Victor Malarek - The Natashas

These women and girls are victims of rape. They have suffered enough. To ensure that they do not endure further humiliation or embarrassment, their names have been changed.

Marika was hit by a blast of hot, dry air as she emerged from the aircraft at Cairo’s international airport. The tall, green-eyed, nineteen-year-old blonde looked around, bewildered. Exhausted and nervous, she shuffled into the customs line. An olive-faced officer thumbed through her passport, shot a cursory glance in her direction and stamped an entry visa onto a blank page. When she emerged into the jammed arrival area with her one piece of luggage in hand, she was met by a burly Russian. He grunted her name. She nodded and he grabbed her firmly by the arm, escorting her briskly to a tan, dust-covered, four-wheel-drive jeep.

Crammed in the back seat were three other women—two from Moldova and one from Russia—all in their late teens. The girls were silent. They looked pensive and frightened. The driver shoved Marika into the front passenger side and wedged his beefy gut behind the wheel. “We have no time to waste,” he bellowed in Russian. “I have to get to the rendezvous point in two hours.”

With a furious lurch, the vehicle lunged forward. The ride was bumpy and deathly quiet. As the jeep barreled deep into the hard-baked, scorching desert, Marika closed her eyes and silently prayed.

Weeks earlier, a garish, rotund woman at a recruitment agency in her hometown of Kharkiv, Ukraine, had spoken excitedly of the job she had arranged for Marika—a stint as a waitress in Tel Aviv. At first, Marika had been apprehensive. She had heard of young women being lured away by jobs that didn’t exist only to be forced into prostitution. The recruiter, though, was adamant, swearing up and down—going so far as to invoke the names of Jesus, Joseph and Mary—that this offer was on the up-and-up.

Marika was the perfect dupe. She was desperate for work. Her mother was sick and her father was an unemployed, miserable drunk. Her two younger sisters were wasting away. The job offer was her only chance to make things better. It was a risk; she felt it in every fiber of her body. But it was one she knew she just had to take. The unsettling twist in the job offer was the unusual travel arrangement—a serpentine route that bore the earmarks of an espionage novel. She would be flown from Kyiv to Vienna. There she would switch planes to Cyprus, where she would board another plane for Cairo. Once in Egypt, she was be driven overland to Tel Aviv. Marika voiced her suspicions but the recruiter was persuasive, telling her it had to do with saving huge amounts of money on airfares. Now, after she’d spent two days traveling, Marika’s dream of a new job was fading by the mile.

The jeep ground to a stop outside a sun-baked village. The driver leapt out and approached two armed Bedouin men. They exchanged a few words. He handed them an envelope and ordered the women out of the vehicle.

For the first time that day, Marika spoke up. “I said I wanted to go back home,” she recalled. “The Russian pig hit me across the face very hard and told me to shut up. My mouth was bleeding and I began to weep.”

The driver got back into the jeep and drove off in a cloud of dust, leaving Marika and the other women in the custody of the Bedouin guides. The men were eerie figures, wrapped in tawny robes and scarves with rifles slung over their shoulders and long, curved daggers dangling from their waists. The girls watched in wonder as the men mounted their camels. They barked out an order in Arabic and waved menacingly at the women to follow. The tiny caravan set out across the Sinai Desert, the women scurrying behind the camels on foot.

“It was so hot and we were so very thirsty, but the Arab men taking us across the desert did not care. They kept shouting at us. I have no idea what they were saying. They just yelled,” Marika recounted.

They walked for almost two days, stopping twice for meals of pita bread, dried figs and dates and a cup of water, and once to sleep on canvas tarps under the stars.

“I felt what it must have been like for the slaves in the times of the Bible,” Marika said. “With every step, I thought I was being punished by God for my past sins.”

Late in the second afternoon, the caravan reached an area marked by rusting coils of barbed wire stretching across the barren landscape. The Bedouins dismounted. Jutting up from the sand was a jagged post. They tied their camels to the stump and motioned the women to pick their way over the wire fence. While Marika didn’t know it at the time, they had just reached the Egyptian–Israeli frontier. From there, the tiny band continued on foot. An hour later, the guides suddenly turned to the women and ordered them to drop to the ground. In the distance, Marika could hear the grinding sound of a truck. It was an Israeli army patrol. The Bedouins signaled for them to lie very still. Several tense minutes passed, and the vehicle faded into the distance. Alone once again, the girls scrambled to their feet and, under the watchful eyes of the Bedouins, the trek continued.

That night, totally spent and dehydrated, the women collapsed under the open sky near the outskirts of a village. One of the guides continued on alone, returning a short while later in a white pickup truck with two Israeli men. The driver spoke fluent Russian and gruffly ordered the women into the back. They were taken to a deserted house and hustled into a bare room. The door was shut and locked behind them. Despite their long, arduous journey, they weren’t offered any food or water, nor were they allowed to wash or talk. They slept on the dirt floor.

The next afternoon, two thuggish men showed up and ordered the girls to disrobe. “We were told to take off all our clothes so they could look at us. It was so humiliating,” Marika said.

We were so frightened. We did as we were told. One of the men took me and the Russian woman. Her name was Lydia. He drove us to Tel Aviv, to an apartment near the sea. Inside were three other women. Two were Ukrainian, the other from Moldova. The door had many locks and a very big man named Avi sat at a desk in the hallway. He was our guard. We were instructed to take a shower, and when we were drying the man came in and told us to put on this cheap lingerie. You could see through it.

The women were herded into the living room, where their owner addressed them. “We called the owner Ba’al Bayith. I learned later it means ‘owner of the house’ in Hebrew. Ba’al is owner and bayith is house,” Marika explained.

The brutish man announced that he had purchased them for $10,000 each and that they would be his property until they each paid off a $20,000 debt. He told them they would have to start working off the debt that very evening by servicing clients. He also warned the women that any refusal to do their job would be dealt with swiftly and painfully. To make his point, the owner shot a meaningful glance in Avi’s direction. The hairy behemoth guarding the door grinned menacingly at the frightened women.

That night, I felt for the first time what it was to be a whore. I had to service eight men. I felt so terrible and ashamed. I showered after every encounter but I could not wash away the filth in me. Over the next four months, I don’t know how many hundreds of Israeli men I was forced to have sex with. Young men, old men, fat, disgusting men. Soldiers, husbands and religious men. It did not matter if I was sick or if I was on my period. I had to work or I would be punished.