Ideas - Voices of a silenced history: inside Bulgaria's Gulag

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

During the Communist era in Bulgaria, anyone who opposed the government could be arrested, sent to the Gulag. For 20 years, Lilia Topouzova has been collecting the stories of those who survived. She recreated a Bulgarian room where her conversations with survivors can be heard, a space about the absence of memory and what that does to a people.

If you want to hear daily news that doesn't hurt your soul and might even be good for your soul, check out As It Happens. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Nielke Oksal. Every day we reach people at the center of the most extraordinary stories, like the doctor who restored a patient's eyesight with a tooth. Or a musician in an orchestra that plays instruments made out of vegetables. Take the scenic route through the day's news with As It Happens, and you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. In order to get anyone to tell you a story, you need to encounter the person. You need to see the person.

So when you're making a film in Eastern Europe or when you're conducting research as a scholar in Eastern Europe, you need to be able to A, drink, B, smoke, and three, eat a lot. And so, you know, maybe as a younger person I was good at all these three things. But more than anything, I think it's about also letting people know who you are. Liliya Tabuzova is a documentary filmmaker and a historian at the University of Toronto. Her work explores the afterlives of political violence and the relationship between remembering and forgetting. I never record anything with people until I've spent at least a year with them. I am not interested in recording because people will never be themselves, especially people

who have gone through severe trauma or people who have inflicted severe trauma on others' perpetrators. She has spent more than two decades studying the Bulgarian gulag, excavating a history that has been deliberately silenced. Very clearly the minister said Belen, the main forced labor camp, should vanish as a symbol of the repressive system. Lillia is fascinated by what lives inside silence. Both the silence of survivors.

There was no language. There were no words. I knew they had been sent to camps. I could see many of them had their files, but they couldn't express. And the silence of those who lived near the camps but learned to never acknowledge their existence. They didn't want to talk to me about the camp. They wanted to talk to me about the weather, about Canada.

I was also beginning to recognize that the camps are a kind of a present absence. Everybody knows they existed. Nobody wants to talk about them, at least directly. So I've had conversations with people about ordinary things like the weather and mosquitoes, for instance. As a filmmaker, Liliya usually turns to images to tell stories. But this story, she realized, is fundamentally about sound, about whispers, about hesitation, and the sound of a room where someone simply cannot speak at all. With her colleagues Julian Chehirian and Krasmira Butseva, she recreated spaces from a Bulgarian home and turned them into an immersive audio installation where survivors' voices and

their silences could live on. Their installation is called The Neighbors. It was the official Bulgarian entry to the 2024 Venice Biennale. And in the fall of 2023, it had its North American premiere in a small room on the University of Toronto campus. We're calling this episode, The Sound of Their Memories.

Here's Ideas producer producer Philip Coulter. So we've just gotten out of the elevator. Where are we? So we are on the third floor of the Monk Center, the Devanshire building. And we are going to go to the room, which is where we're going to stage the installation. Now, as you see, this is a project study room. My office is just across the hall, and I was given the key to this room by our wonderful administrator, who said to me,

you know, Lily, you don't need to go downstairs to the first floor, there's a great water cooler in here. At that point, I was actually not even thinking of doing the installation in Canada. We had staged it very successfully in Bulgaria, and I was working on the academic project on the workshop. And then I was given the key to this room and now you'll see why I fell in love with it. And I like working with found

objects and now this room to me is a found object. It is a naturally sealed room. As you can see, there's no window. The window was sealed. The floor, if you take a look at the floor, it's quite old. In fact, it looks to me like an Eastern European apartment from the 1980s, early 1990s, even one today. And then here's the real gem. This is what I found. Well there's a couple of old records, like vinyl records that are up on the wall.

They look like old 78s, but they're not. This is like an early version of a 33, about a 10 inch record. That's right. It's the Globe and Mail Learn a Language Record Course. And these are the Russian courses. And you can see some of the lessons. It says Russian, lesson 36, to lose, to seek, to find. And there are two of these.

Somebody kept these and saved them and put them up on the wall. That's right. And I decided that this is the perfect space, because there are already objects of this era that speak directly to our research project, to our installation, and I became obsessed with the idea of staging the installation here. You know, one extra thing that strikes me standing in here, you can probably hear it. Just listen for a moment.

There's a rumble coming from somewhere. It's slightly sinister. I guess that's part of the attraction of the room. It's actually a very spooky, sinister room. It's a spooky, sinister room that looks completely ordinary. But there's a feeling that hovers here, and that's why I decided that I wanted to do the installation here. You were describing the floor being a creaking floor. I think we need to demonstrate the creakingness of the floor. Let's walk around. OK. That's the wonderful thing about this room.

You know what? It means that nobody can ever creep up on you. And it also means that when people come in to see the installation once it's staged, we don't need to do so much of the sound work. In a sense, it's already there. The creaking floor is already there. The hovering you hear above that you pointed to, that's already there.

The windows are already sealed. So it means that we are already in a found space where we can begin building, right? Turning scholarship into into media. So the installation that you're putting in here, what is it? This is an installation that I'm putting together with two of my colleagues, Julian Cihirin and Krasimir Bocseva. Together with Julian and Krasimir, we already did an installation once in Bulgaria that represents the room of the forced labor camp survivors, Gulag survivors, from the Bulgarian Gulag. The room is based on 20 years of research that I conducted and

on my interviews. So what we are actually recreating are the spaces where I conducted the interviews. So when we originally did this project in Sofia, we were inhabiting a massive former printing house that was continuously occupied from 1930 until the pandemic, when we became, you know, pre-demolition, we were sort of the last residents of that space. My name is Julian Chakurian. I'm a historian in training.

I'm doing a PhD in the history of science at Princeton University. And I'm also a multimedia artist with an interest in archives and expositions of wayward histories. And in that space, we have three rooms that were part of this larger landscape. Based on the oral histories that I recorded, there were three categories of camp survivor narratives.

There were the narratives of the people who had always told their story. There were very few of them, but these are the kind of practiced narrators. That was one way of remembering the Gulag. The second way of remembering the Gulag were people who still had memories of their experiences, but they had never told them before. So people who had never shared their story, because usually nobody asked them, but they remembered everything and they usually had chronicles of their experiences, little notes that they had taken down.

And the third category, and that is the most painful category, is of those who couldn't speak. There was no language. There were no words. I knew they had been sent to camps. I could see many of them had their files, but they couldn't express. Based on these three categories that emerged from the oral histories from the scholarly research, we decided to recreate three different rooms to illustrate the different ways of

remembering trauma. And the first room was the living room, and that is the space of the first people, those who've always spoken. And we think of the living room as a space where we sit and we have conversations and people speak with ease. And in the living room exist the voices of those few survivors who have spoken openly about their experience through the years. The second room was the bedroom.

We recreated the bedroom as a woman's bedroom because many of the survivors who hadn't spoken before were women. We have very, very little information about what women went through, very few narratives, and we decided to recreate the corner of kind of women's absent memories, and there we were able to play the first interviews that we had with women. The third room is the kitchen. When you enter the kitchen, there is no voices, there are only sounds. So the kitchen was the space where everything like visually was painted white, like there were no colors and you can hear sounds of like presents like

someone making coffee, plates moving, steps and it was the room where there were no voices, just the presence of someone. I'm Krasmina Butseva and I'm a visual artist, a researcher and a senior lecturer at the University of the Arts London. And I'm one of the three members of this team working on the neighbors. And what happened when this was staged for the first time in Sofia was that people spent the most time in the kitchen. Because they said that was like, that was my family, that was our kitchen. No one spoke, but everyone knew that something had happened.

I think many people will have heard of the Gulag that took place in the Soviet Union in what is now Russia. But there is a Bulgarian Gulag. Can you talk a little bit about what the Gulag was and then we can talk a bit more about what your project is? Absolutely. The Bulgarian Gulag functioned between 1945 and 1962 primarily, but it was never completely closed. Forced labor campaign tournament in Bulgaria took place without trial and sentence in the 1970s and ominously in the 1980s during the

forced assimilation campaign of Bulgaria's Muslim minorities. So the forced labor camps, the Gulag, were based on the Soviet Gulag. So once Bulgaria became part of the Soviet bloc, once Stalinization took place in the country much as it did in the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, there followed extrajudicial interment and repression. And so the Bulgarian Gulag is modeled on the Soviet Gulag. It's the same kind of principle. People are sent to a forced labor camp without a trial, without a sentence. They are there usually for an indeterminate period of time.

And the living conditions are excruciating. There is forced labor, there are hardships, there is disease, starvation. It's a very painful experience. And so we are looking at a country of about 7 million people, 110,000 square kilometers. There were about 40 labor, forced labor camp complexes, so about 80 individual sites. So Bulgaria became known after 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as Little Siberia. So who were these people? Who got sent to the labor camps, to the Gulag? The simple answer to the question is enemies.

Perceived enemies, alleged enemies. But there are many different categories. So political dissidents. Now when I think of political dissidents, that's also a very broad category. These were people on the left, but on the non-communist left. These were social democrats, anarchists, members of the agrarian party, Trotskites, and actually eventually by 1949, communists who fell out of favor with the communist regimes were also sent to the Gulag with the communist party.

So that is the first category of people. Then you had a lot of peasants who wanted to hold onto their land. Bulgaria was primarily a peasant country. So you had a lot of people who would not technically be considered political opponents, but their acts of defiance, like wanting to hold on to your land. They were cool acts. They were cool acts. Exactly. So they became political opponents. They were seen as political opponents. And then we have nonconformists. I like the category of nonconformists. The French Bulgar category of nonconformists. The

French Bulgarian philosopher Tsetan Todorov introduces us to this category of nonconformists. These were people who somehow defied the social norms of the era. They defied the social norms of the late 40s, the late 50s, the 60s. There were people who were interested in wearing their hair longer. There were people who liked listening in wearing their hair longer. There were people who liked listening to Western music, for instance, swing. They liked dancing to swing. There were young girls who wore short skirts. They dressed inappropriately.

They wore their hair in a way that the regime considered offensive. They too were sent to the forced labor camps. And then there's the category never used as such by the communist regime of ethnic enemies, but what we think of ethnic enemies, now Bulgaria has a very large Muslim and Roma minority. So people who wanted to preserve and practice their religion were also sent to the forced labor camps. As I said, the last wave of that was in the 1980s, between 1984 and 1987, communist Bulgaria interned members, men, about 500 men of its Muslim minority to the camp, again, for forced labor. And it's usually, it's the same campsite that they use throughout.

I mean, they use many different ones, but there's one main one on the Danube between Bulgaria and Romania called Belen Island. And that is where they were interned. And so these are the main categories and camp internment. I think this is really important for us to think about even today. When we think about who goes, who is sent to prison, how are people sent to prison? And when you think of repression camps were used when you wanted to get rid of opponents or anyone that you perceived as an enemy,

and you couldn't find the route through judicial means. It was always like leaving a door open and saying, well, if we cannot find enough evidence, because sometimes there wasn't any evidence because people did nothing wrong, we could always use that route, that back door. As you can see, we've integrated the installation throughout the Monk School building, so on this landing we're seeing part of the home of a Bulgarian Gulag survivor.

One interesting thing is because at the Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, we have a lot of students from Eastern Europe, and almost every single one has said, this looks like my grandmother's apartment. This looks like the blanket that sits on my grandparent's couch. I am Professor Josh Arthurs in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. I,

along with my collaborator, Liliya Topuzova, have put together a joint initiative on the politics and lived experience of authoritarianism. It includes an academic workshop where scholars are presenting the global range of cases from Turkey and Myanmar to Germany, Ukraine today, and focusing on the imprints that state violence and coercion have on ordinary people, the marks that they leave on psyches, on future generations, how societies debate the legacies left behind by authoritarian regimes. Okay, we're finishing the tour. Do you want to take a question? I like the idea that this could be also a room of ordinary people. In my research in Turkey, there were also objects that were somehow hidden. In my case, for example, books. Books were very representative of intellectuals and leftist militants,

so they were forced to burn or hide their books. So in there, how you still can find secret books, like with a cover, is a novel or something else. Are they turned around? Yes. Just like the books in the landing that we recreated. Do you see how the books are turned around? Yes, they are turned around. Just like the books in the landing, in the landing that we recreated, do you see all the books are turned around? Yeah. For the very reasons.

Alright. Second draft. So you have this object that, for example, in the children always remember the violence of a state that can enter in domestic space and you also have to, I don't know, conceal yourself through material culture. By the way, this is how we work. We've had these discussions for nine years, and then we have a studio, and then as we speak, we do.

And this is very much our practice embodied. We recognize that there are things about those experiences of violence that are not easily communicated by scholarly prose and by documentary evidence. And so in tandem with the academic discussions, we are also holding this installation. This event was also organized with the support of Soulpepper Theatre, which helped with the staging of our installation. There is a kind of fragility and frailty in historical methodology that I think what we're

doing here is an attempt to sort of stitch together the wayward sinews that slip away, one slips away as the next appears. Your project is, as you've described it, a way of recreating the life and the experience and the memories of people who lived through the Gulag. After the collapse of communism in the late 80s, early 90s, what happened to the records that would have been in the state detailing the stories and the lives and the official records of the people that went to the Gulag? What happened to that and to what extent can you work off that in building your project? This is a great question. This is our great challenge. Shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, in fact several weeks after the Berlin Wall fell and the communist regime collapsed across Central and Eastern Europe, Bulgaria, including the Ministry of the Interior and the secret

police purged the archives. It took them about several months to do so, and about 40% of the operational archive of the Ministry of the Interior was purged. And what's really amazing though is that together with colleagues, I found the order that set the purge. So in fact, we have the kind of transcripts and the order by the Minister of the Interior then that set the purge in motion. And here's what we know. Very clearly the minister said,

Belen, the name of the camp, should vanish as a system, as a symbol of the repressive system. Belen, the main forced labor camp, should vanish as a symbol of the repressive system. So we know that information on the camps was a priority. We can never know for certain what documents were purged. It's very hard to know that information on the camps was a priority. We can never know for certain what documents were purged. It's very hard to know that.

But we know that they wanted to get rid of evidence. Let's talk about your project. Because your project is, as you've described it, to a large extent, to, if you like, un-vanish, undisappear the records of the lives of people who suffered through the Gulag. How does it work? How do you go about doing that? How do you go about bringing back that which has disappeared? I'll start at the beginning. I was a graduate student here at the University of Toronto working on my masters. I was writing a master's thesis on the information research department in the UK.

As I was browsing books at Robratt's library on St. George Street, I came across a small booklet that had a black and white photograph. I could see that it's Bulgarian. I'm born in Bulgaria. I could read Bulgarian. I'm born in Bulgaria. I could read Bulgarian. And I saw a black and white photograph on this booklet of a woman who was a forced labor camp guard. So I came across the story of the Gulag in a way as a graduate student here on the cover of a book. And I became very interested in the story of this woman because

it triggered memories of my childhood in communist Bulgaria and the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was born in 1979, so the first 11 years of my life almost. I grew up as part of the communist Lenin Youth. So I was a member, I was a very enthusiastic member of the Lenin Youth. I was a very proud young pioneer. I stood guard very proudly in front of monuments of partisans. And then all of a sudden, that world collapsed. And then I was part of the million people diaspora from that country and many millions more from that part of the world who came to the West with my father when the world

collapsed. And so as a graduate student, when I found this photograph, I wanted to revisit this past. I wanted to find out more about what had happened in these camps, what were these camps who were sent there. I knew that I had a great grandfather who had been sent there, but I didn't know much more than that. And so I was already doing my master's degree,

I already knew a little bit about research, and I went back to Bulgaria. But the reason I went back to Bulgaria is because I wanted to find out more about this young woman who was a guard. I knew that she had become a guard in the Gulag when she was 19, and I knew that she had stood trial for her crimes, and I also knew that she was nicknamed Julia the Beautiful. So I was about the same age as she was when I started doing this research,

as she had been rather when she became a guard in the forced labor camps. And so I went back to try and find out more about her. And I did what any good graduate student would do at the time. I went to the main bookstore of the University of Sofia, and I was browsing through the bookstore. I went to the main bookstore of the University of Sofia. And I was browsing through the bookstore.

I didn't find any obvious books, monographs about Gulag, about the forced labor camps. And so I asked the clerk behind the counter, I'm interested in reading more about the camps. Can you, about the Gulag, can you direct me to some readings? I mean, they had a sizable collection. And she looked at me. There was a bit of silence. And then she said, what camps? I said, the forced labor camps.

And I started naming them, the main ones, Belenny, Lovich, Silence. And then she said, there were no such camps. So there are no such books. And I kind of went out and I said, how is it possible? And then I started doing more research and in fact there was no evidence. I mean everyone knew of course that there were such camps. I remember even in the early 1990s all the newspaper had published articles, we had interviews with the survivors on television.

There was so much evidence but there was nothing immediately available in Bulgaria. So what I did is I started talking to anyone who had, first to anyone who was willing to talk to me, but also anyone who had written anything about the camps in newspapers. I went to the archives of the newspapers that had published the first articles and they said, yes, you can come and see the newspaper and they brought me to a building and it was in a basement and there were garbage bags and there had been a flooding so that newspaper was not preserved. Years later we found some of the articles in the archive in Hungary but again we don't have an actual archive of the main newspaper that had published the articles. And I kind of stood in this basement taking

out wet newspaper out of these garbage bags, and it made no sense. And so I found some of the journalists who had written the articles, and the journalists who had written the book about the camp trial. There had also been a trial against perpetrators from the camps.

And so I met with him and I said, listen, I'm interested in finding out more. And he said, you're a young person. You're just starting out your life. Don't do this to yourself. All of us who had in some way or another contact with this past were injured or psyches are injured. A few people became ill.

Don't do that. Don't look for this path. Don't dig into this. But of course, the more somebody tells you don't do it, of course the more you want to do it. On ideas, you're listening to the sound of their memories. You can hear ideas on CBC Radio One in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, in Australia,

on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake.

No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now. In a small windowless room on the University of Toronto campus, a 1920s Singer sewing machine stitches through a copy of a secret police file. This order sent women to forced labor camps under the repressive communist regime that

ruled Bulgaria from 1946 to 1989. I have the exact files that sent women to forced labor camps and I have one specific file. I don't know how it escaped the purge. Nobody saw how cruel this sounded. That very directly says, women should be toiling very hard at the storm quarry. May their hands burn. May their hands be full of blisters. The sewing machine slices through a copy of the order, overriding the text with red thread. Women who are sent to the forced labor camps, a lot of these survivors never had the opportunity

to go and face the perpetrators, the guards and the people who are responsible for sending them to trial in a courtroom. They never had the chance. This is as close as we can get to women owning the narrative of their perpetrators, undoing it, puncturing it. That is the encounter that never took place. That is the trial that never happened. Lilia Topozova is a documentary filmmaker and a historian at the University of Toronto. Alongside her collaborators, Julian Chehirian and Krasmira Butzova, she recreated spaces from a Bulgarian home and turned them into an immersive installation.

To access a deliberately silenced history, she turned to sound, the sound of survivors' voices and the sound of their silence. And she turned to objects, which have their own stories to tell. Let's begin with some of the objects. The first important object is a mirror. We decided to buy these objects here because it was too expensive to actually transport the installation and the objects from Bulgaria. And so what I did, I have lived in Toronto for many years, I charted out the areas where there is a big Eastern European diaspora near a Goodwill. And so I went to Goodwills where I knew for certain there would be objects

from Eastern Europeans and Central European homes. This mirror that we're looking at is a genuine version of what a Bulgarian mirror might have looked like back in the 1980s. Bulgarian, Hungarian, Russian, Czech, Romanian. All the same. Take a pic. And so I wanted to start with Amir because one of the most important narratives that I have of a survivor from a, actually from a prison, she was a political prisoner, a social democrat, Nadezhda Kassabova is her name, is that, and we played that in the recording, people hear it, she says that

when she, she had to spend about seven years in the prison and when she left the prison and went home her family was waiting for her and they all began crying and she couldn't understand why they were crying. She said they should be happy I survived, I'm alive and then all of a sudden she saw herself in the mirror and couldn't recognize herself. She said, why are they crying? And then she said, who is this wretched woman there looking at me across the street? She couldn't recognize her own image.

So I wanted a mirror because you will hear her narrative and we need a mirror. She took me to my grandfather's house, where my aunt, her husband and other relatives from my grandfather's family, from my mother's family were. When they opened the door, they shouted, Grandma Donke, look, we brought her a life and well. As I walk in, I see everyone is crying. And I ask them, why are you all crying? And I look in the mirror, a large mirror,

and there I meet the gaze of a girl with long straight hair, with sunken cheeks, and I wonder, is this me? Or is it not me? I couldn't recognize myself. Where could I see a mirror? There was no mirror in prison. I've heard it about two, three hundred times probably by now or more. I know each word of it and I can just say it like a text that I've learned.

And yet I'm affected each time. Nothing changes. It doesn't matter that I know each word, that I have heard this information. And there's a moment at the very end of that recording when Nadezhda says, Where do I look? I don't look. Like, where's the mirror? There's no mirror. And someone who's, I think, sitting next to her, who may not be you, finishes her sentence.

There are no mirrors in the camp. Where do I look? I don't look. But now I don't look. And it feels like, for someone like myself her sentence. There are no mirrors in the cam. It feels like for someone like myself who was not presiding in these interviews, it felt like I felt so much there that there was something communal about the memory that even though the memory is incommunicable, different people hold different pieces and the, it's this process of almost like exfoliating the implicit silent memory. The person who was with me in the room when I conducted this interview in 2011 in Gornouryachovice, which is a town, a small town in central Bulgaria, was another woman who herself was a victim of political violence. She never wanted to be recorded. She never wanted to go on the record.

But she accompanied me to the interviews because she thought it was important that we share the women's stories. She was a friend of Natasda. She's the one who agreed to make the connection because these interviews are based on interpersonal connections. Nadezhda Kassabova herself was a social democrat. She was a leftist who had opposed the communist takeover and the communist regime. And so she had been ready to speak for the first time in her life. Her friend wasn't, but she finished her sentences sometimes for her. And it's the only record that we have of this woman, and I'm not sharing her name because

she does not want to share her name. And we do have her testimony in this indirect way when she finishes her sentences. We turned the recorder off shortly after she shared with us the story of the mirror and we had to pause. And what doesn't go on the record, what is not recorded, is that her fear that she hadn't done a good job in telling me the story. I thought it was one of the most powerful narratives I had recorded. There were moments when I myself needed a break from it. And so we would often hit the pause button and return to it again and again. But these fragments, as you said, of her friend finishing her sentences,

these fragments as well, they're testimonies. And from there I was watched by a young girl with long hair, with a hair, with a big smile. And I said to her, am I? Am I? important. Now we're not going to smoke in this room, I just want to save the record, but ashtrays are important. A lot of the survivors smoked, a lot of people from that part of the world that that period of time smoked, but a lot of people smoked here at that period of time as well. So we need to begin with have some ashtrays, a genuine salt and pepper shakers because you never just interview people, There's always a lot of food and drinks.

The sound is coming from a Turkish coffee maker and from a stack of porcelain or ceramic plates in the cabinet. So it sort of drips vertically. Like there's almost a kind of panning a vertical pan downwards let's see what this one is hmm we can find light switch dot wave that wave. It's a live switch in my home, like in the house where I lived, like I was raised in my hometown. A lot of the sounds I recorded there, it's actually an apartment in a tower block from socialism in a small city. And it's kind of preserved in terms of architectural insight and most of the objects are from communism.

So I was going there to just see my grandmother, but also with the recorder recording, like opening the doors and closing the doors because they're very creaky. And then also recording the fridge, the fridge there is like makes even louder sounds than this one. So I was like recording inside of the fridge,

the freezer, super nice, beautiful sounds. And then all kinds of whatever I can figure out to make a sound with in this flat, which then that was transported into the installation later. transported into the installation later. But we very much replicate the sounds we heard in these apartments when we conducted the interviews. It's just that, you know, when you are interviewing the survivors, you cannot focus on soundscapes

because you're so focused on the encounter and on the narrative. So they very much exist as background noises in the original audio recordings. But of course they need to be captured and remade professionally, which is not a possibility as you're encountering that human being and attempting to understand or at least preserve the narrative that they're telling you or even not telling you sometimes. Then we have the... These are important. These are the self-published memoirs of the survivors. So you see all these books existed, but they're mostly self-published. So I've collected them through the years and I've brought them here.

And I also brought, for instance, a survivor from one of the most violent camps, the Lovage Camp, Nicola D'Affino. He always wanted to write a book, but he couldn't. You've got a little, you've got a plastic envelope that has some papers, some cards, some writing and a small paper poster. That's right. The paper poster is the cover of the book he never wrote. He also gave me... This is a letter. It is dated 11th of December, 1960, the city of Lovage,

and it begins, Dear Mother, Father and Liddy. This is the letter written in the camp? In the camp by the camp survivor, and he didn't trust the state. And so he gave me his material, and he said, I will give it to you under one condition. You never deposit it in the Bulgarian archives because they will destroy it. And so I keep it with me because that's a promise I made.

But one day I will of course deposit it. And so I have a lot of little artifacts like that. This is a painting by the father of a woman who was married to a camp survivor. She was grateful that I recorded her narrative and she wanted to give me this painting of her father's as a gift. What do you see in that painting? It looks like there are maybe camp guards and a bunch of people in front of a camp and they're being told to move to the side. It's not very clear. Is it maybe if we move it further

that looks like a very young person right over here. There's sketches. These are I think visual attempts at capturing the experience of the camp. But again, visual attempts at capturing the experience of the camp. But again, because people had to live in secret with these stories, nothing is very obvious. Nothing is very clear to us.

So we need to decipher the meaning as best as we can as scholars. It's like this painting. The past itself is blurred. Everything is blurred. And the hardest thing in the world, probably, is to try and recreate that experience. What needs to be done to bring it back into sharp focus. And I guess that's the struggle.

I think I've struggled with precisely what you said, what you put very eloquently for many years. It's very... once you get the hang of it, it's easy to write an academic paper. Once you get the hang of, you know, crafting scholarship, crafting an argument, using evidence, that... we're trained to do that, we can do that. It's easy to even deliver a lecture on the topic. While it may not be an emotionally easy topic, again, once you master the history in the historiography, you can do that. But to convey to people the feeling that I experienced in that room, in the room that I'm in with these survivors, that is the hardest.

And that is what I'm trying to do, to convey that feeling with my colleagues, with Julian and with Krasimir. Both myself and Lily have had the experience of going to the homes of the survivors who, when I was meeting them, were at the very end of their lives. So when I would go there, it would be me making the coffee for us to drink. It won't be them. They won't be able to stand and make the coffee. It would be me opening the biscuits that someone else has brought before me and me helping them out and sometimes not recording, not photographing, not doing anything really, just having a coffee

and leaving and just staying there with them and not asking any questions about the past, the present, just allowing for them to speak about whatever they're interested in saying. So here we have this kind of a corner of these objects, we have this important calendar, which is very kind of a part of any home of someone that age. There would always be one of these exactly kind of the same, just with a different picture. The calendar is significant because they're markers of time. They lived always keeping track of time, the outside time, the weeks that pass, but they also had their own internal clock and internal times.

And it's the time that they survived. They lived out, there's the exterior world and that's what the calendar keeps tracks of. And then there's the interior world and the interior time of their own rhythm. And there are two worlds. You have the outside world that does not at all remember the camps and the violence. The empty fields, the former campsites are empty fields. And then there's the interior world of time where the camp exists only in these apartments. Maybe we can walk you to where Prisimera brought these authentic stones from the Lovage Stone

Quarry, one of the most violent camps that existed between 1959 and 1962? Yeah, so basically one thing we thought about maybe in two different directions was that if we insert these ruptures in the domestic space, like you see a glass cabinet full of very precious objects curated in a very particular way, but suddenly there are some things that shouldn't be there that look like trash or look like something that totally doesn't belong in the home. Like for example this bark of tree or like a piece of a tile or like this metal kind of whatever it is that we have found on the site of First Labour Camp Ersin. This is from First Labour Camp Woovic. So this is a piece of a tile that was just on the site of the camp because both like the camp in Lovic is basically abandoned. There are almost no trace of what happened there and the local people have started to use it as a

dumping ground, a part of it, because it's like it's a former quarry that has been excavated and it's no longer functioning. So there's all kind of trash there and we collected some of it and brought it into the installation. Because one thing we've thought about is how there are no first there are no photographs from the camps, there are no there's no visual evidence from the camps in the archives and then we're trying to create this visual space that represents these locations and these memories. So it's like that was one of the encounters that was really difficult to think about something visual without having the evidence. And then because the creation or existence of the camps doesn't exist in the history museums in Bulgaria,

there is no information that this ever happened. So basically one of the things we have been doing is collecting objects in the present time from the camps. And when we would bring them to the installation, they would somehow start to adopt this museum quality. And then the other thing which we thought about bringing such objects was also that there are survivors that we have interviewed

who have shared that when they were leaving the camps, when they were getting back to their lives to freedom, they took a little bit of the nature. Like one of the survivors I interviewed shared how just before leaving, he took like a handful of the soil and the stones from the quarry and put it in his pocket and left and When I visited his home, maybe a year or two after I met him the soil was there

It was in one of these cabinets next to the plates next to the photographs of his family next to like the paintings or whatever It's valuable that the soil from the camp was there. And it was there, and it probably remains there many years after communism ended, because this soil was evidence that this happened. I also want to play you something else. So in order to convey not just the room, but as the interview room where we did the interviews, but in order to convey

the memory of the camp, we went together with my colleagues to the campsites. And so these are field recordings from where the camps had been. When you visit the site of the former camp, this beautiful island, Belené island, on the Danube between Bulgaria and Romania, I mean it's a striking place. It's a beautiful, beautiful place and the sound of it is beautiful as well. So at the moment we're listening to one of these vinyls on a record player that a friend of Julian borrowed from us, which has this amazing bass. So basically the drone sound is coming from the amazing bass of the vinyl player, not so much from the actual recording that you can hear.

So a friend of the project, Jesse Dulo, gave us this unbelievable record player to use. It seems to be from the 1960s, and it seems to be more for commercial applications. And it has a very, very powerful speaker. And hearing this record on this record player is a, was a new experience because it was almost like a second wave of forensics

in terms of understanding the field recordings that we had captured and Hearing things in them that we hadn't heard before What I hear in the sound what the sounds represent to me represents to me is the dread of the actual individuals When they're on the island when they're in camp, because you hear the sound of the island, you hear what they heard when they were sent to the island, to the camp. You hear nature, you hear water, you hear birds. Of course we cannot hear what they are feeling in that moment.

So it's one way of interpreting their fear is through this base. But that is something when you're speaking with a person, you can't actually capture, but you can feel. So it's the affect of the interview translated through sound in the way in which you explained, but you also hear the island. And you feel it in your body, in the way that some of the other sounds you hear through the space there

are conveyed through objects that become surrogate bodies for those sounds that might, and in many moments have been kind of bodiless because they have existed on hard drives on recorders and they haven't been brought together and allowed to sort of exist as part of a narrative made of these fragments. When survivors of political violence do not remember, when they do not recall, and this happened both to me and Chris Simir as we were recording, there were instances when there were no memories where they wanted to tell us what happened but they don't remember. Their bodies often remember. Sometimes a survivor will show you their scars.

Sometimes they will break down and they will cry. And sometimes they want to hold your hand. And when their bodies remember, you don't need the written or the verbal evidence. Why is the sound so important? The voice of the survivors is the first sound that I encounter when I begin recording interviews. And then there's the sound of their memories. And so I think capturing the sound is also a way of conveying not just the camp experience but how it exists in the psyches of people. And so so much of what my interviews are ultimately at the end is

sound. Of course there's also information, information that matters, but as you see there's information in the files that we can retrieve. But to be able to hear how one remembers the camps, to be able to hear the camps themselves, I think can more meaningfully convey the experience of remembering but also forgetting. The sound is also the only authentic record you have, because the sound is the sound that they heard too. That's correct. You're right. So it's... And that cannot be erased?

No. That is not something that can be purged. That cannot vanish. You know, they purged my files by burning the folders. And many, many years later, I came across an interview with a young Bulgarian filmmaker, with a former secret police agent who participated in the purge. And he described how difficult it is

actually to burn the folders. So I decided to recreate the purge myself and I decided to burn one of these folders. I had a folder from the same era. And it's true, it is very, very hard to burn a folder. It takes a long time, it's incomplete. But you cannot purge the sound of the camp. On ideas, you were listening to the sound of their memories. This episode was produced by Pauline Holdsworth, Philip Coulter and Danielle Duval. Mix and sound design by Sam McNulty and Orande Williams.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukcic. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayed.