Andrei picks up a small stone and tosses it into the water. She watches as the stone skips three times and disappears under the oilskin of the river.

“Imagine this if you can: once in June, he told me, he saw a prisoner tied to a tree, naked. He knew the man, an engineer from Moscow, Igor. They’d driven shovels into the rocky earth together. From the moment Igor arrived, my father knew he wouldn’t survive. Too civilized. That day, when the guards tied him to a tree, my father saw the glare of insanity in Igor’s eyes; he heard the threats bubbling up on his lips. But what would have been my father’s reward had he stopped Igor from lunging at the guard? Not a day off from digging, not even an extra ration that night. The next evening, they passed the tree on their way back from work. All that remained of Igor were flaps of skin hanging off a skeleton. The man had been eaten alive by gnats. Better him than me, my father said.

“But winter, he said, was far worse. Prisoners who failed to fulfill the daily quota of work were tied to trees and doused with water. From November to April, dozens of ice statues loomed about the campgrounds. Reminders to others not to question anything. Reminders to fear those with power, to follow the rules. And for those who didn’t, he said, there were so many ways to be tortured and killed. My father was a common criminal, so his life was easier, but he saw what they did to political prisoners, to traitors. They were forced to sleep on the lower bunks, the coldest place in the barracks. Kirill from the bunk below my father’s was always scribbling in a notebook and was accused of insubordination. They beat him with iron pipes and left him outside to freeze. The white-haired man everyone called ‘the scientist’ had his hands tied behind his back before they pushed his face into a bucket full of shit and urine. That was his punishment for treason and subversion, a punishment that served him right, my father said.”

For a minute, they sit quietly, watching the figure of a lone fisherman with his rod, motionless, on the opposite bank.

“How could I believe him? This was the stuff of Auschwitz, not our own Vorkuta or Magadan. This is what the Nazis did in their camps. My father had become everything we were fighting against, his cruelty toward my mother, his drunkenness. That’s why I went to work for the Komsomol Committee, because of him. To get away from him, to take revenge on anyone like him. To build a world in which he wouldn’t exist.”