The converted camp is located in a big field, only partly cleared, with small, roughly paved roads winding among the long, low former barracks and a few loftlike, double-height buildings that serve as sound stages.
Some of the posts leaned in one direction or another, and the barbed-wire strands drooped or fell to the ground; the fencing, and the second line of fence posts, several metres beyond, and the low, shameful barracks, with its two doors and three windows, fit exactly with the picture of a Siberian prison camp that one has in the mind.
Tall metal fences separate rows of drab low-lying barracks into individual units that are locked down at night, when the concrete courtyards are lit bright as day.
For as long as anyone can remember in this garrison town of low-slung barracks and rundown shops, the threat of attack by enemy troops massed just across the border has been a constant as fixed and certain as the change of seasons.
The sight of a few trees a quarter-mile down the road led us to a low-rise, barracks-type building, the Bronx headquarters of the Parks Department.
In a study at Army training centers, Brundage and colleagues detected significantly higher rates of febrile respiratory illness among building occupants housed in modern barracks with low outdoor air ventilation rates as compared to soldiers housed in older barracks with higher ventilation rates [ 2].
Yet the vast majority of Russian prisoners — 724,000 out of a total prison population of 862,000 — still live in freestanding barracks, rough-hewn, low-slung buildings of wood or brick encircled by barbed wire, usually in a remote place.
Today, what's left is mainly low stone walls -- the headquarters, barracks, granary and gateways.
The day was bittersweet, said the current commander, Lt. Gen. Donald M. Campbell Jr. — no relation to the World War II staff sergeant after whom the barracks was named —after the low-key ceremony.
