#she and walter got married i believe before her second arrest (he worked in kolyma but wasn't actually an inmate)

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

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My favourite story from my thesis research, which I think about all the time:

In February 1947, Evgeniia Ginzburg was released from Elgen, a camp in the Kolyma gulag system in Siberia. By this point she had served a 10-year sentence, split between several different camps and villages — this was a common experience for gulag inmates —, during which she worked for a time as a nurse under Anton Walter, a Crimean German doctor and her future husband, in the village of Taskan, 22km (13.6 miles) from Elgen.

So on the day of her release, she calls Walter — sentences were often unexpectedly extended at the last moment, so she needed to let him know it had actually happened so he could come pick her up with a horse and sleigh borrowed from his boss and take her back to Taskan — and he tells her there's a blizzard coming in, that he's arranged lodging for her for the next three days and he'll come get her as soon as it's over. And it's Siberia, and the middle of winter — but she's been in prison for ten years, and the sky still looks clear, and the distance isn't anything she hasn't walked before.

The blizzard sets in when she's maybe halfway there. "It conveys a feeling of man's primal defenselessness," is how she would describe it in her memoir, two decades later. "You are indeed naked on the naked earth." It's freezing, and dark, and she has no idea how far she's walked or how far she has left to go — and she's been alone on the path all this time but suddenly there's someone walking towards her. And it's Walter, because he'd only managed to speak with her for a handful of minutes through the terrible reception of the camp phone that cut off half their words but he knew she wouldn't stay in Elgen, not even for another three days, and he came to get her.