03/02/2026
They called it ‘the Baptism’ — what they did to Soviet female prisoners on the very first day
This testimony was recorded in 1997. Galina Sokolova tells her story of survival. She remained silent for 52 years about the events that took place in N**i concentration camps. These are her words. My name is Galina Sokolova. I am 75 years old now. I'm sitting in my small room in St. Petersburg, and it's snowing outside, just like it was back in 1941.
I was silent for 52 years. I didn’t talk about this with my husband, my son, or my neighbors. Silence was my second skin, the armor I put on myself the day I was freed. But the armor wears out. Memory begins to press on the chest more strongly than concrete slabs. I decided to tell this story now because soon there will be no one to remember the truth.
True, not in history books, where they write about strategies and victories. The truth is in the smell of bleach, in the feeling of ice water on burning skin, and in the way a person ceases to be human overnight. This is not a hero's story, but a confession of a survivor who still wakes up from her own screams.
Before the world turned upside down , I was an ordinary girl. I lived in Leningrad, studied at the Faculty of Philology, and dreamed of becoming a literature teacher. I loved Pushkin's poems and believed that beauty would save the world. How naive I was. My life was filled with simple, understandable things.
The smell of fresh bread from the bakery on the corner, the creaking of a tram, the laughter of my best friend Irina. Irina was completely different, funny, lively, with a long red braid, which she was so proud of. We made plans for the summer, discussed boys, and argued about books. We didn't know that our future had already been crossed out in black ink on a map in some German headquarters.
When the war began, we did not immediately understand that this was the end of our lives. We thought that it would not last long, that our army would quickly push back the enemy. But then the bombings began, famine, blockade, and then came the most terrible day. The day we were captured. This happened not in the city, but in the region where we were sent to dig trenches.
We found ourselves surrounded. I remember only chaos, the barking of dogs and foreign speech that cut my ears like a knife. We were herded together like cattle. Nobody asked for names. We ceased to be human the moment we were pushed into freight cars. I will never forget this train. The carriage was packed to capacity.
There was nothing to breathe. We stood pressed against each other so tightly that if someone died, he did not fall, but continued to stand, squeezed between living bodies. In the corner someone was moaning, someone was praying. But by the third day, silence set in. The silence of despair. We were driving into the unknown.
There was no food or water. There was only a small barred window right under the ceiling, through which a ray of light occasionally shone through . I looked at this beam and tried to remember lines from my favorite books, but there was emptiness in my head, only fear. Irina was next to me. She held my hand so tightly that my fingers went numb .
She whispered that everything would be fine. that we are being taken to work, that we are young and strong. She tried to deceive herself . When the train finally stopped, the doors swung open with a bang. Icy air and screams burst into the carriage. Raus, Schnell, faster! They started throwing us out. Those who could not walk were helped by rifle butts.
I fell onto the platform, blinded by the spotlights. All around there was only the barking of shepherds, black uniforms and barbed wire stretching off into infinity. It was Raven Sbruk. But then we didn’t know this name yet. We just realized that we were in hell. They drove us through the gate. The ground was dirty and cold.
We were exhausted from the road, hungry, dirty. But the worst was yet to come. We were led to a long brick building. The guards laughed and pointed their fingers at us. The female guards, in their impeccable uniforms, looked at us with disgust, as if we were insects that needed to be crushed. We were ordered to undress completely right there in the cold room, in front of the male soldiers.
Shame was the first instrument of their torture. Young girls, grown women, old women, we all had to shed the clothes that were our last protection, our last link to home. I remember how Irina's hands shook when she unbuttoned the buttons. She cried silently . Tears just rolled down her dirty face.
I tried to cover myself with my hands, but I got hit on the shoulder with a whip. "Hands down!" - the warden screamed. We stood naked, shivering with cold and terror, deprived of everything. Then began the procedure which they cynically called sanitization. But we, the survivors, remembered it as baptism or baptism.
First, they shaved us roughly with blunt clippers that tore out our hair in clumps. I saw Irina's red braid fall onto the wet concrete floor. Along with our hair, we lost our face. We became identical, grey creatures without gender or age. When I ran my hand over my bald head, I felt that Galina, who loved poetry, had died. Only the bodies remained. But that was just the beginning.
They drove us further into the shower room. We thought it would be water. We were so thirsty, we were so eager to wash off the dirt of the carriages. But what poured down on us was not water. It was a caustic chemical liquid. I don't know exactly what it was. Some kind of disinfectant solution, possibly a mixture of chlorine and some kind of acid against the necks, but I remember the feeling.
As soon as the liquid touched my skin, it was as if I was engulfed in flames. It burned unbearably. The body, covered with abrasions, wounds from beatings and insect bites on the train, flared with pain. The disinfectant got into the eyes, nose, and mouth. The air was filled with a suffocating chemical smell that made me feel nauseous.
There were screams all around. The women tried to cover their faces, but the guards sprayed us with hoses, knocking us off our feet. "It's for your own good, Russian pigs," they shouted. I fell to my knees, covering my eyes with my hands. The liquid was running down my back and it felt like my skin was being ripped off.
I heard Irina screaming somewhere nearby. She was choking. She had asthma, which no one here knew about and no one cared about. I tried to feel for her hand in this chemical fog, but I couldn’t find it. The floor was slippery from this liquid. It was at that moment, through a veil of tears and pain, that I looked up. A German officer stood at the door.
He didn't shout or laugh like the others. He just stood and watched. He was tall, wearing a perfectly fitting uniform. His face was inscrutable. It was Karl Hoffman. I didn't know his name then. I only saw his eyes. They were looking straight at me. They didn't have the sadistic joy that I saw in others.
There was something else in them : cold curiosity, or perhaps a momentary confusion. I'm naked, bald, writhing in pain on the floor. And he, the arbiter of destinies in clean boots. Our eyes met for a split second. I didn't look away. I don't know where this audacity or this despair came from in me. I looked at him through the pain, as if asking: "Do you see a person in me or just meat?" He frowned slightly and turned away, leaving the room.
This chemical shower lasted, it seemed, forever, although it was probably only 10 minutes, when the water, if you can call it that, turned off, and we were left standing there wet, smelling of a pharmacy and death. The skin was burning like fire. She became red and inflamed. My eyes were watering so much that the world was blurry.... READ FULL STORY 👇👇👇