Eighty four year old Mikhail Krasnopevtsev knows all about concentration camps. The pensioner, from Voronezh in south west Russia, was lucky enough to survive a Nazi one and then years in the gulag back in Russia. How? Well, he puts it all down to opera singing.
The Nazis took him prisoner during the summer of 1942, and transported him to a concentration camp in the centre of Nürnberg (I assume he means the Flossenbürg sub-camp there). He was eventually freed from slave labour two and a half years later when Americans, who were, like most other people, amazed by his singing voice, liberated the camp.
Despite holding the position of Komsomol (Communist Union Of Youth) secretary back in his home country, he was arrested in 1948 after someone reported him for calling Stalin names. The sentence of execution by shooting (harsh, perhaps, but not in the least bit uncommon) was replaced with a 25 year prison term, which he was expected to serve at the Inta ‘corrective labour camp’.
His voice got him through it just as it had in Germany. Singing in artistic troupes, and even doing solos for people like the ‘king’ of the camp’s crooks helped him survive. He was released in 1956 during Ottepel (Khrushchev’s Thaw) but not exonerated for another 35 years. More on him at Pravda Online.
