Diamon Williams
11/15/2014
Criminal Justice 10:00 am-11:15am
Solzhenitsyn, A. (1962). One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: Russia.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was written by Alexksandr Solzhenitsyn, who himself faced many of the same punishments that is displayed in the novel. Ivan Denisovich was a Russian inmate at Stalinist labor camp in 1951. Ivan was accused of becoming a spy after being captured by the Germans, during World War II. He is presumed innocent, but was sentenced to ten years in a forced labor camp. Throughout the story there way many challenges Ivan encountered while being locked away in those camps. He had to grow accustom too many different things he wasn’t used to. The book portrays how tough one day in a concentration camp was for many people, and some ways in which there dignity was taken away from them.
What’s was the problem? Although Denisovich was a poor and uneducated man, he was faced with huge challenges, in which was trying to survive in the camp. Russians and many other ethics also faced the challenges of trying to keep their freedom. In the novel, they were also forced with trying to stay alive and survive in hostile circumstances that they had no control over. Some challenges Denisovich faced while being in the camp was he was forced to awake the times the guards told them. The prisoners barely had any food to consume. In the camps, there were no beds, prisoners were forced to sleep on harden beds. Prisoners were forced to go through many harsh obstacles such as working in dangerous weather conditions.
The conditions and treatments inside Stalinist labor camps were designed to attack its prisoners’ physical and spiritual dignities. The living conditions were very intolerable. There bedding had no sheets; prisoners only ate two hundred grams of bread per meal; the prisoners were forced by guards to undress for body searches at temperatures of forty below zero. The camps also degraded prisoners spiritually; their names became combinations of letters and numbers. Prisoners individuality was taken away, they were referred to as nicknames given to them by the guards.
However, through all of the trials, prisoners at Stalinist camp never lost faith. Although they did not agree with the way they were being treated, they also kept their beliefs for themselves. Ivan developed his
