Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (4 page)

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Authors: Orlando Figes

BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
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Lev set off from Moscow with three trucks carrying supplies for the Krasnopresnenskaia Volunteer Division. When he had left the division a few days before, it had been occupying a position near Viazma, between Moscow and Smolensk, but it was gone when he returned. The front had collapsed as the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups attacked from the north and south with tanks, guns and aircraft in a rapid pincer movement encircling Viazma. Taken by surprise, the panic-stricken Soviet forces had dispersed into the forests. Without a radio, Lev had no idea how to find his division. No one knew what was going on. There was chaos everywhere.
Lev’s men drove towards Viazma, hoping to locate their divisional command. It was getting dark and they had no map. One of the trucks broke down so Lev went on by foot. Walking on the road through the thick forest, he could hear guns ahead of him. In the early hours of the morning he came to a village where the remnants of his division were engaged in a fierce gunfight with three German tanks, which had moved out of the forest and on to the road. Soon the Soviet artillerymen abandoned their batteries (they had no ammunition left) and the tanks moved slowly forward, entering the village and firing with machine-guns at the houses. Lev, in a field between the tanks and the village, lay down and waited for the tanks to pass by him before running off into the forest. It was only then that he smelt the eau de Cologne: a bullet had smashed the bottle he had been carrying in his coat pocket to use as an antiseptic for minor wounds, but luckily he was unharmed.
Lev walked deep into the woods. Hundreds of Soviet soldiers who had lost their units were all moving in the same direction in between the trees. Lev did not know where he was going. All he had with him was a pistol, a spade and his knapsack. During the day he
buried himself in the ground to hide from the Germans. By night he walked towards the east, or what he thought was east, hoping to rejoin the Soviet forces.
At the end of the third night, on 3 October, Lev found himself on the edge of a village occupied by the Germans. He decided to head away from it as soon as darkness fell. Retreating into the forest, he dug himself into a ditch, covered himself with branches and went to sleep. A sharp pain under his knee woke him. Peering through the branches, he could see in front of him what he thought was a single German soldier with a rifle. Impulsively, Lev got out his pistol and took a shot at him. As soon as he had fired he received a heavy blow on the back of the head. There were two soldiers: the one who hit him on the head had been poking him with his bayonet to see if he was alive or dead. Lev was disarmed and taken back to the village.
He was not alone. Tens of thousands of Soviet troops were trapped in the German encirclement of Viazma during the first week of October. Lev was brought to a transit camp, Dulag (
Durch-gangslager
)-127, on the outskirts of Smolensk, where several thousand prisoners were crammed into the unheated buildings of a former Soviet military store. There Lev, like the others, was given just 200 grams of bread a day. Hundreds died from cold and hunger or from typhus, which spread in epidemic proportions from November, but he survived.
In early December Lev was part of a contingent of twenty prisoners transferred from Dulag-127 to a special prison near Katyn. The contingent was made up of educated people from Moscow, mostly scientists and engineers. They were imprisoned in a building that Lev thought must have been a school or possibly a clinic before the war. There were four large rooms on either side of a corridor –with up to forty prisoners in each – and a large room at the end where the guards lived. The prisoners were well treated: they were given meat, soup, bread; and their work duties were relatively light. At the end of the third week, Lev and his fellow Muscovites were joined by a small group of well-dressed Russians who were drinking
vodka given to them by the guards. In a drunken moment one of them let slip that they had been trained as spies; they had just returned from behind the Soviet lines and were being rewarded for their work. A few days later they departed for Katyn.
Shortly afterwards, Lev and half a dozen other Muscovites were taken to the spy school in Katyn, where a Russian-speaking German captain proposed to turn them into spies and send them back to Moscow to gather information for the Germans. Only this, he said, would save them from almost certain death in Dulag-127, where they would be returned if they refused. Lev was determined not to work for the Nazis but he was afraid of saying so in front of the other prisoners lest he be accused of anti-German propaganda and given a worse punishment. So Lev said to the captain in German, a language he had learned at school and university: ‘Ich kann diese Aufgabe nicht erfüllen [I cannot fulfil this task].’ When the German asked why, he said: ‘Das erkläre ich nachher [I will explain later].’
Taken by the captain to a separate room, Lev explained in Russian: ‘I am an officer of the Russian army and cannot act against it, against my own comrades.’ The captain said nothing. He sent Lev back to his holding cell. There Lev discovered that three other men had also refused to become spies. If Lev had spoken first, he might have been accused of encouraging their resistance.
The four refuseniks were put into the back of an open truck and driven down the highway towards Smolensk. A German guard sat with his back to the driver and played with his rifle all the way. The truck turned into the forest. Lev thought he was going to be shot. ‘The truck was going very fast down a narrow forest road,’ he recalled. ‘I assumed they must be taking us to an execution ground. I thought: how will I conduct myself in front of the firing squad? Will I have sufficient self-control? Wouldn’t it be better to kill myself? I could jump out of the truck, hopefully to smash into a tree, and if the soldier opened fire it would be even better.’ Lev prepared to jump. But then he noticed through the trees a shed with a neat stack of metal barrels: they were stopping for petrol; they were not going to be shot. As the captain had threatened, the four men
were taken back to Dulag-127. There they tried to stick together to protect themselves against recriminations by the other Soviet prisoners, who must have known that they had returned from the spy school.
A few weeks later, in February 1942, Lev was sent with a group of other officers to a POW camp near the Prussian spa town of Fürstenberg-am-Oder, 80 kilometres north-east of Berlin. Because they had come from the disease-ridden Dulag-127, they were held in quarantine in a wooden barrack, where six men died from typhus in the first few days. Otherwise the officers were treated well and conditions in the camp were generally good. Lev was interrogated by the commandant and two other officers. They wanted to know why he spoke German so well, and whether he was Jewish, because they claimed his comrades said he was. They were persuaded that he wasn’t Jewish only when he recited the Lord’s Prayer.
In April Lev was sent with a smaller group of Soviet officers to a ‘training camp’ (
Ausbildungslager
) on the outskirts of Berlin. The ‘training’ meant that they were lectured on Nazi ideology and the new German order for Europe – ideas they were supposed to pass on to their fellow Soviet POWs in other concentration camps. For six weeks they were made to listen to the lectures of their teachers, mostly pre-war Russian émigrés, who read closely from a script. Then, in May, the officers were dispersed to various camps. Lev was put into a work brigade attached to the Kopp and Gaberland munitions factory in Oschatz.
Oschatz was the centre of a vast industrial zone of POW labour camps (
Stammlager
, or
Stalag
for short) between Leipzig and Dresden. Lev was put to work as a translator for a military inspection unit before being transferred in August to one of the work brigades attached to the HASAG (Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft) Factory in Leipzig. HASAG was a large complex of metal factories producing ammunition for the German army and air force. By the summer of 1942, it had several Stalags holding around 15,000 prisoners of various nationalities (Jews, Poles, Russians, Croats, Czechs, Hungarians, French) in two sectors, one named ‘Russian’ and the
other ‘French’. Lev was housed in a boxroom on his own in the French sector and assigned as a translator to a Czech called Eduard Hladik, whose role was to sort out conflicts among the POWs. Although his mother was German, Hladik considered himself Czech. After the German annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, he had been conscripted by the Germans as a guard in the HASAG camps. Hladik felt sorry for the POWs and could not see the sense of treating them so badly when they were working for a German victory. As a prisoner, Lev had to walk in the gutter when he accompanied Hladik through the streets of Leipzig; if passers-by insulted Lev, Hladik would defend him by saying: ‘It’s easy to curse a man who cannot answer back.’
Hladik saw in Lev someone he could trust. There was something in Lev’s character that attracted people in positions of responsibility to him – his sincerity perhaps or maybe just the fact that he could speak with them in their language. The Czech befriended Lev and gave him German newspapers, forbidden to the POWs because they gave accurate reports on the military situation and – unlike the propaganda sheets they were given in the Stalags – described the Slavs as ‘sub-humans’. On the pretext that he was taking Lev for disinfection outside the barracks zone, Hladik even took Lev to visit one of his friends, a socialist called Eric Rödel, who spoke a little Russian and had a radio on which he listened to Soviet broadcasts. It was a highly risky adventure because Rödel lived above a former SA (
Sturmabteilung
) officer. Rödel and his family received Lev as an honoured guest. ‘The table was set with all sorts of luxuries,’ Lev recalled. ‘We talked for a long time … and then Eric turned the radio on, and I listened to the “Latest News” from Moscow with military bulletins from the Soviet Bureau of Information. The content of the programmes I can’t remember now but – funnily enough – one phrase has stuck in my mind: “In Georgia the tea harvest has been collected.” ’
Eventually, the Germans became suspicious of Hladik. One of the other guards denounced him, accusing him of anti-German activity, and Hladik was summoned for interrogation. He was sent
to the Norwegian front. Not wanting to continue working as a translator, Lev applied to the camp authorities to be relieved of his duties on the grounds that his German was not good enough to rule out the possibility of inaccuracies: ‘I also said that I was incapable of doing propaganda work, because I lacked the skills of persuasion – I was just a scientist.’ In November, he was sent back to the work brigade at the Kopp and Gaberland factory in Oschatz.
Conditions in Oschatz declined dramatically that winter. Working hours were increased, and there were beatings by the guards to squeeze more labour out of the exhausted prisoners. In the early months of 1943 there was an influx of new POWs into the work brigade. Most of them came from Ukraine, a territory occupied by the Germans where terror and the famine of the 1930s had alienated much of the population from the Soviet system. Their arrival was soon followed by a softening of the camp regime, part of a German effort to recruit the POWs into the Russian Liberation Army, the anti-Soviet force being organized by Andrei Vlasov. Vlasov was a former general in the Red Army who had been captured by the Germans in July 1942 and had then persuaded the Nazis to appoint him to head a liberation movement that would aim to sweep away the Communist regime. There was a group of Vlasovite recruiters in Oschatz, mostly pre-war Russian émigrés who ‘wore some sort of undefined but non-German uniform’, Lev recalled, and a smaller number of former Soviet junior officers. The officers had joined the Russian Liberation Army, or so it seemed to Lev, mainly to escape the terrible conditions of the POW labour camps, where Soviet prisoners were ‘treated much more harshly and had fewer rights or means of self-defence than the prisoners of any other country’.
Lev was summoned several times and pressured by the Germans and the Vlasovite recruiters to join their army as an officer. On each occasion he refused. The Germans became suspicious. They began to question Lev about his activities as a translator at the HASAG camp. During a cigarette break in one of these interrogations the translator for the Germans took Lev aside in the corridor and warned him that they thought he was to blame for the Vlasovites’
recruitment failure: Lev’s was the only work-team in the camp that had failed to volunteer a single soldier for the Vlasovite army; and as the only Soviet officer in his work-team, suspicion fell on him.
Lev realized he needed to escape. Three other prisoners in his brigade had the same idea. They decided to make their attempt in June, when the crops would have grown just enough to supply them with food along their route to Poland, 150 kilometres away, where they reckoned that the population would be sympathetic and feed them. Their plan was to join up with the Soviet partisans in Belarus and eventually return to the Soviet Union. To prepare, they saved up dried bread and sugar; Lev made a compass and copied out a map lent to him by one of the German guards, who liked to talk to Lev about his family and tell him where he had been on his weekends. They even managed to obtain medicines: Lev deliberately cut his finger to get sent to the camp infirmary, where the doctor was a Russian POW. Without asking any questions, the doctor agreed to Lev’s request for antiseptic, aspirin and bandages.
The prisoners made their escape on the night of 22 June 1943, the second anniversary of the German invasion. Climbing out of a barrack window they had partially dismantled previously, they scaled the wall of the courtyard and cut through the barbed-wire fence at the top with two sharpened metal strips Lev had made in the workshop. Jumping down into the field outside the camp, they ran through the darkness into the woods. The four men headed north, assuming that the Germans would first search to the east. They walked by night and hid by day. Their map was very rudimentary –the original from which it had been copied had come from a primary school textbook – so they had to make their way by the road signs. When they reached the Elbe River they followed it eastwards, Lev being too afraid to swim across, and, after skirting south of Dresden, kept on moving east towards Poland. ‘We had dry rations,’ Lev recalled, ‘but soon we decided to keep these in reserve and feed ourselves by stealing from the outdoor cellars of the peasants’ houses … It seemed wrong to me at first, but then I agreed.’ After three weeks on the road they were captured near Görlitz, on the
Polish border, by a couple of German soldiers. Noticing the soldiers cycling towards them on the road and assuming that they would be carrying guns, they threw themselves into a ditch, but the soldiers used their lights to find them there. ‘It was a stupid end to our journey, ’ recalled Lev. ‘The soldiers were not even armed.’

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