In the fullness of their perversity, the Soviets decided to build a middle school and a prison side-by-side on the outskirts of Moscow. Olga attended the middle school, where the girls and boys had to wear school uniforms that were a perfect example of the Soviet hatred of beautiful things. The boys wore a shapeless jacket and trousers like cardboard. The girls wore lumpy jackets, knee-length skirts and rough knee-socks. The uniforms were the colour of cowdung. The girls passionately hated their uniforms. Every morning, dressing for school, they felt their souls slipping away.
The prison next to the school was a high-security prison for men. The prisoners were political prisoners. They were not murderers, rapists, criminals. They were decent men who had got caught in some change of the political climate, a common thing in the Soviet Union. One day you were in, the next day you were out.
The prisoners were let out at noon each day for a walk in the open air. They trooped along a narrow passageway with high brick walls on each side and barbed wire on top. For some of its length, the passageway ran beside Olga’s school. At noon every day, Olga and her schoolmates filled the school windows that overlooked the passageway. They waved down to the passing prisoners. The prisoners waved back, some of them with tears in their eyes.
As time passed, the schoolchildren and the prisoners became friends. The schoolchildren began to throw little gifts down to the prisoners: cigarettes, matchboxes, pieces of chocolate. For the prisoners, this was manna from heaven. Their faces lit up with joy. Olga became friends with one prisoner in particular, a small man with a gentle face and sad smile. She looked for him every day in the procession of prisoners, saw him, waved to him, blew kisses to him, threw little gifts down to him which he caught, smiling and waving. The prisoners threw little gifts back to the schoolchildren – little toys made of wood or bits of scrap metal. One day Olga’s friend, the small man with a gentle face, threw a little gift wrapped in newspaper up to Olga. She caught it and clasped it to her breast. The small man smiled at her sadly, waved, and walked away.
Olga held the package of newspaper in her right hand all day, until she got home from school. When she had a private moment, she carefully unwrapped the package, and found inside a tiny angel, beautifully wrought from a scrap piece of tin. She cried tears of joy.
The next day at noon, Olga searched the procession of prisoners for her friend, but he wasn’t there. She never saw him again.
The tiny angel is Olga’s most precious possession. She wears it to this day on a necklace which she never takes off.
The Videbaek Zone 