I must have heard that warning hundreds of times during my captivity. All guards used it, all prisoners knew it. The Russians took great pains to explain to a prisoner exactly where he was to go and the prisoner was left in no doubt that a deviation off course to right or left would mean death from the carbine or pistol of the guards marching two paces behind him. In the Lubyanka it seemed to be an excessive and almost ridiculous precaution, but later, when thousands of captives were being moved from one end of Russia to the other and escape became at least a possibility, the warning sounded sensible enough from the Russian point of view.
On the morning of the fourth day after my sentence an N.K.V.D. lieutenant entered my cell. ‘Can you read Russian?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I answered. He handed me a document which I found was a movement permit. Even convicted men apparently needed a permit to change their place of residence, although it might be a move only from prison to prison. The officer handed me a pen and I signed my name on the paper. He pocketed the permit and left.
Towards dusk on this mid-November afternoon in 1940 I quit my Lubyanka cell for the last time. I was marched out into the prison yard. Snow was drifting down and the cold had an edge which made me draw in my breath. Around the yard were a number of small buildings. At one end were the massive main gates, near which were two red brick storehouses. I was led to one of these and handed a brown paper parcel. The man who gave it me said, ‘This is for your journey,’ and smiled.
As I stood in the yard, one hand holding on to my trousers, the other gripping my parcel, I felt myself shivering with cold and with excitement. There was a great sense of freedom. I told myself, ‘Slav, my friend, this is goodbye to prisons. Wherever they take you, it won’t be to another stinking prison.’ I felt faintly elated. Whatever was ahead of me, here I was already breathing in good, clean, cold air and knowing I was going somewhere — not from cell to cell, from prison to prison, from one interrogator to another, but to a new life, a chance to work, to use my hands again, to meet and talk with other men…
Those other men, my fellow prisoners, were even now being escorted in small batches into the yard. I could feel my heart thumping as I watched each one of them arrive. I stared and stared. They eyed me and one another in the same way. We were all looking for someone we knew. But the odd thing borne in on me was that recognition was impossible. We were all in complete and uniform disguise. We were all longhaired and heavily bearded — I had not had a haircut or shave for nearly a year, but it had never occurred to me that all the others would have been treated alike. Our clothes were the same. When we had all been herded into the yard there were about 150 men like me all holding on to their trousers. One hundred and fifty lost souls turning up in the same pitiful costume at some devil’s fancy dress ball, each with a neat brown paper parcel in one hand and a pair of trousers in the other. The corners of my mouth twitched and I could almost have laughed, but suddenly I felt a choking wave of pity for us all that they should make such fools of us.
This was my first encounter with any other prisoner. In Kharkov and the Lubyanka I had heard noises. I had heard men being shot. I had heard the awful howling of a man who is going mad. I had listened to scrapings and tappings as though someone was trying to communicate with me through a cell wall. But I was never allowed to meet any of the other unfortunates. Isolation was part of the treatment and I got it in full measure.
The business of assembling us, checking names against documents and counting heads took about two hours. During this period we were all made to squat in the snow — another security rule. Two groups of about a dozen armed soldiers kept watch on us. There was little daylight left when we were ordered to our feet and loaded standing into five canvas-topped Army lorries. One lorry-load of soldiers headed the convoy and another followed in the rear. Tossed about and flung from side to side, we were driven at breakneck speed for what seemed to be about ten miles before the brakes were slammed on and we pitched forward in mass. The convoy had stopped.
In that short, jolting ride, I could feel a tense, bubbling excitement all round me. It was an odd and powerful experience to be with other men again, to feel the thump of another shoulder, the sharp prod of an elbow in the ribs, to be reminded again of the smell of men in a packed crowd, to hear exclamations in rich, colloquial Polish. But that great surge of talk one might have expected did not come. We were to find it took some little time to recover the habit of conversation. It came back slowly by way of shouted little questions and short, jerky answers.
The place where the lorry convoy stopped was a small station on a branch line which I estimated to be about five miles outside Moscow. Someone later professed to know the place, gave it a name and said it was a suburb of scattered villas much favoured by the well-to-do Soviet official. As I jumped down from the lorry I saw in the distance the lights of houses, well spaced out, which might support the theory, but there were no civilians around and the prisoners and soldiers had the place to themselves. Drawn up on the railway was a train of cattle trucks of the type which normally accommodated eight horses or cows in stalls, four each side, tails against the front and rear ends and heads pointing inwards to a small central gangway between the two truck doors. There was an engine with steam up at each end of the train.
The loading was carried out quickly. As the name of each man was called he stepped up to the door of the truck and two soldiers hoisted him in. Inside, two more soldiers packed the men around the truck walls, gradually filling the available space towards the centre until they were themselves inched back towards the door. When they had finished there were sixty men jammed immovably in my truck. All the cattle fittings had been removed except the steel rings to which their safety harness had been made fast, and the four barred ventilation openings had been covered from the outside by metal plates solidly bolted into position.
Two soldiers with some special armbands on their uniform looked in at the door and called out, ‘We are first-aid men. If any of you feel ill during the journey, just call for us and we’ll put you right.’ The door was slammed shut and barred from the outside just when it seemed that those near the entrance were in danger of being forced out by the press like corks from a bottle. In the stuffy darkness someone raised a laugh about the first-aid men. ‘How shall we attract their attention — ring ’em up on the phone?’ And, in fact, in the weeks ahead no one in my truck ever saw the experts with the armbands exercising their first-aid skill. It was just one of the many ironies of Russian organization.
I was rammed hard against one end of the truck, my parcel still under one arm. Both arms were pressed into my body. It was impossible to sit and when I wanted to lift a hand I had to have the co-operation of the man next to me, who would lean back against his neighbour on the other side to squeeze out the extra space I needed. It was this anonymous friend who advised me to open my parcel and eat some food in case it might later be stolen. I explored the contents by feel and smell — and it was a rich and rewarding experience. There was a loaf of special bread, oval in shape, about nine inches long and about five inches across at the middle. There were two excellent dried fish of a kind known in Russia as
It was not until the train moved off that the talk began to flow. Voices began to speculate on where we were going. Some expressed the fear that we might end up in Novaya Zemlya, that bleakest of islands in the Barents Sea, or in the Kamchatka salt mines of Eastern Siberia. Everyone agreed that our destination was Siberia.
One of the parting instructions as the door was slid home was that we were to make no noise. But as the train lumbered slowly into some kind of speed and the wheels began to rattle more loudly, we began to shout. Someone would bawl, ‘Anyone here from Lvov?’ A voice would answer from the other end of the truck, ‘I come from near there,’ but any attempt at sustained conversation died in the general hubbub. There were calls for men from this regiment and that regiment. Then the yelling quite suddenly subsided and men began hopefully to engage the attention of their immediate neighbours. Some of the excitement of the occasion was still with me but I could not join in the general free-for-all of question and answer. It always took me time to thaw out. Up against the cold wall of that truck I listened to the others but still hugged my thoughts to myself, reluctant as yet to open out, to seek a friend, but happy just to be one of the crowd, to know I was not alone any more.
Later I found myself inquiring of those near me if anyone knew Pinsk. From my left came a voice which eagerly replied, ‘Yes, I know Pinsk.’ We tried each other with the names of people we knew, of streets, of surrounding villages. But his Pinsk was not my Pinsk and we could find no common ground. The effort died away. I felt disappointed, irritated at his failure to know the people and things I had known. I think he made another
