Abstract:
This article aims at offering a glimpse into the emotions of the prisoners
in the camp ALZHIR (Akmolinskiy lager' zhen izmennikov Rodiny, Akmolinsk Camp of
Wives of Traitors to the Motherland), Kazakhstan in Soviet times.
Alzhir was a female forced labour camp in the time of the Soviet Union, a Gulag that
darkened the history of the Soviet Union.
This investigation will take place through a collection of letters, both from prisoners
and their children, translated in English for the first time. Letters represent the only
tool through which prisoners were able to communication with their families, and
through which they were able to keep their maternal sense from which they had been
violently deprived. The letters reflect the moods, needs, worries and the hopes of both
the prisoners and the children left behind.
The discussion concerning the letters reveals that the communication with the world
outside of the camps (allowed only from 1940) was not enough to give back the sense of
normality that the women yearned for whilst imprisoned.
