oil for
each plate of khasha we bought.

Even then in the forest the conditions were fairly good.
When we were moved to the collective farms in Uzbekhstan
conditions were terrible, and really there was virtually
nothing to eat - not even for the Uzbheks who lived there -
they were starving to death to feed the Russian Army.

In the cotton fields you could sometimes find hedges that
had edible grasses - the peasants (and us) would gather
these and make a very thin soup, but so many died and
especially the very young and the old.

Feliks Chustecki
The Polish Exile