Today’s Icy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Here’s a description of a Soviet prison camp in the Irkutsk Region circa 1980 from the book The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union:
The inmates of Prison No. 410 in Vikhorevka languish under frightfully arbitrary and unbearably severe conditions. Here is an eyewitness report from a former political prisoner, who spent about a year in this facility:
“It was daytime when we arrived in Vikhorevka, a small settlement not far from the Bratsk hydro-electric power plant. When I saw the prison building from the outside, I was surprised to see how gloomy a place could be made to be. This squat, gray one-story concrete building, located on the perimeter of the settlement, was surrounded by an old, gray wooden fence and an off-limits zone with watchtowers. The walls, floors, and ceilings of the prison were cast with cement and iron bars into a cold block. This indestructible reinforced-concrete vault was built in the wintertime. Thus, in order to make the concrete harden as quickly as possible, salt had been added to it. The result, however, was that the floors, walls, and ceiling were constantly wet. With a creak of the door and a squeak of the hinges, I was locked into my cell of 15 square meters. I was ‘at home’. Directly opposite the door was a window under which stood a large plank bed for eight persons. It was made of thick wooden blocks held together by iron clamps that were spaced some 30 to 40 centimeters apart from one another. Ice glimmered in the indentations in the floor. The window was also covered with a thick layer of ice. Drops of water clinged to the ceiling; water trickled down the walls.
“A single oven, positioned between two cells, was used for heating. Yet, because it was placed behind iron bars, we could not even warm ourselves up on it. We received two billets of firewood a day — about a quarter of a log each for use in the oven. The oven was only moderately warm and naturally could not, as a result, heat the cells. Our bodies were the only source of heat in these reinforced-concrete cubicles. Light could hardly penetrate the ice layering on the ironbar windows. Over the door, there was a light bulb of not more than 25 watts. The yellow gleam could hardly illuminate the cell.”
Unidentified former Soviet Gulag Prison
Culled from: The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union
Ghastly!
One of my favorite books is Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook. It is exactly what it says it is: a bizarre and oft-disturbing scrapbook collected over the years by Los Angeles area police detective Jack Huddleston, whose career spanned from 1921 to the early 1950’s. Here’s a mysterious (and unexplained) suicide photo.
Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!
This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).
Here’s today’s entry:
October 31st. Warm and lowering. First, second, and part of third detachment went away in the morning, but there is no enthusiasm, for we believe it to be only a change of prisons, the report of exchange being only a dodge of the rebels to keep us from any attempt to escape during transportation. The rebel sergeants have been taking our carpenters to work on their parole of honor. Rations of bread and rice cooked without a particle of salt.
Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost