Tales from the Gulag: why I’m helping survivors tell their stories

I trudge up the concrete stairs of a council block of flats in west London. Up three floors. Then along one of those outside corridors, past several doors until I reach the final one. It is already open and there she is — smaller than I remember and with a charming, friendly smile. I guess that is because Ivanna knows me better now. She trusts me more. After what she has been through, it’s not surprising that it takes time to gain her trust.

She welcomes me into her little one-bedroom flat and before long, I am in a different world — a world of Ukrainians, Poles and Soviets, deportations, helping resistance fighters, being arrested… it is a world of memories which mean so much to her. She is 96, and the people she was closest to are long gone.

I have come to make a new video recording of her. The previous time I came, I recorded her talking about being tortured in Poland — made to hold her arms up in the air for such a long time that it was agony, and also agony to bring them down again. She told me about being taken out to the Gulag in the north-east corner of the Soviet Union in a region called Kolyma. She had been dismayed that I had never heard of Kolyma. I think she nearly decided there was no point telling her story to someone so ignorant. But she relented and told me about working in temperatures lower than -40°C. Her group of workers were sometimes punished for an infringement of the rules by being made to lie down face-first in the snow, then get up, then go down again. The hunger was so bad that those who did not receive food parcels from relatives struggled to survive.