"NO TEARS, NO PRAYERS, NO NAMES": Memories of the Kem Transit Camp in the Gulag System

The Kem transit camp, located in Karelia, was one of the key hubs of the Gulag system, through which prisoners were transported to the camps of Kolyma, Vorkuta, and Norilsk. Archival records and personal testimonies paint a picture of a place where human dignity was erased, and survival became a daily struggle.

The Kem camp received prisoner convoys from across the Soviet Union. People were hauled in livestock wagons where "filth reigned; we slept on straw, and a bucket behind a wooden partition served as a toilet" . According to E.Kh. Shekk, deported in 1941, "corpses were tossed from the moving trains" — bodies littered the railway tracks like grim milestones .

During the Great Terror (1937–1938), Kem processed tens of thousands of "enemies of the people," including priests, "kulak" peasants, and intellectuals. Poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, arrested in 1938, described the camp in letters as a "hellish transit point in Karelia," where prisoners waited for months to be sent to Solovki .

Kem’s dual function as a transit hub and temporary prison created unique horrors. Prisoners were crammed into barracks with three-tiered bunks, where "20 people crowded into 10 square meters" . Locals often met the convoys with hostility. Deported ethnic Germans recalled: "Village boys shouted ‘Fascists, come out!’ and hurled stones" .

Families of "traitors to the Motherland" suffered particularly. E.G. Genter, deported at age 11, wrote: "We trembled with fear. Once, my mother caught a boy and beat him — they stopped bothering us" . Children of prisoners, like M.S. Gartung, later reflected: "When I grew up, I was considered Russian" — assimilation was their only path to survival .

Kem exploited prisoners for labor. Men felled timber; women unloaded coal barges. Ozerlag survivor V.A. Sorokin recalled: "Norms were tripled — we had to saw 5 cubic meters of pine daily." Those who failed faced "penalty rations": 300 grams of bread and cabbage slop .

By the 1940s, Kem became a testing ground for NKVD experiments. A 1943 report by Commander Nadaraya mentions "using prisoners to build a narrow-gauge railway": of 1,200 workers, 287 died that winter from exhaustion and frostbite . Survivor Yulik Dunsky wrote: "We scavenged potato peels from trash and boiled grass in tin cans" .

Even in hell, creativity persisted. Prisoners secretly wrote poetry, copied books, and organized "camp universities." Poet Anatoly Zhigulin, who passed through Kem in 1949, noted: "In Barrack No. 7, Professor Neumann from Moscow lectured on Peter the Great" .

Music became a lifeline. Researcher Inna Klauze documented choirs in transit camps: "They sang Ukrainian folk songs, romances, even the banned ‘Internationale’" . Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, imprisoned in 1938, recalled: "Silence was enforced, but at night, we whispered Anna Akhmatova’s verses" .

After Kem closed in 1956, its archives were destroyed, but personal diaries survived. From 2003–2017, students at the Yenisei Pedagogical College recorded 40 interviews with survivors, published in Yenisei Germans: Family Stories (sibreal.org).

One survivor, F.D. Arndt, concluded: "We were children, just following our parents… That’s how it had to be then" . These words encapsulate a system where even memory became resistance. As Ozerlag prisoner Vera Golubeva wrote: "Many went mad, but those who survived carried the truth like a torch" .