I pulled up my skirt above the knees to look like a kilt and turned down my stockings to make them look knee high. In Scots fashion my blanket was thrown over my shoulder and I hung my hat in front of me like a sporran. My voice soared with pride, singing “Annie-Laurie,” “Ye Banks and Braes o’Bonnie Doon,” always finishing up with “God Save the King”—without translation.61
Ekart also described what it felt like being an “object of curiosity” for Russian intellectuals:
At specially organized, carefully hidden meetings with some of the more trusted among them, I told them of my life in Zurich, in Warsaw, in Vienna and other cities of the West. My sports coat from Geneva, my silk shirts, were most carefully examined, for they were the only material evidence of the high standard of living outside the world of communism. Some of them were visibly incredulous when I said that I could easily buy all these articles on my monthly salary as a junior engineer in a cement factory.
“How many suits did you have?” asked one of the agricultural experts.
“Six or seven.”
“You are a liar!” said one man of not more than 25, and then, turning to the others: “Why should we tolerate such fantastic stories? Everything has its limits; we are not children.”
I had difficulty making it clear that in the West, an ordinary person, taking some care of his appearance, would aim at having several suits, because clothes keep better if one can change from time to time. For a member of the Russian intelligentsia, who seldom has more than one suit, this was difficult to grasp.62
John Noble, an American picked up in Dresden, also became a “Vorkuta VIP” and regaled his camp mates with tales of American life they found incredible. “Johnny,” one of them said to him, “you would have us believe American workers drive their own cars.”63
But although their foreignness won them admiration, it also prevented them from making the closer contacts which sustained so many in the camps. Leipman wrote that “even my new camp ‘friends’ were frightened of me because I was a foreigner in their own eyes.”64 Ekart suffered when he found himself the only non-Russian prisoner in a lagpunkt, both because Soviet citizens did not like him and because he did not like them: “I was surrounded by an aroma of dislike if not hatred . . . they resented the fact that I was not like them. At every step I felt their mistrust and brutishness, their ill-will and their innate vulgarity. I had to spend many sleepless nights in defense of myself and my belongings.” 65
Again, his feelings have an echo in an earlier era. Dostoevsky’s descriptions of the relationship between Poles and Russian criminals in the nineteenth century suggest that Ekart’s forebears had felt the same: “The Poles (I speak only of the political offenders) behaved with a sort of refined, insulting politeness towards them, were extremely uncommunicative and could in no way conceal from the convicts the revulsion they felt for them; the convicts, for their part, understood this very well and repaid them in their own coin.”66
