Michael Solomon, a Romanian prisoner, wrote of his shock as he was herded into the hold of the ship Sovlatvia headed north to Magadan. It was a scene, he said, “which neither Goya nor Gustave Doré could ever have imagined”: thousands of men and women, dressed in rags, half-dead and covered with boils and blisters. “At the bottom of the stairway we had just climbed down stood a giant cask, on the edges of which, in full view of the soldiers standing on guard above, women were perched like birds, and in the most incredible positions. There was no shame, no prudery, as they crouched there to
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