When in 1990 Gertruda Platas, a former prisoner of the Akmolin camp’s wife of the “traitors” of her homeland, arrived in Kazakhstan, she first told the employees of the Algir museum how she first saw the local Kazakhs and how they treated the prisoners.

One morning, when women prisoners, under a reinforced convoy, gathered shrubs on the shore of Zhalanash Lake to build barracks, old men and children — the locals of the neighboring Kazakh village of Zhanashu — jumped out of the shrubs. Children on the team of the elderly began to throw stones to tortured women (to perform the norm of 40 snaps of shrimp had to work on the frost for 17-20 hours a day). The convoys began to laugh loudly: say, see, you are not only in Moscow, you and here, in the hall, even children do not like you.

It was very offensive and painful, and, above all, morally, remembered Gertrude Plateau and other former prisoners. It repeated for several days. The insulted prisoners were only left to appeal to fate, complaining about the injustice of the stunned and angry Kazakhs by Stalin’s propaganda.
One day, turning away from the stones that flew on them, Gertrude, debilitated, stumbled and fell face to face in those stones. When she got into them, she suddenly smelled cheese, and realized that these same stones smelled... cheese and milk! She took a piece and put it in her mouth – it seemed to her very delicious.
She picked up the camels and brought them to the bar. There were also Korean prisoners. They said it was Kurt, a salt cheese dried in the sun. It turns out, risking the lives of their own children, the heart-sick Kazakhs, having not found another way just this way, without causing suspicion in the guards, shared with the prisoners the last thing they had - a court, in order at least to support the hungry poor women, since they themselves in the 1930s learned the hunger and deprivation.
Secretly from the guards, they left for the prisoners under the bushes pieces of cooked meat, bullshit, curtains, cakes. Gratitude to the Kazakh people, the women told, they carried through all their lives. “All the camps are bad, but it was in Kazakhstan that many survived and, above all, thanks to the Kazakhs. They were hungry, cold, deprived,” they confessed.
The memories of Gertrude Plateau formed the basis of the poem “Kurt – a precious stone”.