Saved from slavery

On October 30, civil activists Oleg Melnikov and Danila Medvedev performed an operation to free slaves in the Products store in Moscow. For 10 years in the basement of the store, its owners held 15 citizens of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Mitya Aleshkovsky, photographer, eyewitness and participant in events:

Each time, visiting Auchan or Metro, I think that if the Lord wanted to send me to hell, after death, then the most painful punishment would be as a cashier in the store. The monotonous pican of goods conducted through the cash desk and gray people who do not know any worries that go through you, like an arch, to exit, with their purchases. And if you are an ordinary seller, then you sit so the whole shift, eight, for example, working hours. But the peculiarity of hell is that it is impossible to get out and run away from it, and you have to sit eternity until one of the angels descends and takes you. And if you add to this that after completing the working day and not having the opportunity to leave, you go behind the wall, you lay out a piece of foam rubber, and you sleep on it, then your master comes, and it beats you for some offends, well, you’re not so given the buyer-instead of large bills-small ones, and you must always keep a lot at the box office. He hits you, hits, breaks your fingers with an iron wrench so that you become crooked. If you are a woman, then you are raped - not a master, so his brother, not a brother, so a matchmaker. And a child is born from you after nine months, and they take it right in the hospital, or, which is worse, because it will be harder to part, they send to live with you on a piece of foam rubber, behind the store’s wall, and then they still take away and take it away in an unknown direction. Then the news comes that the child died somewhere in Kazakhstan, or the bull began to boil and lifted it, or he fell from the shelf or completely died of a heart attack in his two to three years with a bid. You endure it all, tolerate, and then you decide. Cutting a convenient moment when the owner of your personal hell turned away, is absent or busy, quickly run away, break down, rush where you look, run lost, because you don’t know anything around, there has never been here, I haven’t seen anything, all hope for the law that seems to be supported. And they find you very quickly, because you are not at all like everything around, and you look different, and you talk in another language. They put them in the car and promise that everything will be fine, they will take it home, they only take you there, to your little store hell, to your boss who hits you, hits, hits, hits, for an attempt to escape. And you turn off the kalachik somewhere inside yourself and, having already reconciled with your fate, you continue to sell monotonously to sell chocolates with soda, without any hope that freedom, it is somewhere at all. And suddenly people unfamiliar to you burst and take you out into the street. For the first time in many years, you can freely and calmly go outside and no one will drag you back. Or drag? The same police officers who had recently passed you to the owner, fourteen hours do not want to accept a statement that you were kept locked up for a long time, beat, raped and took away the children. Other employees, and the devil will figure them out, how many of their species, do not want to qualify this matter as slavery, but want illegal imprisonment. Everyone runs around, worry, you give out interviews, live with people who have saved you, eat, drink, get dressed normally, look at the city in which there were ten years, but there was nothing but the store sheet. And even some hope appears? And it doesn’t even matter that only those who saved you support you. It doesn’t matter that for the locals you are still nobody. It does not matter that on the Internet far from you, his regulars can meanly doubt the sincerity of your story, to take the phrase “Liberation of slaves” in quotation marks. You are free! Yes, yes? And you are going to understand, all to the same employees, employees, employees. And the second employees, the employees, which is higher, having caused the first employees of the structures, that below, the very ones that handed over you to the boss, they are stirring up from the case, and the second are trying to start a case on illegal migration, in fact, equalizing ten years of slavery in ten years of illegal migration, and want to send you back without apologizing, without returning you dignity without compensating for the entire moral And physical damage, but simply throw you like an unnecessary rubbish, and solve you, but your problems. And with horror, you understand that in order to remain a person, you need to stay in hell and continue to fight for yourself, even if you have taken away from you and who you will never see again. Maybe only in paradise, in the present, in which the Lord should definitely send you after such hell.