“Teenage girls ate their fingers from hunger.”

Babylon is on the northernmost peninsula of the planet. Then the regime did not like: Germans, Latvians, Lithuanians, Finns, Kalmyks, Koreans, Chinese, etc. They were collected in the Far North for certain death

I first saw it in 1993. The ship "Mikhail Godenko" anchored at Ust-Port - this is not the end of the earth, it is already beyond the edge, beyond the Arctic Circle. Under Stalin, the exiled Germans built here an exemplary fish factory, a boarding school, where they courted ...

I first saw it in 1993. The ship "Mikhail Godenko" anchored at Ust-Port - this is not the end of the earth, it is already beyond the edge, beyond the Arctic Circle. Under Stalin, the exiled Germans built here an exemplary fish factory, a boarding school, where they courted the children of indigenous peoples. On board the Godenko there was a silent young journalist from Germany, no one understood what she was doing here and why she was on this tedious two-week journey along the Yenisei. She was silent. And then I saw how Uta, for the first time flashing her eyes, rushed to the elderly Germans who had come out to meet the ship. The “Godenko” did not stay for long: it hummed, choking, and Uta and the woman from the locals still could not part - they cried, embracing. The old German woman stroked the young woman's hair and cheeks. They were not related. Uta then sailed away - she stood at the stern and looked into the distance, and that woman remained a point beyond the edge of the earth.

Krasnoyarsk had just opened then, and they were the first foreigners to freely travel along the Yenisei. Then I saw many times how they met with their own.

And then the 90s passed, some of the former special settlers (r / n) left, many died - the time has come. Ust-Port fell into disrepair, burned down. Like many other villages and machines in the lower reaches of the Yenisei. Now there are only a few former rural settlements in Taimyr, soon there will be no one left, the page of history has been turned, nothing reminds of the tragedy of many peoples thrown here to die.

At the Agapitovo bench in 1942, just before the freeze-up, half a thousand Latvians and Germans were thrown out - then the steamer M. Ulyanov" could no longer walk. C / n gave only 6 tents. By spring, almost all died out. Perhaps no one would have known about this crime, if not for the three Finns who fled from Ust-Khantayka to Igarka. Their path lay through Agapitovo. They witnessed the Agapit tragedy and managed to return to Khantayka, and the news spread from them.

The burrows in which s/n lived and died on the Yenisei shores are now covered with earth, mass graves can no longer be found. There were deserted places, without content. It is returned by the private initiative of individuals. In the 90s, residents of Riga put a cross in Agapitovo with the dates of the winter of 1942-1943. In 2006, the Germans erected a strict high cross in Ust-Khantayka.

Following the dispossessed kulaks, not only the enemies of the people sailed to Taimyr, but also the peoples in general who became hostile. On January 6, 1942, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution "On the development of fisheries in the river basins of Siberia and the Far East." For its implementation in the navigation of 1942-1943, 8417 s / n were brought to Taimyr - Volga Germans, Balts, Finns (according to medical reports in the district state archive). Before that, in 1937, there were Koreans and Chinese from the Far East. In the summer of 1944 Kalmyks were brought in. In total, 25 thousand of them (7525 families) were sent to the Krasnoyarsk Territory. 900 Kalmyk families found themselves in the Taimyr fish trust. Party s/n and s/k arrived in Taimyr until the mid-50s.

Krasnoyarsk "Memorial" in November began and for the second month every day uploads to the site archival data and memoirs of special settlers collected by the Taimyr Museum of Local Lore (the book "Candle of Memory", appendices to it), as well as the second, supplemented edition of the book "Taimyr True Story". ". Its authors are the spouses Lev and Victoria Petri, former s/n. Lev Petri taught at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute for 32 years, and in 1994 he moved to Germany with his family. Petri: “In 1942-1944, disastrous conditions arose in Taimyr for special settlers of different nationalities, as a result of which up to 70% of people brought to the Far North died, who turned out to be “superfluous” due to lack of jobs.” Petri's calculations are based on statistical data for the villages of Potapovo and Ust-Khantayka: "Out of 1950 special settlers brought to these two villages, the death rate for three years was 1370 people, that is, 70%." Why did this happen? Petri: “... 3-3.5 times more people were mobilized than required in the newly organized fishing industry. “Superfluous people” as a result found themselves without a livelihood: there was no housing, clothing, food, fuel. Cold, hunger, scurvy, lack of medicine. Special settlers, especially those who arrived in Taimyr in the second half of the summer of 1942, found themselves on permafrost in dugouts (burrows), which they were forced to dig and in which the conditions of stay, together with the famine that took place, corresponded only to extinction, but not to life. As the victims testify, irreparable fatal damage was caused to parts of the Volga Germans and the Balts by the criminal deception of special settlers when they were sent from their places of residence in 1941, when military convoys were not allowed to take warm clothes, declaring: “You will return by winter!”

Brigitta Genrikhovna Wacker (Gints). Born in 1927 in the village. Hussenbach of the Autonomous Republic of Volga Germans (ASSRNP). By decree of August 28, 1941, she was exiled to the Krasnoyarsk Territory. Since 1942, in a special settlement in the village of Ust-Khantayka. She worked as a fisherwoman, as a veterinary assistant in reindeer breeding. Notable fur breeder of Taimyr. She died in 2002. From her diary entries, 1992:

“In 1941 I was 14 years old, my brother was 16. My parents died. In order to continue our studies at school, we moved to the city of Engels to our friends, who accepted us as family. On August 31, we went to school for a solemn line, but our joy was overshadowed. The principal of the school commanded: "Germans, two steps forward." And with these two steps our ordeals began. On September 2, carts drove up to the houses where the Germans lived, loaded onto them the necessary things, among which there should not have been wooden objects, and we said goodbye to our small homeland forever.

In Siberia, she worked on a collective farm. In June 1942, it was announced that families with no young children were to leave for the North for four months. On June 24, Germans aged 14 to 30 were landed on the banks of the Yenisei. There were 105 of us. The machine where they brought us was called Ust-Khantayka. There were only four houses and a shop in it. They organized the German collective farm "Northern Way". They began to clean up the territory and build huts for housing. Formed fishing crews. We were taught by a local resident, Enets Petr Spiridonovich Bolin, to correctly sweep and pull out a net, to repair nets. Closer to autumn it became colder, northern winds blew more often, but the water still retained heat. To keep warm, we went into the water up to the waist. When they got out of the water, the clothes immediately froze. Seine fishing continued until October 5th. They fished barefoot for 12-18 hours a day.

In September, the last batch of special settlers was brought in - Germans, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians. They were placed in attics, in tents on the banks of the Yenisei. There were already more than five hundred people in the village.

1942-1943 ... Winter, cold, hunger. Scurvy claimed more than half of the population. Only in March-April, according to incomplete data, more than eighty people died. We couldn't make coffins. During the day, the funeral brigade took away the coffins with the dead, at night the dead were dumped into the pits, and the coffins were returned for the “waiting list” (the coffins, as it appears from archival documents, were inventory - they were used from housing to the grave. - A.T. ). There were cases when relatives hid the dead in order to get an extra day of food rations for him. Parents died, children remained. Families were dying. People were so weak that they were unable to carry orphaned children out of the dugouts. Then they liberated one of the dugouts and carried the orphans into it in baskets.

We waited for the end of the war, lived by faith in the best. On the night of May 9, 1945, we worked on the firewood. I remember it was very cold. Approaching the village in the morning, we saw Maria Groo running. She was waving a red handkerchief and shouting to us: “Victory! Leave the sled, go to the rally!” Joy knew no bounds. We believed that we would return to our small homeland.”

Gilda Georgievna Malysheva (Prott). Born in 1925 in the village of Varenburg ASSRNP. In September 1941 she was exiled to the Krasnoyarsk Territory.

“We lived near the Volga. I was orphaned early. Her mother died in childbirth, and her father also died soon after. I was raised by my older sister. Together with her in the fall of 1942, we ended up in the village of Parovaya, Berezovsky District, Krasnoyarsk Territory. A year later, in September 1942, we were taken to Taimyr. On the machine Nikolsky was a collective farm. Kirov. They started fishing and hunting. Every fifteenth day of the month we had to report to the commandant's office. We were afraid that we would run away. There was nowhere to run without clothes and documents. It was terrible in the first winter of 1942-1943. People were starving. Deer skins, fish spruce scales. Lonely teenage girls ate their fingers out of hunger. Many people froze to death in the tundra, because they didn’t have the strength to carry firewood or fishing nets ... They got everything, it was hard. We fished in boots until mid-October. There were already frosts at that time, the river was freezing. Now my joints are aching, I get sick all the time. (Recorded in the village of Potapovo in 1992)

Louise Davydovna Filbert. Born in 1923 in the village. Kind of the Underwalden District of the ASSRNP. In June 1941 she graduated from the Marksstadt Pedagogical School, in September she was exiled to the Krasnoyarsk Territory. Since 1942 she was in a special settlement in the Ust-Yenisei region. My husband and I went to the Volga only in 1996.

“On June 19, 1941, there was a graduation party at our pedagogical school, and three days later the war began, which turned our whole life upside down. On August 31, I met with my future students, and in the afternoon I heard the news that the Germans were being resettled. On the same day the school was occupied by soldiers. On September 4, the whole family - me, my mother, my brother - left their home forever. In June 1942, with the first batch of special settlers, we were sent north along the Yenisei. On July 1, we were landed on the Nosonovsky Islands, not far from the village. Ust-Port, right on the sand. People lay along the banks of the Yenisei. A storm came up and covered everyone with sand. In the village there were a shop and a fish receiving point. There were no houses. We decided to build a house out of turf. It was built mainly by women and teenage children, since healthy men were taken to the labor army. From July to mid-October they lived in huts. By this time, the collective farm "Rybak Severa" was organized. They started fishing. We were told all the time: "Your food is in the Yenisei." We fished until late autumn barefoot in the snow. Our first person died on November 12th. He was buried in Ladygin Yar. One young one was eaten alive by lice. In December, scurvy began. People's gums and joints became inflamed. Products were issued only until January. To save themselves from hunger, people boiled and ate lemmings. In the first winter, twenty people died from scurvy and starvation. It was the hardest winter ever. In March, they brought deer blood and needles. They forced everyone to drink half a glass of this bitter broth. My mother and brother were seriously ill, and I somehow walked.

It was difficult, but we lived in the hope that after the war everything would be sorted out and we would be able to return home. They thought: “How will the Volga be without us?” In 1948, we were forced to write a receipt that we would never return to our homeland, that we would stay here forever. In 1956, many of the special settlers left for their homeland, leaving mostly Germans. They had no place to return to.” (Recorded in Ust-Port in 1991)

Gunar Robertovich Kroders. Born in 1926 in Riga. In 1941, together with his parents, he was illegally deported to the Krasnoyarsk Territory, died in Norilsk in 1999. Excerpts from his memoirs:

“In the summer of 1942, we were sent to the Far North. A caravan of barges chock-full of "Specials" resembled Noah's Ark. Latvian, Lithuanian, Finnish, German, Jewish, Ukrainian were interspersed with Russian… Of the 360 ​​special settlers stationed in Dorofeevsk, no more than forty will be able to work on ice fishing. For the remaining 320, there are no fishing gear on the site. They didn’t talk about any other work - it simply didn’t exist. No work - no income, and therefore no bread ... The first polar winter for us began - the most terrible of all the winters that were before and after it. I tried not to think about her for forty-eight years ... It was painful and creepy to look at my mother. Being by that time already a 16-year-old guy, I was obliged, had to become a support for her, a breadwinner. But I was only a miserable, bewildered, helpless witness to her suffering. And now, after almost half a century, remorse does not cease to torment: how could I not help her, did not pull her out of that terrifying misfortune? With a submissive gaze staring at the sooty ceiling, she lay for days on end. She couldn't scream or cry. Only a rare evening, if the frost did not rage, putting on a summer coat, mother went out "to fish". Like a ghost, she circled near the fishermen's dwellings and - it's terrible to write about it today! - in the slops seized by the cold, she dug out some garbage: fish intestines, rotten cabbage leaves, frozen ones, the size of an acorn, potatoes, crusts of dried bread ... "Production", adding a handful of snow to it, my mother boiled on the stove, and more often on the chimney - so as not to disturb the neighbors in the barracks, who have not yet reached this point, with the disgusting smell. One day, my mother did not have time to bring her dish to a boil, perhaps she was afraid of the neighbors. It ended in severe food poisoning. The young paramedic, whom I persuaded to come, after examining her mother, shook her head and left without saying anything. The agony lasted for three days... The Dorofeevsk Factory is gone now. Only from the barracks, lopsided from time to time, overgrown with lichen, and the blackened grave crosses on the side, one can guess that people once lived and died here.

Ruta Jankovic . Born in 1922 in Liepaja (Latvia). On June 14, 1941, my father was arrested. Together with her mother Natalya Viktorovna Yankovich and her brother Yuri, she was deported to the Pirovskiy district of the Krasnoyarsk Territory. In June 1942, she ended up in a special settlement in the village of Ust-Khantayka, Dudinsky District. From her diary:

“17.01.43. Ust-Khantayka. Frost below 50 degrees. Sparrows fall in flight. Cold water, thrown from a glass with force upwards, falls, rattling ice balls. What about people? People freeze in dugouts.

01/22/43. Already only minus 25-30 degrees. Mom runs from morning to evening around the dugouts and lifts people from the bunks and drives them out into the street, lubricating the bloody legs of the sick from scurvy. At my mother's request, the Nationals brought spruce needles from the forest-tundra. Everyone drinks a bitter coniferous tincture against scurvy. But corpses, corpses families every day. There was a rumor that on the machines of Agapitovo and Nikolsky all the people died ...

07/27/43. Three Finns returned from Igarka (130 km), who fled there and made good money there in four months. But the main thing is that they told a terrible tragedy: “Seeing in Khantayka our hopelessness and near death from hunger and cold, we secretly went to Igarka in early November to earn money there and buy clothes and food. Our path lay along the right bank of the Yenisei on ice. At the Agapitovo camp (45 km) we saw a tent city, where in 30-seat tents people lay frozen to the poles and bedding, mostly women, children and, to a lesser extent, old people. There are no iron stoves in the tents, no firewood is visible, and in general there are no signs of the life of a mass of people. We were afraid to go around all the tents - there were corpses all around. Nevertheless, we found a “living skeleton” and learned from him that about 500 people, mostly Germans from the Volga region and the Baltic states, were delivered here by steamboat just before the freezing of the Yenisei. People were given only tents - no stoves, no pipes for them, no axes and saws for cutting firewood, and, most importantly, no food. In fact, people were written off completely. And here is the result - people died of hunger and froze to death.

We almost crawled to Igarka and reported what we saw in Agapitovo to the special commandant's office of the NKVD. The commandant, after listening to us, asked: “Are there still alive there?” We understood from the conversation that the special contingent delivered to the Agapitovo machine tool was simply “forgotten” by the authorities and fell out of attention. Be that as it may, about 500 people died through the fault of the authorities.

03/02/43. Mom in the tundra took a difficult birth. The baby survived.

06/15/43. On the boat, a commission arrived from Dudinka to establish the causes of the great loss of life over the past winter. Someone filed a complaint against my mother. She was ordered to pack up and go to Dudinka. With the bot came mail with letters - the news of the death of the pope in the camp. Mom fainted. In Dudinka, my mother was “tortured” for three days and then acquitted.” (The diary entries of Ruta Jankovic are taken from Petri's book "The Germans of Taimyr").

Doctor Natalia Yankovic died in 1985, Ruta died in 2006, and they are buried in Riga.

Yuri Yankovich lives in Riga. He also published his diary of the 40s, and recently returned to it, adding memories and assessments of how the implementation of the Kremlin decree of 1942 on the development of fisheries in the river basins of Siberia and the Far East took place.

“Here is an extract from my diary (the entry was made on June 10, 1942): “When this morning our family (I am 18 years old, my mother is 46 years old and my sister is 21 years old), among the exiled Latvians and Germans from the Pirovsky district, was taken to Krasnoyarsk and then to the right bank of the Yenisei in the area of ​​the railway. Art. Yenisei, we were literally dumbfounded by the stunning sight that opened before us. On a vast clearing, a huge human mass of several thousand people swayed. People, surrounded by their belongings, sat, stood, walked. One could hear different languages, but the majority were Germans, less Latvians. There were Bessarabians, Ukrainians, Finns and a few Russians who had previously been dispossessed.” All this mass of many thousands was loaded like a commodity on 8 lighters and barges and sailed to the North. The places of settlement on the Yenisei were called "machine tools", which were built on the deserted banks of the Yenisei and Podkamennaya Tunguska every 50-100 km. As noted by L. and V. Petri, the disembarkation of people took place spontaneously, without any calculation of employment, not to mention the fact that there was no housing.

Suddenly, on August 26, 1942, another 230 people were landed in Ust-Khantayka, and on September 19, right on the eve of freezing, another 115 slaves, including 40 children of school and preschool age. So, only 450 people. There were many Finns and Germans from Leningrad and the region. Ust-Khantaika turned into a kind of dump of people who rushed to break into the mountain, blocking themselves with crooked tundra birch trees, turf and moss. But this did not save them. Whole families of people froze and died out, especially Leningraders. By the spring of 1943, less than 200 people remained alive.

It is still unknown how many people in Taimyr died then.

"Novaya" thanks the employees of the Taimyr Museum and the Krasnoyarsk "Memorial" for the provided text and photographic materials.