A halt was called about half-an-hour after dawn in a wooded depression between two hills. We were all stiff, weighed down with heavy-limbed fatigue, cold and hungry. In my group were men of all ages, from lads of 17 to men of over 60, and from many different civilian backgrounds. Some of the older men were moaning already with misery. They were for the most part professional types, lawyers and architects and the like, who had reached that stage in life before the coming of the Russians when they drove in their cars from home to office and back again – men who had given up the physical caperings of youth and could look not too far ahead to a well-to-do, respected and comfortable retirement. They were skirmishing with death and they had such paltry weapons left for the fight. Then and later we younger men did what we could to help them along, but casualties among them were heavy indeed.
That first stop lasted only a couple of hours, long enough for the field kitchen which had accompanied us to brew up hot coffee and for the soldiers to distribute the bread ration. The heat of the coffee was like a breath of warm life, and we ate ravenously of our bread. We were not unshackled from the chain and in all too short a time we were on the move again, this time in daylight.
The six flanking guards were regularly changed every two hours. They jogged forward to the lorry, six reliefs jumped down, and a new turn of duty started without slowing the march of the winding, toiling column of prisoners. Over the exposed places on high ground the wind howled like a chorus of demons, our feet slipped in the churned up snow, tips of fingers, ears and noses felt the insidious attack of frostbite. And, even this early, the toll of death started. A shout, passed from a contingent well behind us, was relayed along by the walking sentries until it reached the transport commandant in the leading lorry. The leader stopped, the rest stopped. Some poor prisoner was unshackled, his body removed. The same method of disposal was followed as for the dead of the train. The clothes and boots were removed, the corpse was left behind under a mound of snow. This was the first of many. Taking my own section as typical, the death-rate was to reach between ten and fifteen per cent before the long trek was over.
It was difficult to appreciate that we were following any kind of regular road. Everything was blanketed with thick snow. But every hundred yards there would be a stout stake about eight feet tall topped by a well-lashed-on clump of dried hay or small twigs, like a succession of witches’ brooms. These, I guessed, were route markers. They were with us for miles, up steep hills, down into forested valleys, across the fording places of hard-frozen rivers. There were times when even the chain-bound lorry wheels began to slip and then the soldiers would jump down and put their shoulders into a helping heave and we prisoners, motivated only by a desire to get to our resting-place as soon as possible, would close up behind and add our considerable weight to the effort. It was hard going, and it got worse as we progressed.
Few of the marchers had any doubt of our direction. We were pushing north – almost due north – out towards the upper end of Irkutsk province towards the great sprawling area of Yakutsk. We were probably following a course roughly parallel with the western shore of Lake Baikal, that mighty, banana-shaped expanse of inland water stretching over four hundred miles north from its southern tip where the town of Irkutsk lies across the Trans-Siberian Railway. We were headed north from Latitude 50°N. to Latitude 60°N. and beyond, up towards the Arctic Circle, and the Siberian weather got worse as we went forward.
The march continued on the second day until late afternoon. It might, I feel, have ended earlier if we could have reached a sheltered position before this, but, as was to be the practice from then on, there appeared to be an order requiring the Commandant to find some unexposed place, usually in the lee of woods, for the night’s halt. The consideration was almost certainly one of expediency rather than a humanitarian one. Since so much time, effort and money was being spent in getting this considerable free labour force from one end of Russia to the other, there must have been some pressure on the Commandant to bring through as many men as possible still capable of work. Now, outside the settled area of urban Irkutsk, we were unshackled for the night and allowed to light fires. As in the potato field, we dug into the snow to get some warmth and clung close together, dozing in the light of fires for which, with cramped and frozen hands, we had eagerly foraged the wood from the trees about us. There we had our second mug of coffee of the day, and those who had been careful enough to save some bread from the morning issue ate as they drank.
I have grateful memories of the general efficiency of the lumbering field kitchen. It baked the bread issued to us each morning and which was our only sustenance throughout and it produced two hot drinks a day. Only once did it fail, and that was after we had been buffeted and bogged down for hours by a blizzard. On this day we received an emergency issue which proved to be a most welcome and palatable change of fare – rye bread which had been soaked in honey and partially dried to form an easily stored and transported form of iron ration. How well I remember any change of diet on the long road from Pinsk to Northern Siberia. I struggle sometimes to remember in sharp detail some of my experiences but small incidents concerning food come back to me clearly and unbidden. There was never enough of it and the thought of it nagged at us always. Men would have given a handful of diamonds for an extra slice of bread in these circumstances and counted themselves the most fortunate of beings, because only food had value. It was beyond price.
We were hit by three tearing blizzards in the course of our march. The first one, which struck towards the end of the first week was the worst because it was our first experience of the full fury of one of these freezing, high-velocity winds hurling with it a concentrated, driving weight of snow. The sky had been heavy, the clouds low and lead-grey, when we got under way soon after dawn, and the blizzard shrieked down on us about two hours later. It slowed the convoy almost immediately until we were creeping along, heads well down, at only a slow shuffle. It was almost impossible to open the eyes to it. The snow packed on our matted hair and beards, coated the lorries and the taut chains, mantled the soldiers exposed to it ahead and above us, crouched forward near their whitened machine-gun. The blizzard met us almost head on and its impact was such that I wondered how for the next few hours the leading lorry still succeeded in keeping the convoy crawling on. We found some kind of comparative shelter about two o’clock. This was the first time I saw the Russians wearing their bashliks, a larger super-type balaclava in a kind of camel-hair material, the use of which required a special order from the commanding officer.
The storm blew for the rest of the day and well into the night. We could light no fires while it continued. When it abated before dawn into thin flurries of snow we all, and this must include the soldiers too, felt at our lowest ebb. At dawn, looking like a collection of snowmen, we turned with desperate hope towards the field kitchen. The mute appeal was answered. The hot coffee came round. There was a bread issue.
Little opportunity existed for striking up any kind of friendship with one’s fellow sufferers. Everyone seemed preoccupied with his own troubles, grappling in his own fashion with the overriding necessity of keeping going. One man, however, I did get to know, because he was my partner on the chain, handcuffed at the same point and abreast of me. He was a young man, thick-legged, strong and with big, muscled shoulders. It was days before we spoke, although we had been taking stock of each other from the beginning. For my part, I liked what I saw and I think the feeling was reciprocated on his side. We talked first during an enforced stop to unshackle a dead man from a place on the chain just ahead of us. ‘They won’t kill me like that,’ he said quietly. ‘Me neither,’ I answered. ‘We’ll get there . . . wherever we’re going.’
His name, he told me, was Grechinen, and he came from Lublin. He was – although the description is a little too grandiose for the actual job – the stationmaster at a small station outside Lublin. In fact, he did what work was required almost on his own, including the portering. A boy of modest ambitio
ns, content with his own small sphere of importance, happier working with his hands than carrying out the modest amount of clerical work that went with the title of stationmaster. The Russians came, and for no logical reason relieved him of his appointment and sent him to one of the motor transport stations they were setting up to deal with the repair of tractors. Grechinen, born a Ukrainian, was one of those who became Polish in the great Central European rearrangement of boundaries after the First World War. He was philosophical about his changed occupation. In fact he quite liked ‘messing about with tractors’.
Some of those tractors, Grechinen told me, were beyond repair, but he and his workmates nevertheless were expected to get them in running order to be sent back to the farms. Grechinen spent nearly a week on one of them and then watched it go with misgivings. One day he was called to the superintendent’s office and gravely informed that this particular machine had broken down soon after it returned to its farm. Grechinen, a stolid lad and slow to temper, said his piece forcefully and pointedly about the impossibility of turning scrap-iron into farm tractors.
Mechanic Grechinen was arrested and charged with sabotage. A few other charges were thrown in as well. His previous unexceptionable career as stationmaster supported the accusation that he had been a willing worker for the Polish police state and therefore an enemy of the people. Grechinen tried to explain, but no one took any notice, so he shut his mouth after the first interrogation and resolutely refused to say another word. ‘What can you say,’ he asked me, ‘to a crowd of bloody fools who ask questions and get mad at you because you won’t give them the answers they want?’ They manhandled him, pushed him round, yelled at him. Grechinen kept his mouth shut. They thought he was a bit simple in the head, and eventually stopped the treatment and put him on trial. He got off lightly with ten years hard labour.
When the sentence was announced, Grechinen was so surprised that he forgot his vow of silence. ‘Ten years!’ he exclaimed. ‘What for?’ The prosecutor jumped to his feet. ‘Oh,’ he said menacingly. ‘So now you start to talk.’ Grechinen shut his mouth again. He had kept silent, he said, until he met me. Talking in the wrong places, he warned me, could get a man into a lot of unexpected trouble. This, I realized, was advice from a friend. I thanked him. There was a strong bond between us for the rest of the trip. I liked honest Grechinen.
Somehow someone learned during the second week of the march that it was 24 December. Maybe a prisoner had guessed we must be near that date and had had the day confirmed by a guard. The news went up and down the long, struggling line like the leaping flames of a forest fire. It’s Christmas Eve, went the whisper from man to man. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, Grechinen,’ I said. Grechinen half-smiled through his cracked lips. ‘Christmas Eve,’ he repeated. Away back behind us there was suddenly a thin, wavering sound. It was odd and startling. It grew in volume and swept towards us. It was the sound of men singing, men singing with increasing power in the wastes of the Siberian wilderness.
I thought the soldiers would have been ordered to shout us down, but the mounting song reached us unchecked and engulfed us. I was singing and Grechinen was singing. Everybody who had a voice left was joining in. A marching choir of nearly five thousand male voices drowning their despair in a song of praise for the Child who would be born on the morrow. The song was ‘Holy Night’, and those who did not sing it in Polish sang it in the language in which they had learnt it as children. Then a few voices started the Polish Christmas carol, ‘Jesu’s Lullaby’, and I choked on it and fell silent. And half-way through it, others broke down and wept quietly. The Lullaby died abruptly and there was no more singing. Our hearts were full to bursting with the bitter-sweet memories of other Christmases.
Christmas Day came and went like any other of the dreary succession of marching days. We walked into our second blizzard and walked out of it. Grechinen and I between us supported the man directly ahead of him for hours during this second storm, calling on the guards to do something to help him. ‘He’ll manage all right,’ said one of them. He died barely half-an-hour before we reached the night’s stopping-place.
The soldiers were not always so indifferent to the appeals of exhausted prisoners, but it became clear that they were under orders to discriminate. The gasping, flagging, floundering older men from the original train party were never helped, in spite of the advice given out by the guards frequently before the start of a day’s march to ‘call out if you are taken ill’. We were reminded, too, that there were still with us specially-trained first-aid men, but I never saw them about their business.
Back at the assembly point near Irkutsk the train prisoners had been joined by a small crowd of Russians. They seemed to be nearly all youngish men and I suspect they were not, like us, political offenders but ordinary Soviet criminal types, consigned to Siberia to work out the expiation of their crimes. There were three or four of them on our chain and these were the only ones who were helped along on their journey. The procedure when a man began to stumble and fall about and mumble in his misery was for his nearest colleagues on the chain to call one of the walking guards. The name of the unfortunate was shouted ahead to the soldiers in the lorry. A list would be consulted. More often than not the sick man was out of luck. He was told to keep going and his friends heaved and strained to keep him on his feet until the next halt. I saw men collapse into the snow and cry to be unchained and to be allowed to lie down and sleep. It would have been release by death and they begged for it. But the soldiers pulled and kicked them to their feet and the awful struggle went on.
We were surprised indeed at what happened the first time one of the newcomers keeled over, his hand dragging at the chain. There were the usual shouts between the walking guards and the soldiers ahead. The list of names was brought out. The guards roughly hauled the man erect. There was a bit of heavy banter from one of the soldiers as the prisoner was unshackled. ‘You are a fine, strapping young fellow,’ he said. ‘We’ll give you a little rest and then you’ll be able to do some work for us later.’ The man was taken off to the lorry and helped up to join the soldiers. He rode with them for two hours or more and was then brought back to resume his place in the marching column. I suppose we should have been happy that one of our number had had his burden lightened, but, remembering the men who died unaided, we hated him and bitterly distrusted him. We never had anything more to say to a prisoner who had received the favour of a lift in the lorry. Our suspicions even went so far as to conjecture whether such men were planted among us as informers, although, in all reason, it would be difficult to imagine what reward could be offered for their services which would compensate for a winter trip through Siberia. The only discrimination by the military escort might possibly have been on the grounds of age – a quite practical expedient to bring through alive as many young men as possible – but I saw no Pole get a lift and we were not existing in conditions congenial to logical thinking anyway.
The days dragged on in much the same pattern through January. More and more we looked forward to the nightly halt, the fires, the bread and the hot coffee. Some of the old hands among the soldiers said we were lucky that this was not one of the worst Siberian winters, but it was as cruel and bleak as any weather I ever want to experience. The snowdrifts piling high along the track slowed us down increasingly each day. The occasions when we had to help get the lorries out of difficulties became more frequent until we began to wonder how long any progress at all could be maintained. The cold steel of the handcuff burned into my wrist. I was always cold, wet and wolfishly hungry. Stolid Grechinen plodded along beside me day after day. We said little but we derived strength from each other, from our mutual determination to see it through alive. Grechinen would go for days in silence but occasionally he would smile through his beard at me and I would give my own face-frozen smile back to him.
6
End of the journey
IT MUST have been in the last week in January 1941, when we had spent over forty days on the march, that
the third and most violent blizzard hurled itself out of the north and at last bogged down the lorries. The convoy had covered well over eight hundred miles from Irkutsk. We had crossed two great rivers, the Vitim first and, but a few days ago, the mighty Lena, both of them solid frozen and looking like broad smooth roads winding away on their long courses through the vastness of Siberia. After all this, it seemed incredible that the lorries would ever stop their slow thrusting northwards. With the dry, powdery snow thrown stingingly into their faces by the howling wind, soldiers and prisoners together worked to keep digging the leading vehicle out of drifts, but there came a time when no expenditure of human effort could prevail. The long line of trucks and men piled forward on itself and raggedly came to a standstill.
It had been the practice throughout the journey for the heavy duties of leading lorry to be taken in rotation. When the order was given for a change of leadership, the first driver would pull his truck out of line with his chained men behind and allow the rest to move past him, taking up position behind the last truck. The duration of duty at the head of the convoy depended on the type of road and the weather. Now we were on some kind of main road alongside which ran telephone poles, their wires sagging under the weight of the snow, but the advantage of being on a fair road was outweighed by its position on high ground completely exposed to the weather. Apart from the pile-up of snow it must have been almost impossible for the drivers to see ahead into the white wall of swirling snow.
The position of my group at this stage was fourth or fifth in line and it was here, almost alongside me, that the Commandant and his junior officers, after inspecting conditions ahead, got together for an anxious conference. Whether a complete forced stop had ever been envisaged I do not know, but these Russian officers were obviously a very worried lot. They talked, their backs to the wind, for a few minutes and then a signalman climbed precariously up one of the telephone poles and plugged in with a portable hand-set. He came down and reported. There were nods of rather taut approval and the officer group broke up to their various emergency duties. We stood around while a small patrol of troops struck off along the road ahead to reconnoitre for a sheltered place.