Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (6 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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After a month in quarantine, the Pittler group was dispersed to various auxiliary camps linked to Buchenwald. Lev was sent to a work brigade in the Mansfeld munitions factory near Leipzig and then to Buchenwald-Wansleben, an abandoned salt mine at Wansleben-am-See, where he arrived in the first week of September. The mine was being converted into a series of workshops, 400 metres underground and safe from Allied bombing, where bits of engines for Luftwaffe planes were to be assembled by the prisoners. ‘For each of these rooms dozens of inmates died,’ recalled a French prisoner involved in digging tunnels into the salt mine. Lev worked there for the next seven months. The regime was hard, with eleven-hour shifts and harsh discipline. ‘For any misdemeanour or falling-off in the work-rate prisoners were given twenty lashes with
a rubber club, which, though excruciatingly painful, left no marks on the body.’
7
Even worse horrors were to come. In April 1945, as the Western Allies pushed through Germany, Buchenwald-Wansleben was evacuated by the Nazis. At 5 p.m. on 12 April the long march began. The surviving prisoners left the camp in a convoy flanked by open trucks, each holding six armed SS guards. They walked north-east through open fields on the road towards Dessau, though Lev and those around him did not know where they were going at the time. It seemed to them that they were marching back to Buchenwald (in the opposite direction) and therefore heading for the crematorium, where tens of thousands of the Nazis’ murdered victims had been burnt before. Dressed in rags, the prisoners began to fall along the way from exhaustion – only to be shot by the Germans. ‘I remember that at 8 p.m. we suddenly heard much shooting coming from the end of the column,’ recalled the French prisoner. ‘The SS were shooting all the inmates who were too weak to walk or who did not walk fast enough.’
Lev decided to escape. He told Aleksei Andreev, a prisoner from the Pittler group who was marching by his side. ‘Ahead of us on the road to the right I saw something burning,’ Lev recalled. ‘A bombed-out German lorry was on fire. I said that if we made a run for the bushes beyond the lorry as we marched past it, the guards in the truck behind us would not notice because of the flames. Andreev agreed.’ Running from the column, the two men threw themselves into the bushes behind the burning lorry and waited for the rest of the long column to pass them. Then they crawled into the field, dug themselves into the furrows and covered themselves with dry grass to conceal their striped prison uniforms. Lev was terrified. As he
recalled, it was the only time during the entire war when he was overwhelmed by fear.
At night they moved into the woods. They could hear the firing of guns ahead of them. Much of the forest had already been destroyed by shelling. Through the trees they saw a shining light – a searchlight – and by the side of it they could make out the shadows of some tanks. They were US tanks.
From the darkness an American appeared. He shouted at them: ‘Throw away your weapons!’
Lev shouted back in English: ‘We have no weapons.’
‘Who are you?’
‘We are Russian officers. We escaped from a concentration camp.’
Lev explained that they had been in Buchenwald and now wanted to return to the Soviet Union. The American took them to a nearby house. There were five tank drivers staying there. They let the Russians sleep on the floor with them and shared their rations, which Lev, who had been living on bread and gruel, thought ‘tasted as good as restaurant food’. The next morning they sent Lev and Aleksei on their way to Eisleben, the town they had just liberated,  where they said they would be helped by the US military authorities.
At Eisleben the two were interrogated by a US army major, who spoke to Lev in German. When he found out that Lev was a nuclear physicist, he tried to persuade him to emigrate to America and could not understand when Lev refused. ‘But why not?’ he said. ‘In Russia you have Communism, and with Communism there is no democracy.’ In a manner that revealed how far his political opinions had altered in the war, Lev replied that there was ‘no Communism in Russia’, but there was ‘just enough freedom for a clever person to get by’. Lev tried not to engage in a political discussion. The real reason for his refusal to seek a better life in America had nothing to do with politics: he just wanted to go home, to the people whom he loved. All he had in the world was there – ‘Svetlana and her family, Aunt Olga and Aunt Katya, Uncle Nikita: these were the people who were dear to me,’ Lev recalled. He had no idea if Sveta was
alive or whether she had waited for him all this time, but he knew he had to follow where his heart led him. ‘Even if I had only one small chance that she was alive, how could I turn my back on that and go to America?’
The major gave the Russians a coupon for a hotel being used for liberated POWs. The Burgermeister of the town, a former Communist, took them to a shop to buy them coats and hats and order them new suits, all paid for by the town. For the next two months Lev and Aleksei remained in Eisleben. The window of their room looked on to the house where Martin Luther had been born. These months were like a holiday. There were four free canteens for the US military personnel and liberated POWs in Eisleben, and after years of hunger in the concentration camps, Lev made sure to eat each meal in every one of them. ‘We ate twelve times a day!’ The only problem he now had was getting to each of the four canteens in time for the meals. This frenzy of feeding lasted several days, until Lev had overcome the fear of starvation.
In early May there were victory parades by the US troops in Eisleben. Shortly afterwards, Red Army representatives arrived to organize the repatriation of the Soviet troops. On the day of the Soviets’ departure, 8 June, the Americans arranged an open-top lorry decorated with the Soviet and US flags and a banner reading ‘Happy Return!’ The lorry took the men to the Elbe River at Torgau, where they crossed over into the Soviet zone of occupation. They were not received with the same friendly attitude by the Soviet authorities, who treated them as prisoners. The returning soldiers were divided into groups of thirty by the Soviet armed guards and taken off by lorry to Weimar, where they were put into a prison block attached to the headquarters of the 8th Guards Army. The prison was administered by a special NKVD unit known as SMERSH (an acronym for ‘Death to Spies!’), whose task it was to root out Soviet soldiers who had collaborated with the Germans.
Lev’s good luck had run out. He was imprisoned in a room with eight other men. They were stripped and body-searched; all their
personal belongings were taken from them. Lev lost the possession he had cherished most and carried in his pocket for the past four years: the list of addresses he had been given by Sveta’s father. It was just a scrap of paper but the only thing that connected him to her.
During the day the men were forced to sit on the floor but forbidden to lie down or sleep. The interrogations took place at night. Each man in turn was taken out for questioning and brought back after three or four hours to snatch some sleep before the morning wake-up call. Lev was interrogated for more than a month. The SMERSH investigators accused him of spying for the Germans. Their only evidence came from one of his fellow POWs, who had heard Lev speaking German with the captain in Katyn. Lev confirmed that this was true. He admitted that he had worked as a translator but insisted he had never been a spy: he had worked against the Germans, not for them. Naively, Lev clung to the belief that if he told the truth he would be allowed to go home. He believed in Soviet justice. Wasn’t that what he had been fighting for? What happened next shattered his belief. After several nights, the interrogating officers threatened to shoot him unless he agreed to sign a confession. Lev refused. They beat him. ‘I was not afraid of dying,’ he recalled, ‘but sometimes I despaired because I was afraid that the people I had loved might believe I was guilty.’
Lev thought frequently about Sveta. It seemed to him unlikely that he would survive to be with her. On 10 September 1945, Sveta’s twenty-eighth birthday, at this low point of his interrogation, Lev gave up hope of seeing her again and resigned himself to ‘say goodbye’ to her.
In the early morning hours after a particularly stressful night of questioning, Lev was sleeping lightly when he had a vivid dream. This is how he described it:
I was dozing after an interrogation, it was almost daybreak, and I had a dream. It was very clear, very well-defined, as if I were walking somewhere on my own. I turned around and saw Sveta behind me. She was dressed in white, kneeling on the ground beside a little girl
who was also dressed in white, and she was adjusting something on her dress. It was very bright, very clear, and then I awoke.
Having failed to get Lev to sign a confession, his interrogators tricked him into signing an admission of his guilt. Assuring him that he would be found innocent by the military tribunal, they got him to sign a protocol of the interrogation which Lev did not fully check. He trusted the interrogating officer who showed him the document and took his word that it said what he claimed. The officer read the statement out to him, and Lev simply signed it. That signature, ten small letters at the bottom of the page, would change the course of his life. Perhaps he was tired. Perhaps naive. What Lev did not know was that the officer had read only parts of the protocol to him – not the bits admitting to the treason charges – which Lev then signed. It was only at the trial that he realized his mistake.
On 19 November 1945, a three-man military tribunal of the 8th Guards Army in Weimar sentenced Lev to death for treason against the motherland, under article 58-1(b) of the Criminal Code reserved for Soviet servicemen. The sentence was immediately commuted to ten years in a corrective labour camp of the Gulag – a concession often made by Soviet judges in the interest of a system built on slave labour. The trial had lasted all of twenty minutes.
In December, Lev was transferred to a military prison in Frankfurt an der Oder. He was then sent back in a convoy under guard to the Soviet Union, where he began the three-month journey north to the Pechora labour camp.
The convoy travelled slowly north by train from Minsk to Vologda, Kotlas and Pechora, deep in the forests near the Arctic Circle, where Lev was to serve his long sentence. Cattle trucks were used for the prison train. A double tier of bunks made of wooden planks lined each wagon on either side of the sliding doors. In the middle of each truck was a ‘toilet’ in the form of a wide-open pipe protruding from the floor and letting out on to the tracks. The wagons had been built for twenty cows or a dozen horses, but sixty prisoners were crammed into each. ‘Politicals’ like Lev – mostly soldiers who had been caught up in the German zone of occupation – were mixed in with common criminals. Organized and violent, the criminals quickly took possession of the small iron heaters. Lev and the other prisoners, all of whom had been arrested in their summer clothes, huddled together, trying to derive warmth from one another’s bodies in the unheated corners of the draughty carriages.
The prisoners were fed 200 grams of bread a day and salted fish, but they were given almost no water. Many of them became ill or even died from thirst. The dead and dying were thrown out of the carriages. No one understood why the guards deprived them of water. There were lots of Gulag rules about the proper care of prisoners on a convoy, and it made no sense to let them die if they had economic value as slave labourers. The most likely explanation is that the guards simply could not be bothered to lug heavy water buckets to the carriages. But there may also have been an element of cruelty whose rationale was linked to the guards’ own system of profiting from hierarchy and control. The guards employed the criminals to beat the politicals and steal from them in exchange for better rations and water. They told the criminals that they were ‘our people’ who were being only ‘temporarily detained’, whereas the
politicals were ‘enemies of the people’ who deserved to be beaten. Lev was shocked by the criminals’ brutality. He thought they were ‘no longer human beings but a new biological phenomenon,  cynical and cruel to the point of sadism’. The guards were little better. They would come into the carriages once or twice a day to carry out a ‘search’. Ordering the politicals to one side, they would beat them with whatever came to hand – iron bars, hammers, mallets, wooden planks and sticks – to show the criminals how it was done. In one search Lev was badly hurt in the kidneys and, in another, bashed so hard about his head that one of his eardrums burst.
Beyond Kotlas the train slowed to a jogging pace, and every now and then it stopped to eject another dead or dying prisoner. The track had been poorly built by Gulag prisoners and did not allow for faster speeds without risk of accidents. All along the line there had once been labour camps filled with prisoners to build the railway. Looking through the tiny windows of the cattle truck from his corner of the upper bunk, Lev could see their physical remains: barbed-wire fences and watch-towers between the pine trees. At Mikun’, Ira-Iol’ and Kamenka, the prisoners were taken off the train and marched under convoy to a ‘sanitary point’, where they were made to strip in the freezing cold and pass through disinfecting showers. Those with swollen legs or cracked and flaking skin around the hips, the first signs of pellagra (a disease caused by vitamin deficiency), were not allowed back on the train. Perhaps they were taken to a hospital. Perhaps they were shot.
After travelling for three months, Lev’s convoy arrived in Pechora in March 1946. It was not yet spring. The dark Arctic winter lasted nine months this far north. The river was still frozen and there was snow on the ground. The prisoners were exhausted from their long journey. Even Lev, a strong man who had grown accustomed to the deprivations of the German concentration camps, was thin and weak. Many of the prisoners were so frail, some no more than skin and bones, that they were barely able to climb down from the carriages on to the track.
The prisoners were taken to the transit camp, the point of arrival in the labour camp, an area near the railway station fenced by barbed
wire, with three barracks for the prisoners, an isolation block (for punishments), an infirmary with a cemetery, and a small working yard. The men were showered, head-shaved and de-liced, and then sorted into groups – the sick (mainly from pellagra and scurvy) going straight into the infirmary and the rest assigned to various labour tasks and installations according to their physical condition. Lev was selected for the wood-combine (
Lesokombinat
), the main industrial zone of Pechora, where timbers floated down the river from smaller labour camps or colonies in the forests further north were hauled up from the riverbank and turned into furniture and housing for the Gulag settlements on the railway line between Kotlas and the important mining area of Vorkuta.
The railway was the be all and end all of Pechora, the key to the Gulag’s colonization and economic exploitation of the North. In the nineteenth century, the region had been forest thinly populated by the Komi tribes. The discovery of enormous coal, oil and mineral deposits in the Pechora and Vorkuta basins in 1929–30 had transformed the North into an area of supreme industrial and strategic importance for the Soviet Union. Hitherto the country’s major fuel supplies had come from the Donbass and the Caucasus in the south-east. But these areas were vulnerable in military and political terms (in 1918–20, the newly born Soviet Republic had lost them to the Whites and their Western allies in the Russian Civil War). Opening up the immense coal reserves of Vorkuta would not only help the country to industrialize but guarantee its fuel supply in the event of another foreign invasion: the remote Arctic region was practically unassailable.
For a while the Soviets toyed with the idea of using the rivers to transport coal from Vorkuta, but the route was long and indirect and the Pechora and Ust-Usa rivers remained frozen for nine months of the year. Then, in 1934, they committed to the building of a railway connecting Leningrad to Kotlas, Ukhta, Pechora and Vorkuta (see map on p. 288). By 1939, labour camps and smaller Gulag colonies had been set up along the entire length of the projected line. According to the census of that year, there were 131,930 prisoners (18,647 of them women) in these labour camps and colonies. All the
work was done by hand – the cutting of the trees, the levelling of the land, the laying of the tracks – and went on around the clock. During the long hours of darkness, which in winter numbered more than twenty, the building sites were lit by bonfires made of scrapwood collected by prisoners too weak to work on the railway. In the three months of summer it was light all day and night.
The German invasion added urgency to the construction of the railway line. By the end of 1941, the Germans had occupied most of the Donbass, which produced 55 per cent of the Soviet Union’s coal, and in 1942 they steadily advanced into the Caucasus, threatening the country’s oil supplies. Finishing the railway to Vorkuta became a top priority, a matter of the country’s survival, and immense pressure was put on Gulag bosses to complete the line in record time. By 1942, 157,000 prisoners were working without break on the railway, sleeping in unheated tents or out in the open in freezing temperatures, all of them exhausted and hundreds dying every day from cold, hunger and disease. To speed up the completion of the line they put the rails directly on the ground without stabilizing stones or sand, went round lakes and swamps rather than carry out the necessary land reclamation, and even laid tracks on the ice (bridges could be built later). The line had so many dangerous curves and slopes that trains often crashed, leading to arrests for ‘sabotage’. The crucial bridge across the Pechora River – between Pechora and Kozhva – was built in such a hurry (with temporary wooden girders instead of steel and iron) that the first trains to cross it in 1942 could not go faster than 5 kilometres an hour without serious risk of falling off from the vibrations. Nonetheless, coal from Vorkuta could at last get through to Soviet towns and industries – 200,000 tons of it a month by 1945.
Pechora developed as the main industrial hub of the region. Its location at the intersection between the railway and the Pechora River placed it at the centre of the Gulag’s wood-processing, railway-servicing and shipbuilding industries. Established as a Gulag settlement in 1937, Pechora was a small ramshackle town of about 10,000 prisoners and free citizens by the time Lev arrived in 1946 (see map on p. 289). Near the railway station was a shanty-town of crooked narrow
lanes and squalid dugouts known as ‘Shanghai’ because of its ‘Asiatic’ appearance and the Chinese immigrants who had settled there. The main part of Pechora was between the station and the wood-combine, the industrial zone behind barbed wire, which occupied the riverbank. From the transit camp, Lev would have marched down the long main avenue, Soviet Street, in a convoy flanked by guards with dogs towards the wood-combine, whose main entrance was at the end of 8 March Street (named for International Women’s Day). Soviet Street was a wide dirt track with wooden boards for a pavement. There were no street lights, only the searchlights of the watch-towers around the prison zones; practically no cars or motorcycles, only horses, which the camp bosses used to get around; no stone buildings, only wooden houses, half-buried in the ground for better insulation against the Arctic winds; no inside toilets (except in the house of the commandant of the labour camp); and no running water in anybody’s house, only wells, sheltered in small pavilions to keep the water from freezing during the long winter, when temperatures regularly dropped to minus 45 degrees centigrade. There were hardly any shops and only one small post office (which sold vodka) in the Shanghai area.
Passing through the gates of the wood-combine, Lev entered the industrial zone, his prison for the next ten years (see map on pp. 290–91). It was a large rectangular area the size of a village, 52 hectares, surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence and watch-towers with searchlights. Inside were about fifty buildings, mainly ‘temporary wooden structures’ that seemed to have been built without any planning and ‘randomly positioned’ in the zone. There were various workshops, a drying unit, wood-stores, saw-mills, stables, canteens, barracks, a club-house for the guards and free workers, a settlement of single-storey houses sunk into the ground, a wash-house, a fire station with a horse and cart and a light railway with a loading area. Ahead of him, towards the river, Lev could see the red-brick chimney of the power station towering above the camp.
The men of Lev’s convoy were counted in the railway’s loading area, where the finished products of the wood-combine (units of furniture and pre-fab housing) were loaded on to trains. Then they
marched into the barracks of the 2nd Colony, or work brigade (
kolonna
), which was located in a special prison sector with its own barbed-wire fence and guard-house inside the industrial zone.
There were ten barracks with about 800 prisoners in the 2nd Colony. All the barracks were the same: long single-storey wooden buildings with two rows of double-decker bunks holding two men at each level (in Gulag parlance they were known as
vagonki
because they were like the bunks in sleeping cars on passenger trains); in the passage-way between the rows of bunks were tables, benches, and wood-burning heaters. The 40-watt bulbs hanging from the ceiling gave off a dim yellow light. The mattresses and pillows were filled with wood shavings. Lev’s barrack had the advantage of always being warm because the guards allowed the prisoners to bring in scraps of wood for the heaters. The barrack was not locked at night and prisoners were free to come and go (there was an outside toilet block), provided they did not approach the barbed wire (if they did they would be shot).
Lev took his place on the lower storey of a bunk by the window at one end of the barrack. It was the oldest barrack in the colony. One of his neighbours was a young ‘political’ from Lvov in western Ukraine, a small and slender man with an expressive face and lively eyes called Liubomir (or ‘Liubka’) Terletsky. He would become Lev’s most precious friend, much loved for his fine intelligence, poetic temperament, wit and sensitivity. Terletsky had been at Pechora for six years and so could help Lev settle in. He had been arrested at the age of eighteen, in 1939, shortly after the Soviet invasion of Lvov. In his home the NKVD officers had found a map, a compass and a rucksack (Terletsky was a keen walker) and had taken these as evidence of espionage for the Germans. Beaten into a confession, he was sentenced to be shot. For two months he sat in a prison in Kiev waiting for his execution, before his sentence was commuted to ten years’ hard labour in the camps. Terletsky almost died on the convoy to Pechora. He was put to work in a team collecting firewood and scraps from the riverbank and hauling them by cart 500 metres up the hill to the power station, where the
wood was fed into the steam engines producing energy for the wood-combine. Terletsky could not handle the heavy work. The stokers at the power station, seeing that he was dying from exhaustion, took pity on him, allowing him to rest while they did his work for him. It was a lucky break: at the power station Terletsky was spotted by the head of the Electrical Group, Viktor Chikin, a prisoner himself, who was impressed by his intelligence and got him put into his team of electricians at the power plant.
In the bunk next to Lev’s was Aleksei (‘Lyosha’) Anisimov, a fellow Muscovite and student of the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers. He was a shy and quiet man, much liked by Lev, who described him as ‘a wonderful fellow’ in his letters to Sveta. Anisimov had been arrested in 1937 and given fifteen years for ‘anti-Soviet activity’. The 2nd Colony was mostly made up of ‘politicals’ like Lev, Terletsky and Anisimov. Many (eighty-three to be precise) had been caught in the German zone of occupation and arrested as ‘spies’ or ‘collaborators’ on their return to the Soviet Union or else had been swept up in the mass arrests that accompanied the Soviet reinvasion of these territories in 1944–5.

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