The Long Walk

N.K.V.D. major, ‘is the questionnaire to which you have given us your answers. Just sign here and we shan’t have to bother you any more.’ I didn’t sign. I said I could not sign a document the contents of which were withheld from me. The major smiled, shrugged his shoulders. ‘You will sign, you know — some day you will sign. I feel sorry for you that you do not sign today. Very, very sorry.’

He must have been thinking of Kharkov.

So opened the battle of wills between Slavomir Rawicz and the men of the N.K.V.D. Quite early I realized they had no specific information against me. They knew only what my Army dossier revealed and what they could pick up in Pinsk about my family background. Their charges were based entirely on the conviction that all Poles of middle or upper class education living on the Russian border were inevitably spies, men who had worked stealthily and powerfully against the Russian day of Liberation. I knew none of the places they mentioned, none of the men they sought to get me to acknowledge as confederates. There were times when I was tempted to relieve the anguish of soul and body by admitting acquaintance with the strangers they mentioned. I never did. In my mind, even in my deepest extremity of spirit, I knew that any such admission would be surely fatal.

The great stone fortress prison of Kharkov opened its grim gates to me in April 1940. Mildly conditioned by the rigours of Minsk I was still unprepared for the horrors of Kharkov. Here the phenomenal genius of an N.K.V.D. major nicknamed The Bull flourished. He weighed about fifteen stone. He was ginger-haired, with luxurious growths on head, on chest and on the backs of his huge red hands. He had a long, powerful body, short, sturdy legs and long, heavy arms. A shining red face topped a bulging great neck. He took his job as chief interrogator with deadly seriousness. He hated with frightening thoroughness the prisoner who failed to capitulate. He certainly hated me. And I, even now, would kill him, without compunction and with abounding happiness.

The Bull must have been something special even in the N.K.V.D. He ran his interrogation sessions like an eminent surgeon, always showing off his skill before a changing crowd of junior officers, assembled like students at an interesting operation. His methods were despicably ingenious. The breaking-down process for difficult prisoners started in the kishka, a chimney-like cell into which one stepped down about a foot below the level of the corridor outside. Inside a man could stand and no more. The walls pressed round like a stone coffin. Twenty feet above there was the diffused light from some small, out-of-sight window. The door was opened only to allow a prisoner to be marched for an appointment with The Bull. We excreted standing up and stood in our own filth. The kishka was never cleaned — and I spent six months in the one provided for me at Kharkov. Before going to see The Bull I would be taken to the ‘wash-house’ — a small room with a pump. There were no refinements. No soap was provided. I would strip and pump the cold water over my clothes, rub them, stamp on them, wring them and then put them back on to dry on my body.

The questions were the same. They came from the same sheaf of documents which travelled with me from prison to prison. But The Bull was far more pressing in his absorbing desire to get my signature. He swore with great and filthy fluency. He lost his temper explosively and frequently. One day, after hours of unremitting bawling and threatening, he suddenly pulled out his service pistol. Eyes blazing, the veins on his neck standing out, he put the barrel to my temple. He stood quivering for almost thirty seconds as I closed my eyes and waited. Then he stood back and slammed the pistol butt into my right jaw. I spat out all the teeth on that side. The next day, my face puffed out, the inside of my mouth still lacerated and bleeding, I met him again. He was smiling. His little knot of admirers looked interestedly at his handiwork. ‘You look lop-sided,’ he said. And he hit me with the pistol butt on the other side. I spat out more teeth. ‘That will square your face up,’ he said.

There was the day when a patch of hair about the size of a halfcrown was shaved from the crown of my head. I sat through a forty-eight-hour interrogation with my buttocks barely touching the edge of a chair seat while Russian soldiers took over the duty in relays of tapping the bare spot on my head at the precise interval of once every two seconds. While The Bull roared his questions and leered and, with elephantine show of occasional pleasantry, cajoled me to sign that cursed document.

Then back to the kishka, to the clinging, sickening stench, to hours of awful half- sleep. The kishka was well named: it means ‘the intestine’ or ‘the gut’. When I came to — usually when my tired knees buckled and I had to straighten up again — I had only The Bull to think about. He filled my life completely. There were one or two occasions when the guard on duty pushed through to me a lighted cigarette. These were the only human gestures made to me at Kharkov. I could have cried with gratitude.

There were times when I thought I was there for life. The Bull seemed prepared to continue working on me for ever. My eyes ran copious tears from the long sessions under powerful arc lamps. Strapped on my back on a narrow bench I would be staring direct into the light as he walked round and round in semi-gloom outside its focus, interminably questioning, insulting, consigning me to the deepest hell reserved for stubborn, cunning, bastard Polish spies and enemies of the Soviet. There was something obscene about his untiring energy and brute strength. When my blurred eyes began to close he would prop them open with little sticks. The dripping water trick was one of his specialities. From a container precisely placed over the bench an icy drop of water hit exactly the same spot on my head steadily at well-regulated intervals for hours on end.

Day and night had no meaning. The Bull sent for me when he felt like it, and that could as well be at midnight as at dawn or any other hour. There was always a dull curiosity to guess what he had thought up for me. The guards would take me down the corridors, open the door and push me in. There was the time when The Bull was waiting for me with half-a-dozen of his N.K.V.D. pupils. They formed a little lane, three each side, and the mastermind stood back from them a couple of paces. I had to pass between them to reach him. No word was spoken. A terrific clout above the ear hurled me from one silent rank to the other. Grimly and efficiently they beat me up from one side to the other. They kicked me to my feet when I slumped down, and when it was over and I could not get up again, The Bull walked over and gave me one final paralysing kick in the ribs. Then they lifted me on to the edge of the same old chair and the questioning went on, the document was waved in my face, a pen was thrust at me.

Sometimes I would say to him, ‘Let me read the document. You can’t expect me to sign something I have not read.’ But he would never let me read. His thick finger would point to the space where I was to sign. ‘All you have to do is to put your name here and I will leave you alone.’

‘Have a cigarette?’ he said to me on one occasion. He lit one for himself, one for me. Then he walked quietly over and stubbed mine out on the back of my hand, very hard. On that occasion I had been sitting on the edge of the chair until — as always happened — the muscles of the back and legs seized up in excruciating cramp. He walked round behind me as I rubbed the burn and kicked the chair from beneath me. I crashed on to the stone floor.

As a new and lively diversion towards the end of my stay at Kharkov, The Bull showed off with a Cossack knife, of which he seemed very proud. He demonstrated its excellent steel and keen edge on my chest, and I still have those scars to remind me of his undoubted dexterity and ingenuity.

There was a day near the end when he was waiting alone for me. He was quiet. There were none of the usual obscene greetings. And when he spoke the normally harsh, strident voice was low and controlled. As he talked I realized he was appealing to me to sign that paper. He was almost abject. I thought he might blubber. In my mind I kept saying to myself, ‘No, not now, you fat pig. Not now. Not after all this…’ I did not trust myself to speak. I shook my head. And he cursed me and cursed me, with violent and passionate intensity, foully and exhaustively.

How much can a man, weakened with ill-feeding and physical violence, stand? The limit of endurance, I found, was long after a tortured body had cried in agony for relief. I never consciously reached the final depth of capitulation. One small, steadfast part of my mind held to the unshakable idea that it was death to give in. So long as I wanted to live — and I was only a young man — I had that last, uttermost, strength of will to resist them, to push away that document which a scrawl of pen on paper might convert into my death warrant.

But there was a long night when they fed me with some dried fish before I was taken to the interrogation room. I retain some fairly clear memory of all the many sessions except this one. My head swam, I drooled, I could not get my eyes to align on anything. Often I almost fell off my chair. The cuffings and shakings seemed not to worry me and when I tried to talk my tongue was thick in my mouth. Vaguely I remember the paper and the pen being thrust at me, but, like a celebrating drunk might feel after a heavy night, there is no memory of the end of that interview.

In the morning when I came back to life I pulled my face away from the wall of my cell and smelt a new and peculiar smell. In the dim light the wall where my mouth had rested showed a wide, greenish stain. I was really frightened as I stood there, weighed down by a truly colossal feeling of oppression, like the father of all hang-