STRICT REGIME "THEY CONDEMN YOU TO AN EMPTY BELLY"

Reproduced below is a brief sketch of the strict regime from My Testimony, E.P. Dutton and Co., New York, 1969, pp. 224-7.

"Well, and what about a prisoner's rights? There is his right to correspond (with limitations and censorship). His right to have visits from relatives. His right to buy up to five rubles' worth of food in the campshop, though only with money earned inside the camp. If he has nothing left after deductions have been made-too bad, he can make do without, even if his relatives are prepared to send money. Not on sale in the camp shop and forbidden because of the regime regulations are: sugar, butter, tinned meat and fish, bread. All you can buy is tinned vegetables or fruit (hardly anybody buys these because they are too dear, they take your whole five rubles), cheap tobaccos, toothbrushes, envelopes, notebooks, and you can buy camp clothing if you like-not that anybody does on five rubles a month.

"But these rights are no better than a dream, a mirage. Admin (the camp authorities) has the right to deprive a prisoner of all of them. This is done for violations, and who can say that he commits no violations-if Admin wants to find some? And so they take away your rights-to the shop for instance, for a month, two months, three. And then you have to get by on 'basic'-on camp rations that have been worked out on scientific principles to be just enough to keep you from dying off.

"The daily norm is 2,400 calories: 25 ozs. of bread, 3 ozs. of cod, 2 ozs. of meat (the sheepdog guarding the cons gets 1 lb.), 1 lb. of vegetables-potatoes and cabbage, about 1 oz. of meal or noodles, 4 oz. of fat and 1⁄2 oz of sugar. And that's all. It adds up to one and a half times less than a normal man needs on light work. You will say: what about the shop? But then they deprive you of the shop! Keeping strictly to all the rules and regulations they condemn you to an empty belly!

"But anyway, not even all of this finds its way into the prisoner's bowl. A cart, for instance, comes into the compound carrying meat for the whole camp, 300 lbs. for three thousand men. You look at this meat and you hardly know what to think is it carrion, or something still worse? All blue, it seems to consist entirely of bone and gristle. Then it goes to be stewed and you're lucky if half an ounce finds its way into your mouth.

"You're eating cabbage and you can't make out to begin with what it is: some sort of black, slimy, stinking globs. How much out of the established quota gets thrown on the rubbish heap? And in spring and summer the cookhouse hands can't even bring themselves to throw out the bad potatoes any more, otherwise there would be nothing to put in the soup. And so they throw in the black and rotten ones. If you go near the cookhouse in summer the stench turns you over. Stinking cod, rotten cabbage. The bread is like we had in the war. In number seven we had a bakery in which we baked two kinds of bread, black for camp, white for outside. Sugar, though you would think was foolproof. It won't rot, you don't have to measure it. But then they give it to you damp so that it weighs more. And they give you ten days' ration at a time-5 ozs.-because if they give you your 1 oz. daily, it wouldn't be a question of having nothing to eat as of nothing

to see.

"During six years in camp and jail I had bread with butter twice-when I received visits. I also ate two cucumbers-one in 1964 and another in 1966. Not once did I eat a tomato or an apple. All this was forbidden.

"And that is what strict regime looks like today. Strict regime, for the most part, is for political prisoners, because among criminals only the persistent offenders get put on strict regime, or those who commit a crime or a violation already in the camps, and even then not for their whole term-they do a stint on strict regime and then go back to normal regime again. For criminals and civil prisoners strict regime is the harshest form of punishment. But for us politicals it is the mildest, our imprisonment begins with this, because it is the minimum awarded by the courts. From strict regime political prisoners can go only to special regime or to the clink. And that is even worse."

PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE

Presently, more than 40 victims of show trials, staged to repress the growth of Jewish national feeling, are serving sentences in strict and special regime labor camps. Many of these unfortunate people are in need of medical care for serious ailments. All are in physically weak condition as a result of the extended interrogation and imprisonment between the time of their arrest and trial and as a result of the semi-starvation diet in the labor camps.

Brief sketches of several of these prisoners of conscience follow: