Forty Days at Kamas (14 page)

"When I faint I see strange things sometimes–things that haven't happened yet. Oftentimes I can tell when someone in the barracks isn’t going to make it. That's happened five or six times now."

Reineke said he understood.

"I've known men who had visions like that just before combat," he told Jackson. "Almost drove them nuts, trying to decide whether to say anything about it. But go ahead, Ben, tell me what you saw in your dreams."

"In the first dream I saw Kamas camp from way above, like I was in an airplane or something. Only there was no snow in the valley, only in the highest mountains, so I figure it must have been summer. And the walls between the divisions were torn down in places and women were together with the men all over camp. They were walking around together and going to work in the workshops and building things together in the camp yard.

"On the second night I saw the same thing, except that the camp was surrounded by soldiers in trenches and sandbag bunkers with tanks and armored troop carriers all around. Bulldozers were digging up the ground and creating huge clouds of dust. And off in the hills there were security people watching through telescopes and binoculars and listening with big radar–like dishes. They were watching and listening day and night.

"On the third night, I saw the camp after dark, but the sky was bright because there were flares floating above all the yards and spot lights shining on the camp from every direction. But inside camp it was quiet and there were only a few people still awake. Then suddenly the bulldozers started moving in toward the fences, knocking them down and crashing into the barracks and the workshops. The tanks came right on their heels, doing the same thing. And as people started coming out of the buildings, troops with Tommy guns followed the tanks in and gunned them down. Some of the prisoners fought back and the killing went on and on until I thought I couldn't stand it any longer."

"But as I got closer I could see that the prisoners knew exactly what they were doing and that most of them expected to die. I looked into their faces and into the faces of the troops and it seemed clear to me that the prisoners were really the winners while the attackers had lost everything that mattered."

Ben Jackson stopped talking and looked at Reineke and at me for a sign that we had understood.

"Quite a vision," Reineke replied. "I guess it means we may die with our boots on after all. If you ask me, an old soldier can't ask for much more."

"You'll die that way for sure, Major Reineke. But Paul won't. He'll be gone by then. And so will I. I do believe I'll be dead before all this comes to pass."

I felt as if he had plugged my hand into an electric socket.

"Gone where?" I pressed. "Do you mean 'gone' as in 'away' or ‘gone’ as in 'dearly departed?'"

"All I know is you won't be in camp," he answered with a shrug. "You'll be somewhere; I just don't see where."

"Well, I just hope you have better luck at escaping than I’ve had, Paul," Reineke told me before offering Ben Jackson his hand.

"Ben, if there is anything at all that I can do for you, come back and let's talk some more. In the meantime, if you aren't feeling well enough to work, talk to Schuster in the dispensary and tell him I sent you. He'll give you a break, I promise."

Ben took Reineke's hand and held his gaze for several seconds before leaving. Reineke remained standing and turned his attention to me.

"You've probably figured out by now what I was about to ask you before Ben came along. Only now that I've had time to think about it, I've changed my mind. We still need good men to help us with counterintelligence work but I don't think that's why we crossed paths last week in that railway car.

"Something is about to break loose here at Kamas, Paul. Whatever it is, I've stopped trying to escape it. But I think Ben is right about you. This is not the hill you were meant to die on, Paul. Before we're done here, I think we'll have more than enough martyrs to go around. What we need are more witnesses.

"So here's the offer I'd like to make to you. I want you to go all over this camp. Talk to people. Find out all you can about Kamas and what makes this place tick. People like Knopfler and Murphy can help you. Then remember it all. Write it down if you have to but imprint the important details on that educated mind of yours. Then when the time comes, I'm going to find some way for you to get out of here and tell our story outside."

I took Reineke's extended hand.

"It's a deal," I replied. "Whether I make it out of here alive or not, I'll have a damned good reason to try."

C
HAPTER
13

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
—Victor Frankl,
Man’s Search for Meaning

MONDAY, MARCH 18

The worst of the frigid weather lasted four more days. But since the fourth day fell on a Sunday, we did not have to face it outdoors except for our brief forays to the mess hall and the latrine.

An unnatural quiet pervaded the barracks that Sunday. By now we newcomers had been at Kamas for nearly two weeks and had slipped into a routine. We had adjusted to our new work, learned what to expect from the warders and work team leaders, and had settled down sufficiently to see that all we could expect for the indefinite future was more of the same. By now only the most doctrinaire Unionists among us expected the Warden to make good on his promises.

Our day of rest also gave us an opportunity to take our minds off immediate issues of work and survival long enough to contemplate our past and future and the meaning of our lives in camp. For the first time in months, I found myself unable to repress thoughts of my former life and, particularly, of my wife and children.

Fifteen months earlier, I had driven myself nearly mad with worry over how my wife and two young daughters would survive after my arrest. My failed efforts to keep my business alive had left me jobless and nearly destitute. Now, having been arrested and charged with political crimes, my wife would also be unemployable and my children disqualified from attending public school. As my months in prison dragged on, I imagined my wife selling all our possessions to pay the rent and keep the children clothed and fed.

The only hope for their future lay in collecting enough money to pay the emigration tax and join my wife’s relatives abroad. But until I confessed, exit visas would be out of the question. So after refusing to budge through a year of nightly interrogations and beatings, I finally signed a plea bargain agreement on the condition that State Security would allow my wife and daughters to emigrate. A week later I was told that their exit visas were granted.

Then, on the eve of my departure west, I received a smuggled message that my in–laws had wired money for their emigration tax and that Juliet, Claire, and Louisa would be boarding a flight to London in a few days. At last they would be free. But I would be sent to the camps and might never see them again. How could I have let such a thing happen?

Around that time, an older inmate at Susquehanna had assured me that unconquerable feelings of guilt and regret were normal following a political prisoner's arrest. In fact, guilt tended to be strongest precisely among honest and principled people. He then pointed out that the State Security interrogators relied on such guilt feelings to crush a prisoner's will and extract his confession. To the inmate’s knowledge, the only sensible course of action for a prisoner who carried such a burden was to absolve oneself of guilt, put aside longings for home and family, and start an entirely new life in the camps. Only by accepting the end of one's former life could a prisoner hope to preserve his sanity and have a reasonable chance to survive.

I had accepted the man's advice. Yet images of my wife and daughters continued to pass before my eyes whenever my mind was idle. In an instant I found myself reliving perfectly preserved moments from the days before my arrest, memories that had lain repressed for more than a year. It did not require much analysis to trace these thoughts back to my conversation with Glenn Reineke five days before, when my hopes of a new life beyond the camps were suddenly rekindled.

I began to question whether the path laid out by the Susquehanna inmate might not be right after all. Rather than resign myself to an indeterminate future of hunger, exhaustion, and declining health spent hauling bricks and stones, perhaps the time had come to use the hope of rejoining my family as an incentive to escape.

My thoughts were occupied with little else all day Sunday and into the night. When I awakened on Monday morning, I knew that I could no longer pursue the path of pessimism and self–denial that I had been on. From that moment I nurtured the idea that my presence in Kamas really did have a larger purpose and that I might discover it by paying closer attention to events going on around me.

But those events were far from reassuring. Apparently I had not been the only prisoner to have spent Sunday contemplating the meaning of life at Kamas. Others had brooded, too, and had reached different conclusions from mine. One young prisoner, a Cuban from Miami, had slit his wrists during the night. A middle–aged bachelor in Barracks B–8 had slipped away from the barracks and hanged himself from a lamp post. Between dawn and roll call, two other prisoners ran into the perimeter wire and were electrocuted before they could be shot. And, as was the usual pattern on Monday mornings, several additional Division 3 residents had simply given up hope and expired in their sleep.

Two rows of bunks from mine, an emaciated young prisoner who had been a college senior when he was arrested two years earlier appeared to have given up hope but not breath. He lay on his back in a lower bunk two rows from mine, staring open–mouthed at the ceiling of the bunk above him. A kind–hearted, white–haired prisoner whom I knew from the recycling site knelt by his side and held the youth's hand while doing his best to cajole him into rising for roll call. The older man was Al Gallucci, an aeronautical engineer from Georgia who for some unfathomable reason still worked as a common laborer, having refused repeated offers of promotion to foreman or team leader.

"Paul, could you help me lift him? He's not responding, but I think that if we could get him on his feet, he'd come along."

I grabbed an arm and the two of us raised the youth to his feet. As we did so, the warder Sam Renaud swaggered through the barracks door with a rubber truncheon in his hand and blood in his eye. Renaud spotted someone still in bed and delivered a vicious whack to his unprotected shins. He slashed another prisoner across the lower spine as the man rolled onto his stomach to flee. When he reached us, he searched momentarily for an exposed target zone, then brought the truncheon smashing down on the youth's collarbone. When his victim failed to resist or even shrink from the blow, Renaud raised his weapon again.

Without thinking, I grabbed Renaud's wrist and drove my shoulder into his ribcage, shoving him back against the oak pillar of a bunk. His head connected with a heavy thunk and for a moment he was stunned. I used the opportunity to bring around my hand and tear the truncheon from his grip. But he recovered more quickly that I expected and shoved me away before lowering his head and coming at me like a crazed bull. Although I was taller by at least four inches and had once probably had a hefty weight advantage, Renaud now had the benefit of three square meals a day and the use of the guards' weight room to keep up his strength. I feared for my life if he succeeded in getting on top of me.

An instant before impact, I sidestepped Renaud's charge and grabbed his elbow, pushing him off–balance so that he sprawled forward onto a vacant bunk. With the desperation of an underdog, I leaped onto his back and wrapped my forearm around his throat, pulling with all my strength. I felt his body tense as his air passages closed and he could no longer scream for help. He tried to reach behind him to grab my head but failed to connect. I felt his muscles tense, then slowly go slack. Running through my mind was the thought that, while the bosses would probably not execute me for killing a warder, who was after all just another prisoner, to leave Renaud alive would invite deadly revenge at a time and place of his choosing.

Before I knew what was happening, a hand gripped me under the chin while someone else wrested my left arm away so that I lost my leverage against Renaud’s throat. I was being pulled from behind off the warder’s back. Then I saw the rubber truncheon come down against Renaud's head.

Gary Toth unzipped his coveralls a few inches and slipped the rubber truncheon inside.

"Drag him into the corner and leave him," Toth barked to the man who had pulled me off Renaud’s back. Then he turned to me.

"Come on, let's get out of here. It's not worth going to the isolator for killing this lowlife scum."

Having felt weakened for so long by hunger and cold, I had forgotten the superhuman strength that adrenaline provides in moments of desperation. I was shaking all over and gasping for air but I no longer felt cold or afraid.

I arrived at roll call just in time to be counted. As it turned out, Gallucci had managed to coax the student onto the parade ground after all. I saw the two of them after breakfast in the column heading out to the recycling site. But Gallucci’s efforts amounted to little in the end. Two days later the student ran into the wire.

By the time we lined up and marched out to the recycling site, the sky was a bright and cloudless blue. Despite the residual cold and the blanket of snow on the ground, the sun radiated warmth through our coveralls and gave us hope that spring would not be many more weeks away.