Published February 16, 2001
In Russian labor camps, rosary was prisoners’ catechism
A rosary made of bread crumbs was pictured in the last edition of the Anchor (2/2). It was one woman’s way of outfoxing her Soviet guards.
Another Russian woman told me that she was very young when she was conscripted to work in the slave-labor camps near Magadan. She did not take her rosary with her because she knew it would be confiscated. "But I have 10 fingers," she said.
At the public rosary recited at the dedication of the new Cathedral of Irkutsk last year, a camp survivor gave testimony about how the prisoners prayed the rosary every day, many times a day.
As one person put it, "The rosary was the catechism of the camps."
The slave-labor camps were built throughout the Kolyma region of the Russian Far East to mine the gold that the dictator Joseph Stalin used to support his wars abroad and campaigns of terrorism and persecution at home.
The city of Magadan was built in the early 1930s as the port of entry to the camps. Prisoners were shipped from Western Russia by train, herded onto boats near Vladivostok on Russia’s east coast, and marched ashore at the port of Magadan. From there, they were dispersed by truck to the camps.
The first camp laborers were prisoners from jails in the West. Then came prisoners of World War II. The opera house in Magadan was built by captured Japanese soldiers. Then came political dissidents. And some hundreds of thousands were declared "enemies of the government" because of their religious beliefs or their ethnic background.
One man described last month how he was rounded up with other Bolsheviks.
"I was born into a Bolshevik family. When the Bolsheviks became the early enemy of the communists, everyone from a Bolshevik family was imprisoned as an enemy of the state. I was sent to prison for that, nothing more," he said.
Stories abound. The parish in Magadan is setting up a recording system and team to capture these stories.
Repeatedly the camp survivors told of praying the rosary. Not only was it their form of prayer, it became, as they put it, their catechism.
In praying the rosary, they reflected on what we now call the teachings of the church: the annunciation, the birth of Jesus, the mysteries of the life of Jesus: suffering, death, resurrection.
They meditated on the openness of Mary to the message of the angel. They could relate to the condemnation of Jesus without cause. They understood why Jesus stood in silence before his accusers. They connected his isolation from family and friends to their own isolation.
Most often, I think, we have an image of the praying of the rosary as a pious devotion, which it is. But the rosary is also, in its 15 decades and its beads, a snapshot of Catholic doctrine and teaching.
The response to the rosary can be emotional or intellectual or both.
One can imagine a prisoner who has no access to the Catholic community and no access to books about the Blessed Mother, about Mary and her place in the church and in our lives, finding in the praying of the rosary not only a deeper affection for God but also a deeper understanding of God and his very special relationship with his people.
Is it necessary for the majority of us to have to suffer the depravations of a prison to be able to appreciate the value and the personal experience of the full significance of this most popular prayer of the church?