Gulag kilde: Beskrivelse af fængsel i uddrag af den ukrainske professor Nicholas Prychodkos erindringer om Gulag – slutningen af 1930’erne

At the beginning of summer there were one hundred and thirty-two prisoners in our small cell. There was hardly standing room, let alone a place to sit and sleep. It was stuffy beyond endurance, with the sun beating down on the roof and the window shutters closed. We stripped our clothes off, but even that didn’t help much. We sweated profusely, using rags to wipe ourselves, and then wringing them out into bowls at our feet. These bowls were handed from one person to another and emptied into the urinal. Our bodies were covered with red itchy spots which bothered us all day long. Even when fresh air did blow in at night, myriads of bedbugs came out of invisible crevices and prevented sleep.

To slake the thirst of one hundred and thirty-two persons, all we got was a six-gallon iron bucket of water in the evening. It is hard to picture the state of mind with which we awaited this small dole of water. We poured it carefully into cups as if it were some priceless nectar. The water, of course, was locked all day long in the wash rooms. We had to go there in our bare feet across a lot of stinking filth to bring it with us to the cell, thus befouling the air still more.

When we were out for our exercise I glanced at my fellow-prisoners. They looked like illusory, skinny, wax skeletons. I was afraid to ask anybody what I looked like.
Some of the inmates did not have the strength to endure this sort of life, so they were taken away, we knew not where, and their places filled with others. Any protest against this order of things was punished with a sound beating, for the superintendents had full power of control to use as they saw fit.

One day two peasants were brought into our cell directly following an investigation at Brovari near Kiev. They told us about a terrible “death combine” operating in the Darnitsky forest behind a barbed-wired enclosure. In damp cellars of about forty square yards in area, two hundred and fifty prisoners were incarcerated, with standing room only, in the stench of their own sweating bodies, and with hardly any water to drink or anything to eat.
Near these cells the torture chambers worked day and night, and the cries of the tortured victims kept on incessantly. Their feet were seared with hot irons, air was pumped into their stomachs with motorcycle pumps, needles were shoved under their fingernails, and they were beaten over the most delicate parts of their body with an oak ruler. This in the twentieth century, in the “most happy country in the world!” Several corpses were carried out from the cells every day, and in the dead of night many more were taken away to the Darnitsky forest to eternal peace…

Their places in the cells were soon filled with other prisoners.
In the outside courtyard of the torture chamber there was a deep well. One day when they were marching a group of prisoners by this well, two of them broke out of line and dived into it head first. Following this incident, the well was covered over with boards.
When the Nazis invaded the Ukraine, they uncovered a mass burial place at Vynnytza, where thousands of corpses had been thrown. The same evidence was discovered in Darbitsky forest near Brovari, although here they had no time to disinter the bodies, since they had already begun to retreat from the Ukraine; and they had to cover up all traces of their atrocities.

And so at Brovari thousands of unknown persons lay dead without benefit of decent burial or a cross to mark their graves. Somewhere in the night many bereft mothers and orphaned children must have been waiting in vain and shedding bitter tears.