Brittney Griner Describes Russian Labor Camp Ordeal: ‘It Was Basically Slave Labor’

For the first time, Brittney Griner is taking the public inside her stay at IK-2, the Russian labor camp in Mordovia, a Russian republic about 300 miles east of Moscow, where she spent 10 months of her life.

The details are harrowing, from the dangerous working conditions to the squalid bathrooms that made personal hygiene nearly impossible. And all of this because Griner forgot about two cartridges containing hash oil that she had left in her bag while traveling through a Russian airport. Griner’s mistake led to her February 2022 arrest and subsequent nine-year prison sentence.

Her new book, Coming Home, written with Michelle Burford, comes out next week, and TIME shared an excerpt in which Griner describes in vivid detail what she went through at the camp.

“All inmates work 10-, 12-, or 15-hour-or-longer days,” she wrote. “We earned a few rubles an hour, around 25￠. It was basically slave labor.”

And as she describes from the sewing factory she was assigned to, that’s no exaggeration.

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“There was no ventilation and little heat. No bathroom breaks. We knew to empty our bladders during the 20-minute lunch break. Each group was given a quota, around 500 military uniforms a day. Teams who failed were berated. A girl near me was sewing so fast she stitched together her fingers, which meant she bled onto the garment and slowed production. Her leader yanked the material from her hand, threw it on the floor, and screamed for her to pick it up and continue.”

To get through it, she focused on her release date: October 20, 2031. She knew that might change, but having the target in mind was a reminder that there would be an end to this chapter in her life.

But after three days of sewing in a setting not made for a person of her height, Griner says she could barely stand and was experiencing debilitating back and knee pain. When she was moved to a new job to better accommodate her height, she found herself slicing pieces of fabric with second-time offenders who “follow their own rules to some degree.”

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“Our machine was basically a rusted old table saw with no shield,” Griner wrote. “Several of the 30 women in my group were missing fingers. My partner had a long scar on her face, starting near her eye.”

It didn’t take long for Griner to get sick. She felt like the air was freezing in her lungs with every breath. Her morning exercises were done in blizzard-like conditions and her hand-washed clothes never completely dried. Wet and cold, Griner’s dreadlocks eventually froze together and she had to cut them.

“The girl I once was now lay in a heap of dreads on the concrete floor,” she said. “But the true me, the survivor, remained. I’d always thought of myself as someone who could endure almost anything. At a slave camp in Russia in the dead of winter, I found out just how tough I was.”

Coming Home will be released on Tuesday, May 7.