The Long Walk (11 page)

By the end of the first month the camp had settled into a disciplined rhythm of life and there was a general feeling that, harsh though existence was in this remote, winter-bound spot,
conditions could have been much worse. All working prisoners were given 400 grammes of bread (some 14 ounces) a day and those too sick to work received 300 grammes. The bread was issued with the
early morning coffee, part was eaten then, another portion went down with the midday soup and the rest was taken with the hot drink handed out at the end of the day’s work. There was an
occasional treat on Sunday when we were given dried fish, but bread remained our staple diet and the most important single factor in our lives. Tobacco, too, was important in a lesser degree. There
was a fairly generous issue once a week of the coarse
korizhki,
with a sheet of very old newspaper to act as cigarette paper. Bread and tobacco were the only commodities of value in the
camp. They were the currency of the camp, the only means of payment for services.

The mortality rate continued high in that first month. Many of the men who survived the death march wrecked in body and mind never did any work. They were given bunks in the existing huts when
we arrived, and worn out beyond endurance, just lay there day after day until they lost their feeble grip on life. Volunteer burial parties from among their friends carried their bodies under armed
escort to a clearing about a quarter of a mile from the camp, laboured to hack shallow graves out of the hard-frozen earth, and committed them at last to rest.

Twice I went out with burial parties and in so doing discovered that the Commandant was provided with an aeroplane. Our way took us past what seemed to me to be an inadequate runway cut out of
the forest at its highest point. The plane, protected by tarpaulins, stood under the shelter of some trees. It was a small, Tiger Moth trainer type. One of the guards said Ushakov piloted it
himself to attend conferences at area Army headquarters at Yakutsk.

The Russians interfered very little with our lives outside working hours. Inspection of our quarters was infrequent and perfunctory. Prisoners working in felling teams in the forest found new
friends and at first sought permission to change from one hut to another to bunk near their teammates. The authorities offered no objection and let it be known that such moves could be made as a
mutual arrangement between prisoners. Most men could be persuaded to switch places from one hut to another by a bribe of tobacco, and there was therefore a constant movement in those early weeks as
men sorted out themselves and their friends. I knew none of my companions particularly well, although I still occasionally saw Grechinen, my companion of the march. Apart from him there was only
the Czech, whose wit and gaiety I admired but who was never a close friend. The various national groups tended to hold together and we Poles, for instance, used to start the day with the singing of
that little traditional hymn of praise, ‘When the Morning Light Appears’. The Russians did not care for our singing, but they never took active steps to stop us.

I used to lie on my bunk in the long evenings looking up to the smoke vent twenty feet above me and think about it all. There would be men talking quietly, some of them visitors from other huts.
Words and disconnected sentences would reach me . . . names of places, and prisons and Army regiments . . . ‘She said, “Darling, don’t worry, it will all be over soon, and I will
still be here”.’. . . A snippet of conversation about the guard who didn’t get out of the way as the tree groaned and broke and fell the wrong way . . . ‘Poor bastard, he
won’t get any real treatment for that smashed leg of his.’ . . . There was talk of somebody who had got his ribs bruised. ‘He’s doing all right for himself – light
duties cleaning out the officers’ mess and plenty of tobacco to be picked up.’ . . . It would flow around me, a half-noticed background to my own thoughts. The pine smell and the warmth
and the movement of men clanging open the tops of the stoves to stoke up with bright-burning wood. And all the time my mind juggling with pictures of the stockaded camp and Ushakov and the Politruk
and the soldiers (how many of them died?) and always the men about me, the young ones like me who were resilient and quick to recover, the forty-year-olds who surprisingly (to me, then) moved
slowly but with great reserves of courage and strength, and the over-fifties who fought to stay young, to work, to live, the men who had lived leisured lives and now, marvellously, displayed the
guts to face a cruel new life very bravely. They should have been telling tales to their devoted grandchildren, these oldsters. Instead they spent their days straining and lifting at the great
fallen trees, working alongside men who were often half their age. There is a courage which flourishes in the worst kind of adversity and it is quite unspectacular. These men had it in full.

My mind revolved them round, these crowding impressions. And then, unfailingly, until I dropped off to sleep on the moss-covered planks, I would grapple with my own problem. The insistent,
hammering thought always was, ‘Twenty-five years in this place.’ Many of these men I now knew would die as the years passed. There would be fresh entries. And I would get older and
older. Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years. As long to go as I had already lived. But how to get out? And having beaten the wire, the moat and the formidable wooden fences, where would one escape
to? I would think of the little Ostyak and his talk of the Unfortunates. Did any of them ever get out of Siberia? No man could ever hope to fight his way out alone against the crushing hazards of
this country with its immense distances. Where, having planned an escape, could one find resolute men to make the attempt? These, and other questions, I put to myself. And I had no answers.

I fell in with Grechinen on the way to the latrines one evening. ‘Grechinen,’ I said, ‘if I could one day think up a plan of escape, would you come with me?’ A frown
creased his forehead. ‘Are you serious?’ I nodded. Grechinen ran his fingers slowly through his beard. ‘Rawicz,’ he answered finally, ‘I will think about it tonight
and tell you tomorrow.’

Cautious Grechinen. I saw him the next day in the wide space between the two rows of huts. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I would come with you if there was a chance, but the snow and the
cold would kill us before we could get anywhere, even if the Russians didn’t catch us.’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I still don’t want to die young,’ added
Grechinen.

I put the same question to the Czech. He thought at first that I was joking. Then he sat down on the edge of his bunk and motioned me down beside him. He put his hand on my shoulder. Quietly, in
a voice just above a whisper, he said, ‘Yes, I would come with you, but you want strong and healthy men. My stomach plagues me and I think it will eventually kill me. If I came with you I
would die that much sooner out there and you would suffer for having me with you.’ We sat there in silence for a few minutes after that. Then the Czech spoke again. ‘If you get the
chance, clear out, my boy. Keep your eyes skinned, pick your men. I shall wish you luck, anyway.’

We worked hard for six days and had an easy day on the seventh. Sunday was the day when the Commandant addressed the prisoners. He would talk of the work target for the following week, draw
attention to any infringements of camp rules and make any announcements necessary affecting the life of prisoners. He would also call for suggestions and questions. We had been there a month when
the Commandant called for volunteers for a new job. He wanted men who had experience of making skis. There was no response at first. Said the Commandant, ‘Volunteers will receive an immediate
increase of one hundred grammes on their daily bread ration, and there will be more if the skis turned out are of good quality.’ Sixty men volunteered, and I was one of them. I had once made
a pair of skis. I could not claim to be an expert, but for an extra three or four ounces of bread a day I was willing to try my hand.

The ski shop was the other half of the building occupied by the library. Half-a-dozen of the volunteers were real experts at the job and by common consent they divided the rest into a team of
handymen for the actual process of manufacture and an outdoor crew for felling the birch trees, sawing the wood into the right lengths and keeping up a steady supply of the right timber to the
shop. My achievement in having once made a pair of skis earned me a job inside the hut on the last stage of steaming and shaping. And the very first day, before a single pair of skis had been
produced, we all received our new ration of 500 grammes of bread.

On the second day we turned out our first two pairs of skis. They were each in turn placed with their ends on two upturned logs, the middle unsupported, and Ushakov himself tested them by
treading down on them until they touched the floor in the shape of a letter U. Two soldiers then took them away and tested them on a run through the forest. They passed both tests. At the end of
the week Ushakov came to the shop and announced that samples sent away to Yakutsk had been accepted as up to the standard required by the Red Army. Our bread ration would go up immediately to a
kilogramme a day – over double the normal ration – and there would be more tobacco for us. At the end of a fortnight we were turning out 160 pairs of skis a day.

There was considerable bad feeling among the forest gangs over our new privileges. I was asked more than once how I could allow myself to make skis for Russian soldiers, but I never entered into
arguments. My own feeling was any work one did in a Siberian camp was bound to benefit the Soviet in some degree, so one might as well take the most interesting job available. Interesting, of
course, and well paid. With bread occupying the exalted position it did in our lives, it would have been surprising had there been no adverse comment from the less favoured majority. I shared my
extra tobacco and I took some of my extra bread to the sick. So did many others of the ski-making prisoners. But the dissatisfaction persisted. It is odd to reflect that the prime advocates of a
classless society had this early succeeded in making two classes of workers and in marking the difference so clearly with substantial rewards to one class.

Working all day in the warmth of the ski shop, with the big stove roaring all day for the steaming of the wood, I felt I was getting back towards my full strength again. It should have made me
resigned to my sentence, but instead it turned my thoughts more and more to escape. I began to wonder how I could preserve and hide some of my extra bread. I still had no workable plan and I could
not know then that I was soon to get help from a most unexpected quarter.

I
HAD
volunteered once and struck lucky. I volunteered again one cold blustery Sunday morning in mid-March as flurries of
snow swept about the hunched-up prisoners at the weekly parade.

‘In my quarters,’ said Ushakov, ‘I have a radio set. It is called a Telefunken. Is there any one of you who knows this make of set well enough to do a repair job?’ I knew
the Telefunken, because we had one at home – a German make, I think, made under licence in a factory at Wilno for the Polish market. Men turned their heads to see who might step forward.
There was a full minute of silence and nobody made a move. I knew the set, but could I repair it? If I could, there was the exciting prospect of hearing some news from the outside world, from which
I had been cut off for nearly eighteen months. I had a sudden panic that somebody else would get the job. I stuck up my hand and called out. An N.C.O. stepped up and took my name and my place of
work. ‘I will send for you when I want you,’ said the Commandant.

It was to be a fateful decision, launching me into the last and most extraordinary phase of my stay at Camp 303. In this isolated community of between five and six thousand men under sentence
and a battalion strength of officers and men, there was but one woman. The defective Telefunken was to be the means of my meeting her, and, so far as I knew, I was the only prisoner who ever talked
to her.

The following afternoon as I worked in the ski shop, the Commandant’s messenger, a moon-faced private named Igor, called for me. ‘The Commandant wants you,’ he said.
‘Come with me.’ As we left, the other men in the shop called out, ‘Find out how the war’s going,’ and ‘Get us some news from Poland,’ and so on. I waved my
hand. I confess I felt nervous as I walked away from the ski shop, across in front of the big gate, past the officers’ mess to the Commandant’s house standing on the other side of the
camp at the northwest corner of the parade ground. It was, like all the other buildings, built of logs with the typical porch opening south to keep the wind and snow away from the front door. As I
stepped inside I saw it differed only from the style of the prisoners’ barracks in having an inner skin of smooth plank walls, a wooden ceiling and floor, and a stove stackpipe that went all
the way up through the roof. For windows it had, not glass, but the same peculiar tough fish-skin stuff which was fitted in all the other buildings. The most that could be said for this skin was
that it was windproof and let in light. It could not be seen through.

Igor ushered me in. Ushakov stepped forward towards the door, dismissed Igor and motioned me in. ‘I have come to look at the set,
Gospodin Polkovnik
,’ I said in Russian, using
the old Russian style of respectful address to a Colonel.

‘Yes, of course. I will show it to you.’ He stepped past me and out through the door I had just entered, looked around and came back in.

The woman sat in front of the stove, which had been placed so that it protruded through the partition which divided the home into two rooms, so heating both halves. The Colonel murmured a
conventional introduction to his wife. I bowed and said something formal and she smiled with a small inclination of her head. I found myself staring at her. She was the first woman I had met since
I left my wife and my mother in Pinsk. I felt awkward and ill at ease, painfully aware of my ugly clothes, my beard and my long hair which curled over the neck of my jacket. I could not take my
eyes off her.