The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom Read online

  I felt a slow burn of excitement as I waited through the next few days to see if I would get another call. I met a man named Sigmund Makowski, a thirty-seven-year-old captain in the Polish frontier forces. A precise, clear-thinking fellow, fit, active and bearing the stamp of the Regular Army officer. I marked him down, as I had marked Kolemenos, but I said nothing of my plans at this stage. I do not know what I expected of Ushakova, but at least I thought she would be in a position to advise.

  Call for me she did, and when I had tuned in the radio, dallying round the dial to pick up some news items for my friends, she started casually enough to talk of the approaching short Siberian summer. I took the plunge. ‘I am sorry about the last time,’ I said. ‘Of course, I do think of those things, but the distances are so great, the country so difficult and I have no equipment to face such a journey.’

  ‘You are only 25,’ she answered. ‘You need not have been afraid to admit that you do not look forward to the next twenty-five years in these surroundings. It was something to talk about between us. I am reasonably well looked after here. We have comfortable quarters, much better food than yours and as many cigarettes as we need. But I couldn’t spend twenty-five years here. So escape must be an idea close to your heart and it may do you good to tell me what you think.’

  So we talked of it as an abstract thing, as though it were being contemplated by some third person. We posed the question: Supposing a man could get out of the camp, where could he head for? The only possibility for such a man, I thought, would be to dash due east the short six hundred miles to Kamchatka and from there find his way to Japan. The attempt would be a failure, in her opinion. The Kamchatka coast was a Number One security commitment and would be heavily guarded. Could he smuggle himself on to a westbound train, maybe find himself a job in the Ural mines and possibly make his way out of Russia later? There would be difficulties of travel and work permits and other vital papers, she said. That was all the exploring we did that day, and it was not until I lay thinking things over on my bunk that night that I realized the one escape route she appeared deliberately to have ignored – south, past Lake Baikal. Whence from there? Afghanistan was the name that popped into my mind. It sounded sufficiently neutral and obscure.

  It was the Colonel himself who next sent for me. He genuinely could not work that simple radio set, a fact which greatly surprised me, for he was an intelligent man. He seemed to be a little in awe of it and liked to have me find the stations for him. He wanted news, and as I got it for him in various speeches and bulletins, he said he now felt certain that Russia would soon be involved in war. I don’t think he wanted war but in war obviously lay his chance to get out of Siberia and back to the real job of soldiering for which he was trained.

  There was no fanciful talk of escape when the Commandant was there. I imagine he would have been horrified to know his wife had ever broached such a topic with a prisoner. When the time came for me to go, he stayed near the radio and she walked behind me to the door. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You will be all right.’

  That night I spoke to Makowski. I walked him over to the latrines. ‘What would you think of an escape?’

  ‘Don’t be crazy, man. We have nothing to escape with, even if we got outside the camp.’

  ‘I might get a little help.’

  ‘If you can, I’m with you. To hell with this place.’

  Ushakova appeared to be actively enjoying her rôle as conspirator-in-chief. I have been unable to decide whether she ever believed I would really attempt an escape. It might be that all this was an intriguing exercise for the sharp wits of a woman bored by depressing camp life. Some things, even at this distance of time, I cannot answer.

  The business had emerged from the abstract. This was Ushakova planning away as the radio gave us one of her favourite Tchaikovsky symphonies. ‘You will want a small number of the fittest and most enterprising men. You, from your extra rations, will save a quarter of a kilo of bread a day and dry it at the back of your ski shop stove and you will hide it every day. I will find some sacking to make into bags. Skins you will need for extra clothing and footwear. The soldiers trap sables and the officers shoot them. They hang them on the outer wire. The men working outside must grab one a day. No one will miss them. Plan your own way out and then head south. Wait for a night when it is snowing heavily, so that your tracks are covered.’

  And then, almost as an afterthought, ‘Colonel Ushakov will be leaving for a senior officer’s course at Yakutsk shortly. I would not want anything to happen while he was in command.’ A very loyal wife, this Ushakova.

  I sought out Makowski immediately. ‘We are getting out,’ I said. ‘There will be a little help for us.’

  ‘How many men will you want?’

  ‘About half-a-dozen,’ I said.

  ‘Good. We’ll find them. I know one I can personally recommend.’

  I thought of Kolemenos. ‘I know one, too. We’ll start rounding them up tomorrow.’

  9

  Plans for Escape

  ‘THERE HE is now.’ Makowski, standing beside me at the midday break the next day indicated a prisoner standing a little apart from the rest. ‘Let us wait here a couple of minutes so that you can look him over.’ The man’s shoulders were squared and the shapeless clothes could not disguise that ramrod back.

  ‘You are a cavalry man,’ said Makowski at length. ‘You should recognize the type.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He’s a Pole. Sergeant of Cavalry Anton Paluchowicz. He’s 41, but strong and fit, well-trained, experienced. I’d go anywhere with him. Shall we talk to him?’

  We went over and talked. I liked the look of Paluchowicz. He accepted the proposition like a good soldier undertaking a mission of war. He was glad to know I was a Lieutenant of the Polish Cavalry. ‘We shall do it together,’ he said. ‘It won’t be easy, but we shall do it.’

  That evening I came up behind Kolemenos. I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned. He smiled. ‘Oh, it’s you again.’

  ‘Kolemenos, I am getting out of here with some others. Would you like to join us?’

  He put one big hand on my shoulder. ‘You mean it? Seriously?’ I nodded. ‘Yes, seriously. Perhaps very soon.’ The big man smiled happily through his blond beard. ‘I shall come.’ He laughed aloud and brought the weight of his hand down twice on my shoulder. ‘I could carry you on my shoulders if necessary. If we could come all that way from Irkutsk hanging on those bloody chains we can go a long way further without them.’

  Now there were four of us. We began to plan with a sense of urgency. It was the end of March and I felt we had not a great deal of time. We began to watch things closely. We noted, for instance, that the starting of the dog patrol around the perimeter at night was always signalled by the yelping and whining of the sledge dogs showing their annoyance at being left behind. That signal came only once every two hours. We discovered the patrol always went round anticlockwise, covering the long south side first. We decided the escape must be through the southerly defences and that therefore we must get ourselves established in the end hut on that side. We began to bribe and cajole ourselves bunks in that hut.

  Paluchowicz brought Zaro into the scheme. Eugene Zaro came from the Balkans, a Yugoslav I think. He was 30, and, before the Russians had caught up with him, had been a clerk. ‘If you want some fun on the way,’ said our Sergeant, ‘Zaro is the man.’ Like an inspection committee, Makowski and Paluchowicz and I stood back and watched him in the food queue. He was a well-built man, below average height, and his almost black eyes had a constant gleam of laughter and mischief. The men around him roared in joyous gusts and Zaro stood there, his eyes twinkling in a mock-serious face. ‘All right,’ I pronounced, ‘we’ll have him.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to travel, and this sound good,’ was Zaro’s answer to my approach.

  ‘It’s going to be the worst trip you ever had,’ I told him.

  ‘I know,’ he replied, ‘but I’m coming
with you anyway.’ There was a pause. ‘The Russians have no sense of humour. It will do me good to get away from them.’

  So Eugene Zaro came in and we were five. And we talked about making the number up to ten so that outside we might split into two parties and take different routes to make the job of pursuit more difficult and confusing.

  But it was not to be as easy as that. Two likely-looking fellows I approached in the ski shop shied away even from the mention of the word escape. To talk about it was dangerous enough, in their view. To attempt it would be suicidal. They were content with their new-found riches, the daily kilo of bread and the extra tobacco. Why invite disaster and death in a crazy bid to break out? ‘You are probably right,’ I said. ‘It was just an idea that passed through my head.’ And I went on with my daily chore of drying a quarter of a kilo of my bread behind the big stove to add to the growing store hidden beneath the pile of rejected skis in the far corner of the shop.

  Escaper Number Six was brought in by big Kolemenos. He was a twenty-eight-year-old Lithuanian architect named Zacharius Marchinkovas. He was tall, spare-framed, with alert brown eyes. I was impressed at the manner in which he had already weighed the odds against us, and, having found them formidable, decided that the slightest hope of success was worth the attempt. An intelligent, likeable type, this Lithuanian.

  When Sergeant Paluchowicz brought into our hushed deliberations the name Schmidt, I thought this must be one of the Russo-German colony who had joined our prison train at Ufa in the Urals. These Russians with German names were the descendants of German craftsmen brought in by Peter the Great. I had read that they settled on the Volga. ‘Is he German?’ I asked the Sergeant. ‘His name is Schmidt, but I do not know,’ was the answer. ‘He speaks Russian very well and easily. He stands apart from the others. He does a great deal of thinking by himself and he gives me excellent advice on everything. I recommend him to you.’ Makowski and I announced our intention of meeting Mr. Schmidt the next day. ‘I will point him out to you, then,’ said the Sergeant with a smile.

  He was coming up to the window of the kitchen for his coffee, the last issue of the day, when Paluchowicz indicated him with a jerk of the head. Makowski and I strolled over. My first impression was that he might be too old for the rigours of the adventure we were planning. I judged him to be about fifty. He was well built, wide-shouldered and slim-waisted. His thick hair and beard were tinged with grey. He had seen us coming and, probably because the Sergeant had warned him of the meeting, showed no surprise when I spoke. ‘We would like to talk to you.’

  I spoke in Russian. He answered in Russian, ‘Walk towards the huts and I will join you.’ He moved on and we walked away.

  Holding his mug of coffee, he fell in with us and, clear of the crowd, we stopped. He faced us and smiled. ‘Gentlemen, my name is Smith. I understand you have a proposition.’

  Makowski and I stood there, mouths agape. ‘Smith?’ We repeated the name together.

  ‘I am Smith, Mister Smith. I am an American.’ He grinned happily at our astonishment. ‘You are surprised, gentlemen.’ We just could not believe our ears. His Russian was impeccable. I could detect no trace of an accent.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said at last. ‘It is hard to believe. How did you get here?’

  He had an easy, patient, almost professorial manner of speech. ‘Let me repeat, I am an American. By profession I am an engineer and was one of a number cordially invited by the Soviet Government to help build the Moscow Metro. There were about fifty of us. That was nine or ten years ago. They arrested me in 1936, convinced themselves I was a professional foreign spy and gave me twenty years.’ He drank off his coffee. We were still looking at him like a pair of fools. ‘Now I’ll take my mug back and we shall walk together to the huts.’

  Makowski and I followed his retreating back. Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, Czechs, Finns, the flotsam of a European upheaval, these we expected to meet in the hands of the Russians. But an American . . . Said Makowski, with heavy humour, ‘Maybe if we look around a little more we shall find some English and French.’ Paluchowicz came over to us. ‘What do you think of him?’ Makowski shrugged, still following with his eyes the figure of Smith as he handed in his mug and turned to walk back. ‘Herr Schmidt,’ he told the Sergeant, ‘is Mister Smith.’ Paluchowicz furrowed his forehead in puzzlement. ‘And Mister Smith, my dear Sergeant, is an American.’ It was all over Paluchowicz’s head. He opened his mouth to speak and then shut it.

  The four of us walked slowly back to the huts and, as was the custom, exchanged sentences. That is to say, we introduced ourselves by name as Smith had done. And he, in accordance with camp etiquette, asked us in turn, ‘How long are you in for?’ This question always had its place in first meetings. It was a form of introduction.

  By now, the beginning of April, Makowski and I had got ourselves bunks near the door of the end hut. Kolemenos had also managed the switch and the others hoped to join us within a few days. Telling the Sergeant we would see him later, we invited Mister Smith into our hut. Sitting on Makowski’s bottom bunk, I cautiously outlined our plans. I told him I had sound reasons for believing that only the long road south held any chance of success, although some of the others were still reluctant to drop the idea of the short route east to Kamchatka.

  He did not rush to answer. He asked a few shrewd questions. We sat silent as he thought things over. And then, ‘Gentlemen, it will be a privilege to join you. I agree that the south route is the best. You can count on me.’

  We sat long with Smith. All our histories, our Russian dossiers, followed a similar pattern. Smith was different. He was the odd man out, and he intrigued us. He told us much, but neither then nor ever did he tell us his Christian name. Later, when we six Europeans addressed one another familiarly by first names, the American was always, as he first introduced himself, Mister Smith to us all, the ‘Mister’ somehow being accepted as a substitute for the name we were never told.

  He had a ridged scar curving lividly from right to left from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck, some eight or nine inches long. He received it, he explained, when some scaffolding fell on him during the Metro building.

  ‘Apart from the accident that gave me this scar,’ he told us, ‘I had a good time in Moscow for a few years. The work was interesting, I was highly paid, and I found the Russians easy to work with. They had skilled engineers themselves, but key positions went to foreigners like myself. The reason, I think, was that this Metro scheme was a great prestige prospect and if anything went wrong national pride would be saved by having a foreigner as the scapegoat. I was quite happy. I had wanted to see Russia and I was being financially well rewarded for the experience.’

  In a Moscow obsessed between the wars with its Five-Year Plans, Smith and his friends, installed in well-appointed flats and with money to spare to buy luxuries in those shops where the entry permit was either a Party membership card or a foreign passport, must have been conspicuous. Smith had a car and travelled around freely – a circumstance which must have earned him an underlined report in secret police records. He had a Russian girl friend; the police would not have liked that, either. But they let him go on, working hard and playing hard.

  ‘I never saw the blow coming,’ he went on. ‘After a year’s work, the Russians, without any move from me, doubled my salary, which had been fixed by contract, to show their appreciation of the steady progress that was being made with the work. From then on I thought I was well in with them.’

  Smith was in his flat with the girl after midnight one night in 1936 when the N.K.V.D. called in force. They were quiet, determined and most efficient. Smith and the girl were both arrested. He never saw her again. Other occupants of the flats probably never saw or heard a thing. When dawn came Smith was occupying a cell in the Lubyanka – it was to be his home for the next six months. Repeatedly they brushed aside his demands to be allowed to see someone from the United States Embassy.

  ‘What a transitio
n,’ mused Mister Smith. ‘One day a successful engineer, the next a professional foreign spy. It seems that apart from keeping a general watchful eye on my activities they had been opening my mail home. The main charge against me was that I had been sending out information about Russia in my letters to my folks in America.

  ‘The trial was secret and farcical. I got twenty years, as I told you. They confiscated my car and all my possessions, so perhaps they got back most of the extra salary they had so generously awarded me.

  ‘I was digging for diamonds in a mine in the Urals. I told them I could, by modern engineering practice, substantially increase efficiency and output. They weren’t interested. They kept me on manual labour.’

  Makowski broke in. ‘Have you ever thought about escaping?’

  ‘I have been thinking of how it could be done ever since I was first sent to the Urals. I decided I could not do it alone.’

  Then he questioned us closely about our plans. He wanted as clear and detailed a picture as we could give at this stage. He questioned shrewdly about the distances involved. Had we realized it would be a thousand miles of foot-slogging to the borders of Mongolia alone? We talked, almost in whispers, for a long time, as other occupants of Hut Number One came in past us, stamping snow off their boots, calling out to friends, standing in groups round the three red-hot stoves. I told him we would help him make the move from his hut in the middle of the line to this one. I urged that time was short.

  He stood up, nodded thoughtfully. ‘Goodbye for now,’ I said. ‘Goodbye, gentlemen,’ he answered, and walked out.

  The others readily accepted the seventh and last recruit to the party. There was the practical consideration that he would be useful when we got to the English-speaking world. And Zaro told him, ‘I would like to go to America when we are free.’ Said Smith, ‘I would like to have you all come to America.’