Quotation of the day

The following quotation comes from the journal of the famous Russian-German autonomy activist, Dominik Hollmann. He wrote it in 1942 while serving in a labor army work site in Kirov devoted to felling timber. An English translation of the excerpt is reproduced in his daughter's memoirs, Ida Bender, trans. Laurel Anderson, Carl Anderson and William Wiest, The Dark Abyss of Exile: The Story of Survival (Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, 2000), p.101.

Every morning some of the men reported sick with diarrhea, caused by bad food and unsanitary conditions. Many had scurvy from lack of vegetables, legs swollen, entire body covered with sores. Many were weak and wasting away from starvation and disease. Men who previously had weighed eighty or ninety kilograms were down to forty or forty-five.