In Praise of Holy Women

this path: 'as Berdyaev has remarked: "Inability to suffer sometimes proves
to be the greatest evil of all"... if you lapse into such a condition, it is unlikely
that you will ever get out of it without the help of a psychiatrist.'
That state was very dangerous indeed. The gulag was full of inmates –
usually ‘criminal’ prisoners – who had taken that path. 11 The other road
was even harder. De Beausobre writes that this second way of coping
with the sadism of torturers was excruciating: ‘It exacts of the victim who
undertakes it a heightening of consciousness, which is inseparable from
the pain that goes with any expansion of awareness.’ She explains that the
victim has to make an intense effort to gain sympathetic insight into the
situation, to be attentive to every detail of the moment, and to penetrate
as far as possible into the minds of her torturers. She warns that this
empathy must not veer into any sentimentality; you must avoid both selfpity
and any absolution of your tormentors’ responsibility. 'All this is very
hard. But the point is that once it is achieved, you realise that you have
been privileged to take part in nothing less than an act of redemption...'
Complete attention necessitated complete acceptance of the situation:
no inner protest – ‘Why me?’ or ‘This is unfair; I am entirely innocent!’ –
because resistance would mean absconding from the present. Acceptance
meant surrendering to the reality of the moment, as Nicholas Sakharov had
done by responding immediately his interrogator fell ill.
This kind of attentiveness could only be attained through faith. De Beausobre
stressed that it was important that the tortured belonged to the Church, so
that they did not just think of themselves as poor or brave, lonely wretches
but as members of the mystical body of Christ.... They alone can raise their
harrowing experience from the level of a personal evil... and make it an
impersonal enrichment, a universal good, a part of the redemptive work of
Christ through his mystical body – the Church.
In her memoirs, de Beausobre recounts how she received Divine help during
her periods of interrogation. She called it the voice of Peace which came to
11
In St Petersburg in the late 1990s I met a woman who had been an actor in a Siberian
logging camp like the one to which De Beausobre had been sent. Tamara Petkevich suffered
the consequences of the numbness, the spiritual deadness, against which De Beausobre
warned. She described how female criminal prisoners had beaten her up as a ‘political’ – but
a few weeks later they were weeping as she read them a story. “Perhaps you have to suffer
a great deal in order to understand the effect of creative expression on the spirit,” Tamara
Petkevich told me. “Only then do you truly appreciate how it enables you to survive an ordeal.
The human psyche is capable of enormous transformation. It is only by living through this
process that you appreciate it.” She saw her role as that of performing the equivalent of
cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on the prisoners – and on the guards too, by reminding them
that beauty and emotion existed. And in doing this Tamara saved herself from lapsing into the
condition of numbness and disconnection that De Beausobre warned against – a condition
from which there is virtually no way back.
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