Deprived of food, heat or water, up to 20 per cent of deportees, especially old people and children, died on the way. One of the main transit points was Vologda, where the corpses were unloaded and the survivors crammed into empty churches. ‘In a little park by the station,’ an eyewitness wrote of another transit town,’ ‘dekulakised peasants from the Ukraine lay down and died.
