Looking through the window of the rushing train, I think: Siberia, so this is how it looks! I heard this name for the first time when I was seven years old. Stern mothers from our street cautioned “Children, behave yourselves, or they’ll deport you to the Sybir!” (They said it in Russian -Sybir- for this sounded more menacing, apocalyptic.) Gentle mothers would become indignant: “How can you frighten children this way!”
It wasn’t really possible to imagine Siberia. One of my friends finally showed me a drawing in a book: In a heavy snowstorm walked a column of tattered and hunched-over men. Heavy chains with iron balls at the end were attached to their hands and legs and they dragged these balls behind them over the ground.
Siberia, in its sinister, cruel form, is a freezing, icy space… plus dictatorship.
In many states there exist icy territories, lands that for the greater part of the year are frozen over, dead. Such, for instance, are the vast stretches of Canada. Or take Danish Greenland, or American Alaska. And yet it doesn’t occur to anyone to frighten children with: “Wash your hands or they’ll send you to Canada!” or “Play nicely with that little girl or they’ll deport you to America!” In those countries, quite simply, there is no dictatorship, nobody puts anyone in chains, nobody imprisons anyone in camps, dispatches him to work in hellish frost, to a certain death. In those frozen lands, man has one antagonist -the cold.
I read this in a book… thought I might share it. I’m sure the copyright layers are going to kill me now…
Tags: Canada, cold, rain, Russia, work
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