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NEWS DESK 25th JULY 2000
MICHAEL WALSH: BEHIND THE HEADLINES
SOVIET PRISON CAMP REVIVED
Lithuanian Viliumas Malinauskas is investing £500,000 to open ‘Stalin’s World’ a prison camp complex in Gruta, a small village with only one paved road. It will be a faithful reproduction of the Gulag slave camps of the Soviet Union where tens of millions of people perished.
Mr Malinauskas who owns the world’s largest private collection of Soviet era artefacts will use the original maudlin machinery of the Jewish-Communist killing machine to provide realism to educate today’s generation about the vast Soviet killing machine.
He is already bidding for the original rolling stock that was used to forcibly expel an estimated 200,000 Lithuanian civilians from their Baltic homelands. Few ever made it back.
Determined that the world should begin to appreciate the awesome scale of horror visited upon the populations of countries overrun by the Communists, often with British collaboration, visitors will be transported along the original railway lines in the actual rail cars used by Stalin’s henchmen.
MILLIONS PERISHED
With millions of others of many nationalities who were similarly engulfed by Communism, these unfortunates perished in a program of liquidations, mass deportations and purges aimed at reducing whole populations to ‘manageable’ proportions.
The organisation of these terrible liquidations began with the occupants of entire towns, villages and hamlets being rounded up and either placed in corrective camps with hard labour (lagiers) or deported. Families were divided as a routine matter. A KGB defector described how teenagers would be randomly singled out and publicly hanged to instil terror in seized communities.
The patriotic Lithuanian entrepreneur talked of the importance he attached to people ‘experiencing the vision of hell our relatives experienced’. Even apologists, fellow travellers and collaborators of the Soviet Union concede that the final figure was 30 million dead. Experts put the figures far higher.
ATTACKED BY THE WESTERN PRESS
Attacked by the press who for decades have sanitised and airbrushed Soviet crimes out of the big picture, Mr Malinauskas dismisses suggestions that it is a ‘tasteless theme park’ or that he is being insensitive. He insists that his venture will not cheapen history.
"Every exhibit will tell of the crimes committed by Stalin and in particular what his regime has done to the people of Lithuania. This is my gift to future generations and I will fight to keep it."
Interestingly, journalists criticising Mr Malinauskas by claiming he is ‘theme park profiteering’ never made the same allegations against Auschwitz and Dachau which have since been denounced, even by prominent Jews, as precisely that; ‘Disneyland theme parks with the prime objective of making money’.
BRITISH HORROR CAMPS
An interesting development might be the similar recreation of British, French and American slave camps that were active until the late 1940’s.
From Britain’s declaration of war against Germany (3rd September 1939) and its subsequent declaration of war against many other nations including Finland, Rumania and Hungary (7th December 1941) the British Government similarly rounded tens of thousands of people up and forced them into concentration camps and prisons.
BRITAIN’S PENAL COLONIES
Most were held in slave labour camps dotted throughout the then United Kingdom. Vast penal colonies sprang up in the Isle of Man, Scotland, Wales and the less inhabited parts of England. Prisons were filled to overflowing with people innocent of any crime other than their national origin. Others were forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada. Many didn’t survive the journey.
Those of Italian, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Finnish or Rumanian origin were treated particularly harshly. One such was 84-year old German-born widow, Gertrude Timmis.
‘TREATED LIKE AN ANIMAL’
She tells of how she was treated ‘like an animal’ during three years of internment even though her half-brother, George Addison, was fighting in the British Royal Navy and her husband was a serving soldier in the British Army.
Her mother having fallen in love with the serving Scottish soldier moved to Glasgow in 1930, long before Hitler was elected. Gertrude was then just a thirteen-years old schoolgirl.
In 1940, then twenty-three and working as a hotel domestic, she was arrested and hauled before a tribunal (not a court). Temporarily released she lost her job as a consequence of her arrest.
"STRIPPED AND GIVEN INTERNAL EXAMINATIONS"
A few weeks later she was arrested once again and taken to one of Britain’s most notorious hanging-gaols, Winson Green in Birmingham. There she spent nine hours each day sewing men’s’ shirts and sleeping on bare floors in freezing conditions. Later on she was moved to the equally notorious Holloway Prison in London where entire families of those opposed to the war were incarcerated.
Here she says she was forced to wear the same clothes for weeks on end because she was not ‘eligible’ for ration coupons. She described how one female inmate took her own life.
"I was victimised simply because of my nationality said Mrs Timmis, and because they thought I was a Nazi. "The cooks used to spit in my food and put some human hair and fingernails in it."
The now elderly lady went on to describe how she was later transferred to Liverpool’s Walton Prison and then to a large concentration camp in the Isle of Man.
Now living in Droitwich, Mrs Timmis says her wartime internment broke the terms of the White Paper exempting relatives of soldiers serving in the British armed forces. She said: "As a thirteen-year old I had no choice about coming to Britain and couldn’t go back to Germany. I feel very bitter about what happened to me. When I remember the conditions in those prisons and the abuse I got when I hadn’t done anything wrong I feel sick to the bottom of my stomach.
"I was given the worst chores and made to work really hard. We were stripped to the skin and given internal examinations. We were treated like animals.
Note: Mrs Timmis’s half-brother was killed in 1944 when his boat, the Orne, was sunk by the Germans off Le Havre.
Sources:
Daily Mail, London, July 25 2000
Daily Mail, London April 18 1996
Liberty Lobby, Spotlight
The Dark Side of the Moon, Faber and Faber.
Russian Oppresssion in the Ukraine, Ukrainian Publishers Ltd, London, 1963.
A Special Michael Walsh News Report