The stories of people whose lives were touched by the Gulag system were among the first we began to record when we started work on the project “GULAG. Witnesses.”
The story of Ida Shchupak was one of the very first — and perhaps one of the most moving.
Sometimes memory lives in objects — in a photograph, a line in a letter, or a painting made by someone who shared your pain and your faith.
Ida’s story is one of those.
She carried through her life not only the sorrow for her father, a Gulag prisoner, but also the love he left her — a love stronger than fear, hunger, the camps, and years of silence.
Born in Bobruisk, Ida lived through evacuation, Siberia, cold, and famine.
As a child, she was afraid to say aloud that her father was an “enemy of the people.”
Her father, Mikhail Naftolin, was a frontline soldier, wounded near Bryansk, later captured, and then arrested and sentenced under Article 58.
In the camp, surrounded by cold and despair, he asked a fellow prisoner — an artist — to paint a portrait of his little daughter from a photograph.
In the lower corner, he wrote: “To my dear little daughter Idachka, from your loving daddy. Uglich.”
When the portrait finally reached Ida, she carefully painted over the word “Uglich” with oil paint — so that no one would know where her father had been.
She carried that portrait through her entire life — from Bobruisk to Zaporizhzhia, and later to Canada.
It stood in her home among other things that preserved his memory.
Years later, in Canada, Ida began creating her own art — delicate pictures made from fish bones.
She used to say that each bone was like a human life: fragile, transparent, but when joined together — something living and beautiful could emerge.
She gave one of those shimmering, pearly, almost weightless artworks to each member of our filming crew.
One of them stands in our home today.
As a reminder of her.
A few days ago, Ida passed away.
I remember her voice, her eyes, her hands.
We send our deepest condolences to her sons — our friend, Ukrainian historian Ihor Shchupak, and his brother Yuriy.
The bright memory of their mother is not only a part of their family’s story.
It is part of all of ours.
English version: gulagshadows.com/ida-shchupak Ukrainian version: gulagshadows.com/uk/ida-
Project website: gulagshadows.com#IdaShchupak #GULAGWitnesses #GULAGShadow #Memory #StalinRepressions #Gulag #Ukraine #Canada #Documentary #Memorial #HistoryOfMemory #ECGProductions
