In 1953, a young Ivanna Maszczak trudged through the Siberian labour camp in which she was serving a 10-year sentence. She was 28 years old, 5ft tall, and hungry. Her shoes were wet from the snow and the temperature had dropped below minus 50. Ivanna and some fellow female prisoners were being escorted by guards through the camp to begin their day of gruelling physical work: mining gold, felling trees and hacking into the frozen ground.

As they stumbled through the snow, a scrunched-up piece of paper landed at their feet, thrown from a truck transporting male prisoners. One of them picked it up before a guard noticed, and later the women huddled together and opened it. It was from a male prisoner asking whether someone would write to him, to distract him from the relentless bleakness. Ivanna was deeply moved. Five years into her imprisonment, she, too, was desperate for human contact. She decided to reply to this stranger.

Ivanna, now 93, tells her story in her one-bedroom ex-council flat in London. The flat is on the top floor and there is no lift, but, although Ivanna is very small and thin, she’s strong enough to walk up and down three flights of concrete stairs several times a day. Born in Ukraine, she was taken from her family one frosty January morning in 1948 while her mother, a schoolteacher, made beetroot soup for lunch. She belonged to a Ukrainian youth organisation, and her brother was a member of the Ukrainian underground. “At that time every Ukrainian was under suspicion,” Ivanna recalls. “My father was a priest, which didn’t help, because the authorities were suspicious of priests, members of the intelligentsia, teachers and students.” Even after Nazi Germany’s surrender in May 1945, the civil war in Ukraine and eastern Poland continued, as underground organisations, including the Ukrainian Insurrectionary army, refused to live under communist rule. Ivanna was one of many thousands of ethnic Ukrainians sent to Siberia after being accused of aiding the rebellion.

Military guards stormed the house and marched the 22-year-old out of her home and into a truck. “My mother’s eyes were full of tears,” she says, quietly, in her strong Ukrainian accent. “I told her that I would be back one day. I still can’t believe I ever came back alive.”

Ivanna was sentenced to 10 years in Stalin’s labour camps. She was moved from one to another, before she and 700 other prisoners were put on a boat and taken to a gulag in Kolyma, a sub-arctic region in Siberia. “As we pulled into the wharf we could see snow, and guards in furs,” Ivanna remembers. “We were in our tatty, thin clothes and, getting off the boat, we were so weak that some of us fell into the snow. We were forced to strip outside and given a typhoid injection – all with the same needle – and a lice check.” Everyone got the same size clothes and shoes. “Imagine me in huge shoes when I have feet this small,” says Ivanna. “Numbers were sewn on to our backs – I was 108 – and we felt our identity was taken away from us.” At night she slept on a wooden plank in barracks alongside hundreds of others.

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Then the crumpled note landed at Ivanna’s feet. His name was Vladimir; he was the same age as Ivanna and also serving 10 years. She asked around, found out which part of the gulag he was in and, with help from sympathetic construction workers who agreed to pass the notes on, managed to get a letter to him. She used the pen and paper the prisoners were sometimes given in order to write home. Their letters, which Ivanna has kept and shows me, stored in a wooden box, came back and forth, talking of life in the camp (“There is a roaring snowstorm outside even though it’s spring”), but also philosophy and the idea of freedom. “What is happiness?” writes Vladimir in one letter. In another: “One day the corrective labour system will be recognised as a huge political mistake.”

“He wanted to find a kindred spirit and I became that person,” Ivanna says now. Despite the fact that they were unable to meet, she began to feel a deep bond with this young man. “After the cruelty I had seen, writing to him was some respite from the hell I was in. I was terribly lonely, so to have Vladimir wanting to know how I felt made things bearable.”

Ivanna Maszczak: ‘He wanted to find a kindred spirit.’ Photograph: Lydia Goldblatt/The Guardian

The greatest physical suffering was the hunger, Ivanna says. “We had one piece of bread and a bowl of fish-bone soup a day. The bread was thin and heavy like clay, because it was full of water. Some prisoners ate it in one go; others – including me – divided it into three and carried the other two bits with them all day. We were hungry all the time.” Often, Ivanna was only allowed to eat if she finished her tasks, such as felling trees and hacking into the permafrost. “I rarely finished. I weighed 35kg [5st 5lb] when I was arrested, so I wasn’t built for it, but most people just couldn’t do it all. I wasn’t very strong, but I was stubborn. I kept telling myself I had to survive.”

It was illegal for prisoners to correspond with each other, so they relied on the construction workers to deliver the letters. “Sometimes it took weeks for a letter to come, and some letters disappeared,” Ivanna says. “But when our system worked, the notes were a salvation.” Soon the tone changed. “At first it was friendship, but when you talk for so long, so intensely, you start to feel love,” Ivanna says. “In one letter Vladimir writes, “Waiting for your letters causes my heart to beat faster.” In another, “Believe me that my love for you is so great that I will do anything for you.” They made tentative plans to meet if they were ever freed.

Ivanna was finally released in August 1955, after almost eight years of her sentence. Stalin’s death in 1953 had somewhat thawed the regime; prisoners had begun to rebel and were gradually being let free. Ivanna’s family had no idea she was coming home. “I walked to the door and my mother turned and screamed my name. She started crying with joy, but I wasn’t able to cry. I didn’t know how to live as a free person. Everything seemed strange – buying milk, going to a hairdresser, eating an apple.” Her freedom came too late for her to be reunited with her father; he had died just two months before her return home.

Images of Ivanna: the pair exchanged photographs after their release. Photograph: Lydia Goldblatt/The Guardian

Vladimir was still imprisoned, and when she first wrote to him from the outside world, he replied: “If I had had the opportunity, I would have left everything behind and followed you. Have you now found everything you dreamed of during these dreadful years? One day we will have the opportunity to meet each other – but it will not happen soon.”

When Vladimir was eventually released two years later, he wrote: “Dear Ivanna! Your prayers have reached the heavens and here I am, alive and healthy. Reunited with my parents. There were many events and stories to share but, most importantly, I am home.”

Soon afterwards, Vladimir wrote again to tell Ivanna he was getting married. Under pressure from his father, he would wed his former classmate, someone his family had expected him to be with all along. “Despite the emotions we felt for each other, I was not surprised about the marriage,” she says. “This was what his father had planned – he had even tried to stop us writing to each other at one point, believing I would scupper his plans. I felt that, despite his marriage, we had an unbreakable bond: the bond of two people who have been in prison together for so long. We were both trying to adjust to freedom and learn to be with our families again. I understood how things were, that he needed to move on.” Yet the letters kept coming and Vladimir confided in her, telling her he found it difficult to adjust to normal life. “On the outside everything looks great: I have a wife, a house, a job, friends, but I cannot recover from the nightmares I’ve endured. I watch my life like a film that I am not part of.”

Those letters were a lifeline; they gave me some purpose. I felt that things could be better again one day

A few years later, Ivanna got married, too. While visiting a friend in Britain, she was introduced to a Ukrainian man named Wolodomyr who proposed to her just five days after they met. “I never regretted it. We lived a simple life in London, and were happy together for 47 years,” she says. Wolodomyr, who passed away in 2012, aged 94, understood why the correspondence with Vladimir was still so important to his wife. In May 1965, Vladimir wrote to her in wonderment that it had been “10 years of knowing each other… of holding pieces of paper on which we shared our thoughts, hopes, doubts, expectations and love. I thank the heavens that you’re in my life.” The following Christmas they exchanged other family photos. Then one morning Ivanna received a curt letter from Vladimir’s wife demanding that the correspondence cease immediately. Ivanna never heard from Vladimir again.

As darkness falls, she pauses in her story to reach across to switch on a softly lit lamp above the small wooden table where we sit. “It hurt me greatly. I didn’t write back to Vladimir. I didn’t want to interfere in his family life. I know I was lucky to be released from Siberia early,” she says, “but I lost out on a chance to meet him.”

Three years ago, contemplating her old age, Ivanna wondered whether this might be a good time to re-establish contact. She Googled Vladimir and found he had his own website. “I recognised him immediately from the photos I’d seen over the years. He now looked older and had grey hair but I knew it was him, and was excited.”

Yet after more research she discovered that it was too late, and he had recently died. “I should have tried harder to find him, I regret that I didn’t. But I worried that it would cause problems for him and his marriage if we ever actually met.”

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Photographs of Vladimir that Ivanna had seen over the years. Photograph: Lydia Goldblatt/The Guardian

It has now been 64 years since Ivanna was released, but eight years in the gulag still has an impact on her daily life in ways that few outsiders would notice. She doesn’t eat much – maybe a baked potato at lunch, but usually no dinner. It doesn’t occur to her to want anything that she doesn’t have. She has a small bedroom, but sleeps on a futon in the living room as she hates feeling confined. “I don’t like to admit this, but I don’t like doors being closed because it reminds me of being imprisoned.” She points to the wardrobe doors, slightly ajar. “Even those I keep open,” she says sheepishly.

It’s been more than 50 years since Ivanna received her final letter from Vladimir. Now in her 90s, she thinks more than ever about the bond they forged in the harsh extremities of the Stalin gulag. “Vladimir and I were linked by our experience. Those letters were a lifeline, they gave me some purpose. I felt a sense that things could be better again one day,” she says. It’s clear that Vladimir felt just as strongly. In a letter to Ivanna while he was still imprisoned, he wrote: “Life is very short and we only live once, but, wherever I am and whatever happens to me, I will remember and think of you always.”

‘If you get married, I will be terribly jealous’: excerpts from Vladimir’s letters to Ivanna after her release

2 November 1955

I am so glad I haven’t lost contact with you! The news of your departure shook me. I felt lonely and abandoned but then I thought – you have freedom! On the one hand I felt so happy for you, on the other hand I felt such pain. I knew that you would write, I longed for the moment you would… sometimes the loneliness became intolerable. Then I sat down and wrote to you without even having your address because it was like having a conversation with you.

31 December 1955

In these final minutes of New Year’s Eve, I think of you, my dear… look at the stars, maybe it’s possible that our eyes could meet while looking up at the same stars.

4 February 1956

I love you. But we’ve never met in person. This is probably not the way clever people act. It is so difficult, so difficult to define our relationship! You are so far from me now. But every day you become more dear to me. I can’t forget you and I don’t imagine a future without you.

8 February 1956

I was longing for your letters with an anticipation that can’t be described. I do not know how to thank you for everything you wrote. We owe each other so much and this is why there is no way we’d be able to forget each other. I know that if you get married, I will respect that person although I will be terribly jealous.

25 March 1956

You wrote that you felt indebted to me for many things – you do not need to explain – sometimes I am in awe of everything you have brought into my life. My dear friend! Some things do not need words because none of them could possibly reflect the complexity of our feelings for each other.

18 April 1959

Who knows? We might meet one day. We must believe this, otherwise there is no point to living. You are always in my heart.

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