Euphrosinia was born into a noble family in Odessa in 1907. Her brother Anton, two years older, was infatuated from childhood about the glorious exploits of the Russian Army. Her father Anton Antonovich Kersnovski was a criminal lawyer. Her mother Alexandra Alexeevna Kersnovskaya (maiden name Karavasili) was a teacher of foreign languages. During the Red Terror of 1919 in Odessa, her father was arrested by the Cheka (secret police), along with other tsarist lawyers; but by some miracle he was not shot. The family were spared, and secretly escaped by sea to Romania. There they were given asylum on the basis that Anton senior owned property at Tsepilovo in Bessarabia, which had become part of Romania in the previous year. It had been left to him by his father, a colonel and military engineer in the Russian Army, who had bought land there on retiring. 
In the mid 1920's, her brother Anton junior left for Europe to receive education, finally settling in Paris. There he became a military historian; his articles and books on the history of the Russian Army later won international acclaim, including in Russia itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile Ephrosinia finished her secondary education with outstanding marks, but then chose to remain home to look after her parents. She completed a veterinary course, and this enabled her to restore the rundown family property to productivity. On their 40 hectares she planted a vineyard and grew seed crops, guided by a local farmer, and raised cattle. Meanwhile she kept up her education by means of her grandfather's huge library. Her passtimes included horse riding, walks through the Carpathian Mountains and Poland, and bicycle tours to the Black Sea with her cousins.

In 1936 at the height of the autumn harvest, Euphrosinia's father died. His creditors turned up with their claims; but instead of accepting their heavy repayment schedules she contracted with the State Federal Bank to export high-quality gain, and with the loan granted by the bank she repaid all of the family debt. The farm continued to flourish.

World War II broke out in September 1939. In 1940 Euphrosinia's brother Anton was called up for service in the French Army and was sent to the front. In May he was reported as killed in action, and separately as missing in action. Both reports were wrong. Anton was wounded and returned to Paris.

The USSR-Germany Non Aggression Pact, signed on August 23, 1939, provided for the annexing of Bessarabia by the Soviet Union. However Stalin delayed doing so, as Rumania had an alliance with France. Stalin's hand was freed by the defeat of France by the Nazis in May and June 1940.

Euphrosinia's estate was not far from the city of Soroca. On June 28, 1940 the Russian Army reached the city after crossing the Dniester River from the Ukraine. From there they went on to occupy the whole territory of Bessarabia, which on the 2nd. August became part of the Moldovian Soviet Socialist Republic.

A wave of arrests and repression began immediately. In July 1940 Euphrosinia and her mother were evicted from their own home; their entire property was confiscated. The same happened to her father's younger brother, Boris Kersnovsky; he left for Rumania with his large family. Euphrosinia also sent her mother to Rumania, to relatives in Bucharest, so as to preserve her from hardship.

Euphrosinia wanted to become a responsible full citizen as quickly as possible and to work effectively enough to bring her mother back and surround her with care. She registered as a farm labourer and so received back from the Soviet authorities a small portion of her own equipment. She set out to find work, but because she was classed as a former landholder she had been stripped of all rights, including the right to steady employment; this restricted her to seasonal work as a farmhand at the Soroki Agricultural College.

Deprived of her house and property from July 1940 Euphrosinia came under further persecution and social segregation. Having no Soviet identification papers, she decided against living someone else's roof not to lead anybody into a scrape. She slept at the places of her temporary work - at the College farm, in the gardens, at the vine-yards.
As the elections were scheduled on January 1, 1941, when the turnout had to be 100 per cent a day earlier she got the Soviet passport but with Paragraph 39, banning her from living in large cities. That happened after the questioning at the NKVD where she didn't conceal her views.
In winter Euphrosinia lived in a little room at the place of her Mother's friend, Emma Yakovlevna Gnanch-Dobrovolskaya, in Soroca. She was privately employed for stump extraction, wood bucking in the forest, sawing of firewood in the city. She worked worked alone as the NKVD barred people from working with her threatening them with the expulsion from the labour union. Only contacts with the family of Soviet officer Drobotenko quartering at Emma Yakovlevna's place and epistolary intercourse with her Mother saved her from complete solitary.
In the early hours of June 13, 1941, NKVD officers came for Euphrosinia when she was away. She refused to escape and hide and voluntarily went to the exile together with other Bessarabians.

The deportation of groups of Bessarabian started on June 14, 1941, with the separation of fathers, or "householders" who were extrajudicially taken to prison camps from family members exiled to Siberia backwoods. 
Euphrosinia naturally found herself in the second category. The status of the exile the deprivation of necessities and people were made sensible of that on their way to the exile. They had very little food, water or air, slept on the carriage floor. But with the guards in the carriage lied women telling them they would see their husbands at the end of the way the women endured those sufferings. In the with Euphrosinia there were about 40 people including six children, several teenagers and two crones. She always helped the vulnerable. People were deprived of health aid, on the way one of the women happened to give birth and the deported had to deliver themselves. For the whole week the train went through Ukraine, via the city of Poltava, European Russia, via Voronezh, Tambov, Penza, then passed Kuibyshev and Ufa. After the Urals - Petropavlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Omsk. It was very hot there, and Euphrosinia despite the ban left the carriage to bring a bucket of water for a mother with a new-born. For that she was incarcerated.
People were deprived of information, they had no idea of where they were going or what was in stock for them. On June 22, 1941, at a station near Novosibirsk they incidentally heard via the loudspeaker the radio announcement of Germany's aggression against the Soviet Union and declaration of war.
The train went to the Kuznetsk Coal Basin. For a short while the exiled worked at a communal farm and authorities wanted them to stay there to establish sheep breeding and the production of brinsen cheese, but soon they were sent to lumbering - at fist taken back to Novosibirsk and sent along the river Ob to the Narym Area (now - Tomsk Region) to the north.
 

In the course of transporting along the river the exiles were called over to the bank and Euphrosinia could stay in one of the Ob villages at a communal farm but she wanted to work in lumbering because the work with wood was known her since Bessarabia times and she thought the pay for that kind of work would be higher. Bur she was wrong.
Bessarabians were the deported special settlers. They chose neither place of residence nor kind of work, their labour was coercive, slave. They had 12-hour working day. The exiled found themselves in the taiga hard climate - a short summer with gnat and a long cold winter. 
Euphrosinia found herself in a back-country village on the river Anga where she fell trees for the construction of a narrow gauge railroad and a winter road. Then, the exiled were transferred to Harsk where there was virtually no work and therefore no food. When winter came the Bessarabians were re-settled in Ust-Tyarm. Thinking that she would be able to buy she might need Euphrosinia hadn't taken winter clothes. But the shops in those regions sold virtually nothing and the exiled needed the authorities' special permission for any kind of shopping. When the temperatures fell to minus 40C she was allowed to buy felt boots and a quilted jacket.
Production quotas (measured in cubic metres of wood) at war time were top heavy, only high-quality wood was paid for, and the wood in the marshy taiga was mainly bad, and it wasn't always possible to fulfil a quota.Relatively good pay started after the fulfilment of 40 quotas, and as the chiefs often changed the kinds of work for Euphrosinia she couldn't amass that quantity of quotas. 
She had no money or clothes she could change for food. Euphrosinia started famishing. Even though everyone only thought of survival she still complied to the moral standards and shared with her countrymen everything she could.

Khokhrin, a man incredibly cruel in his treatment with people was appointed the head of the Suiga logging enterprise. Many woodcutters cried after learning of his appointment. Unlike the others Euphrosinia openly expressed her views. At the woodcutters' meetings in the club she criticised Khokhrin who represented the Soviet Power for top heavy production quotas and the ban for work-team members to help each other. In early December of 1941, Khokhrin sent Euphrosinia to work at Suiga, the most hardship post, hoping to get rid of her sooner.
In Suiga there were a good few of dependents, old people and children eligible to get only 150 gram of bread daily. If the workers shared their food with the dependents in their families they lost the strength because of starvation and were doomed to death. At the same time Khokhrin and his family lacked nothing and had warm clothes. Euphrosinia accused Khokhrin of children's famishing saying he was fully responsible for that.
In February 1942, Euphrosinia fell ill and couldn't work. Khokhrin ordered a nurse he appointed not to give her a leave from work and deprived her of food rationing. She preferred the death in the loose over the death in slavery and on February 26, 1942, escaped from the exile.
Khokhrin regularly gave the NKVD information on Euphrosinia but in winter the lumbering enterprise had no means of communication with the country town. In spring they came to arrest Euphrosinia but didn't find her among the exiles and the NKVD placed her on the wanted list.

Suiga - Narga - Parabel - Pudino - Kenga - Bakchar - Voronovo.
For several days Euphrosinia went westward along river beds and crossed the Ob from its right bank to the left one. In the very first village she encountered - Narga - Euphrosinia realised the rule of "Siberian hospitality", nobody let runaway exiles in. She passed the nights in the woods and in all sorts of places having a warm blanket in her backpack. In the marshland winter was the season of fuel bucking and Euphrosinia picked up a livelihood bucking firewood for locals.

Euphrosinia planned to go to Omsk, to the south-west from the village of Parabel. But almost all the villages and Old Believers' priories she encountered on the way were uninhabited. Hunger forced her to turn back to Bakchar. The exiled Poles told her a Polish army to fight Nazis was formed in the city of Tomsk. Euphrosinia decided to go to the Polish consul in Tomsk and citing her paternal ancestors to join the Polish army as a paramedic. But that plan also failed. Tomsk was on the right bank of the Ob and Euphrosinia was stranded on the left one. She was late; the ice had drifted off the Ob and the only way to cross the river was by ferry where one should present ID papers and Euphrosinia had none. She had no choice except for going southward.
 

Since 26 February 1942, Eufrosinia within six months had walked 1500 kilometres across the Narym mires, boreal forests, the Altai virgin steppes avoiding cities and working for anyone so that not to die from starvation. She made her first acquaintance of life in Russian periphery in the very first year of the war famine. She saw what the dispossession of kulaks meant with whole villages disappearing and nobody left to cultivate the land. She couldn't grasp the wastefulness with all those slogans shrieking of conservation all around. She couldn't make the mind to the spring burning of spike remains instead of giving them out to the hungry. At that time she didn't know yet that those in the collective farms worked not for money but rather for work-day units and not always got food for them. Under «the law on spikes» (On protection of property of state enterprises and collective farms) hundreds of thousands of hungry collective farm workers manually gathering the remains of grain in collective farms' fields were imprisoned for up to 10 years.
How Eufrosinia's escape finished? Eufrosinia was arrested three times and each time released by the skin of teeth. On August 24, 1942, near the city of Rubtsovsk Eufrosinia was arrested. The prisoner transport to the prison of the county town of Krasnozerskoye laid ahead.

Euphrosinia's escape ended with an arrest that sharply changed her life. Since August 25, 1942, prisons had become her «universities». Later on she got to know transportation under guard and prison camp, she had been tried twice before finding herself in Norilsk. 
In the Krasnoozersk prison she was interrogated and charged with espionage, from the railway station of Karasuk in Novosibirsk Area she was transported by train under guard to Barnaul. From a solitary cell of the court martial she was transferred to the NKVD inner prison.
Night interrogations started and she wasn't allowed to sleep in the daytime. That was the kind of torture called a "conveyor". Three interrogators in charge used different techniques of interrogation and brainwashing. After she refused to plea guilty of espionage Euphrosinia was transferred to Barnaul suburban prison. From there she was transported to the transit prison of Novosibirsk.
In the autumn of 1942, the police escort brought her to the motor-ship Voroshilov. While that prison transport was moving along the river Ob' she the children of women exiled from Azerbaijan dying from starvation or dysentery.
Euphrosinia spent the winter of 1942 in an unheated remand cell in the village of Molchanovo in Narym Area. The interrogators accused her of the "anti-Soviet propaganda" and "criticism of superiors' orders"... At the prosecutor she acquainted herself with the material of investigation based on Khokhrin's denouncements and refused to put her name under interrogators' fabrications. The local NKVD chief tried to dragoon her into putting her name under case papers but failed to intimidate Euphrosinia and his attempt to beaten her went wrong as she managed to protect herself. 
Euphrosinia was formally charged under Criminal Code Article 58-10, Part 2 ("libelled the life of working people in the USSR") and Article 82, Part 2 ("escaped from the place of mandatory location"). The circuit session of judicial division of Narym District Court of Novosibirsk Area sentenced her to death. She was offered to write a petition for pardon; that was another attempt to force her to plead guilty. She refused to ask for mercy. On February 24, 1943, the death sentence was commuted to 10 years in correctional labour camps (ITL) and 5 years of civil incapacity.
The long march under police escort to the city of Tomsk followed.

In spring - mid-summer 1943, Euphrosinia was in prison camp N3 Mezhaninovka, in Tomsk Area. She went to the workshop producing wooden dishes and banded barrels to acquire the skills of a cooper. But those in the pyrography workshop noticed her artistic bent and she was taken there. 
It was time of massive mortality of prisoners from starvation and deficiency disease - pellagra. With the help of the physician Sarah Abramovna Gordon, the wife of a "public enemy", Euphrosinia was accepted in the prison hospital and got a chance for survival. 
In the summer Euphrosinia, still atrophied, was transferred to prison N4 at Yeltsovka station near Novosibirsk. Since June 1943 she worked night shifts in the cap workshop, in the team repairing caps brought from the war theatre, and in the day-time - at a part-time farm where she could refresh herself with raw vegetables. Since September Euprosinia gave a half of her food ratio and vegetables she managed to secretly bring from the field to her pregnant prison mate Vera Leonidovna Tankova. As she didn't bring vegetables to her foreman Euphrosinia forfeited the work in warmth. She was transferred to the camp constructing a military plant on the outskirts of Novosibirsk. The prisoners worked without construction machines. In the early winter of 1944 she carried wheelbarrows with matrix and materials along the gangways up to the fifth floor.

As a trained veterinarian Euphrosinia was summoned to the prison-camp pig farm where the epidemic of an unknown disease broke out. She volunteered to save the dying pigs after determining the course of treatment using special tests and necessary vaccination. She took that risk despite warnings of Sarah Gordon, a physician who had saved her from dystrophy in Mezhaninovka prison camp and being transient in Yeltsovka tried to dissuade Euphrosinia from taking on that job because she faced the charges for sabotage and execution if the vaccination proved useless.
Euphrosinia succeeded in saving the pigs and took on putting the work of the farm in order.
Euphrosinia stayed on having in her tow Vera Leonidovna Tankova weak after the childbirth to whom she gave almost all of her bread ration. At her request Euphrosinia baptised her new-born son Dmitry in the prison-hut room for nursing mothers. Soon after Tankova and her child were transferred to another camp and their trace was lost.
Euphrosinia's work as a vet didn't suit the prison camp brass as she refused to sign bogus paperwork on pigs' deaths and, as a result, the ganders couldn't get extra fresh meat. Euphrosinia, as always, behaved single-heartedly openly expressing everything she felt and that was the reason for reporting her. First, they transferred her to the construction of the Youth League Club. Euphrosinia had already got into the animals and could not understand why she should have been separated from them. She did not know that before the arrest they usually fired the person to undermine the morale. On April 18, 1944, she was arrested and locked in the camp underground prison.
On June 22, 1944, the permanent session of Novosibirsk Region court for cases of the NKVD prison camps and convict colonies (ITLiK) convicted Euphrosinia under the Criminal Code Article 58-10 and sentenced her to 10 years in prison and five years of civil incapacity. With the remainder of her previous sentence absorbing by the new one she had to spent 10 years in prison instead of eight.

After the sentence Euphrosinia was transferred the medium security hut (BUR) of the Eltsovka prison camp near Novosibirsk where hard-core criminals were held. She worked in the laundry hand-washing blood-stained clothes, delivered from the front line. Soon, all the criminals were sent to Krasnoyarsk.

From the port of Zlobino near Krasnoyarsk where prisoners worked loading barges they were taken along the Yenisei River to Norilsk in the ship lower hold. Euphrosinia went to bat for an elderly man whom the criminals humiliated. She saved, as it later turned out, a prominent scientist, Professor N. M. Fedorovsky.

The prisoners reached Norilsk in August 1944. Working at construction of a five-story apartment block Euphrosinia sometimes had to coat its roof with asphalt standing on all fours and maimed her leg. The disease wasn't treated properly and developed into sepsis. In fever she was admitted to the Norilsk prison camp Central Hospital (TsBL) where surgeon Bilzens operated on her leg and saved it. Almost everyone in the hospital medical staff was a prisoner including highly experienced doctors. They were to return prisoners to duty quickly as the Norilsk Works manufactured defence products.

Although the hospital was a part of the camp it nevertheless was "an oasis in Hell" owing to the efforts of the TsBL chief V. I. Gryazneva who managed to arrange human life conditions for prisoners. Such doctors as Vera Ivanovna Gryazneva and Leonhard Mardna, nurse Margarita Emilievna were well-educated intellectual who valued Euphrosinia and wanted to help her.

Upon recovery she worked as a nurse in several TsBL units. Working as a surgical nurse she sketched operations of I. A. Kuznetsov, was in internal medicine training with L. B. Mardna. Euphrosinia became a blood donor entitled to a high-calorie ration which she gave out to the severely ill.

  Euphrosinia could not stay with the team of the infectious disease unit the members of which believed the most important thing to be their personal survival at any cost and paid no regards to the needs of seriously ill patients. Mardna whom she esteemed highly persuaded Euphrosinia to take the job of a morgue anatomist.

Doctor Mardna persuaded Euphrosinia to take the job of a morgue anatomist. The morgue staff included its chief Nikishin, free with five-year deprivation of rights, clerk Dmohovsky (free), who kept records of autopsies, and two orderlies, bytoviki felons.

She liked many things there. For example, to study anatomy, to read books from a good medical library and to learn from doctor Nikishin. Working there Euphrosinia had done 1,640 autopsies. She wondered how it was possible to cope with. And answered: The horror one tends to feel when seeing a corpse is only possible if the corpse maintains human appearance. But prisoners being emaciated beyond limits mostly looked like the dead even in the lifetime.

Nikishin took her to Alexander Suvorov, a Russian general well-known for eating mush together with soldiers from their cauldron. The morgue staff, even though they got their food from different sources (the prisoners - from the TsBL zone mess hall, Dmohovsky - from eatery #1 in the opposite part of the city, Nikishin - from the eatery of the House of engineers and technicians) pooled it, went shares and dined together.

When doctors Gryazneva and Mardna procured Euphrosinia the job in the morgue they hoped that Frosya would catch on with that small team. With a noble purpose Mardna inspired her with ("Here the death might help the living") Frosia wanted to show a doctor all the pathological changes occurring in the body of a deceased as clear as possible. In a similar case, it would help them to apply more effective treatments. Euphrosinia insisted on including the doctors' errors in the autopsy records. But they complained. The morgue chief Nikishin being afraid of everything rewrote her autopsy records so that all the conclusions coincided with the doctors' opinions. Euphrosinia didn't enjoy that monkey business which inflicted moral suffering on her.

She resented the cynical attitude to the burying. On the orders of the prison camp bosses the dead men and women were thrown together into a special box, hearse, and transported from the morgue to the foot of the Shmitiha Mount where the mass graves - ditches for two hundred people - were.

By the spring of 1947 Euphrosinia lost her TsBL patrons. Mardna got free and left Norilsk, and Gryazneva was sacked from the job of the camp hospital chief and made a common doctor because she refused to renounce her husband, "a public enemy".

Then, Lyanders started hounding Euphrosinia out of the work.

The case was that everyone who got free from the TsBL (the camp Central Hospital) passed the nights in the morgue building sleeping on the tables where autopsies were made in the daytime. That happened because a former prisoner had no home in Norilsk and only after getting a job could find a place in a hostel or buy a trailer (balok). In 1947, Lyandres, the former chief of the TsBL pharmacy, because of the conflict with whom Euphrosinia had been previously transferred from the surgery unit to the internal medicine one, moved in the morgue only bed-sitter and demanded Euphrosinia to go to the zone before dinner (earlier all the staff had dined together) and stay in the zone on Sundays (even though the morgue worked on Sundays, too). Nikishin was afraid of Lyandres who was a known informer and asked not to contradict him.

Euphrosinia voluntarily went to the TsBL zone and found herself in a hole. The work in the hospital, her only chance for survival in Norilsk, had been lost, and going away to another zone most certainly meant getting the third prison term there. If there is no hope without which Euphrosinia cannot live there is mine which they in the camp thought to be worse than death and where it would be easier for her to give up life. In the end of May she asks to send her to the mine. In response to the refusal she goes on hunger strike. She decided when they call her to the prisoner transport to cut her wrists in a booth of the TsBL steam shop. But the encounter with Dmohovsky, the morgue clerk, on the way to the steam shop and a faint caused by hungry prevented her from performing the plan.

Again a new page of her life began with an attempt to give up the life as the meaning of the previous one was depleted.

In a truck they brought Euphrosinia to the camp of Nagorny in the Coal Valley. Her thought of death was replaced by the interest to know what that mysterious mine looked like.

Euphrosinia was put to extract coal from the working face at mine #13/15. The heavy work of a miner was to her liking. But not everything went smoothly. One deadly ordeal followed after another.

The eleven-day hunger strike started after the work at the morgue continued on arrival to the mine. They didn't attach her for administration being confident that she would prove incapable to withstand the workload and return to the camp hospital. Exhausted to the limits Euphrosinia went to the accounting department to sort out the problem but as a result of an encounter and row with the chief security officer she was sent to the punitive confinement where prisoners dug trenches for dead mates near the Shmitikha Mountain. A guard was going to beat one of her mates but Euphrosinia stood up for her. Other prisoners liked Euphrosinia's behaviour and they shared clothing and footwear with her. That could not have come at a better time because the work at the mine required for changing clothes and Euphrosinia, before going to the mine, thought she would need nothing more in this life and returned spare clothes including a quilted jacket and a blanket to the TsBL storeroom.

The next Euphrosinia's bicker was with a mine foreman who accused her of absence from work for no good reason. But she managed to prove the absurdity of the accusations. She had to confront the mine itself later, when careless mates left her in an untimbered bottomhole and an exfoliated layer of coal nearly buried her but she managed to escape to the light from the thick darkness.

The mining prisoners had two "masters" - the Norilsk mining and smelting group and the prison camp. A clash with the camp security officials was the worst thing. Euphrosinia appropriately responded to a guard's mistreatment and was placed in a punishment cell without a physician's approval. Poletayev, the head of security, slapped her in the face "to cut the comb" and then beat her up. They kept her in a cold cell when it was hard frost outside and later threatened with sending to work in a sand quarry, and that was tantamount to death. But the mine management found out and protected her from the camp administration's arbitrary treatment. Miners valued Euphrosinia's heroism and her ability to play it cool under any conditions. At a meeting in the headquarters Baydin who represented the mine remembered that Euphrosinia managed to prevent an accident putting her life in jeopardy, showed courage and resourcefulness and so had every reason to be proud, and thus they could not treat her that way.

Rogozhkin who headed the Communist Party cell at the mine came to see Euphrosinia to the Nagorny came. When he learned that she slept on bare boards and had no clothes he ordered to give her a blanket, a quilted jacket and a cap. So, the first problems linked to the work in the mine were overcome.

While the trail was still hot Euphrosinia wrote a complaint of Lieutenant Poletayev's behaviour to the chief of the Norilsk prison camps, and Poletayev was reduced to a lower rank.

Since Euphrosinia had once worked as a medical drawer she had moist colours, coloured pencils, ink and paper. Drawing saved her from the camp environment even though she refused to do an artist's job at the camp club. Euphrosinia had put down in a notebook the story of her escape from exile and made several illustrations. A woman Euphrosinia had saved obtaining for her light work outside the mine gave the notebook to an officer in exchange for two packs of shag. It was in 1948, the evidence was not enough for new charges and the potential case was swept under the carpet. The threat of the third conviction Euphrosinia apprehended went over her head.


After Euphrosinia was injured and admitted to the hospital, Kuznetsov, the chief surgeon, managed to persuade her to stay and illustrate his monograph. She was a drawer in her spare time working at the bandaging room of the surgical unit. She could not help noticing the air of callousness inoculated by the new chief of the hospital with civilian physicians showing no interest or responsibility. New doctors from prisoners were vivid personalities. One of them, Ludwig by the family name, she taught French since he managed to get hold of an otolaryngology textbook in French.

Working at the surgical unit Euphrosinia was personally involved in saving human lives. Thus the life of a man crushed by the train was saved owing to the emergency blood transfusion directly from a Euphrosinia's vein and she did not even lie down not wishing to lose a minute. She also saved a lad suffering of burns from the amputation of both hands making a lot of manipulations, dishes and dressings. 

Kuznetsov often used new methods of surgery with excellent results. When traumatologist Pulyaevsky decided out of spite to re-operate on two Kuznetsov's patients using the old method in his absence, Euphrosinia refused to obey that doctor deeming his move to be harmful for patients, and afterwards she proved to be right.

She realized that at the hospital she was more in prison than at the mine where she at least enjoyed the freedom of action in emergency and returned there.

At the time of fires at the mine she went to the group of mine rescuers' labourers and laid the brick bulkheads working with the respirator on. It was difficult to carry bricks in the hands and she, taking the respirator off, ran to another site for the "goats", brick hauling devices, and found in the place full of carbon monoxide unconscious engineer Pozhevilov whom she dragged outside. Later, giving lectures on safety he always told the students of overman course that story admitting that Euphrosinia had saved his life.

The job of a miner had its advantages, each working day was counted as three. But mine #13/15 split in two and Euphrosinia's unit was included in mine #15. Women prisoners were soon transferred from the Nagorny camp to camp #7 and after that worked at the Gorstroy. Again, Euphrosinia felt as a slave she did not even got a bonus for prevention of an accident in the mine, they only read her the appropriate ruling.

In winter 1952, Euphrosinia was at general works in a team clearing railroad tracks. In response of the foreman's insult she stroke back and was placed in a solitary cell of a punitive unit handcuffed. After Kirpichenko, the deputy commander of the camp, beat her she started a hunger strike. The mine executives learned that from her friend, a contract worker Petkun, pleaded for Euphrosinia and she was summoned to the camp commander who knew nothing about his deputy's behaviour. To right the deputy's wrong the commander granted the wish for transferring her to the job of a loader at a transhipment and grocery base. There she earned credits for parole.

At that time prisoners released from the camp faced lifetime exile as a mean of their isolation from general public. Euphrosinia was notified that the place of her exile would be in Narym Area from where she had fled in 1942. She plunged into depression at the prospect of living in the forest as she wanted to stay in Norilsk among few educated people she already knew, at the well-paid work of a miner. Waiting for exilement she copied the painting Rest after the battle depicting of cheerful Vassily Terkin. During an inspection a senior officer asked her why she was not at work. Euphrosinia explained her situation and at his request presented him the copy.

The next day she was summoned for the release but they put forward preconditions for her parole, she had to sign a pledge to sever all ties with those in prison, forget everything she saw and never tell anything about the camp to anybody. Euphrosinia refused pointing out that in the camps she met estimable people was glad to be of use for them and could not forget the things she had seen and experienced there. For her, a signature is not a mere formality, a person worth as much as his word. Euphrosinia was released without the signature, life and work in Norilsk waited for her.

Owing to the system of credits introduced in the Norilsk camp in 1950, Euphrosinia was released two year, in 1952, not in 1954. She was an exile with restriction of rights for 5 years.

Euphrosinia had known the mine since 1947, worked there for about six years and after being released went to look for a job there. They at the mines did not hire women but her former boss Kovalenko introduced her to the personnel department as an excellent worker. She got a job of a scraper operator with the lowest salary since the exiles enjoyed no rights. She had no place where to live and between working shifts slept in a bath house locker room but soon got place in a hostel.

Euphrosinia worked at the mine #15 for more than seven years until the retirement.

The most competent and clever miners were sent to the courses of shift attendants. After graduation with honours Euphrosinia returned to the mine as a deputy section manager. She became a white-collar worker (ITR). Her subordinates were convicts, former prisoners of war, who after the World War II were charged for high treason and sent to special prison camps with hard labour and harsh conditions. They were competent miner because worked at the coal mines after being taken prisoners by Nazis. Frosya helped them in any way she could, bought them food, wire-transferred money to their families. But she could not show more work than was done so that they could get more money than earned as in that case she had to lie and she always told the truth... And certainly she, unlike all the other managers, did not provide her subordinates with alcohol.

After Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, the changes started in the country. The Communist Party 20th Congress taking place in Moscow in February 1956, denounced Stalin's personality cult. Massive retrials of political prisoners resulted in their early releases. In September 1956, the Norilsk labour camp was shut down. At the mine the prisoners were replaced with the civilians. They were discharged veterans (the Red Army did not discharge soldiers until they signed up for work in the Arctic for three years) and "enthusiasts" from the Young Communist League. Euphrosinia found it far more difficult to manage those subordinates and to work with new, civilian, managers.

The lack of cheap labour - convicts - resulted in mothballing of mines and idle managers were looking for jobs. A section foreman from one of the mothballed mines was appointed on Euphrosinia's place. She could challenge that decision or to take an easier job of a scraper operator. She however chose a different path, seeing in the production chain a hole originating from the "enthusiasts'" unwillingness to drill she decided to prove that a woman could do that work and became a driller. The newcomers were ashamed and followed her example. She instructed some of them in drilling. It any case, that was the hardest work she had to do at the mine.

After the death of shift attendant Arzhba who perished a day before going home to Georgia where he had not been for 15 years, Euphrosinia thought that to die before visiting the mainland was unfair. The Gryaznevs family had a house in the city of Yessentuki, Vera Ivanovna invited Euphrosinia to spend a vacation there and she agreed.

The plane flew to Syktyvkar with a stop in Ukhta. In Moscow Euphrosinia visited the Tretyakov Gallery where a half of the rooms was given to the heroics of the revolution, collective farms and the World War II. Dmohovsky with whom she was at Norilsk showed her the Arbat Street and the Exhibition of Economic Achievements (VDNKh). She also went to see Myra Barsky who sent her oil colours to Norilsk and then departed to the Caucasus. She had never before drawn from nature but the south night in the city of Mineralniye Vody and the park in Kislovodsk impressed her and Euphrosinia started sketching landscapes in her album.

In Essentuki she was welcome with open arms and started introducing the Gryaznevs junior to the southern nature demonstrating the gift of an educator. During the trip to the Mount of Razvalka near Zheleznovodsk she discovered the landscape of the Grand Caucasian Ridge, and Euphrosinia decided to see the whole Caucasus.

Euphrosinia was an enthusiastic and skilled traveller but her first encounter with the Caucasus was special. After years in prison camps and work at the mine in the North she felt the wind of freedom and revelled in pristine beauty of the southern landscapes. Wherever possible she preferred to walk and drew. Her album The Caucasus survived. 

Her route ran from Kislovodsk along the Georgian Military Road by bus, over the Cross Pass, along the River Terek, through the Daryal Gorge to the capital of Georgia, Tbilisi. From there by train - to the city of Kirovakan, over the Semyonov Pass, through the city of Dilijan, over the Lake Sevan to the capital of Armenia, Yerevan.

Being in Georgia Euphrosinia noticed the tension in the society. People told her about the events in Tbilisi (in March 1956, the Red Army broke up pro-Stalinist rallies there) but the authorities still did not dare to remove statues of Stalin. In Yerevan too, a roughly hewn figure of the "father of people" stood at the entrance to the city. The previous masters grabbed the best plots including the shores of the Ritza Lake to build their dachas there but the new state leaders did the same turning recreational areas into their estates, and Euphrosinia saw that when travelling and running into dead walls with razor wire in places she had passed freely not long before.

After getting a general idea about the Caucasus and sightseeing in big cities she slowly went back to the Georgian Military Road in a truck basket and after the Cross Pass walked drawing the Kazbek and other mountains, caves, cliffs, the Terek, the Daryal Gorge. She wanted to share this beauty with someone kindred and she imagined her cousin Ira beside her. After making sketches of eagle nests on white stones near Vladikavkaz she took a truck and returned to Yessentuki.

Euphrosinia fell in love with mountains and wished to make another trip - to go to the Teberdinsky Reserve and to reach the Black Sea over the Great Caucasian Ridge. By bus she got to Cherkessk, then walked or hitch-hiked to Karachaevsk and from there to Teberda. Euphrosinia had neither a voucher to a climber camp nor a permission to enter the Reserve but she managed to slip through security behind a car and found herself in Dombai. Being a wild tourist she couldn't get a place in a tent camp. It was mid-August, and she chilled without a blanket at the height of 2,500 meters near the base of great glaciers. In Dombai she climbed the glacier of Alibek where she made friends with a family of climbers from Moscow. She also went to the Turiye Lake and climbed the mount of Semenov-Bashi.

That year only groups accompanied by police were allowed going over the Kluhorsky Pass because the authorities feared of attacks of mountaineers who were restored to their rights and returned from the exile in the Central Asia and Kazakhstan where they were deported in 1944. Euphrosinia rejected the idea of going "under police escort" and walked alone saving herself from the heat by immersions in icy water of the mountain river Ganachkhir. At the starting point of the serpentine road leading to the Klukhorsky Pass she passed the tourist tent camp "Northern Haven" and found a path along the mountain stream Northern Klukhor. Then, over packed slippery snow she climbed down the glacier turning into a steep slope near the Kluhorsky Lake. 

Abkhazia lied ahead. Euphrosinia raced down leaping from rock to rock and rushed over the snow tongues sitting astride a stick. The small river South Kluhor showed the direction. She crossed a tributary of the river Klych over a snow "bridge" formed after the outburst of winter avalanches. The tent camp "Southern Haven" charmed her with its beeches and stuck in memory with a conversation to Svani guides. In the Kodori Gorge she went over the "ledge" on the Bagat Cliff and got to the city of Sukhum at the Black Sea.

In the New Athos she visited Anakopia Fortress on the Iberian Mountain. The fortress and a monastery were built in the 7th through the 9th centuries, and in 1930, when the monks were driven out those millennial structures were blasted with dynamite. She was taken aback with that vandalism. She spent a night on the mountain so that to finish a sketch in the morning and was astounded to see an old monk left there as a watchman wandering among the graves at night fuming them with incense and whispering prayers. That prompted her to leave the monastery so that not to violate claustral rule prohibiting women to spend a night in a friary. At dawn she gave the monk money for incense.

Euphrosinia went on over the Black Sea coast. She took the fancy of relict salt tolerant pine trees in Pitsunda, from the city of Gagra she went to the high-mountain Ritsa Lake and drew dawn there. The highway only continued to the "Stalinist Narzan"; when she tried to find out how to get to the Krasnaya Polyana through a mountain pass alert university students from a tourist group almost took her for a spy, at that time a single tourist making drawings evoked suspicions. But she met a hundred-year old mountaineer who proved to be a guide and showed her the way. She went over the Svaneti Ridge seeing the Great Caucasus and the mount of Elbrus to the right of her and the Gagry Ridge to the left. Along the valley of the river Mzymta Euphrosinia came to the Krasnaya Polyana and from here to the cities of Adler and Sochi.

She spent the remaining vacation days visiting Leningrad she liked a lot. She saw the city sights and monuments and its suburb Peterhoff.
 

Euphrosinia switched over to the job of a shooter which was easier than drilling but more dangerous. Colleagues at the shooting workshop took her warily knowing her fidelity to principles but she always helped out anyone who asked her and the attitude changed.

The operating cycle of the mine was common for all the shops but managers more often than not cared for only their parts of the cycle at the expense of the others who feared to tell the truth. Thus, the machine shop refused to produce drilling bits because of unprofitability and the collet holes drilled with worn out bits were smaller than necessary which made shooters' work extremely dangerous. The shooters feared to tell the executives the truth and Euphrosinia alone raised the issue at the level of the Coal Mining Department. She was skinned for that but the drillers got brand new bits and blasting work became less risky.

Euphrosinia volunteered for particularly hazardous work firing in blocks of the third layer (the blocks consist of the coal remaining in the sides of the mine where the works are over) which none of the shooters wanted to take on. Explaining her decision she said that all of them had families while she was single and her death would make nobody suffer. But Euphrosinia simply considered the miners to be her workmates and obeyed the principles of good fellowship.

On the other hand, the work in the blocks was cyclical and allowed having vacation in summer.

In 1957, she started her vacation in Bessarabia so that to visit her Father's grave. Upon arrival in Chisinau she took a taxi to the town of Soroca bu