In ‘History: Ukraine and the World’, a textbook for 10th graders by Oleksandr Gisem, the author loses all scruples and resorts to crude forgeries. In one instance, he uses a photograph of children behind barbed wire, labelled ‘Child prisoners of the Gulag, late 1930s’. A sign in the photo is written in Russian, and reads ‘Resettlement camp, entry and conversation through barbed wire is prohibited under the penalty of execution’.
But if you run the photo through a search, the original quickly pops up. It turns out that the writing on the sign is cut off, and that it has an upper part written in Finnish.
The children in the photo are prisoners at the 6th Finnish concentration camp in Petrozavodsk. During the occupation of Soviet Karelia, the Finns created six such camps in the area to hold Russian-speaking residents. The photo was taken by war correspondent Galina Sanko after Petrozavodsk’s liberation by Soviet troops on June 28th, 1944. Sanko entitled the photo ‘Prisoners of fascism’. This photo was even presented among the evidence at the Nuremberg Trials.
