He was a young doctor, and—more important—he was a convict doctor. Surovoy’s friend tried to persuade him not to go. He could have refused and been sent to a general work gang instead of taking on this patently dangerous work. Surovoy had come to the hospital from a general work gang; he was afraid to return to it and agreed to go to the mine and work at his profession. The camp authorities gave him instructions but no advice on how to conduct himself. He was categorically forbidden to send healthy thieves from the mine to the hospital. Within a month he was killed while admitting patients; on his body were fifty-two knife wounds.85
When he arrived to work as a feldsher in a criminal lagpunkt , Karol Colonna-Czosnowski was also warned that his predecessor had been “hacked to death” by his patients. On his first night in camp, he was confronted with a man carrying an ax, demanding to be excused from the following day’s work. Karol managed, he claims, to surprise him and throw him out of the feldsher’s hut. The next day he did a deal with Grisha, the camp criminal boss: in addition to the genuinely ill, Grisha would give him the names of two additional people a day who were to be freed from work. 86
Alexander Dolgun also describes a similar experience. On one of his first days as a feldsher, a criminal prisoner presented himself to Dolgun, claiming to have a stomachache—and demanding opium. “He motioned me to come close. ‘Here!’ he whispered fiercely, pulling back his shirt. His right hand was inside his shirt, holding a wicked carved knife like a miniature scimitar. ‘I want opium. I am always treated very well here. You’re new. You might as well know that if I don’t get my opium, you get the knife.’” Dolgun managed to fend him off with a fake opium solution. Others were not so quick-witted, and could be kept in the criminals’ power indefinitely.87
Even when a prisoner finally made it into the hospital, he often found that the quality of medical care varied widely. The larger camps had proper hospitals, with staff and medicines. The central Dalstroi hospital, in the city of Magadan, was known for having the latest equipment, as well as for being staffed by the best prisoner doctors, often Moscow specialists. While most of its patients were NKVD officers or camp employees, some of the more fortunate prisoners got treated by specialists as well, there and elsewhere: during his camp sentence, Leonid Finkelstein was even allowed to visit a dentist.88 Some of the invalid lagpunkts were also well-appointed, and seem to have been genuinely intended to nurse prisoners back to health. Tatyana Okunevskaya was sent to one, and marveled at the open spaces, the generous barracks, the trees: “I hadn’t seen them in so many years! And it was springtime!”89
In the smaller lagpunkt hospitals, the situation was far grimmer. Usually, lagpunkt doctors found it impossible to maintain even minimal standards of sterility and cleanliness.90 Hospitals were often no more than ordinary barracks in which the sick were simply dumped on ordinary beds—sometimes two to a bed—with only minimal supplies of medicine. An inspector reporting on one small camp complained that it had no designated hospital building, no sheets and underwear for patients, no medicine, and no qualified medical personnel. Death rates, as a result, were extremely high.91
Eyewitnesses concur. In one small hospital, in a lagpunkt of Sevurallag, “treatment and documentation were poor,” according to Isaac Vogelfanger, once the camp’s chief surgeon. Worse, food rations were remarkably inadequate and very few drugs were available. Surgical cases such as fractures and major injuries to soft tissues were badly handled and neglected. Seldom, as I later discovered, were patients discharged to return to work. Having been admitted with advanced signs of malnutrition, the majority would die in the hospital.92
A Polish prisoner, Jerzy Gliksman, remembered that in one lagpunkt prisoners actually lay “in a clutter” on the floor: “All passages were crowded with lying bodies. Filth and wretchedness were everywhere. Many of the patients raved and shouted incoherently, while others lay motionless and pale.”93
