Proportion

This week has been an odd one, made odder and more horrible for people all over the world by the Germanwings plane crash a few days ago. Despite all the horrors happening every day, something so needless and violent and obvious strikes a different sort of chord. There is nothing about the crash that is not truly, tragically heartbreaking, which makes it difficult to talk and write about. Suffice to say, it makes us feel a little less safe, and a little more aware of our own mortality, followed by a horrified awareness of our own selfishness - 150 people died, yet here we are thinking about ourselves. I know I'm not the only person to feel like this, but ultimately it's not about that. It's about mourning the victims and helping the grief-stricken left behind.

Due to all this, I didn't feel like writing a blog post about myself this week. Nothing particularly noteworthy happened, it had its ups and downs like any other week, and I am just another insignificant speck on the planet, living a self-absorbed life because I can't conceive of the bigger picture. So I've decided to write a blog about this, and a book, and labour camps.

This week I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, a novella by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (I managed to write the title without looking, but the author's name got me.) As the title indicates, this is a snapshot of a single day in Ivan Denisovitch's life, a fictional character based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences of his imprisonment in a Russian gulag camp. The novella shows Denisovitch getting up at 5.30am, working from 8am until 6pm at a power plant, and returning to the camp in the evening. The important aspect is not the plot, however, but the atmosphere created; it is incredibly compelling, and the feeling left at the end of the novel is one of overwhelming futility. Most of the prisoners are in the camp due to crimes they have not committed, or that would not be considered crimes under a democratic regime, for example Denisovitch's himself; when serving in the army, Denisovitch was captured by the enemy. When he managed to escape their clutches, he returned to the Russian side only to be accused of being a spy and sentenced to ten years in a labour camp. As he muses, however, he considers himself lucky to have only been given ten years; a few years after he was imprisoned, the general sentence rose to twenty-five years for all so-called criminals, regardless of crime committed. Solzhenitsyn himself was imprisoned for eight years after criticising Stalin and the Russian government in a private letter to a friend, and thereby being accused of anti-Soviet propaganda.

The surprising thing about the character of Ivan Denisovitch is that he manages to live in such a way that he is able to deal with his desperately bleak situation, and even to be content. He takes pleasure in such things as finding a sharp piece of scrap metal on the group when he is working, because he can make it into a small knife. He continues building the wall he has been assigned to even after the working day is over because he does not want to waste materials, and he gets real satisfaction in doing his job well. He considers the day detailed in the novella as 'such a good' one, where he 'felt in such good spirits' that he didn't want to go to sleep yet. This good feeling has mostly been caused by his wrangling an extra piece of bread and an extra bowl of this soup that day, in addition to the usual rations.

Denisovitch, like many of his fellow inmates, has a remarkable dignity. Although they are constantly hungry, he will not stoop to licking the crumbs off plates, as some prisoners do, or asking his friends for a drag on a cigarette or something from their food parcel; he will not even look at the cigarette or food in case it could be interpreted as pleading, but instead waits until it is offered. I had always subconsciously assumed that such incredibly harsh conditions would cause one's dignity and integrity to be taken over with the base instinct for survival, but in many cases this is not true at all.

The concept of living in a forced labour camp for years at a time with minimal food, a strict hierarchical system for prisoners and guards alike, arbitrary punishments handed out by the guards according to their whims, and working outdoors doing hard labour all year round - they were allowed to stay inside when the temperature reaches -48 degrees, and not before - is totally incomprehensible. I started reading the book when I was in the bath, and the juxtaposition of lying in the warm water in my warm flat with food and shelter and, above all, freedom, while reading about life in the gulag was just ludicrous. My life, and those of pretty much everyone I know, could not be further removed from theirs.

Even harder to believe is the fact that there are still places in the world where people are kept prisoner in such conditions today, in 2015. Much as I want to be able to write in an educated way about North Korea, I am still too ignorant about it, and I don't want to pretend to be knowledgeable while ranting on with uninformed opinions. However I do know that the horrendous human rights violations and quality of life there, especially in the prisons, is comparable in some ways to the gulag - the lack of food, the wretched living conditions and the number of people who die from malnutrition or related illnesses.

I don't know what the moral of this post is - maybe something embarrassingly cliched about how we should be more grateful for our incredibly cushy lives? Or, more important and less self-centred, a call for more awareness that things we learnt in history and read about in novels still happen. There is nothing that can be done to help the people we read about, because they are either fictional or they have escaped from such a life - if they had not, we would not be reading about them. However, there are people still living in similar situations, and they cannot be ignored. Maybe at some point North Korea will stop being a punchline to jokes about which films they 'allow us' to watch, and will start being the cause for international concern and action that it should be.

This is an interesting, eye-opening article about a camp called 'Siberia's last gulag'; this is about camps inside North Korea and the conditions there; and this is an article and video about a woman who managed to escape. Articles and information are easy to find, and the more people are educated about this, the more likely it is that change will happen.