Eufrosinia Kersnovskaia. «How Much is a Person Worth?»

Commentary to the 2nd bloc of drawings (from Album 5)

Eufrosinia's escape ended with an arrest that sharply changed her life. Since August 25, 1942, prisons this chapter tells of had become her «universities». Later on she got to know transporting 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 by train transported under guard to Barnaul. From a solitary cell of the court martial she was transferred to the NKVD inner prison.
«I recalled those several horrible days spent in a mass cell of the bullpen where I was overwhelmed with such a tidal wave of new impressions so many woes of different kinds that I, seeing others' sufferings and hearing out sorrowful tales of each of those women wild of misery and despair forgot of myself.»
She remembered many of those people by name and her work has been turned to as a document. The Ogonyok magazine that was the first to publish Kersnovskaya's drawings in 1991, received 150 responses and one of the letters contained the direct appeal to Eufrosinia.
«One of the pictures published in The Ogonyok depicts 'a night frisk' and is captured, 'A miserable German dying of consumption hardly stands by my side...' The point is that my mother perished somewhere in prison camps. She was German. I know she suffered of lung disease. May I in any way to know that woman's name? I have still known almost nothing about my mother, where she died, in what camp all of this is still a secret. They sent me that she died in prison on October 21, 1943. Maybe it's the truth, maybe a lie. They sent me the acquittal certificate. That's all. If that is my mummy I at least will know in what area of the country her grave is.»
«Everything written here is the truth,» finished Eufrosinia her narration. Not once she told her friends it was hard to recall all that, she liked ploughing land and planting flowers much more. But it was necessary as she had promised her mother «to write. at least briefly, the chronicle of those years, horrific sorrowful years of my ;universities'... However Dante in some way forestalled me describing nine circles of the Inferno.»

(Texts translated from Russian by Natalya Hmelik.)