Possibly the most gruesome of human taboos, the act of cannibalism has never been socially
acceptable in most places.
That’s not to say humans haven’t eaten each other at times.
Archaic humans, such as Neanderthals, were said to feast on each other as well as other
animals.
Meat was meat to that wandering animal.
Throughout history tribes from the Congo to the Amazon Basin to the South Pacific islands
have also practiced cannibalism.
Stranded humans have resorted to flesh breakfasts, such as the Donner Party and the Uruguayan
rugby players that got stuck on a mountain.
That was a matter of survival and eating cutlets of human thigh was a moral dilemma, unlike
it may have been for certain serial killers.
Today we’ll tell you a truly shocking tale of cannibalism though, in this episode of
the Infographics Show, Cannibal Island - The Real Battle Royale.
This island, called in a French documentary “L'île aux Cannibales”, was indeed for
a while home to a kind of Hunger Games environment.
Call it what you want, but this was an historical, non-fictional Battle Royale, and as some historians
have said, a blight on humanity, testament to how bloody cruel we can be at times
In 1933 The Soviets decided to deport around 6,000 people to a remote island in Siberia.
That was Nazino Island, a place where criminals and political prisoners were not going to
escape from.
Under the paranoiac leader Joseph Stalin, these folks were shipped off and abandoned
with nothing much more than the clothes on their back, a few tools and flour.
Those that refused to make the move were shot.
While millions of people that Stalin saw as a threat to the Communist Party or who had
committed crimes were sent to many parts of Siberia, the thousands sent to this wild island
were perhaps his most unfortunate victims.
Not only were they only given a few kilos of flour each, but they weren’t even given
cooking utensils or other food stuffs.
Guards went along, too, and it was thought the prisoners would be able to somehow survive.
But imagine being dropped off on a tiny island no longer than 2 miles long and 1,800 feet
across, with thousands of other desperate people.
The island wasn’t home to many animals or much edible vegetation.
What would you do?
You might well fight for the flour that you’d been given.
It’s said the prisoners quickly ran out of flour, and when the authorities sent over
another batch the people were so hungry they fought tooth and nail to get to it, during
which time many prisoners were just shot dead.
It’s also said the guards on the island would keep the flour for themselves, and if
you wanted some, you had to pay in some way.
You can only imagine what favors were demanded by these abusers of power.
But even if you had flour you had nothing you could do with it except mix it with river
water.
That’s what many people did, and soon prisoners fell gravely ill with dysentery.
Things went from bad to worse.
With many prisoners left to die, they formed gangs on the island, with a plan to take what
they could from others.
It was anarchy; it was hell, the nadir of human depravity.
We should add there that some doctors were sent to the island when things got really
bad, but it’s said that even they feared for their lives.
Power ruled, and the guards it is said established a reign of terror.
They killed you if you tried to escape and they might kill you if you were caught stealing.
Some people on the island did have some valuables on them, such as their rings, their gold teeth,
and some money.
They could use this to bargain with, but it’s said much of the time if you had something
of value you got killed for it.
Murder became commonplace as hungry men (there were far fewer women) battled to survive.
But murder was not the final act, the consumption of the corpse was in some cases.
Human meat was better than starving to death, and in terms of nutrition a lot better than
dirty water mixed with flour.
One of the few survivors of Death Island later talked about one thing he witnessed.
He said one day a young guard called Kostia had left a girl he had been staying with,
just for a short time as he had to go somewhere.
This is what happened to her according to that witness:
“People caught the girl, tied her to a poplar tree, cut off her breasts, her muscles, everything
they could eat, everything, everything....
They were hungry, they had to eat.
When Kostia came back, she was still alive.
He tried to save her, but she had lost too much blood.”
You must understand this all happened in a very short period of time.
Most of the prisoners were dropped off on May 18th.
Another 1,200 arrived on May 27th.
Within a couple of weeks 70 people had died.
Five of them had been someone’s breakfast, lunch or dinner.
You might be thinking that people can survive longer without food, but there is no doubt
they were already malnourished.
27 people didn’t even survive the trip to the island from the nearest city of Tomsk.
Within a month 50 people were arrested by the guards for acts of cannibalism.
Out of the 6,700 people that were sent there, only 2,200 survived that one summer on the
island.
Of them, only 300 were in any fit state to work as their experience had taken such a
toll on them.
One woman, Feofila Bylina, many years recounted a Death Island story.
She had lived close to the island during the chaos.
“Once a woman from the Island of Death was brought to our house,” she said.
The woman was being sent to another camp after surviving Cannibal Island.
She didn’t exactly get off the island in one piece, as Bylina remembered.
“The woman was taken into the back room to spend the night and I saw that her calves
had been cut off.”
Shocked, she asked what had happened.
The prisoner replied, “They did that to me on the Island of Death – cut them off
and cooked them.”
You can actually find documents in the Tomsk museum, transcriptions of interrogations of
prisoners at the GULAGS.
One prisoner was asked if he ever ate human meat while on the Island.
“No,” he replied.
“That is not true.
I only ate the hearts and livers.”
The same man told his interrogators that in some cases killing people already half dead
from starvation was better than leaving them to suffer.
“I picked those who were not quite living, but not yet quite dead,” he said, adding
that once they were finished off they were cut up and pieces of them were cooked over
an open fire; speared kidneys like human marshmallows, tickled by the tips of raging flames.
Imagine doing that and peering over the fire at your friend, himself cooking part of a
dead person’s organ.
We know about what happened there only because one man called Vasily Velichko, a Communist
himself, decided it had to be investigated.
He started his investigation shortly after the last people had been taken off the island,
but his report was kept “Top Secret” until it was released in 1994.
For his efforts, which embarrassed the Communist government at the time, Velichko was excommunicated
from the Communist Party.
He went on to write books and was a correspondent during World War Two.
The tragedy has not been forgotten by some Russian people, and each year a group of people
lay a wreath on the island to commemorate that Summer of Blood.
Even today people in Russia will refer to the place as Death Island, or “Ostrov Smerti”
in Russian
How would you feel about eating a dead person?
Would you have killed to survive had you been there?
What would you have done?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video called WHAT TO DO IF THERE IS A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION?!!
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See you next time!