We used to politely hide our crimes against humanity

In 1953, when Joseph Stalin died, the Cold War entered the so-called Kruschev thaw, a departure from the blood-soaked horrors of the Stalin era (don’t worry there were still decades of violent oppression).

The satellite states got the hint. Belene, a brutal Bulgarian gulag on the island of Persin in the Danube, was emptied of most of its prisoners. The labor camp, which operated for five years, had been especially sadistic. In “Gulag: A History” Anne Applebaum observed that at least the forced labor in Stalin’s gulags was linked to the dictator’s 5-year-plan for industrialization. The Bulgarian gulags existed primarily to torture prisoners. The guards starved them and forced them to perform pointless, backbreaking labor in extreme weather. In the scorching summer they’d put them in cages over the water to be eaten alive by mosquitos. They beat and killed them for fun. When the Island flooded the guards fled and the prisoners had to climb and sleep in the trees to avoid drowning.

After their release, survivors were forced to sign documents pledging to never speak about the camps. One of them was my grandfather. Most of the other prisoners were former officials, priests, dissidents, writers, and other potential threats to the regime. He’d ended up there after an angry ex-wife told authorities that he’d planned to illegally cross the border into the West. In an important sense then, he was actually a threat to the regime. So-called “enemy emigration” was against the law because escapees undercut the narrative that the regimes had built a Socialist utopia no one would want to leave. In reality the great dream included mass executions, forced collectivization, gulags, and a lack of freedom of speech and movement (you know, like what Zorhan Mamdani plans for New York). He was officially named an “enemy of the People.”

You don’t have to think too hard to find echoes in today’s psychotic crackdowns on “the border” and the criminalization of people who crossed “illegally” as my grandfather tried: it’s to uphold the myth of Judeo-Christian white supremacy, even as quality of life has sharply degraded for Americans and Europeans who aren’t gazillionares, in ways big and small, and that have nothing to do with immigrants.

***

I went to the site of the gulag a few years ago. There’s almost nothing commemorating the brutal tortures of thousands of men and hundreds of women. Our driver, Peter, who had grown up 100 feet away from the island in a nearby village, had never heard of the camp until he got a job with a woman who leads birdwatching tours. These double as tours of the remnants of the camp for interested parties, who are few and far between—primarily relatives.

It’s tragic historical erasure. A few years ago I had the following surreal exchange with a woman around my age I’d befriended on a trip. We were both traveling alone in Egypt and became dinner buddies. One day on a long bus ride, a book fell out of my back-pack. It was a compilation of Belene survivor memoirs, published in the early 1990s. One of my friend’s friends had procured a copy—it has long since been out of print.

“Oh this is interesting,” I said. “My friend found me an out-of-print copy of witness accounts from the gulags.”

She stared straight ahead. “We never had gulags in Bulgaria.”

I’m sitting here holding a dog-eared copy of survivor testimonies. “My grandfather was in the camp,” I said. See, flouting the order to never speak about the camp, my grand-father never shut up about the fucking camp. (“Eventually I only pretended to listen while thinking about more pleasant things,” my grandmother told me).

“Your grandfather must have been a criminal who was sent to prison,” the woman told me.

“No … he got put in Belene just for trying to cross the border…”

“Bullshit. Impossible.”

“But … “

“We will not be discussing this topic any longer,” she said staring straight ahead.

The Communist regimes tried to hide the camps. They tried so hard that they succeeded in purging them from history. In the 1990s, a transitional lawmaker was charged with reviewing government records of the camps actually just destroyed up to forty percent of them.

Meanwhile, hear about “Alligator Alcatraz?” Probably. Because unlike the brutal, sadistic Communist camp guards and officials who went out of their way to hide the existence of the gulags, the brutal, sadistic MAGA crowd is reveling—joyously reveling—in the snap construction of a camp for immigrants in the Florida everglades.