Part I, Chapter 12, The Cellars at Black Lake Summary and Analysis

In Part I, Chapter 12, Black Lake is a lakeside resort; the Soviet secret police also had a building there, and the name "Black Lake" became infamous. Ginzburg is taken into the cellar of the secret police building at Black Lake, where she was put into cell 3. Her cell mate is Lyama Shepel, twenty-two years of age. Lyama's family worked on the Chinese-Far Eastern Railway, which was sold to the Manchurians. When the railway families returned to Soviet Russia, most of them were arrested as spies.

The cell they are in is dark, barely lit by a red light bulb, damp, and full of rust and foul smells. Lyama teaches Ginzburg the ways of communicating in the prison, such as scrawling her initials on wood planks in the...