Usually, children were transferred out of the camp nurseries and into regular orphanages at the age of two. Some mothers welcomed this, as a chance for the children to escape from the camp. Others protested, knowing that they might be deliberately or accidentally transferred to different camps, away from their children, whose names might then be changed or forgotten, making it impossible to establish a relationship or even contact.66 This sometimes happened to children in ordinary children’s homes. Valentina Yurganova, the daughter of Volga German kulaks, was put into a children’s home where some of the wards were too small to remember their names, and the authorities were too disorganized to remember them. One child, she told me, was simply renamed “Kashtanova” (“Chestnut”) because there were so many chestnut trees in the park behind the orphanage.
Years later, another such child wrote a heartbreaking description of her unsuccessful, lifelong search to find the real names of her parents: there was no record of any child being born in her region under the surname that appeared on her passport, and she had been too small to know their real names. Nevertheless, she remembered fragments of her past: “Mama at a sewing machine. Me asking her for a needle and thread . . . Myself in a garden . . . Then later . . . The room is dark, the bed on the right is empty, something has happened. Somehow I am alone. I am terrified.”67
No wonder some mothers “cried and screamed and some even went crazy and were locked in bunkers until they quieted down” when their children were taken away. Once they were gone, the chances of a reunion were slim.68
Outside, life for children born in camps did not necessarily improve. Instead, they joined the massed ranks of the children who had been transferred directly to children’s homes following the arrests of their parents— another category of child victim. As a rule, state orphanages were vastly overcrowded, dirty, understaffed, and often lethal. A former prisoner recalled the emotions and high hopes with which her camp sent a group of prisoners’ children into a city orphanage—and the horror they felt on hearing that all eleven had died in an epidemic.69 As early as 1931, at the height of collectivization, the heads of children’s homes in the Urals wrote desperate letters to regional authorities, begging for help in caring for the thousands of newly orphaned kulak children:
In another home for kulaks’ children:
In 1933, a children’s home near Smolensk sent the following telegram to the Moscow children’s commission: “Food supply of the home has been cut. One hundred children are starving. The organization refuses to give rations. There is no help. Take urgent measures.”72
Nor did much change over time. A 1938 NKVD order describes one children’s home in which two eight-year-old girls were raped by some of the older boys, and another in which 212 children shared twelve spoons and twenty plates, and slept in their clothes and shoes for lack of nightclothes. 73 In 1940, Natalya Savelyeva was “kidnapped” from her children’s home— her parents had been arrested—and adopted by a family who wanted to use her as a house servant. She was thus separated from her sister, whom she never found again.74
