The officer or sergeant on duty was positioned in the entryway. The actual gate to the camp was covered with wooden boards. Information or orders were communicated through a small porthole. In the right-hand wing of the gate building were rooms used for the intelligence investigations of the "operative group" of the NKVD (an abbreviation for People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the interior ministry of the Soviet Union), which monitored the inmates and carried out arrests and interrogations. In several cases, this is where trials were held before Soviet military tribunals, which prosecuted people for crimes in the Soviet Union or against Soviet citizens. On the left were detention cells, where inmates were kept for interrogation over the course of several days. Between the gate and the inmate housing, there was an area cordoned off with barbed wire, the so-called "sluice." Translators and messengers worked in a small stone building. They transmitted the orders of the camp leadership and kept track of inmates who left the inmate barracks to work in other areas.
