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

  About half-an-hour after the breakdown the chains were unhooked from the lorries and the prisoners marched off ahead, crunching into the fresh snow, beating out a track and laboriously treading down the snow. The lorries crept after us. We struggled on for a mile until we came to the blessed haven of a belt of woods. Somehow we got the fires going, hundreds of them, and all through the raging night tended them for our lives. We felt the storm was trying to blot us out en masse. Prisoners dourly struggled and inched their way in towards the inner ring around the blazing timber. Some fools, ignoring advice that had been given since the start of the march, warmed their numbed hands close to the flames and then shrieked with the agony of returning circulation, beating their arms about and contorting themselves with the fierce pangs of it. Within range of the heat we kept turning ourselves about because the blizzard froze one’s back even while the fire was giving out some little warmth to hands, face and the front of the body. No one was allowed to sleep. Those in the inner ring who began to doze off were shaken roughly awake by their friends. To sleep, as we all knew, might mean no awakening.

  For twenty-four hours we lived out the full force of the blizzard, the lorries hopelessly snowed in. Only the fires and the still-functioning field kitchen preserved us. The tufts of hardy broad-bladed grass, a roadside feature all through the march, bent over, swung and gyrated under the whiplash of the wind with a constant swishing and whistling. The snow hissed and sizzled as it drove against the fires. We stamped around to save our frozen feet from frostbite, huddled our hands in our fufaikas, damned the storm and wondered how we were to get out of this place.

  When the wind eventually abated and the snow began to thin, the first impression I had was of the silence. It was possible again to hear clearly ordinary camp noises, to pick up the murmur of low conversation. There was still a sharp wind, keening quietly through the trees, but its sound was nothing to the hammering whine of the blizzard which had assaulted us through the long hours. I do not remember just how long we stayed under the lee of the woods. It seemed a long time. Maybe it was no more than two days. At any rate, there came a morning which was clear with that extraordinary clarity one gets on a fine Siberian winter day, a very cold day when the breath is expelled in clouds of steam, when the eye can see for vast distances. A knot of Russian officers stood talking, occasionally looking back in the direction whence we had come, from time to time glancing at their watches. There was an air of waiting for something to happen and because we had not the remotest idea of what the next move could be, we were all stirred with curiosity and a growing excitement.

  We heard before we saw what we were waiting for – the sound of men’s voices yipping and yelling in the distance. Everyone turned in the direction of the sounds. We stood looking for perhaps five minutes before the first of them came over the ridge about a quarter of a mile away. We shouted our surprise and excitement. Reindeer! Reindeer and sledges! Dozens of them. Reindeer, two, three and even four to a sled in line ahead, driven by little brown men, barely five feet tall, with smooth Mongoloid faces, the nomadic Ostyaks, the primitive herdsmen of the Siberian steppes. The novelty of it all was like a tonic. Men came out of their discomfort and apathy with shouting and laughter. Near me was a man who jumped up and down and kept saying over and over again, ‘Well, I’m damned. Look at that lot.’ New faces, new sights, new sounds. The cries of the Ostyaks, the unharnessing of the reindeer, the hobbling of the forefeet and the setting of the animals free to feed and look for their staple diet of moss under the covering of the thick snow – all these activities absorbed our interest. It was all new in surroundings and conditions where we thought there could be nothing new. The man near me was still talking to himself in a tone which suggested, ‘What will they think of next?’

  It took the Ostyaks only a short time to release their reindeer from the primitive harness, a neck collar of reindeer hide, thong-fastened to two long, curved shafts which swept down and back to form the runners of the simple, wood-platformed sled, on which were sable and other skins. The little men had brought food with them in small sacks and they joined us round the fire as we received our morning issue of bread and coffee. They wore warm skin clothing. They looked at us with pity, their sharp, twinkling eyes puckered into slits as is the manner of men who spend their lives facing hazards of the world’s worst weather.

  I spoke to one of them in Russian. He might have been sixty, but it is difficult to tell with these Mongol types. He told me they had been visited at their winter camp by the Red Army men and they were not pleased to be sent on this trip. He thought they had made a fast journey of nearly a hundred miles to meet us. They had brought soldiers with them, a couple to each sledge. He told me about reindeer, that you could not ride on their backs because they were weak there, but their necks and the humps of their shoulders were very strong and an Ostyak could vault up there with the help of his long pole, the gentle goad they used in driving the sledge, and ride without strain or fatigue to the animal. He told me his name, but to a mind used only to Western and Russian names it left no impression on the memory.

  On several occasions I was to talk to this little man. He would quietly seek me out. He had not a great deal to say. He would think hard and with obvious effort to put over any idea. But he called us, as did all the Ostyaks, the Unfortunates. Traditionally, from the time of the Czars we were, to his people, the Unfortunates, the prisoners of a régime which always sought to wrest the riches of Siberia by the use of unpaid labourers, the political prisoners who could not fit in the framework of successive tyrannies.

  ‘We are your friends always,’ he once said to me. ‘Since a long time ago, before me and my father and his father before him, we placed outside our dwellings at night food for the wandering Unfortunates who had fled away from their camps and knew not where to go. In my time, too, because I am becoming an old man, I remember the placing of food.’

  ‘These men like us,’ I said, ‘have they always tried to escape from the Russians?’

  ‘Always men who are young and strong and hate slavery have tried to escape,’ said the Ostyak. ‘Perhaps you will try to escape, I think.’

  Escape. I turned the word over in my mind and knew that it had been with me as an idea since the day I left the Lubyanka. Yes, old Ostyak, I thought, all men who are young and strong and do not want to die must think of escape. Step to the right, step to the left . . . the Russians knew it too. But only a madman could entertain any serious hopes of a break on this wintry trek to the North. If a man were not shot – and there were chances of getting away as security slackened in the last stages, with the soldiers as preoccupied as anyone in keeping fit and alive and completing the march – there could only be death in attempting to live off this country in winter, weak and half-starved as we already were. Nevertheless, the old reindeer man left me with one thought I was to cherish later: men did attempt to escape.

  The old man talked of the way of life of his people, the animals whose skins were so valuable to them, about the reindeer which they looked after with such care. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘we were allowed to shoot animals with a gun, but now the Soviets will not let us use guns and we catch all our animals in traps.’

  The day we moved off behind the sledges there was some laughter at the protests of the Ostyak whose four-reindeer team had been selected to draw the field kitchen, which was only a wood-fired steel boiler and oven combined. He swore that his animals and his light sledge would never be able to cope with so difficult a load. The Russian cooks went stolidly on with the job and we watched with amused sympathy for the Ostyak but with a tinge of concern lest his fears became justified. It was all right, though. We trudged off, our chains now fastened to the sledges, and the field kitchen, to our relief, came too. Some of the soldiers stayed with the lorries and I was sorry to see those big, dependable vehicles left behind. What happened to them I do not know. Perhaps they were able to turn back, or the kolhoz tractors came to their rescue.

  The novelty of
marching behind the wagging rumps of reindeer and watching their antlered heads swinging along the trail never quite wore off. We learned that by gently leaning back on the chain all together we could slow the pace considerably. We picked up that trick in a somewhat disorderly crossing of a small river bounded by steep banks. The reindeer made a great scramble of it, the guards bawled at the drivers to hold their charges to a reasonable pace and we, half-enjoying the confusion, threw our combined weight back against the speeding sledges. We got down one bank at a rush and then tore up the opposite side at a shambling trot. It took the best part of an hour to get the crazy circus back into line and ready to move again.

  The hazards of the journey did not diminish and exhaustion claimed more victims, some of them soldiers. The troops were now coping with difficulties as great as our own, although they were still getting better food, their basic rations fortified with tinned meat and vegetable soups, and were, of course, better clothed against the cold. But none of them – except the Commandant and the sick – was allowed to ride. We were still being helped along by the chains, but they had to break their own trails on the flanks through thick snow, an effort which all except the leading prisoner groups avoided. For many of these guards, men from the southern autonomous Soviet republics, this was their first experience of the harshness of a northern winter, and they suffered accordingly.

  The Ostyaks were the least affected. The only thing new about the situation to them was the job they were doing. They pitied us, but seemed to realize the only help they could give was to get us to where we were going as quickly as possible. Over all kinds of terrain they managed to average about fifteen miles a day. They acted towards the soldiers with an almost jaunty independence. They coveted from the Army only the empty tins which, by order, were always carefully preserved. Their interest in metalware revealed their primitive background. Metal was scarce but skins and timber were plentiful. So there was a good deal of surreptitious bartering between them and the Army cooks of skins for tins. A sable for an empty meat tin was a bargain for both sides and a lesson for the rest of us in relative values. The tins, they told us, were for use as cooking utensils and would be highly prized by the women when they returned home.

  The fantastic procession wound its way onwards for over a week, mostly through open country, still keeping away from inhabited places. The length of chain dragging in the snow at the end of each section of prisoners told the tale of the men who had fallen out on the way. At each death the men behind the vacant space were moved up and the varying lengths of spare chain were an indication of the casualty rate in each group. The two end-of-the-line prisoners hugged the chain to their bodies under their armpits to ease the strain and we took turns in this least favoured position, sparing, however, the older and weaker men.

  On the eighth or ninth day after leaving the lorries we entered a vast forest which, from high ground some hours before, we had seen stretching ahead of us unbrokenly as far as eye could range. We walked along quite a wide track between the trees, grateful to be out of the sharp cut of the wind and to know our nightly shelter was assured. We noticed, too, that the soldiers were showing some signs of cheerfulness and guessed, rightly as it turned out, that this must be a landmark near the end of the journey. The progress through the forest lasted two days and there was a sense of drive and urgency about the second day’s march that convinced men who were almost dead to hope that the great trial was finishing. It was a long march, starting at the first light of dawn and continuing through the short winter day to dusk. We emerged in the failing light into a big, man-made clearing carved out from the surrounding forest. There were lights ahead and voices calling.

  This, then, was our destination – Camp Number 303, on the north side of the Lena River, which I estimate to have been between 200 and 300 miles south-west of the Northern Siberia capital, Yakutsk. I do not remember in any sharp detail the scenes of arrival that night in the first week of February 1941. I remember how we moved, reindeer team by reindeer team up to a massive main gate in a stout palisade of rough-hewn logs, of being freed of my chains, the odd feeling of security as I milled about inside the compound, the meal enhanced by turnip-water ‘soup’, the lighting of fires on what appeared to be a big parade-ground, the hearing of my name called in the checking of the lists. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with Grechinen round a crackling pile of logs, I talked a little, dozed often, stood up to ease the pain in my aching legs. Over a thousand miles of marching from Irkutsk and we had got here. I found myself marvelling. In spite of my physical misery I had a feeling that was almost happy. The awful strain of two months on the road was over. Nothing the next day could bring could be worse. I think I must have been a bit light-headed.

  Aching, heavy-eyed and weary, we were astir, by habit, at dawn. Some of the men were very sick and their companions had to lift them to their feet. The Ostyaks and their reindeer had gone in the night. The first day of my life in a Soviet labour camp was before me.

  7

  Life in Camp 303

  A FAINT early-morning haze dissipated and in the cold, clear light of day I looked round at the place to which I had been consigned to spend twenty-five years of my life. Camp 303, lying between 300 and 400 miles south of the Arctic Circle, was a rectangular enclosure about half-a-mile long and about 400 yards broad, at each corner of which stood a guard tower raised high on solid timber stilts, manned by machine-gun crews. The main gate, around which were built the troops’ quarters, the kitchens, storehouses and administrative huts, faced west in one of the shorter sides of the oblong. Roughly in the centre of the enclosure was an open stretch of ground which served as the security no-man’s-land between the soldiers and the prisoners.

  Between us and the surrounding forest were the typical defences of a prison camp. Looking from the inside, the first barrier to freedom was an unbroken ring of coiled barbed wire, behind which was a six-feet-deep dry moat, its inner side cut downwards at an angle of about thirty degrees and its outer wall rising sheer and perpendicular to the foot of the first of two twelve-feet-high log palisades presenting a smooth surface inwards but strongly buttressed on the far side. Both outer sides of the two wooden walls were protected by rolled barbed wire. The space between the two provided a well-beaten track giving access from the main gate guardroom to all four control towers, and was regularly patrolled by armed sentries accompanied at night by police dogs, who shared kennels near the west gate with a pack of sled dogs.

  Mingling diffidently with us that first morning were about a thousand men, a large proportion of them Finns, who were already installed when our bedraggled crowd of some 4,500 arrived. They came from four big huts at the eastern end of the compound. These log-built prisoner barracks were about eighty yards long by ten yards wide conforming in situation with the general plan of the camp itself, the doors, facing west, in the narrow end and protected from the direct blast of wind and snow by a small covered porch with a southerly opening. It was obvious that there was no accommodation for us newcomers.

  Speculation was cut short by orders from the troops to line ourselves up for food. We shuffled along in line to the open window of the kitchens, one of the buildings to the left of the main gate. There was the usual issue of ersatz coffee and bread. Each man drank up as quickly as he could and returned his tin mug through another window. There was plenty of hot liquid but a shortage of utensils. This shortage remained all the time I was in the camp and applied also to the wooden bowls in which soup was dished out.

  Into the middle of the parade ground soldiers carried out a portable wooden platform. Around it, under orders from junior officers and N.C.O.s, they formed a ring. We prisoners were then hustled to form ourselves in a big circle around the troops, facing inwards towards the platform. Accompanied by a small armed guard, two Russian colonels walked through the ranks to the foot of the platform. One of them stepped up. From my place in the front row I eyed him closely. He was tall, slim and distinguished looking, his hair greying at the temples
, a typical example of a professional soldier in any army. His small grey moustache was carefully trimmed, his lean face showed two deep lines etched from a firm mouth into a strong chin. He carried his head slightly forward and I was struck by his air of detachment, that indefinable quality of effortless authority that any man who has served in armed forces will have met in professional commanders. He was facing a hostile audience, a mob of ill-treated humans whose bitter hate of all things Russian was almost a tangible thing, but he gave no sign. He stood perfectly relaxed with no movement of hands, feet or body. From the assembled prisoners there was a hum of comment. The Colonel turned his head slowly to look at us all. There was perfect silence.

  He spoke clearly and crisply in Russian. ‘I am Colonel Ushakov,’ he said. ‘I am commandant of this camp. You have come here to work and I expect from you hard work and discipline. I will not talk to you of punishment since you probably know what to expect if you do not behave.

  ‘Our first job is to provide shelter for you. Your first task, therefore, will be to build barracks for yourselves. How quickly you get inside out of the weather depends on your own efforts. It is up to you. In all communities there are those who will let others do the work for them. That kind of slacking will not be tolerated here and it will be to the benefit of all of you to see that everyone pulls his weight.

  ‘I expect no trouble from you. If you have any complaints I will always listen to them, and I will do what is in my power to help you. There are no doctors here but there are trained soldiers who can administer first-aid. Those of you who are now too sick after your journey to work will be accommodated in the existing barracks while the rest of you get on with the new buildings. That is all I have to say.’