Randi Robertson
Norwegian, born in 1923. Survivor of Gulag’s prison camps in the USSR 1945-1953. Photographed in 2004.
She has fallen in love, this young girl from Erik in Vest fold County. It is 1941 and the man with whom she fallen in love is a German soldier, an Austrian named Alois Reith.
A love affair of this kind will not be problem-free for young Randi Robertson.
Her beloved Alois dies sometime later on the front in the Soviet Union, but Randi’s photo and address are sent to his mother who contacts her.
They become friends, and as a result Randi Robertson leaves her poverty-stricken life and an alcoholic stepfather in Norway. 19 years old, she goes to Germany. She gets a job at a hotel and often visits Alois’ mother in Vienna.
Randi Robertson falls in love again, this time with an Austrian dentist. They get engaged and the only thing stopping their marriage is the lack of Randi’s papers.
But the outcome will not be happy this time either.
Her fiancé is sent to the front and is killed. The War is nearly over, and the soviet forces are nearing Vienna where Randi now lives. Without a valid Norwegian passport and with no help from the Norwegian consulate, things become very dangerous for Randi. She flees to a little village near Vienna, but is followed and captured by the soviets. She
is accused of spying – what else would a young girl from Norway be doing in Vienna during the War? After 12 May 1945, Randi Robertson is in soviet hands, sentenced to ten years forced labour.
Her sentence is to be served in Gulag, a network numbe- ring 476 prison camps in the Soviet Union. No less than 28 million people are thought to have been imprisoned in these camps during the 70 years they existed, from 1917 to 1989.
During these years the soviets built up major portions of their industry with the help of slave labour. The prisoners are put to work in forestry, mining, construction, timber cutting, in factories where they build planes and weapons. The Sevmash shipyard, the nickel factory Norils Nickel in Siberia, the railway lines towards China – these are just a few of the ventures in which slave labourers toiled. Their work was a deliberate part of the Soviet Union’s planned economy system.
Randi Robertson is a pawn to this system for eight years. She is prisoner nr. E502. She is clad like a man, she remembers, they all wore the same clothes whether it was 50 below or 50 above zero. Randi nearly dies several times, from the cold, the lack of food and the toil.
She soon realizes that prisoners are not expected to survive this slave labour. In a period of 25 to 30 years, between four and five million people die due to the extreme conditions and the brutal toil of the Gulag camps.
Randi weighs 36 kilos in that first camp. She is ravaged by typhus. The first Russian words she learns are “water” and “bread”. But things would worsen for this young girl. Her stomach begins to grow. She is pregnant, 22 years old and in a prison camp in Kiev, in the Ukraine.
On 6 January 1946, little Laila is born. Randi tries despera- tely to keep Laila alive, but has nothing but a sheet to wrap her newborn baby in. She sends frantic letters to Norway, but no help arrives. The little baby girl lives only for eight months, then dies of tuberculosis and malnutrition. A tiny coffin is made, but Randi never learns where her daughter is buried. “That was the worst thing I experienced in the Soviet”, she says of Laila’s fate.
More than seven years are to pass after her daughter’s death before Randi is granted amnesty and set free in 1953, the year that Stalin dies. Randi Robertson was among the nearly 150 who survived of the roughly 212 Norwegian prisoners who toiled in Gulag. She was also the only woman. By that time Randi has toiled herself nearly to death in at least eight different camps: Odessa, Kiev, Severodvinsk, Archangel, Ust-Kut, Kirensk, Bratsk, Taisjet. But finally, back to Norway on 29 November 1953.
Back to an empty railway station with no family members or friends to meet her. Nor does anyone believe her story. She is suspected for many years of having been a soviet spy. Randi Robertson is kept under observation by the Norwegian authorities for over 20 years after her liberation from the Gulag camps.