Gulags Essay

Nazi concentration camps and Gulags brought together various connections of fellow prisoners, there were men and women, Jews, Germans, Russians, and several other diverse groups of people contained. I will be focusing on female prisoners in both Nazi concentration camps and in the Gulags, identifying particular aspects of living situations in both camps and prisons, and also analyzing women’s perspectives of the circumstances they were forced upon. Women suffered from continuous dehumanizing conditions, which included vicious rape, discriminatory murder, and endless embarrassment. I will be exposing women’s physical and biological concerns during their time in both institutions. We can look at men and women sharing their tragedies of resistance, …show more content…
The Gulags were different from other correctional institutions, rather than the punishment of criminal acts the Gulags were focused on the control of populations. Innocent civilians were imprisoned in the Gulags, as well as high-risk criminals and political figures; prisoners in incarnation could vary between five to twenty years of hard labor. Prisoners worked in horrible conditions without the necessities necessary in their circumstances, they were given clothing that did not reflect the weather they were faced with, their tools were faulty, which made work more difficult, and the prisoners suffered from severe starvation from the lack of food and clean water they were given. Women in the Gulags suffered from sexual assault, frequent dehumanization, and the constant battle of fighting for their safety. When entering the Gulags, women had to deal with the embarrassment of being disinfected; they were immediately sent to the bathhouse and their clothes were taken away from them. Anna Cieslikowska recalls that, “after the bath, we had to wait a while for our clothes, which had been taken to be disinfected. This period of waiting was the worst.” After the traumatizing bathing and loss of clothes, women endeared the terrifying experience of having their hair shaven off their bodies. In one memoir from Hava Volovich, she explains that the reasoning for shaving her head was because she wanted to avoid the ordeal of having lice; many women did not have a choice and were forced to lose their hair. Women in the Gulags also had body inspections, male guards searched their hair, mouths, genital area, and this humiliated the women to a great extent. “Many women found life in the