Forty Days at Kamas (5 page)

My assignment to the general labor pool held no special significance for me yet, as all of us had been assigned to general labor and I did not yet appreciate the survival value of non–manual labor. Similarly, my identification card, number patches, and ration card held no meaning to me beyond the humiliating realization that from now on, the camp authorities would know me only by the numbers sewn onto my hat and uniform.

The event I remember most vividly from the final stages of in–processing was receiving my first ration bar. I had become so accustomed to the transport feeding schedule that the delay in my morning meal had left my stomach in knots. Now I chewed each bite of the fortified meal bar slowly and savored its flavor and texture. It was a vanilla bar, but it tasted nothing like vanilla, its recipe having been adulterated beyond recognition from the government's original formula.

Those of us who finished our in–processing first were made to sit cross–legged outside on the snow–covered parade ground. Not far away the warders huddled around an oil drum warming themselves over the wood fire inside.

Will Roesemann and I sat beside each other on the parade ground and speculated quietly about what surprises might lay in store for us at Kamas. Will had heard rumors of Asian–style re–education and brainwashing, while I expected hard labor building airfields or military bases.

Before our discussion had gone very far, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and saw a slim, long–legged prisoner not much older than twenty–five with a flat, open face and a broad grin. His sparkling blue eyes revealed a raw vitality that seemed oddly misplaced in a camp like Kamas.

"Are you the fellows who helped Major Reineke off the train last night? I looked for you when we got to the barracks but I lost you in the dark."

From his accent I surmised that he was a Texan.

"I wish you'd found us when we were still on the road," I grumbled. "We could have used your help. That last couple hundred yards nearly killed me."

"I would have pitched in," the Texan replied, still grinning, "except I was at the back of the line where the bread was. I scored five pieces and was fixing to give the extras to you. But I was so damned hungry, I couldn't keep from eating them all. And good thing I did, because if I'd still had them this morning, they would have gone straight into the hamper."

"Well, I'm glad they did somebody some good," I groused.

Will laughed at my sour disposition. Then he introduced us and asked where the man was from.

"Galveston. Name's Jerry Lee," he replied. "How about you fellas?"

"Pennsylvania. We shipped in from Susquehanna. Tell me, how do you know Reineke?"

"I served in his unit during the Chinese War. He was battalion commander when the Chinks attacked us across the Ussuri River. If it hadn't been for the Major, the Chinks would have overrun our sector big time. Later on, I heard he stayed on all the way through the withdrawal to Magadan and the airlift back to Alaska. Man, he was a hell of a fighter! I couldn’t hardly believe it when I heard he deserted."

"Hold on," Roesemann interrupted. "How do you know he deserted? From what I’ve been told, State Security arrested just about everybody who made it back from Magadan. I’ve met troops accused of desertion who swore that the DSS rolled up their entire unit the moment they stepped ashore in Anchorage. The desertion rap stinks, if you ask me."

Jerry Lee shrugged sympathetically.

"So maybe he didn't desert. All I can say is that when I was in Alaska just after the Armistice, some buddies of mine told me Reineke had tried to resign but the brass wouldn't let him go. A couple of days later somebody at field headquarters tipped him off that he was about to be arrested. So he got wise and hightailed it for the Yukon."

Another voice spoke up from the row in front of us. It was a knowing voice with a Long Island accent.

"I know Glenn Reineke," the voice said. "What he did may have been desertion under the law, but it had nothing to do with cowardice. Remember, Reineke escaped twice from this camp. No coward would ever do that, knowing what the warders do to people who get caught."

"How about the guy who stopped the dog?" Roesemann asked. "Do you know him, too?"

"He was Reineke's escape partner. A former Navy SEAL by the name of Toth. Hard–bitten as they come. My guess is he'll leave the isolator even stronger than when he went in."

The speaker had a long, gaunt face that was deeply creased with leathery wrinkles. His doleful eyes and drooping eyelids gave him an almost funereal expression. It was an intelligent face, but not an honest one. I introduced myself and met Steve Bernstein, a forty–four–year–old pharmaceutical rep from Manhasset. This was his fourth year in the camps. After nearly a year at Green River, he had been transferred back to Kamas to work as a hospital orderly.

When we learned that Bernstein had been in Kamas before, we peppered him with questions about camp conditions, work assignments, the guards and warders, and every aspect of camp life.

At first, Will Roesemann abstained from the questioning. Instead he listened carefully and watched Bernstein with the skeptical demeanor of an attorney hearing trial testimony from a hostile witness. I assumed that Will had picked up the same whiff of dishonesty in Bernstein that I had detected. But after a few minutes he joined in to ask Bernstein what percentage of Kamas inmates consisted of drug dealers, armed robbers, and sex offenders, criminals of the kind who tyrannized the holding prisons and transit camps.

Roesemann seemed pleased when Bernstein reported that the only non–political prisoners in the camp were white–collar criminals like Renaud, Grady, and Mills. These men had agreed to serve out their sentences as warders in a labor camp rather than as prisoners in conventional lock–ups in exchange for being given two years credit for every year served. I knew that the presence of violent career criminals at Kamas was a matter of vital concern to Roesemann. The felons had not given him a moment of peace in the holding prisons.

Jerry Lee asked about work categories at Kamas. Mines were universally feared because of their reputation as death traps. Logging camps and quarries did not rank much higher. Federal safety regulations were not enforced at any of the worksites in the camp system. Bernstein told us that he had spent six months at a gold placer facility in the Yukon where conditions were as primitive as the days of the original Yukon gold rush a century before. Prisoners perished daily from exposure, disease, and exhaustion.

Fortunately, Kamas offered a variety of work specialties, including military and civilian recycling, road–building, logging, snow–clearing, and silver mining. Recycling, however, employed by far the largest number of prisoners. The military recycling site, located on the road to Heber, salvaged destroyed or damaged military ordnance left over from Civil War II and the invasion of Mexico. With so much weaponry and equipment having been lost in Russia, and industrial capacity stalled at less than half of what it had been before the Events, recycling was essential to rearming the military.

The civilian recycling site, located near the burned–out village of Oakley along the Weber River, specialized in truck and auto parts as well as building materials and fixtures removed from forfeited properties around Park City. According to Bernstein, camp engineers estimated that it would take more than a decade before the Kamas–based salvage crews could exhaust the potential of the former Park City and Deer Valley resort areas, once rebel strongholds. The high price of auto parts and plumbing and electrical fixtures on the black market meant that the government would make a fortune from stripping the confiscated properties of its once–prosperous citizens.

Jerry Lee followed up with a question about work quotas and food rations and the margin for survival between them. Was it possible to outlive your sentence if you stayed on full rations? Or was the system rigged from the outset against a prisoner's survival?

Bernstein answered that Kamas was not as corrupt as other labor camps, where guards and warders grew fat on extra rations stolen from starving prisoners. Still, quotas and rations were calculated at Kamas with precious little margin for error. For that reason, prisoners were always seeking easier work or additional food by fair means or foul. The constant struggle for survival led to rampant theft, cheating, fighting, extortion, and every other means of ensuring one’s own survival at the expense of the next man.

After nearly four years in the camps, Bernstein's theory was that State Security considered political prisoners fundamentally incapable of rehabilitation or re–entry into Unionist society. But if so many prisoners were to remain in custody indefinitely, the camps had to be self–financing. And since a prisoner's value to the state depended on his contribution to the camp’s output, his continued receipt of rations depended upon his meeting the work quota. Anyone who failed to meet the quota saw his rations cut. The problem for us was that anything less than a full ration was insufficient to sustain life.

When asked how camp veterans managed to beat these odds, Bernstein replied simply that they were willing to do whatever it took to survive. New prisoners, he said, tended to harbor unrealistic hopes of a last–minute reprieve or clung to delusions that they were special and would somehow be looked after. They tended to judge the camp by their pre–arrest values and standards. Veteran prisoners had learned to cast aside their old values and seek only those things that would preserve life, however humbly or crudely. Whoever looked backward risked slipping irrevocably into the abyss.

Bernstein's commentary had a sobering effect on us. But to me he still seemed a bit too eager to gain our confidence.

Nothing more was said among our small group until the last of the new prisoners emerged from the transit center in their fresh orange coveralls. Then the warders ordered us to count off by threes and divided us into teams to shovel snow from the entrance roads, walkways, and parade grounds around the camp.

Renaud led one team to the Service Yard, which contained workshops, storage sheds and maintenance facilities and served as a buffer zone between the women's camp in Division 1 and the men's camp in Divisions 2 and 3. Grady took another team, including Will Roesemann, to Division 2, where the foreigners' barracks were located. Jerry Lee and I remained in Division 3 with Mills.

In less than an hour of shoveling snow from the Division 3 parade ground, blisters formed on my hands and my entire upper body began to ache. Nearly a year and a half of captivity without exercise had made me quite unfit for hard labor. I found myself moving more slowly, using less effort, and faking it as much as I could without drawing Mills's attention. I observed how the others paced their work and learned to follow their example. By the third hour I had become an energy–efficient robot.

As the sun sank lower in the sky and hid behind the western hills, an icy wind arose and poked its way under our collars and up our sleeves and pant legs. Despite my blistered hands, aching shoulders, and the shooting pain in my lower back, I shoveled faster just to stay warm. I kept my head down, glancing up only occasionally to watch the advance of leaden clouds across the darkening sky.

How had my life come to this? How often my mind had returned to that thought through the months of jail and interrogations. All my life I had worked hard, done the right thing, grown a family and built a business, and now the government had taken it all away and thrown me into the camps for having tried to emigrate. How had these Unionists managed to seize power and turn themselves within a few short years into such brutal masters? How had so many of us been so foolish during those days of economic hardship to trade our freedom for the empty promises of the corrupt political class?

Suddenly I heard the sharp crack of a rifle shot and instinctively hit the dirt. Craning my neck around to see what had happened, I watched a pair of uniformed guards clamber down the ladder from the nearest watchtower, enter the gate in the inner perimeter wall, and draw their pistols from their holsters. One covered the other as the latter knelt beside the fallen figure of a young woman in coveralls a few yards from the wall. The kneeling guard rolled her body over, revealing that the entire back of her skull had exploded from the force of a rifle shot exiting her head. Then the guard waved to the watchtower and the marksman inside fired a second shot into the air. This was the girl's warning shot. The official report always required a second bullet casing as evidence that the warning shot had been fired.

Once satisfied that the woman posed no further threat to camp security, the two guards holstered their sidearms and dragged her body by the ankles through the open gate into Division 2. Then they ordered the rest of us to resume shoveling while they retreated to the warmth of the heated watchtower. It was all over so quickly that none of us had time to react. One minute the girl was scribbling on her clipboard, the next moment she was carrion.

Within minutes, word spread among the hushed shovelers that the girl's name was Lillian, that she had been a work scheduler from the women's camp, and that she was in the habit of leaving her hat and scarf near the perimeter wire while she worked. Someone remarked that the guards had warned Lillian many times to keep her distance from the wire, but this time they had not bothered with courtesies. Even in the context of a corrective labor camp, such a brazen act of premeditated murder outraged every prisoner who learned of it. Eyewitnesses circulated through the yard to retell the story and embellish it along the way.

As the news spread, less and less snow was shoveled. Portions of the entrance roads, walkways, and assembly areas had still not been cleared as the sun set and the first column of prisoners returned from worksites outside the camp. Mills cursed at us to keep working and shoved several idlers whose shovels remained at their sides but he stopped short of using his nightstick. The prisoners stood their ground and refused to work. Meanwhile, the guards surveyed the scene warily from the towers.