The cover photo made me keep it. I wasn’t so much intending to read the inside again.
A lot of interesting things came across my desk, the twelve years or so I had that job, and I liked to read all of them. Pretty much a free education in issues of the times, and a few other times too. I sometimes took home stuff I knew nobody else wanted.
This was the August/September 1991 issue of the Index on Censorship, and isn’t it funny how right I always am to throw very few things away? I’ve had this in my files ever since, and even when I have one of those fits people sometimes get, thinking I’m never gonna try all those recipes and maybe I can survive never getting around to seeing that film and I guess I’m not going to use this stuff for decoupage now and I start to clean out all that half-turned-into-parchment-already collection of papers, I always put this back in the drawer.
So I was in the midst of the tossing-out-the-junk excuse for not doing all that much elsewise this week, and here I am looking again at the face of Nina Gagen-Torn when she was just a schoolgirl, years before the first of those two times she was sent off to labor camps.
The photo inside had been worse, her a young woman holding her little girl and under the picture these lines from one of her poems:
There is much suffering in life
But no more bitter emptiness
Than to have your children torn from your arms
To be raised by someone else…
Here’s the rest of the stanza:
And you cannot erase, forget or drown the thought,
That your children have been taken by a stranger
Forever this wound will ache,
This sorrow be with you forever.
And yet someone who’d been in the camps with Nina said this about her, later:
In a horrible life, where people wore dresses with numbers and had no connection with normal existence, it was a miracle to meet a person who as it were soared above the entire horror of the camps. That miracle was meeting Nina Ivanova Gagen-Torn.
K. S. Khlebnikova-Smirnova
My kid was just barely a toddler when I first had all this open in front of me, and I used to wonder, in those days, as you do, how much I’d be able to endure and resist for the sake of my child, would I keep my mouth silent if need be even if they threw me into a barrel of cockroaches or began ripping out my fingernails, would I be worthy of the gift.
But this is different, isn’t it? To give hope to the whole terrible world you’ve been compressed into because something inside you is so rare.
I see every day on Notes people revealing their true natures, almost entirely contrary from how they claim they are, and it’s such a tiny cauldron, such a tiny fire they’re boiling over that manages to render them down so efficiently. These guys are always quoting Solzhenitsyn and maybe it’s just as well. Nina Gagen-Torn wouldn’t suit them.
Another description of this woman: https://relstud-hist.spbu.ru/en/articles/en-gagen-torn-nina-ivanovna
Learn something new every day ... 😉🙂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Gagen-Torn
Hard to fathom the lives of the many who have come before us -- some have estimated 117 billion of us since we were recognizably human:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/04/quantifying-human-existence/
"nasty, brutish, and short" probably summarizes the lot of most of them; seems more people should consider how far we've come. And how far we could fall.