Dead Horse

In 1939 the young man from Ruthenia, Nikolai Kubarič, was sentenced to three years of forced labor for the illegal crossing of the border into the USSR. He got into a forced-labor camp that was located near the Siberian town of Vorkuta. The conditions there were extremely harsh. According to the memories of Nikolai Kubariče, it was dark and - 50 degrees °C for six months of the year. The other half of the year, the inmates of the camp were plagued by clouds of mosquitoes. He worked in the woods, in the mines and as an assistant in the blacksmith's workshop. He tells the story of how they once found a dead horse in the stables. Although they were immensely hungry, they didn't dare to cut away the flesh, but only cut off the hooves and cooked them in the workshop. "Of course it smelled for miles." Rather unsurprisingly, they were soon discovered by the patrolling guard and subjected to interrogation. "We were very lucky in the end. At first they thought that we had poisoned that horse. They would have locked us up for five years for that. But then the horse was dissected by a vet and it turned out that it had swallowed a nail or something like that. This saved us." At Vorkuta, many prisoners died of exhaustion, hunger or cold. "Peoples' lives didn't matter at all there. We had to meet the assigned workload, because if you failed to, you simply got no bread. We would pull the dead from the bunk beds, load them on the sleds and drag them for about a pit twenty meters long, two meters deep, which was about a mile away. We dumped them in the pit, assorted them in line and covered them with lime." Towards the end of 1942, Nikolai Kubarič was released from the camp due to an agreement with the Soviet Union and he went to Buzuluk, where he became a soldier in the Czechoslovak units.