The maloletki--"juveniles"--inspired little sympathy among their fellow inmates, "Hunger and the horror of what had happened had deprived them of all defenses," wrote Lev Razgon, who observed that the juveniles gravitated naturally toward those who seemed the strongest. These were the professional criminals, who turned the boys into "servants, mute slaves, jesters, hostages, and everything else," and both boys and girls into prostitutes. Their horrifying experiences failed to inspire much pity, however, on the contrary, some of the harshest invective in camp memoir literature is reserved for them. Razgon wrote that whatever their background, child prisoners soon "all displayed a frightening and incorrigibly vengeful cruelty, without restraint or responsibility." Worse,

They feared nothing and no one. The guards and camp bosses were scared to enter the separate barracks where the juveniles lived. It was there that the vilest, most cynical and cruel acts that took place in the camps occurred. If one of the prisoners' criminal leaders was gambling, lost everything and had staked his life as well, the boys would kill him for a day's bread ration or simply "for the fun of it." The girls boasted that they could satisfy an entire team of tree-fellers. There was nothing human left in these children and it was impossible to imagine that they might return to the normal world and become ordinary human beings again.