On the second day we turned out our first two pairs of skis. They were each in turn placed with their ends on two upturned logs, the middle unsupported, and Ushakov himself tested them by treading down on them until they touched the floor in the shape of a letter U. Two soldiers then took them away and tested them on a run through the forest. They passed both tests. At the end of the week Ushakov came to the shop and announced that samples sent away to Yakutsk had been accepted as up to the standard required by the Red Army. Our bread ration would go up immediately to a kilogramme a day – over double the normal ration – and there would be more tobacco for us. At the end of a fortnight we were turning out 160 pairs of skis a day.
There was considerable bad feeling among the forest gangs over our new privileges. I was asked more than once how I could allow myself to make skis for Russian soldiers, but I never entered into arguments. My own feeling was any work one did in a Siberian camp was bound to benefit the Soviet in some degree, so one might as well take the most interesting job available. Interesting, of course, and well paid. With bread occupying the exalted position it did in our lives, it would have been surprising had there been no adverse comment from the less favoured majority. I shared my extra tobacco and I took some of my extra bread to the sick. So did many others of the ski-making prisoners. But the dissatisfaction persisted. It is odd to reflect that the prime advocates of a classless society had this early succeeded in making two classes of workers and in marking the difference so clearly with substantial rewards to one class.
Working all day in the warmth of the ski shop, with the big stove roaring all day for the steaming of the wood, I felt I was getting back towards my full strength again. It should have made me resigned to my sentence, but instead it turned my thoughts more and more to escape. I began to wonder how I could preserve and hide some of my extra bread. I still had no workable plan and I could not know then that I was soon to get help from a most unexpected quarter.
8
The Wife of the Commissar
I HAD volunteered once and struck lucky. I volunteered again one cold blustery Sunday morning in mid-March as flurries of snow swept about the hunched-up prisoners at the weekly parade.
‘In my quarters,’ said Ushakov, ‘I have a radio set. It is called a Telefunken. Is there any one of you who knows this make of set well enough to do a repair job?’ I knew the Telefunken, because we had one at home – a German make, I think, made under licence in a factory at Wilno for the Polish market. Men turned their heads to see who might step forward. There was a full minute of silence and nobody made a move. I knew the set, but could I repair it? If I could, there was the exciting prospect of hearing some news from the outside world, from which I had been cut off for nearly eighteen months. I had a sudden panic that somebody else would get the job. I stuck up my hand and called out. An N.C.O. stepped up and took my name and my place of work. ‘I will send for you when I want you,’ said the Commandant.
It was to be a fateful decision, launching me into the last and most extraordinary phase of my stay at Camp 303. In this isolated community of between five and six thousand men under sentence and a battalion strength of officers and men, there was but one woman. The defective Telefunken was to be the means of my meeting her, and, so far as I knew, I was the only prisoner who ever talked to her.
The following afternoon as I worked in the ski shop, the Commandant’s messenger, a moon-faced private named Igor, called for me. ‘The Commandant wants you,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’ As we left, the other men in the shop called out, ‘Find out how the war’s going,’ and ‘Get us some news from Poland,’ and so on. I waved my hand. I confess I felt nervous as I walked away from the ski shop, across in front of the big gate, past the officers’ mess to the Commandant’s house standing on the other side of the camp at the northwest corner of the parade ground. It was, like all the other buildings, built of logs with the typical porch opening south to keep the wind and snow away from the front door. As I stepped inside I saw it differed only from the style of the prisoners’ barracks in having an inner skin of smooth plank walls, a wooden ceiling and floor, and a stove stackpipe that went all the way up through the roof. For windows it had, not glass, but the same peculiar tough fish-skin stuff which was fitted in all the other buildings. The most that could be said for this skin was that it was windproof and let in light. It could not be seen through.
Igor ushered me in. Ushakov stepped forward towards the door, dismissed Igor and motioned me in. ‘I have come to look at the set, Gospodin Polkovnik,’ I said in Russian, using the old Russian style of respectful address to a Colonel.
‘Yes, of course. I will show it to you.’ He stepped past me and out through the door I had just entered, looked around and came back in.
The woman sat in front of the stove, which had been placed so that it protruded through the partition which divided the home into two rooms, so heating both halves. The Colonel murmured a conventional introduction to his wife. I bowed and said something formal and she smiled with a small inclination of her head. I found myself staring at her. She was the first woman I had met since I left my wife and my mother in Pinsk. I felt awkward and ill at ease, painfully aware of my ugly clothes, my beard and my long hair which curled over the neck of my jacket. I could not take my eyes off her.
She stood up and I saw she was tall for a woman. She wore a long thick skirt and a dark woollen cardigan over a white, flower-embroidered cotton blouse. Her brown hair, tightly plaited and wound in the Russian style halo-wise around the head, had a live, well-brushed sheen, and I was struck by the clearness of her skin. I was never much good at guessing women’s ages, but I think she would have been nearing forty. She was not beautiful but she had that quiet quality of essential womanliness, a way of holding herself, an ease of moving, a way of looking at one, that would demand attention anywhere. I came out of my fleeting trance to find her blue eyes regarding me in a look of frank pity and sympathy. And I turned my head away and saw Ushakov standing in the doorway between the two rooms looking at me in that preoccupied and detached manner of his. ‘Let me show you the radio,’ he said.
The inner room was their bedroom and his office combined. Along one wall nearest to the stove was a heavy wooden bunk, at the head of which was a cupboard in which I could see his uniforms hanging. Near it, against the wall farthest from the door, was a solid wooden chest. The bed was to my left as I walked in through the partition door, the chest immediately in front of me. The part of the room to my right was Ushakov’s office. Hanging on the wall was a big contour map of Eastern Siberia – an extraordinary production in that instead of place-names there were only numbers. There was also a plan of the camp and a coloured portrait of Joseph Stalin. On a bench under the all-seeing eye of Stalin was the radio, a brand-new, battery-operated Telefunken.
Ushakov gave me a Pushki cigarette, fetched over a kerosene lamp and set it down on a bench near me. I took the back off the set and began running my fingers along the leads, suspecting a loose connection somewhere. Ushakov asked me questions about the set, where it was made, what it cost, how it worked. Hesitantly, I inquired where he had got it. ‘I happened unfortunately,’ he answered, ‘to be in charge of troops in Poland in 1939, and I acquired it there.’ My mind seized on the use of the word ‘unfortunately’. It tied in with the theory which the prisoners expressed that even to be commandant of a camp in Siberia was in the nature of a punishment. I had the impression then, later to be strengthened, that Ushakov owed his appointment to Siberia to some indiscretion during the Polish campaign.
He went back to the fire and sat down on the polished bench with his wife. I worked on, unhurriedly checking the circuit. After about half-an-hour, I was aware that she was busying herself in the next room, and then he called me to the fire, while she poured out two mugs of tea, saccharine sweetened. The Colonel drank first and then gave his mug to me. I went back to the radio, and as I worked I surprised myself with the thought that I was not going to rush this job,
that this was my most pleasant experience since my arrest and that I must make it last. When Igor came to collect me, I explained that checking all the leads and valves was a slow business. ‘Very well,’ said Ushakov, ‘you must come again. I will send for you.’ He gave me another cigarette and I went off with my escort.
‘What’s the news?’ they called out to me when I got back.
‘I haven’t got it going yet,’ I said, ‘but I’ll tell you what’s happening when I do.’
Igor fetched me again the next day. As I fiddled with the set, they both talked to me. Ushakova was interested in my family, impressed by the fluency of my Russian. I told her my mother was Russian.
‘What did you do to get sent here?’ This was the Colonel.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘You have twenty-five years, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
There was a pause and then she spoke. ‘Twenty-five years is a long time. How old are you?’ I told her I was 25.
The three-cornered conversation was interspersed with odd silences. They sat close together on the bench, I was on my haunches looking over the top of the Telefunken. Surprisingly, Ushakov asked me if I thought Russia would be involved in another war. The last war for Russia, as far as he was concerned, was that of 1914. I mentioned Finland and Poland. ‘Ah,’ he replied, ‘that wasn’t war; it was liberation.’ I wondered if he believed it. I popped my head up over the top of the radio and looked at him. He was looking up at the ceiling and his face was expressionless. He returned to the question of Russia being involved in war.
‘In Poland,’ I said, ‘it was common knowledge that Goering came to us to get us to give the Germans a corridor through which they could attack Russia. Germany is ready and the attack is inevitable.’ I gabbled it out fast. I expected to be told I was talking too much. But neither Ushakov nor his wife made any comment.
‘Did you find the war very cruel?’ she asked me eventually. I told her about the roads choked by fleeing Polish women and children and old men, and how the Stukas came screaming down and blasted them. ‘That is war,’ said the Colonel. ‘When you chop wood somebody is always liable to be hurt by splinters.’
It occurred to me that they did not seem very anxious to hurry the repair of the radio. I had found what I believed to be the fault, a loose battery lead. But I just did not want to put the back on the set, connect up and switch on. I thought my visits must then end.
She asked me about pre-war Poland. What were the women’s fashions? They were often elegant, I said, straight from Paris. And high-heeled shoes? Yes, I said. They, too, were very attractive.
Two days went by before I was summoned again and meanwhile my workmates chaffed me that I couldn’t mend the set anyway and that the Commandant was going to get fed up with the delay.
On this third visit I started straightaway to get the Telefunken working. Ushakov was busy at his desk and the woman did the talking. She asked me about the films I used to see and was surprised to hear that Russian films were banned in Poland. As she talked I switched on. The radio hummed into life and I began to turn the dials. Ushakov left his work and came over beside me. We heard a concert from Moscow. I went from station to station, picking up fragments of news and finally we heard the voice of Hitler, ranting in his own unmistakable fashion, at a youth rally in the Ruhr – I think it was Düsseldorf.
Ushakov gave me a whole packet of korizhki tobacco and a sheet of old newspaper. As Igor stood in the doorway waiting to escort me away, he said, ‘If the set needs any attention, I will send for you again. I am afraid we do not understand how to work it very well.’ I went back and I told the men all I had learned from the wireless. Their greatest interest was in Germany and the Hitler speech. They wanted to know when I would be going again. ‘When the set breaks down,’ I said.
It was now nearing the end of March. I worked uninterruptedly for several days in the ski shop and began regretfully to think that the Telefunken episode was over. Just about that time I came to know a remarkable man named Anastazi Kolemenos. I had seen him come in occasionally to warm himself at the big fire. He was one of the finest physical specimens I have ever seen, over six feet tall, blond-haired and blond-bearded, with curious grey-green eyes. In spite of the privations he had endured, he must have weighed fourteen stone. He was a kind and helpful giant of a man, whose job was to carry the birch logs and split them for use in the ski shop.
I was standing outside the ski shop door watching him this day. I walked across to where he had piled some logs and went to lift one to take it over to him. The end came up easily enough. I tried to get a grip round the middle to hoist it up. It defied my efforts. Then, suddenly, Kolemenos was beside me. ‘That’s all right, friend,’ he said, ‘I’ll do it.’ He bent down and swung the log on to his shoulder in one powerful movement. I did not regard myself as a weakling, but this man’s strength was phenomenal. I spoke to him, spontaneously told him who I was. Kolemenos told me his name, volunteered the information that he had been a landowner in Latvia, that he was now 27 years of age. The old escape idea came surging into my mind, but this was no place to talk of it. ‘We will have a talk some time,’ I said.
‘I shall be glad to,’ answered the giant.
Over the clatter of workshop activity they called out to me, ‘Your friend has called for you again.’ Igor stood stolidly inside the door and beckoned. I put down a ski I was testing, dusted myself down, and walked out with him.
Ushakov was there and she was there. He told me the set was not working as well as it did. I tested it and it seemed to function, although the signal strength was down a little. I said he would be advised to get spare batteries. He said he would arrange that. He put on his greatcoat, murmured something to her about having to attend an officers’ meeting and went out. There was great understanding between these two and they were completely devoted to each other.
‘I will make some tea for you,’ she smiled. ‘You can find me a station with some good music.’ She talked on for a while about the music she liked, praised Chopin but declared her favourite composer to be Tchaikovsky. She told me she played the piano and that having to leave her piano behind was one of her greatest hardships here in Siberia. I looked at her hands, which she had spread in front of her. The fingers were white, long and capable, the hands well-shaped and cared-for. ‘Those are artist’s hands,’ I ventured. ‘I sketch, too,’ she told me. ‘It is a hobby of mine.’
I found her the kind of music she wanted and she talked about herself with a symphony orchestra as the background. She talked to draw me out, to get me to tell her about myself. It was as though she were saying, ‘This is me, this is my life. You can trust me.’ I didn’t quite know why this was happening to me. I said to myself that in spite of his exalted position here, these are really exiles and outcasts. She, especially, is almost as much a prisoner as I am. She is here only because he is here, and probably the real ruler of Camp 303 is the Politruk.
We sipped hot tea and she kept her voice low. This was the story she told me. Her family had been Army officers for generations before the Revolution. Her father had been a Colonel in the Czar’s personal guard and had been shot by the Bolsheviks. Her young cadet brother died of wounds received in the defence of the Smolny Institute. Her mother had fled with her from their home near Nijni Novgorod and when, later, the mother died, she had adapted herself to the new order of life, got herself a workcard and found herself a job. She did well and earned herself a State holiday with other favoured workers at Yalta. And there she met Ushakov. I gathered that from then on he was the only man in her life.
She was very loyal to Ushakov. She did not tell me why he had suddenly been posted from Poland. He went first to Vladivostock and she had no word from him for six months. Ushakova knew some Party people with the right influence. They told her he was going to Siberia in charge of a camp and she strove unceasingly until her friends got her a travel permit to join him.
All the time I was telling myself: S
he talks to me because I am a prisoner and she is sorry for me and because she cannot talk these kind of things to her own people. Yet, amid lingering doubts, there was the conviction that this was an intelligent, sensitive and most compassionate woman, and this camp, which surrounded her with the evidence of cruelly wasted lives, had shocked her. It was no place for a woman. Ushakova was a Russian, she believed passionately in the great destiny of Russia. But she was also a woman and I don’t think she liked what she now had to see, day after day, month after month.
What made me talk about the Ostyaks? I do not know. I think I was embarrassed at her complete acceptance of me and I seized on another topic to steer the conversation away from ourselves. They used to put out food for the Unfortunates, I said.
Those clear blue eyes held mine. ‘Do you ever think of escape?’ The question panicked me. There was awful danger in it. I had my mouth open and could not speak. I put the cup down with a clumsy thump. And her eyes, wide open and blue and candid, held me still and watched my flutterings of fear.
The quiet voice was going on. ‘You do not answer, Rawicz. You do not trust me. I thought you might want to talk about it. There is no danger in talking to me about it . . .’
Escape. Escape. It was as though she had looked into my mind and plucked out that one word of danger and longing and hope. Yes, I wanted to tell her about my perilous dreams. But she had shocked me into silence. The words would not come.
Then came Igor and I turned to go, disconcerted and miserable, like a man who has turned his head from the extended hand of a friend. She spoke coolly and formally. ‘You will come again if the set wants adjusting?’ My words came in a rush. ‘Yes, yes, of course I will. I shall be glad to.’