" In the famous Kresty prison, which was composed of one thousand single-person cells, the average number in each cell was thirty; we learnt this from prisoners from the Kresty, who usually spent the night before their transport to the labour camps in the Peresylka. We reckoned the numbers in our prison at ten thousand; in cell No. 37, to which I was taken, and which was intended, in normal conditions, to hold twenty prisoners, there were seventy of us. One of the most astonishing and admirable features of the starved intellectual life of inmates in these “houses of the dead” is the extent to which every experienced prisoner has developed his powers of observation. "

― Gustaw Herling-Grudziński , Inny świat