Hellish Brutality in Northern Russia

“Russia’s Northern Flights” (July 26) conjured up many dark stories my parents shared throughout their lives. Not too long after the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, my immediate family, which had lived in eastern Poland, was deported to a Soviet concentration camp in the Archangelsk region not far from the Arctic Circle. One uncle was transported across the breadth of Siberia and forced to dig gold in Kholyma, known as the White Auschwitz. During this period, upward of 2 million Polish citizens were ethnically cleansed from eastern Poland; barely 500,000 ever returned alive. Places like Vorkuta became associated with hell, where incredible hunger, exhaustion and death were a part of daily life as tens of thousands of deportees were forced to dig coal. I remember the account of one man describing how, as a 13-year-old, he was forced to toil in the mines, up to his chest in icy water, working next to his mother and other pregnant women.

I was thoroughly disappointed with the reporter’s insensitive choice of including a former NKVD agent in his article, however. The amount of suffering and death these individuals meted out in their capacity as “security guards” has been well documented. Who cares that he himself became a victim?

Richard J. Widerynski

Long Beach