Art. 58-8, terror

Gulag (Glavnoie Upravlenie Lagerei), acronym of Main Administration of Camps.

Photographs of the Blumthal family:

    Erich Sõerd and his mother

    Oskar Sõerd

    Erich and Leida 1930s

    Leida and her son, Jaak

    Liisa Ots Blumthal, Leida´s mother

    Linda's police portraits

    Helene-Marie

    Ida

    Adolf

At that time, being expelled from the PCR (b) meant the ruin of a dream linked to the construction of a more just society. Also, if you were excluded from the communist party you automatically became an 'enemy of the people'; not like now that you can change political parties as if you changed your jacket.

The Stalinist purges approach and the wave of repression reaches Os Blumthal. In 1938 Leida was arrested as a counterrevolutionary woman and sentenced to ten years in a concentration camp. People who give their best years to achieve a splendid future for humanity are punished as a reward.

Our author, on page 67, notes that 7998 Estonians were shot.

(Now I remember a little book that I read when I was very young: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.)

What madness! The Soviet dictator was convinced that if a relative of leaders entered in prison or was sent to concentration camps, euphemistically called 're-education', his 'subjects' would learn the lesson: here we are all equal and anyone can be condemned. This happened to Ekaterina Ivanovna, wife of Mikhail Kalinin, president of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and close collaborator of Joseph Stalin, also, years later, to Polina Zhemchuzhina, wife of Molotov and many others. No one was safe and the ‘strays’ were expensive. The life.

There is a complete chapter dedicated to Ida and Adolf, brothers of Leida, when they are arrested and sent to Siberia, which the writer introduces with a phrase of E. Evtuchenko: Stalin was the father of the Gulag, but the grandfather was Lenin.

In this same chapter the existence of an anti-Semitic campaign is denounced, of which the so-called 'Processo dos Médicos Assasinos' was part, with a similar objective to that of Hitler, that is, the liquidation of the Jews of the Soviet Union; where also appears an extract from the letter that Erenburg, a well-known Soviet writer, sends to Stalin in January of 1953, in which very intelligently -he was of Hebraic origin- proposes to the dictator a formula that could resolve the Jewish question in us Socialist state.

Exciting, for the crude description he makes of his experience in a concentration camp, the entire page dedicated to the writer Mikhail Rozanov. Please, if you can, search for the book and open it on page 71. I won´t tell you more.

The fear of reprisal was such in Soviet society that it created great tensions and conflicts between members of the same family. That was what happened between Ida and Leida when the first asked her sister to accept her in her house. Leida apologized, but didn´t respond to her request in case the treat with Ida - who had been condemned in the USSR for political reasons - could cause more problems.

Special mention must also be made of stoicism and humility of the great scientist Boris Rauschenbach who worked in a horrible place making bricks with temperatures around 40 degrees below zero and where it was not strange that some days ten men died. When he remembered these moments said that he survived by chance, as by chance all things happen on the face of the Earth.

In the section that Mr Milhazes titles Regresso à 'Normalidade' and presents after a Portuguese saying that comes to tell us that always suffer the same people, the writer, in six pages, moves the atrocities of the communists to those of the new Nazi occupiers. Leida, after a short space of 'normality', is sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp: Quando o mar bate na rocha, quem se lixa é o mexilhão.

From my Borstal

LDR

Os Blumthal: Uma História Real de Vidas Sacrificadas às piores Utopias e Tiranias do Século XX. 2018, José Milhazes e Oficina do Livro. Afragide. Portugal