AP English Independent Reading

Friday, May 23, 2014

Dear Reader

Dear Reader,

It is at this point that our journey through the dehumanization of work camps must come to an end. This has been an enjoyable romp throughout a somewhat somber topic. When I started this project, I had very little clue about what I should focus on from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I considered a few options; friendship, the Soviet Union, and the prisoners of the camp. In the end, I obvious selected to research the camps themselves, and then focus on how the camps dehumanize those who are imprisoned within them. With this spark I set about researching the manner in which these prisoners were treated, first with the Russian work camps, and second with the North Korean work camps that are currently still in use to this day. While I ended up not writing about the North Korean camps in my genres, I continued to research them after I finished my first genre piece, the quality narrative, which predictably was my hardest piece to write.

Upon finishing my project, I was rather pleased with the result. After my initial struggle with the Quality Narrative piece I moved like greased lightning through the rest of my genres, coming up with ideas in rapid succession and implementing throughout my work. All of my genre pieces concern the work camps in some manner, and discuss the dehumanization in similar ways. In my Quality Narrative, the personified Quality is shipped to a work camp in a similar manner to the way that Shukhov is taken to the camp; he returns from being a POW and is immediately imprisoned for essentially surviving the war without dying for his country. I also wrote a letter from Shukhov to his wife, who I had to create a name for as she is only referred to as his wife in the novel. In the letter, rather than “disclose” information about the camps and the people that Shukhov associate with, I described them as “REDACTED”, in order to simulate the censorship that took place in some camps. This was intended to create an effect of oppression, and thus dehumanization as well. I also described the manner in which people are dehumanized in my recipe genre, treating the prisoners as ingredients in a dish of dehumanization and maltreatment. Now, I intended to create some sort of lightheartedness in this project in order to make a change from the complete sullenness and atrocities of the work camps through my pamphlet advertising the work camps in a manner similar to the way in which children’s summer camps and workshops are advertised. Again, this was done to emphasize the dehumanization that occurs in these Soviet camps all while adding a small amount of dark humor.

The golden thread of my project is not immediately apparent when looking at my genres. In each genre that I created for this project there is mention of identification numbers, specifically Shcha - 854, Shukhov’s identification number in the novel. I chose to use this number to emphasize the dehumanization that occurs when you remove someone’s name and instead give them a number, basically labelling them as property or as an object. Overall, this was a very enlightening project, and if I were to do it again I would probably try to make more creative genre pieces.

Sincerely,

Duncan

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Lovely Gulag Pamphlet

Click here for the Pamphlet

A Recipe for a (Un)healthy Dose of Dehumanization

A Recipe For a (Un)healthy Dose of Dehumanization

Shell of Man Stew

(Prep time: 3 months - 8 years)

Necessary Ingredients:

A group of people

2 cups of wrongdoing

5 pounds overwork

a dash of identification number

2 tablespoons of malnourishment

Enough poorly fitting, thin clothing for each person.

Instructions:

1. Gather a group of people from the general population of your desired country.

2. Remove the innocence from all of these people, it will not be needed or considered for the creation of this dish.

3. Strip these people of all of their belongings. This will make it much easier to manipulate them.

4. Place the prepared group of people within a camp, consisting of 2 barbed wire fences, guard towers, and a sturdy gate.

5. Assign each person a identification number (example: Shcha -874). From now on they shall be referred to by this number.

6. Give each of them poorly fitting clothing so that they all match. It’s best if this clothing is unsuitable for the conditions these people work in.

7. Overwork these people until their bodies are broken. This will tenderize them for the next step.

8. If a large number of the people die, repeat the process. Continue to resupply the camps with people when current prisoners die.

Work Cited

Works Cited

"Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom." Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom. Web. 21 May 2014.

"Jaan Kross." Jaan Kross. Web. 22 May 2014.

"North Korea’s Gulags." North Korea Now RSS. Web. 20 May 2014.

Solzenitsyn, Aleksandr. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. London: Frederick Warne, 1963. Print.

"Torture, Starvation, Infant Execution in N. Korea Prison Camps Exposed to UN Panel." - RT News. Web. 22 May 2014.

A Letter to a Wife

LETTER INTERCEPTED BY CAMP SMERSH BRANCH. APPROPRIATE CHANGES MADE.

February, 1951

To: Yulia Denisovich

From: Ivan Denisovich Shcha - 854

[CAMP LOCATION REDACTED]

Dear Yulia,

I apologize that it has been such a long time since I last sent you a letter. I have been busy working in the [REDACTED] along with my comrades [REDACTED]. We are often tired, but we try to make the best of what we have here at [REDACTED]. Today we had a slight variation on our typical morning stew. As usual, the cook made our oatmeal gruel, but today he added a small lump of meat for flavor. I’m not sure what sort of meat it was, but it made eating the slop more bearable. I am now used to the hunger that comes with not receiving home cooked meals. Others in the camp have not fared as well. I hope that I will soon be able to leave this camp and return home to you and the rest of the family.

Your Husband,

Ivan Shcha - 854

LETTER DEEMED INAPPROPRIATE, DISCARD.

Misery: A Quality

Misery

Misery lives in a work camp, along with fellow prisoners Hopelessness and Despair. Prior to his imprisonment he was a soldier and prisoner of war, serving his country on the Eastern front. When he was captured by the enemy, he was distraught. He lived in a prisoner of war camp with many of soldiers, and waited patiently for the day that his countrymen would rescue him from the grasps of the enemy. For two years he sat in the camp, brooding over his lost friends and family. He refused to open up to the other soldiers, preferring to sit alone late at night.

When the day finally came that Misery left the prisoner of war camp, he was not as happy as the other soldiers. Finally he had his freedom, yet he felt terrible was bound to happen. This freedom was short-lived. Soon after returning home, the authorities arrested him and shipped him far east, to the work camp where he resides today. That was 8 years ago.

For 8 long years Misery has watched countless others succumb to hunger, disease, and the cold of the tundra. To the guards and foremen of the camp, he is no longer Misery. He is Shcha - 854; a number, no longer a person. Every morning he ventures out into the cold with Hopelessness and Despair to the factory, where they build prefabricated fence for 13 hours a day. Hopelessness and Despair know not to ask Misery about the times before the camp, as it will drive him into a place from which he cannot return. Unfortunately for Misery the presence of his comrades alone can send him into the dark. There is no escape in sight.

Expository Essay

Gulag: Absolute Dehumanization

During the 20th century, a new form of punishment arose from the ashes of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and the prisoner of war camps controlled by the Third Reich and Imperial Japanese government. These work camps, controlled under the Gulag agency, were intended to punish political prisoners and criminals unsuitable for the traditional justice system. Under the regimes of Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and the Kim dynasty of North Korea, millions of innocent people died, and in the case of the Korean prison camps innocent people still suffer to this day. Prison work camps dehumanize those who are unfortunate enough to be held within their foreboding walls; through brutal working conditions and total mistreatment, the prisoners of gulags are reduced from an individual to a number.

In his book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gives the fictional but historically accurate account of a day in the life of Ivan “Shukhov” Denisovich, a prisoner in a soviet work camp during the early 1950’s. He and a group of other prisoners are assigned to Gang 104, and use this title when they are called by the prison wardens and other officials in the camp. While some of the guards treat the prisoners with some level of respect, many of the guards treat the men like animals, disallowing them from getting medical attention and barring them from meals, which often consisted of a weak oatmeal gruel and possibly a lump of unidentifiable meat. Rather than use his name as his official registration in the camp, Shukhov is called Shcha - 854, removing his name and therefore part of his identity (Solzhenitsyn 30). As a number, the prisoners are no longer treated as people; they are simply a body with a regimented form of identification to be used when they are punished or registered as dead.

In addition to their reclassification as a letter and string of numbers, the prisoners of Shukhov’s camp faced brutal working conditions, toiling away in factories in below freezing temperatures without coats or other cold weather equipment (Solzhenitsyn 95). At the end of the work day, when the workers returned to the camps, the guards would count the number of prisoners present, and if one or two were missing, they’d search the roads by the camp for the frozen dead bodies of the missing prisoners.

While it is true that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a work of fiction, the the manner in which the prisoners in the gulag are treated is historically accurate. Millions of Soviet citizens died in Stalin’s work camps, as a result of mistreatment (Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom). Like the characters in Solzhenitsyn’s novel, the real prisoners in gulags had no value in the eyes of the Soviet government. The horrendous conditions of the camps and the meager rations given to prisoners lead to millions of deaths, and with the deaths of these prisoners the Soviet government simply imprisoned more people in order to fill their ranks. In most cases, such as Shukhov’s in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the prisoners did not commit a crime that warranted their imprisonment in a work camp. For example, Jaan Kross, an Estonian writer, was imprisoned in a Soviet work camp simply because he was arrested by the German occupation two years prior (Books and Writers). The Soviet’s treated their people like cattle, and stripped them of all humanity, replacing them as if they were lead in a mechanical pencil.

When compared to the North Korean work camps of the 20th and 21st Centuries, the Soviet work camps are a leisurely stroll. The Kwan-Li-So, the North Korean work camps, house as many as 200,000 North Korean citizens, and it is possible that this number is far greater (North Korea Now). In Camp 22, a work camp with an area similar to Los Angeles, prisoners are worked to death in grueling conditions, and children are worked just as hard as their parents. Like the prisoners of the Soviet camps, they are stripped of all identification from before they were imprisoned. However, unlike the Soviet camps, North Korean prisoners live in constant fear of being beaten to death by the prison guards. In many camps, prison guards are given a college education if they kill escaping prisoners, so in some cases the guards kill prisoners indiscriminately to get this reward (North Korea Now). The only way prisoners escape Camp 22 is through death, and even then their bodies are buried within the confines of the camp.

Within the work camps of the Soviet Gulag agency and the North Korean government innocent people die at the hands of prison guards, from starvation, and from terrible conditions. Prison camps reduce their occupants from people to work mules, slaving away for imaginary crimes. Without a name or identity these people lose their humanity, and other than what little hope they have, they have nothing.