A Day in the Life

While reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, I could not help but think about the terrible conditions of the work camp, and how difficult it would be to live there. Thoughts such as what the purpose of the camp was flowed through my head. Then, finally, it hit me. The camp's purpose was to break the will of those individuals forced to stay there. What other purpose could they serve than to break the will and identity of the individuals there. Just look at the location of these camps. Siberia, arguably the worst and most difficult place to survive on earth. It is freezing cold, and basically impossible to escape from. A prison there would not even need walls or gates to keep prisoners from leaving because, in an interesting way, when a person is in Siberia the camp is keeping them from the wilderness and from death, not the other way around. The location thus makes a person feel confined and stuck in a world so separated from everything else that there is no hope of returning; a person cannot escape from this hell. This sense of hopelessness serves to break the will of the prisoners, and inevitably, force them into perfect submission, or into tools of the state. Also, giving the prisoners little food keeps them struggling, and it shows these people that although they only receive little food, without the camp they could have nothing. In other words, the camp uses food to enforce its will on the prisoners, and it knows that it can starve them or keep them hungry, also breaking down a persons will. This leads to complete exhaustion, and a loss of all sense of hope. Constant hunger is quite possibly one of the worst feelings a person can feel. And, finally, being treated as a lesser person, or as property, finally breaks down the individual until his only remaining identity is that he is a property of the state. When people are constantly telling you that you are not an equal human being, but more like an animal for years, you lose the sense of who you really are, as you have not been told anything different. So, how do the prisoners fight these evils of the camp? First, a prisoner must be resourceful and be able to survive based on what he or she can find. Scavenging is a necessity for a prisoner in a gulag. This enables a person to get at least something similar to adequate nutrition, which is necessary to work the immense hours they have to. Combating the constant belittling by the guards and the people controlling the prisoners is much more difficult to achieve. This takes mental strength and the ability to hold on to who you are. The only way to have success here is to stay mentally tough and tune out the constant and false statements made by the camp. Also, the only people who will survive the camp with any sense of identity are those who never give up hope. It is necessary to live day by day, hour by hour, never giving up the hope of surviving the camp. That is the only way to survive a place like that. Thus, the camps are constantly trying to crush the identities of the inmates who must struggle to keep this identity in order to survive. Without an identity, what is a person, an individual. In truth, a person without an identity is reduced to nothing; it is emptiness. Thus, keeping identity is the most important, and the most difficult, struggle the inmates undertake when they are forced to imprisonment in the gulag.