Labor Camp Quotes

“I'd thought you'd given up on me.”
― Heather Morris, Cilka's Journey

“This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life’s beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and
telegraph poles, and tomorrow you’ll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that
extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you’ll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson be was not prepared to forget.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“Only one group of people kept their humanity in the camps, the believers, whether Orthodox or sectarians.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories

“The agnosticism I had upheld throughout my conscious life had not made me a Christian. But in the camps I had not seen better people than the believers. Depravity affected everyone's souls; only the believers held out.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories

“He might all the same do a little something for us. We’re
on our backs, doesn’t He see?'
'I’m doing my best, I tell you,' said Father Julien. 'I pray and I pray and I pray . . .'
'Even we find a way of doing something for the may- beetles.’
'You don’t give a damn about the may-beetles, you bastards,' said Father Julien. 'You do it out of pride. If you weren’t in a forced labor camp you’d step on may-beetles without even noticing their existence. This is something that happens in the head, not in the heart. You’re bursting with pride, that’s what it is.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven