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.
8.
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
