TIMBER SLAVERY

Hawera Star, Volume L, 10 February 1931, Page 5

TIMBER SLAVERY

TERRIBLE RECITAL OF CAMP CONDITIONS. SOVIET’S INHU A t ANITA". (United Ptess Association—By Electric Telegrapn Copyright). LONDON, February 7. Commander Bellairs has sent a letter to Mr. Ramsav MacDonald, drawing attention to Lord Ponsonhy’s attic d© in the House of Lords that the evidence of slavery in Soviet timber camps was insufficient, and showed that only 60,000 prisoners were labouring in the forests.

He forwarded nine affidavits from escapees including an ex-official of the 0.G.P.U., declaring that there- were 662,200 prisoners in the timber camps on January 5 of last year. The affidavit of Nicholas Malytshew. a medical assistant in the Red Army, who was sentenced to- three years’ imnrisonment for anti-Soviet propaganda, alid spent a- year in the Solovki camp, asserts that the barrack floors are merely earth and practically an iceblock throughout the year. The ceilings arc lea.ky and the barracks arc indicated.

The prisoners, who- are all ipoliticaL. sleep on bare plank® unless they possess their own bedding. There is terrible overcrowding, and a typhus epidemic has killed tens of thousands. Work in the winter times lasts from five in the morning until eight in the evening. The prisoners are each forced to fell and strip thirty-five trees daily. Tn many cases thev are freezing owing to lack of clothing. Lads from fifteen to seventeen years of age get the same tasks- as men. The hospitals are overcrowded and the patients lie- on the floors. The mortality is 15 per cent.

Another relates that his convoy consisted of 137 men and women who were sent to the camp near Parantola. The convicts, working in groups of three, hand-fell and trim fifty large trees da?lv and a proportionate number of smaller ones. _ A third’ affidavit states that out of 200.000 prisoners, at Solovetsk 19,000 died of typhus in May of last year.