By the end of the first week in April we were all in the same hut – a triumph of preliminary organization. We were gathering an impressive store of skins, most of them pulled off the wires by Kolemenos on his frequent trips to pick up the birch logs for the ski shop. On the grindstone in the ski shop I flattened and sharpened a six-inch nail into an instrument that could be used to cut and pierce holes in the tough pelts. Our final collection included sable, ermine, Siberian fox and, a real prize, the skin of a deer which one of the officers had shot for the pot. We cut long thongs of hide for lacing up the simple moccasins we fashioned in the nightly gloom of the hut. We plaited thongs together and used them as belts. Each man made and wore under his fufaika a warm waistcoat with the fur inwards to the body. To protect the legs, we made fur gaiters.
Our acute fear at this time was that we might be betrayed. Our feverish efforts were bound to attract some attention. Had a word been dropped to the Russians, the informant would have been well paid in extra bread and tobacco. But there was no Judas. Those who suspected what we were up to probably thought us mad and left us alone to the disaster they were sure we were inviting. For the more casual observer there was nothing odd about pilfering skins from the Russians and using them to the best advantage. We kept apart as much as possible in the hut and most of our serious planning was done on trips to the latrine trench.
I told Ushakova that I had found six friends. She did not ask me who they were and I do not think she wanted to know. She handed over to me a gift that was to be of inestimable value – an axehead. ‘That will be on my conscience all my life,’ she said. ‘It is the first thing I have ever stolen.’ I made a handle for it and Kolemenos wore it for safe keeping inside the back waistband of his trousers.
One other priceless article I made in the ski shop was a fine three-inch-wide and foot-long knife. It was originally a section of broken saw blade which I heated in the workshop stove, hammered into shape and ground on the grindstone. The handle was two pieces of shaped wood tightly thonged together by long strips of deerskin. As Kolemenos became the keeper of the axe, so did I take over the custody of the knife. These were perilous possessions inside the camp. The discovery of either would have wrecked the whole scheme.
The problem of making fire was one we already had the answer to. Here, where matches were counted a luxury, there existed an effective, if primitive, method which made use of a thick fungoid forest growth which the Russians called gubka, literally sponge. It could be tugged off the trees in sheets. It was then boiled and dried. The fire-making equipment was completed with a bent nail and a piece of flintstone. The dry gubka, a supply of which we all carried stuffed into our jacket pockets, readily took the spark from the flint and could be blown into a red smoulder. We all became experts in its use.
The word reached us that in a week’s time it would be Easter Sunday. It fell in 1941 on 13 April, I have since discovered. The Sunday before, 6 April, marked the end of our preparations. Our escape wardrobe was then complete with the making of seven balaclava caps of fur with an extension flap down the back which could be tucked into the neck of our jackets. We were all tense and ready to go, worried about our valuable new possessions – the skins, the axe, the knife, the store of dehydrated bread – and fearful that at this point some of them might be stolen.
And on that day Ushakova sent for me and said, ‘My husband has gone to Yakutsk. That is why he did not attend the parade today. I have made seven bags out of provision sacks. You will have to take them out one at a time.’ She was perfectly calm. My heart was hammering with anxiety. When she handed me the first of these bags I saw that she had provisioned it, too, and I wondered how possibly we could hide it. I tucked the bag under my arm inside my jacket, stuck my hands in the deep pockets and walked back to the prisoners’ lines hunched up and bending over like a man in deep thought. Six times more in the next few days I made that hazardous trip, knowing each time that if any Russian discovered what I was carrying disaster would be sudden and complete. We made pillows of them, covering them with bits of animal skin and moss, and every hour that we were away from the hut we sweated in apprehension.
We acquired in those last few days a discarded and worn soldier’s sheepskin jacket. I told the others of an old poacher’s trick in which a sheepskin was dragged along behind to put the gamekeeper’s dogs off the human scent. We could try the trick ourselves, I suggested. The others agreed.
We watched the weather, so essential a part of our escape plan. We wanted snow, big-flaked, heavy-falling snow, to screen our movements. Monday was cold and clear. On Tuesday there was wind-driven, icy sleet. Mid-morning on Wednesday a lead-grey and lowering sky gave us the boon we sought. The snow thickened as the day went on. It began to pile up round the untrodden no-man’s-land between us and the wire. At the mid-day break the seven of us met briefly. The word went round. ‘This is the day.’ At about 4 p.m. I left the ski shop for the last time with my fufaika bulging with my hoard of bread and the knife-blade cold against my leg in my right boot. We drank our evening mug of hot coffee, ate some of the day’s bread issue and walked back to the hut in ones and twos.
There were frequent walks to the latrines as we tensely talked over the final plans. It was Smith who advised that we must not start our break too early. The camp must be allowed to settle down for the night before we moved. Midnight, he thought, would be a reasonable time to run for it. Meanwhile we must try to keep calm. And the blessed snow kept falling in big, obliterating cotton-wool flakes, covering everything.
Zaro it was who had the preposterous idea of attending the Politruk’s Wednesday evening indoctrination. We laughed at first and then Makowski said, ‘Why not?’ So we went, all seven of us, leaving our precious, moss-camouflaged bags on our bunks and telling ourselves that now, on this last night, nothing could go wrong. We sat ourselves at the back and the Politruk beamed a faintly surprised welcome at us. We smiled right back at him and tried not to fidget.
It was the most exciting political meeting I have ever attended, although the element of excitement owed little to the speaker. The Politruk, now the camp’s senior officer in the absence of Ushakov, was in good form. We heard again about the miracle of the Soviet State, about the value of toil, of self-discipline within the framework of State discipline, of the glorious international ideal of Communism. And what did Comrade Stalin say to his comrade workers on the State farms in 1938? An eager soldier leaps to his feet and quotes word-for-word two or three sentences of this epic appeal. The Politruk gave us it all – Soviet culture, capitalist decadence and disintegration and the rest of it. It was, as far as we were concerned, his farewell speech, and we enjoyed it accordingly.
There was about an hour and a half of it before we stood up to go.
‘Goodnight, Colonel,’ we chorused.
‘Goodnight,’ he answered.
Back in Hut Number One the men were beginning to settle for the night. Smith and Zaro, in the bunk nearest the door, were to give us the starting signal. We all broke up and climbed on to our bunks and lay there. Six of us lay wide awake and waiting, but big Kolemenos in the bunk below me was gently snoring.
I lay thinking and listening to the bumping of my heart. I remembered I had not said goodbye to Ushakova. I decided she would not have wanted me to. The hours dragged by. Gradually the hut grew quiet. There was a loud snoring from someone. A man babbled in his sleep. Someone, barely awake, got up and stoked the stove near his bunk.
Smith tapped my shoulder. ‘Now’, he whispered. Gently I shook Kolemenos. ‘Now,’ I repeated.
10
Seven Cross the Lena River
WE SWUNG our bags off the bunks by the rawhide straps which we had fitted for slinging them across our backs. We piled the moss coverings back in pillow form at the head of the beds. ‘Everybody well?’ I whispered. From all around me came the hissed answer, ‘Yes.’ ‘Anybody changed his mind?’ There was no reply. Said Makowski, ‘Let’s go.’
I dropped my bag near th
e door and stepped outside. The camp was silent. It was snowing as heavily as ever. I could not see the nearest wire. In the south-east guard tower, our nearest danger, they could not have had twenty yards visibility. We could be thankful that in this place of no piped water supply and no electricity, there were no searchlights to menace us.
The inner wire was a hundred yards from the hut door and the success of the first part of the operation depended on the observation that the frost-stiffened coils did not faithfully follow the contours of the ground. There was a dip in the ground straight ahead of us which we reckoned would provide a couple of feet of clearance if we burrowed through the snow and under the wire.
We went out one by one with about a minute’s interval between each. Zaro went first and I prayed he found the right spot at the first attempt. Then the Lithuanian. Then Mister Smith. Then Makowski and Paluchowicz. Kolemenos turned and whispered to me, ‘I hope they’ve made a bloody great hole for me to get through.’ I watched him run off into the night like the others, carrying his bag in front of him, ready, according to plan, to shove it through the gap ahead of him. Then it was my turn, and the palms of my hands were moist with sweat. I took a last swift look round. The men in the hut were sleeping on. I turned and bolted.
When I reached the wire Smith was under it and slowly wriggling forward. Two were through. The rest of us crouched down and waited. Agonising minutes passed as first the Sergeant and then Makowski squirmed and grunted, bellies flat pressed against the earth, under the wire. The big bulk of Kolemenos went head first into the gap and I held my breath. He was halfway through when the barbs took hold on the back of his jacket between the shoulder-blades. He shook himself gently and little pieces of ice tinkled musically down the coils of the wire.
‘Lie still, Anastazi,’ I hissed. ‘Don’t move at all.’ Someone on the other side had pulled his bag through and was reaching through over his neck to try to release him. The minutes ticked by. I was aware that my jaws were clamped tight and I was trying to count the passing seconds on my fingers. Kolemenos lay very still as the hand worked over between his shoulders. Someone spoke on the other side and the big man went forward again. I let my breath out in a long sigh and followed through. The first obstacle was behind us. It had taken a full twenty minutes.
We knelt down along the edge of the dry moat and looked across to the loom of the first tall wooden fence as Kolemenos slithered in and braced himself against the steep-sloping near side. We used him as a human stepping stone, and as we clambered over him he took our feet in his linked and cupped hands and heaved us one by one on to the ledge at the base of the twelve-foot palisade. More vital minutes were lost in pulling Kolemenos out of the ditch. By standing on his shoulders and reaching out at full stretch, we were able to haul ourselves over the top, and standing on the lateral securing timber on the other side, lean over and help up the later arrivals.
Anchor-man Kolemenos again posed us a problem. Straddling the top of the fence, our legs held firm, Makowski and I leaned head downwards and arms outstretched to haul at him, one arm each. Three times we got his fingers to within inches of the top and three times we had to lower him down again. We paused, trembling with exertion and near-despair, and tried again. His fingers scrabbled for a hold on the top, gripped. To our straining he began to add his own tremendous strength. He came up, up and over.
To beat the coiled wire at the foot of the fence we threw ourselves outwards, landing in a heap in the deep snow. One or two failed to leap quite clear and were scratched as they pulled themselves away. We were in the patrol alley now between the two fences and time was running out. If I had heard the sound of the sledge dogs announcing the start of a patrol now, I think I might have been physically sick.
We ran the few yards to the outer fence and this time shoved Kolemenos up first. We were probably making little noise, but it seemed to me the commotion was deafening. This time I was last up and it was Kolemenos who swung me up and over. In a final mad scramble we leapt and tumbled over the last lot of barbed wire at the foot of the outer fence, picked ourselves up, breathlessly inquired if everyone was all right, and, with one accord, started to run. Round my waist was tied the old sheepskin jacket. I tugged it free, dropped it and heard it slithering along behind me attached to the thong looped on my wrist.
We gasped and choked and wheezed, but we ran and kept running, into the great forest among the looming, white-clothed trees. We ran south, with the camp at our backs. One and then another stumbled, fell and were helped to their feet. The first headlong rush slowed to a steady, racking lope. We jogged along for hours, into the dawn and beyond it to another snow-filled day, our packs bumping and pounding our backs as we went. When we stopped to draw air into labouring lungs, I made them start again. And I made them struggle on until about 11 a.m. when hardly one of us could have moved another pace. I picked up the old sheepskin and held it under my arm. We looked round at one another. Paluchowicz was bent over double with his hands on his knees, his shoulders heaving, fighting to get his breath back. Two of the others were squatting on their haunches in the snow. All of us were open-mouthed with wagging tongues like spent animals.
This place was a shallow, bowl-like depression where the trees grew more widely spaced. We had stumbled down into it and could not, without a rest, have attempted the slight climb out of it. We stood there for about ten minutes, too breathless to speak and in a lather of sweat in spite of the subzero temperature. The snow still came down, thinning a little now, and there was a moaning wind through the trees that made the gaunt branches shake and creak miserably. Like hunted animals we were all straining our ears for sounds of the chase. In all our minds was the thought of the dogs. But there was only the wind, the falling snow and the stirring trees.
Up the slope to our left the trees grew more closely together. ‘We will get up there,’ I said, finally. ‘There is more shelter and we shall be better hidden.’ There were groans of protest. Smith joined in, ‘Rawicz is right.’ So we laboured our way out of the hollow and picked on the broad base of a great tree as the location of our shelter. We scooped the snow away down to the tree roots and cleared a space a couple of yards square. We built up the snow around into a solid low wall. Kolemenos cut branches with his axe and we laid them on top in a close mesh, piling on more snow to complete the roof. It was a lesson we had learned the hard way in Siberia: Get out of the wind, because the wind is the killer. The old Ostyak had told me, ‘Snow? Who worries about snow? Just wrap it around you and you’ll sleep warm as though you were in a feather bed.’
Here it was that we had our first real look at the contents of our packs. Each man had a flat baked loaf, a little flour, about five pounds of pearl barley, some salt, four or five ounces of korizhki tobacco and some old newspaper. All this in addition to the dried ration bread I had managed to save. On the top of each pack were the spare moccasins we had made and the left-over pieces of skin. We crawled into the little snow-house, all jammed closely together, and talked in low voices. There was a discussion as to whether we should smoke. We decided the additional risk was slight and the benefit to jangling nerves great. So we smoked and lay close together in the warm blue fug of burning tobacco.
There was, this relatively short distance from the camp, no question of lighting a fire, so we wolfed some of our bread. And in so doing we made a discovery about Sergeant-of-Cavalry Paluchowicz. He had not a tooth in his head. Eating this hard bread was agony to him. The only way he could cope with it was by soaking it – in this case, where there was no water, by painstakingly kneading it with snow.
‘I had a nice set of dentures when they took me prisoner near Belystok,’ he explained. ‘Then those bastard N.K.V.D. fellows knocked them out of my mouth and they smashed on the floor. They laughed at that trick but it was no bloody joke to me, trying to get my gums round that prison bread, I can tell you. First thing I do when we get to where we are going will be to treat myself to another set of teeth.’
‘And have them
gold-plated. You’ll deserve them.’ This from Zaro. We laughed, and Paluchowicz joined in, too.
We slept through the remaining few hours of daylight, only one man remaining awake at a time to keep a listening guard near the small opening. Kolemenos went off like a tired child and snored gently and musically. No one had the heart to stir him for guard duty. The Lithuanian Marchinkovas roused us as the light outside began to fade. We ate some more bread, smoked one cigarette each and crawled out. The snowfall had diminished to light flurries and the wind was getting up. It was very cold and we were stiff and sore.
All seven of us knew it was imperative that we should get clear out of the camp area as soon as possible. All through that second night we alternately ran and walked. The stiffness began to leave me after about an hour but I acquired new aches as the bumping pack chafed my back. I swung it round at intervals and held it against my chest. Kolemenos found the axe in his waistband was rubbing him raw, took it out and jogged on with it under his arm. It never seemed to be completely dark but the going was nevertheless difficult through two and three feet of crisp snow, the undulations of the ground masked by close-growing trees. Near morning we crossed a frozen stream, steeply banked on the other side, and when we scrambled up and got away from it into the continuing forest, we made our camp.
For the first four or five days we stuck to this night movement and daylight holing up. There was no sign of pursuit. Hopefully we decided that, our tracks having been well covered by the first night’s snow, the hunt had probably been organized eastward as being the shortest and most feasible escape route. Cautiously we congratulated ourselves on the choice of the flight to the south. We started to travel by day, advancing roughly abreast in a spread-out formation and making up to thirty miles a day. Watching the occasional watery sun, reading the sign of the moss growing on the sheltered side of the trees, we held to an approximate course south. Several more ice-bound streams were negotiated and I judged they were all flowing southwards to drain into the great Lena River. It was a time of hardship, of a constant battle against cold and fatigue, but our spirits were high. Most of all at this time we wanted to be able to light a fire and we spurred ourselves on with the promise that we should have one as soon as we sighted the Lena.