He stepped down. Immediately the other Colonel took his place. He did not step up so much as leap forward in eagerness. There was nothing relaxed about this man. If there was a sense of restrained authority about Ushakov, this fellow wore his power like a flaunting banner. He was better dressed than the Commandant. He wore a sheepskin jacket, his well-made high boots were of soft leather, brightly polished. He was young enough to have been Ushakov’s son.
If I ever knew his name, I do not remember it. He was the political officer and we never called him anything but the Politruk, the short title by which all such officials were known. He stood for fully a minute just looking at us, faintly smiling, eminently sure of himself, a picture of well-being and arrogance. The men stirred uneasily and stayed quiet.
He spoke like a sergeant-major, strongly, harshly and insultingly. ‘Look at you,’ he said, hunching his shoulders and placing his gloved hands on his hips. ‘You look like a bunch of animals. Just look at yourselves! You are supposed to be the highly civilized people who fancy they can run the world. Can’t you now appreciate what stupid nonsense you have been taught?’
Fortified by his anonymity in the restless crowd, one brave man had the temerity to answer back. His voice shocked the silence of the pause which the Politruk had allowed himself for dramatic emphasis after his opening onslaught. ‘How can we look any different? You won’t let us shave, there’s no soap and no clean clothes.’
The Politruk turned in the direction of the voice. ‘I’ll get your food ration stopped if I am interrupted again.’ He was not interrupted again.
‘After a time here,’ he went on, ‘and under the guidance of Comrade Stalin, we shall make useful citizens of you. Those who don’t work don’t eat. It is my job to help you to improve yourselves. It won’t all be work here. You can attend classes to correct your way of thinking. We have an excellent library which you can use after working hours.’
There was some more in the same vein. Then, briskly, ‘Any questions?’ A prisoner asked, ‘When does spring come here?’ Replied the Politruk, ‘Don’t ask stupid questions.’ The meeting ended.
The first few days of building the new prisoners’ barracks were chaotic. All were willing enough to work but it was most difficult to direct to the work for which they were effective the men with the best qualifications. The position sorted itself out smoothly enough after about three days. There were teams of architects and surveyors to plan out the ground and mark with stakes the plots for each hut. There were teams of young labourers hacking away at the frozen earth to make deep post-holes for the main structural timbers. There were builders, men skilled in the use of axes to rough-shape the virgin wood from the forest. The main labour force issued forth from the camp gate every morning at eight, in charge of armed soldiers.
I joined the forest workers. The camp was awakened by a bugle at 5 a.m. and there was an early morning procession of half-asleep men to the latrine trenches inside the wire behind the building site. Then would follow the line-up for breakfast. Tools were issued from the store on the left side of the gate, carefully checked out and as scrupulously checked in again at the end of the day. As we marched out of the gate a tallyman checked our names against his lists.
The forest was mainly of pine, but there was also an abundance of birch and larch. I worked in a felling team, handling one end of a heavy, cross-cut, two-man saw. Occasionally I was able to get some variation by lopping with an axe the branches of the trees. Since the days of my boyhood on the estate at Pinsk I had always been handy with an axe and I enjoyed the work. I found my strength coming back daily. I became absorbed in the bustle and activity. There was a glow of pride and satisfaction in being able to use my hands again. At 1 p.m. we went back to the camp, man-handling the timber we had cut back to the builders. We received a midday issue of soup and returned to the forest to work until the light faded. Each day the line of huts increased in length.
A fortnight after our arrival the huts were finished. They lay in two lines with a wide ‘street’ between each line of ten huts. I was allocated a bunk in one of the last half-dozen to be completed and I well remember the wonderful feeling of shelter and warmth, protection and comfort I felt the first night I came in out of the chilling night into my new home. The air smelt deliciously of fresh-cut pine. Down each long side wall of heavy timbers were fifty three-tier bunks, simply made of planks laid out within a strong, four-post framework. Three square, sheet-iron stoves equally spaced out down the length of the room blazed red into the gloom, fuelled by short pieces of sawn log, of which a supply was brought in daily by the forest working parties. Following the example of those already installed in their huts we had brought in as much moss as we could carry in our fufaikas to spread on the hard boards of our beds. There were no chimneys for the stoves; the smoke issued from a short length of stackpipe and curled away through vents in the roof. The smell of wood-smoke mingled with the scent of the pine. I lay on my top bunk, hands clasped behind my head and listened to the talk of the men around me.
Lying on his side facing me on one of the adjoining top bunks was a man of about fifty. We talked about the huts. We complimented the builders on the excellence of their workmanship, we were magnanimous enough to compliment the Russians on their efficient stoves. We talked about each other. He told me he had been a schoolteacher in Brest Litovsk and a sergeant in the Polish Army Reserve. The Russians came and he lost his job to a Communist who had taken a fortnight’s ‘short course’ in teaching in the Soviet style. The mothers still brought their children to him, someone complained, he was arrested, interrogated and sentenced to ten years. I sympathized, even as I thought, ‘Ten years; you’re lucky, my friend.’ He was still talking as I fell asleep, my first real sleep for months.
We had to spend many hours in our huts. After 6 p.m. all prisoners had to be back in their own quarters. A certain amount of movement in and around the huts was allowed as long as there was no standing about in large groups. Both lines of barracks were under close supervision from the towers at the eastern end of the compound, but as long as prisoners obeyed the strict order to keep well away from the wire, the guards took no action. There was nothing much to do in the huts. There was nothing to read and no light to read by. The only permitted activity after the 6 p.m. deadline was a visit either to the Wednesday night lecture by the Politruk or to the library, the other Politruk-controlled enterprise. I began to think a browse among the books would commit me to nothing and would break up the long nights. On an impulse I sought permission to go to the library one evening. It was readily granted.
The library was housed in half of one of the administrative buildings on the left of the gate and farthest away from it, about twenty yards from the wire on the long south side. About two hundred books were set out on plain wooden shelves along one side of the room and I moved about picking them out at random. There were a number of works by a man named Mayakovski. Some fifty books were all of a series of Russkaya Azbuka, illustrated primers for children. On this and other nights I spent some time reading the Azbuka. It was an ABC, the text in simple verses, extolling the virtues of Soviet aeroplanes and pilots, Soviet tanks and tankmen, the Red Army, Soviet heroes like Voroshilov, Soviet statesmen like Lenin and Stalin, Soviet tractor-drivers and kolhoz workers, and all the rest of the glories of the U.S.S.R.
But the pride of the collection was the History of the Great Communist Party of Bolsheviks in two well-bound volumes, and a complete version of the Russian Constitution. I spent some interesting hours with both works and concluded there was little danger that, even in twenty-five years, I should be converted to Communism of the Russian or any other brand.
It was a lively, cynical and entertaining Czech occupying a bunk near me who persuaded me to go along to one of the Politruk’s Wednesday night talks, compulsory for all off-duty troops. The Politruk made no secret of his pleasure at seeing us and addressed a few special remarks to us before proceeding to deal with his military class. He spoke of the might
of Russia, of her dominating place in the world (with asides at us on the decadence of the evil Capitalist system). Soldiers asked questions and the Politruk answered with the dogma of Marx and quotations from the speeches and writings of Lenin and Stalin. He was smiling as we left He would not have been smiling a few minutes later had he watched the Czech put on a magnificent show for the benefit of the prisoners in our hut of the Politruk’s education of the Red Army. I joined in the uproarious laughter. The Czech was a born actor and mimic. He wound up by asking for questions from his vastly entertained audience and answered them in an acidly-clever distortion of Marxisms, Leninisms and Stalinisms. The rest of the prisoners agreed that our visit to school had been well worthwhile.
There was a diversion of a different kind a few nights later. In our hut was one of the handful of prisoner priests, mostly Roman Catholic, but with a few Russian and Greek Orthodox also. We were lying and sitting about late in the evening when our cleric, a Roman Catholic, walked slowly down the long aisle between the beds asking quietly if anyone objected to his holding a short service. Some did not answer, no one objected. He stood in the middle of the room and carried through a simple service, the Latin words striking strangely in this place. I peered at him through the faint light given out by the stoves and thought it odd to see a Catholic priest in a long black beard. Then he prayed for our deliverance and I climbed down from my bunk and fell on my knees. Many others did the same. Holding in his hand a silver birch crucifix, he called a blessing down on us. He was beanpole thin, tall and slightly stooped, his black hair tinged with grey, although he was probably not more than 35. I never knew what brought him to Siberia. He never talked about himself. His name was Gorycz, which means in Polish ‘bitterness’. No man could have been more unsuitably labelled.
By the end of the first month the camp had settled into a disciplined rhythm of life and there was a general feeling that, harsh though existence was in this remote, winter-bound spot, conditions could have been much worse. All working prisoners were given 400 grammes of bread (some 14 ounces) a day and those too sick to work received 300 grammes. The bread was issued with the early morning coffee, part was eaten then, another portion went down with the midday soup and the rest was taken with the hot drink handed out at the end of the day’s work. There was an occasional treat on Sunday when we were given dried fish, but bread remained our staple diet and the most important single factor in our lives. Tobacco, too, was important in a lesser degree. There was a fairly generous issue once a week of the coarse korizhki, with a sheet of very old newspaper to act as cigarette paper. Bread and tobacco were the only commodities of value in the camp. They were the currency of the camp, the only means of payment for services.
The mortality rate continued high in that first month. Many of the men who survived the death march wrecked in body and mind never did any work. They were given bunks in the existing huts when we arrived, and worn out beyond endurance, just lay there day after day until they lost their feeble grip on life. Volunteer burial parties from among their friends carried their bodies under armed escort to a clearing about a quarter of a mile from the camp, laboured to hack shallow graves out of the hard-frozen earth, and committed them at last to rest.
Twice I went out with burial parties and in so doing discovered that the Commandant was provided with an aeroplane. Our way took us past what seemed to me to be an inadequate runway cut out of the forest at its highest point. The plane, protected by tarpaulins, stood under the shelter of some trees. It was a small, Tiger Moth trainer type. One of the guards said Ushakov piloted it himself to attend conferences at area Army headquarters at Yakutsk.
The Russians interfered very little with our lives outside working hours. Inspection of our quarters was infrequent and perfunctory. Prisoners working in felling teams in the forest found new friends and at first sought permission to change from one hut to another to bunk near their teammates. The authorities offered no objection and let it be known that such moves could be made as a mutual arrangement between prisoners. Most men could be persuaded to switch places from one hut to another by a bribe of tobacco, and there was therefore a constant movement in those early weeks as men sorted out themselves and their friends. I knew none of my companions particularly well, although I still occasionally saw Grechinen, my companion of the march. Apart from him there was only the Czech, whose wit and gaiety I admired but who was never a close friend. The various national groups tended to hold together and we Poles, for instance, used to start the day with the singing of that little traditional hymn of praise, ‘When the Morning Light Appears’. The Russians did not care for our singing, but they never took active steps to stop us.
I used to lie on my bunk in the long evenings looking up to the smoke vent twenty feet above me and think about it all. There would be men talking quietly, some of them visitors from other huts. Words and disconnected sentences would reach me . . . names of places, and prisons and Army regiments . . . ‘She said, “Darling, don’t worry, it will all be over soon, and I will still be here”.’. . . A snippet of conversation about the guard who didn’t get out of the way as the tree groaned and broke and fell the wrong way . . . ‘Poor bastard, he won’t get any real treatment for that smashed leg of his.’ . . . There was talk of somebody who had got his ribs bruised. ‘He’s doing all right for himself – light duties cleaning out the officers’ mess and plenty of tobacco to be picked up.’ . . . It would flow around me, a half-noticed background to my own thoughts. The pine smell and the warmth and the movement of men clanging open the tops of the stoves to stoke up with bright-burning wood. And all the time my mind juggling with pictures of the stockaded camp and Ushakov and the Politruk and the soldiers (how many of them died?) and always the men about me, the young ones like me who were resilient and quick to recover, the forty-year-olds who surprisingly (to me, then) moved slowly but with great reserves of courage and strength, and the over-fifties who fought to stay young, to work, to live, the men who had lived leisured lives and now, marvellously, displayed the guts to face a cruel new life very bravely. They should have been telling tales to their devoted grandchildren, these oldsters. Instead they spent their days straining and lifting at the great fallen trees, working alongside men who were often half their age. There is a courage which flourishes in the worst kind of adversity and it is quite unspectacular. These men had it in full.
My mind revolved them round, these crowding impressions. And then, unfailingly, until I dropped off to sleep on the moss-covered planks, I would grapple with my own problem. The insistent, hammering thought always was, ‘Twenty-five years in this place.’ Many of these men I now knew would die as the years passed. There would be fresh entries. And I would get older and older. Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years. As long to go as I had already lived. But how to get out? And having beaten the wire, the moat and the formidable wooden fences, where would one escape to? I would think of the little Ostyak and his talk of the Unfortunates. Did any of them ever get out of Siberia? No man could ever hope to fight his way out alone against the crushing hazards of this country with its immense distances. Where, having planned an escape, could one find resolute men to make the attempt? These, and other questions, I put to myself. And I had no answers.
I fell in with Grechinen on the way to the latrines one evening. ‘Grechinen,’ I said, ‘if I could one day think up a plan of escape, would you come with me?’ A frown creased his forehead. ‘Are you serious?’ I nodded. Grechinen ran his fingers slowly through his beard. ‘Rawicz,’ he answered finally, ‘I will think about it tonight and tell you tomorrow.’
Cautious Grechinen. I saw him the next day in the wide space between the two rows of huts. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I would come with you if there was a chance, but the snow and the cold would kill us before we could get anywhere, even if the Russians didn’t catch us.’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I still don’t want to die young,’ added Grechinen.
I put the same question to the Czech. He thought at first that I was
joking. Then he sat down on the edge of his bunk and motioned me down beside him. He put his hand on my shoulder. Quietly, in a voice just above a whisper, he said, ‘Yes, I would come with you, but you want strong and healthy men. My stomach plagues me and I think it will eventually kill me. If I came with you I would die that much sooner out there and you would suffer for having me with you.’ We sat there in silence for a few minutes after that. Then the Czech spoke again. ‘If you get the chance, clear out, my boy. Keep your eyes skinned, pick your men. I shall wish you luck, anyway.’
We worked hard for six days and had an easy day on the seventh. Sunday was the day when the Commandant addressed the prisoners. He would talk of the work target for the following week, draw attention to any infringements of camp rules and make any announcements necessary affecting the life of prisoners. He would also call for suggestions and questions. We had been there a month when the Commandant called for volunteers for a new job. He wanted men who had experience of making skis. There was no response at first. Said the Commandant, ‘Volunteers will receive an immediate increase of one hundred grammes on their daily bread ration, and there will be more if the skis turned out are of good quality.’ Sixty men volunteered, and I was one of them. I had once made a pair of skis. I could not claim to be an expert, but for an extra three or four ounces of bread a day I was willing to try my hand.
The ski shop was the other half of the building occupied by the library. Half-a-dozen of the volunteers were real experts at the job and by common consent they divided the rest into a team of handymen for the actual process of manufacture and an outdoor crew for felling the birch trees, sawing the wood into the right lengths and keeping up a steady supply of the right timber to the shop. My achievement in having once made a pair of skis earned me a job inside the hut on the last stage of steaming and shaping. And the very first day, before a single pair of skis had been produced, we all received our new ration of 500 grammes of bread.