In 1997, in a small apartment in St. Petersburg, an
elderly woman agreed to speak on record for the first time.
Her name was Galina Sokolova.
She was seventy-five years old. Outside her window, snow fell steadily,
covering the streets in the same quiet white that once buried her youth in
1941.
For more than
half a century, she had told no one—not her husband, not her son, not her
closest friends—what happened to her after she was captured during the early
months of the Second World War. Silence had become a survival skill. Words were
dangerous. Memory was heavier than concrete.
But time was
thinning the witnesses.
“I am not
telling this story to be brave,” she said. “I am telling it because soon there
will be no one left to contradict the lie.”
What follows
is not a battlefield account. It is not about military strategy or victory
maps. It is about what happened before forced
labor, before
starvation statistics, before people
became numbers in archives.
It is about
the first day.
The day the
system made sure you understood that you no longer belonged to yourself.
Before the Camps,
There Was a Life
Galina was not a soldier. She was a philology student
in Leningrad. She loved literature. She planned to teach. Her days were filled
with lectures, arguments about poetry, streetcar rides, and the small rituals
of ordinary youth.
Her closest
friend, Irina, was everything Galina was not—loud, impulsive, always laughing.
They spoke about books, about men, about summers that felt infinite.
None of them
knew their futures had already been crossed out on a military map.
When the war
began, optimism lingered. Few imagined the scale of what was coming. Then came
bombardments, food shortages, evacuation orders. Galina and Irina were sent
outside the city to dig defensive trenches.
They never
returned.
Capture Without
Names
The capture did not feel dramatic. There was no
speech, no announcement. Only chaos—dogs, shouting in a foreign language,
rifles used as extensions of command.
No one asked
who they were.
The moment
they were pushed into sealed freight cars, identity became irrelevant. Inside,
there was no air, no space, no sense of time. The living stood pressed against
the dead because there was nowhere to fall.
By the third
day, silence replaced panic.
When the doors
finally opened, floodlights erased the night. Barbed wire stretched farther
than the eye could follow. They did not yet know the camp’s name. They only
understood one thing:
They were no
longer in the world governed by rules.
The Procedure
They Called “Sanitation”
Exhausted, hungry, and barely conscious, the women
were led into a brick building. Guards laughed. Female wardens watched with
visible contempt.
Orders were
short. Cold. Final.
They were told
to undress completely.
This was not
about hygiene. It was about erasure.
Privacy
vanished. Shame became an instrument. Clothes—the last personal possession—were
stripped away under supervision, transforming individuality into vulnerability.
Then came the
process officials described in paperwork as sanitization.
Survivors
later called it something else.
Baptism.
Hair was
removed quickly, carelessly. Not for health reasons, but uniformity. Mirrors
were unnecessary. You learned who you were by touch alone.
After that,
they were driven into shower rooms.
The women
expected water.
What came down
instead was a harsh disinfecting solution used by the system to mark
transition—from civilian to prisoner, from human to inventory. The substance
stung existing wounds, inflamed skin, and filled the air with a smell that many
survivors would later say followed them for life.
The point was
not cleansing.
The point was
to teach the body obedience.
The Look That
Shouldn’t Have Existed
During this process, Galina noticed something
unexpected.
At the doorway
stood an officer who did not shout. He did not participate. He watched.
His uniform
was immaculate. His posture calm. His face unreadable.
For a brief
moment, their eyes met.
She did not
look away.
Years later,
she would still ask herself why. Desperation, perhaps. Or the instinctive need
to be seen as something more than matter being processed.
The officer
turned and left.
At the time,
she did not know his name. She would learn it later.
Karl Hoffman.
Becoming a Number
After the showers, no towels were provided. Rough
garments were distributed. Footwear consisted of wooden blocks that did more
harm than protection.
Then came
registration.
Name. Age.
Profession.
When Galina
answered “student,” the clerk laughed and wrote something else.
She was
assigned a number.
From that
moment forward, that number replaced her name. Failure to respond to it meant
punishment or death.
Galina
Sokolova ceased to officially exist.
The First Night
The barracks were overcrowded. No bedding. Bare
boards. Air heavy with illness and despair.
No one slept.
People
whispered prayers in different languages. Others stared into darkness, already
retreating inward.
Galina lay
beside Irina, listening to her breathing change. The disinfectant smell
lingered on their skin. It would linger in memory for decades.
That night,
Galina made a decision.
If she
survived, she would remember.
Not
statistics. Not slogans. Details.
Survival Is Not a
Clean Story
Weeks turned into months. Hunger became constant.
Cold rewired the body. Time lost meaning.
During a work
detail, Galina collapsed from exhaustion. A guard raised his rifle to strike
her.
The blow never
came.
A quiet
command stopped it.
Karl Hoffman.
He reassigned
her to indoor work, citing efficiency. Later, in ways designed not to be seen,
he left small items behind—ointment, soap, a piece of fruit.
These were not
heroic gestures. They were calculated risks taken inside a system that punished
deviation.
Galina did not
know whether to hate him or fear the gratitude she felt.
In the camps,
moral clarity was a luxury no one could afford.
Liberation Is Not
the End
Galina survived the death march. She survived
liberation.
But survival
did not mean freedom.
Like many
returning prisoners, she was sent to filtration camps. Questioned. Suspected.
Interrogated.
Why were you
alive?
Why were you
assigned indoors?
Who helped
you?
Silence became
necessary again.
She learned
that some truths were unwelcome, even to the side that won.
Why She Finally
Spoke
“I did not survive to be grateful,” Galina said in
1997. “I survived to testify.”
Her account
does not simplify history. It complicates it.
It forces
uncomfortable questions about systems, complicity, memory, and the cost of
staying human where humanity was designed to fail.
The first day
was not an accident.
It was policy.
And it worked
precisely because it was repeated, processed, documented—and later softened by
time.
Galina refused to let that happen again.
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