Michael Zimmermann

How I Survived the Wars and Peace:
My Life in the Gulag

Chapter IV. The Twilight Zone

I am borrowing the term from a television series watched years ago. I remember Rod Serling, creator of the movies, introducing them as covering situations "... beyond human imagination ...".

So far in my life, I have never imagined that I would find myself inside Soviet prisons some of which made the infamous "black hole of Calcutta" look like a spa.

In my wildest imagination I could not foresee that a time would come when I would be felling trees of one foot or more diameter at the cut, and that the total of my work measured at the day’s end will determine if I eat or starve. You know my physique, it was not that of a lumberjack.

Would I believe if told that for the duration of one week or so, I would be eating boiled weeds gathered from a ditch and nothing else, because there was nothing else.

Could I foresee that I would live in a geographic zone where the average outdoor temperature was 60 degrees C (I repeat: sixty degrees Celsius) and I will be shaking as if I was inside a meat freezer, blood in my arteries frozen by attacks of tropical malaria, every other day.

Early morning, September 7, 1939. Throngs of people were pouring out from side streets, all marching in a single direction - east - in a pitch-dark city. It has been estimated later that about 200 thousand of Warsaw’s population, predominantly young men, left their homes that day. In those days, Poland did not have highways in the meaning of present day thruways, the one we were on was more like a rural, unpaved road. People were marching singly or in small groups, some in a more patriotic mood and in order to preserve the semblance of an orderly withdrawal, were forming military rows and singing martial songs. The wildest rumours were being passed forward seemingly from the city we just left. One said that British marines landed in the Polish port of Gdynia and were marching to engage the oncoming front of the German army.

Before the night came, with little rest, our group of six covered a distance of 60 kilometers (37 miles) and reached a small town. We slept on the floor of the railway station. Early next morning back to our trek. Food could still be bought in small stores on our way in spite of the multitude of marchers. We marched deep into the night. We tried to keep together in the dark but suddenly I noticed that Richard was not with us. We stopped assuming that he is somewhere behind and will reach us in few minutes. No Richard. I refused to continue our march as his family whom I knew well specifically asked me to keep an eye on him considering me the more responsible of the two. We reversed our steps marching in the opposite direction. Immediately, we were stopped by a military patrol asking suspiciously why are we going back. We were let go after an explanation. While looking around I was hollering Richard’s name. Suddenly, there was a response. What happened? While marching, apparently Richard fell asleep, fell into a ditch, lost his orientation and was groping around in the fields. The responsibility for Richard weighed heavily on me also in the future but I will write about it at the proper time. There was a village near by, we decided to have a night rest right there. We woke a peasant and asked him to open his barn. Seeing in the dark a group of men he complied out of fear and we spent a night on the hay.

I am not going to describe our march day by day, in my memory they blurred into one eerie adventure. However, a few episodes bizarre as they were cannot be erased from my memory. Incidentally, we were left only four. Joseph, exhausted with the constant fast march jumped on the rear of a passing peasant horse-drawn wagon planning to gain a few kilometers and then drop down and wait for the rest of the group. It was late in the night. We never met him in our continuous trek. His brother, Sigmund, was heart broken being the older one and feeling responsible. It turned out, that before leaving home, the brothers discussed the line of action should they get lost to each other. The meeting place was the address of their distant relative who lived in a small town in the area we were then in. Thus, Sigmund left us too on a trip of his own. Just as a footnote, weeks later, I met Joseph who never contacted his brother so far, then again on another occasion I met Sigmund who then only from me learned that Joseph was alive and somewhere around. I never met them again. Many years later, I learned about Sigmund from a man who knew him. My friend lived in a small town in the part of Poland which was then in the Soviet zone. in 1941, the German occupation forces entered the town. All Jews were enclosed in a small area. Sigmund who was a civil engineer was commanded to take a group of men and dig fortification trenches outside the town. He suspected the real purpose of their work but had to obey the order. Eventually, the entire Jewish population of the town was marched into the trenches and machine-gunned.

As I said, our group consisted now of Adam, Richard, Lutek and myself. Adam was a natural leader of the group from the start. He served in the Polish army and had the rank of corporal. Marching along the main highway became unproductive as it was impossible to buy any provisions. The area looked as if after a flight of locusts. Consequently, we used rural roads parallel to the main highway leading east. One night, after a long stretch of march, we came to a small town. Not a single soul was around, the entire population had left for some more secure place. Entrances to the houses were padlocked. We broke a padlock of the nearest house and entered a strange residence. For me it was a first experience. Never before had I broken into somebody’s house. The place was emptied of all belongings, just the heavy pieces of furniture were left. All we needed were the beds even though they were bare of mattresses. I noticed that although I was lying on the bed my legs were still moving like in a march and I could not stop them from jerking forward. In one of the closets I found a child’s sailor cap. I ripped off some part and shaped a beret for myself as I had no headgear among my meagre belongings

Another episode. We stopped for a short meal and selected a spot in the fields off the road. Suddenly a small unit of Polish soldiers approached the place and the officer asked us what we are doing here. Adam explained our march east as commanded when still in Warsaw and the officer said that we cannot stay here now and should go elsewhere. We gathered our belongings and moved towards the near-by forest. Within minutes, German airplanes appeared low above the field and started machine-gunning the area. I dropped flat, covered myself, including my head, with my trenchcoat and prayed that I be killed outright and not wounded. For the short moment when the planes passed and before they returned, we succeeded in reaching the safety of the forest. All four of us survived, we did not look to see what happened to the soldiers.

One late evening we were close to a small town and were passing their cemetery. Suddenly, we heard the planes coming and lay down under the wall surrounding the place. Within minutes bombs started falling. The town had no military significance, the German pilots apparently had just one purpose: to spread panic all over the country. The bombardment took very long, we were stunned by the noise of the bombs although not under the direct hit. Then the bombardment stopped and the airplanes disappeared. We got up and found that Richard was missing. As before, I reversed my steps calling his name. After a long time he appeared. No explanation. He just panicked and decided to go home to Warsaw. We wanted to continue our march east but it was impossible to use the main road through the town as the houses all around were burning furiously and we were moving in the dense smoke. We saw people desperately dragging out their belongings from the burning houses. We were looking for a bypass, choosing lanes in a strange place and feeling completely helpless. Suddenly, out of the smoke a figure appeared. A nun approached us and said: "Come, I will show you the way out of the town". A few minutes later we were back on the main road leaving the inferno behind.

Our aim was to reach the Polish-Soviet border and in case the Germans will come close we will cross the border. One piece of information of historical significance. Four days before the Germans invaded Poland, Hitler signed an agreement with Stalin on a mutual non-aggression pact. Thus, the Soviet Union became an ally of our enemy. The crowd of marchers of the gentile persuasion who had an inborn aversion to Russia for historical grievances were all moving to the Romanian border far south. However, when we were close to a large city on our itinerary east, from the oncoming people we learned that the Germans were already attacking the place from the north .We immediately changed our course and decided that now our plan was Romania as well. And to think that only a few weeks ago I was a five minutes walk from the Romanian border and safety while vacationing with Tusia. I would avoid the terrible experiences which fate had apparently been preparing for me.

One day, and it was the 17th of September, a historical date in Poland’s martyrology, our group of four reached the outskirts of a small town. We noticed an eerie absence of the German air force buzzing in the sky, a constant companion in our march. For a brief rest we sat down on the grass at the first house. A window opened and a man called to us : "Fellows, you don’t have to run any more. We have just now heard on the radio that the Red Army crossed the border of Poland and is occupying the eastern part of the country which is being joined to the existing Soviet Republics of Ukraine and Byeloruss." We were invited inside. The man was Jewish as, it turned out, was the majority of the inhabitants, and recognizing in us his co-religionists suggested that we stay over in his house this being the day before the Yom Kippur Holiday. In Jewish religion, a good deed at the time of High Holidays in considered a most important blessing, the so called "mitzvah." Within minutes, neighbours learned about the four Jewish wanderers and we were approached by several women with proposal of washing our dirty clothes.They wished to earn a "mitzvah" too. Incidentally, when they brought the clean clothes a few days after the Holidays they accepted payment for their services.

Let me explain the euphoria among the Jewish population of the town. They lived in mortal fear of finding themselves surrounded by the brutal German soldiers whose reputation was by then well known in Europe. On the other hand, at that time the Soviet Union was known as a country where all nationalities were being treated equally and with respect. Thus, the Red Army was expected as liberators from a mortal peril. For the information of the reader, the Polish flag consists of two wide horizontal stripes, one red the other white. Each house was supposed to have a flag to display on national holidays. The inventive inhabitants ripped off the white strip from the available flags and in a short time the entire town was decorated with red flags as a sign of welcome to the expected Soviet soldiers.

We four went to the town’s barber to shave off our ten-day growth and trim our hair so that we look presentable for the festivities. All of a sudden we heard salvos of machine guns. What happened? It turned out that a Polish iron-clad military train stopped at the railway station and, seeing the houses decorated with the hated red flags decided to teach the traitors a lesson. Within minutes the red flags disappeared. Somebody called the near-by town where the Soviet Army had already an outpost and fifteen minutes later the first Red Army tank arrived in our place. The train moved away and we avoided a massacre.

We rented a room from a woman with four small children and stayed in the town for a week or so. Then, the decision was made to move to a close-by large city of Rowno. We jumped a freight train and, some time later arrived at the place which was bursting with escapees who like us stopped in their flight due to the changed circumstances. We lingered there for some time but did not see any future. Then, Lutek came up with an idea. He had some close relatives in the city of Vilno (later called Vilnius) quite a distance from Rowno. But no problem. To explain the situation, every train now had an escort of Soviet soldiers. However, speaking the language, I lied to them that we are going to our destination to start working in our profession, and were allowed to occupy an available freight car.

Lutek’s relatives were very happy to see him and also accepted the rest of us as guests for a while until we find a room, not an easy task considering that Vilno was also full of refugees from the German occupied part of the country. After a while, we did find a suitable place and Adam, Richard and myself moved there. Then, I remembered that I have some relatives in the city of Vilno as well, actually they were first cousins of mother. I never met them and I don’t remember mother ever writing to them. Anyway, I found the address and rang the bell. I was admitted by two ladies and, when I told them who I am they remained completely indifferent and did not express any interest in welcoming me. Later they told me that they took me for an impostor, apparently a game practised by some arrivals in relation to gullible people in the city. But when I told them a few details known only to the true members of the Nadelman clan, the ladies not only melted but smothered me with attention and love. The ladies were spinsters and lived with two brothers unmarried as well. Later the two gentleman came home and displayed warmth and hospitality too. They suggested that I move in with them but I declined on account of my two friends and wishing to have freedom of movement. I was invited to have meals with them, and occasionally I brought the other two fellows as welcome guests.

I met a friend, an escapee like myself, who found a job in a local company manufacturing radio-receivers of very high repute in Poland. It turned out that the factory was going to be dismantled and transferred to a Russian city of Minsk, and the staff willing to do so would be transferred as well. My friend assured me that there would be no problem in me getting a job there too. I did not wish to move away from my family in Warsaw hoping for an early end of the war and I declined the offer. Fifty years later, here in Montreal, I met a man who went to Minsk as an employee of that factory. In 1941, Germany occupied a huge part of the Soviet Union including Minsk. The entire Jewish population of the city was exterminated the same as elsewhere but those Jews who worked for the said factory were protected from the Gestapo due to the importance of their work.

A few days later, it was announced that the city of Vilno would be ceded to Lithuania within two weeks. That country for years maintained that Vilno was taken from them by Poland illegally and now the Soviet Union was going to straighten the historical injustice.

For the reason that I mentioned above, I decided to stay on the territory of former Poland and left Vilno shortly. Lutek stayed behind with his relatives, Adam and Richard accompanied me. Later, I learned that Lutek returned soon to Warsaw to join his father, the only member of his family. Presumably, he perished like almost everybody of the huge Jewish community. As my next destination I chose the city of Lvov just because of Tusia. Adam and myself dropped Richard off on our way to the city where his aunt, a childless widow lived and she was only too happy to shelter her beloved nephew. Tusia whom I informed by letter about my planned arrival, as well as her family accepted us two with a warm hospitality offering one of their rooms as a temporary shelter. It turned out that the city was bursting with the escapees from the German-occupied area, in fact the peace-time number of inhabitants which was 360 thousand grew to one million. We were quite comfortable there but wished to go elsewhere as mealtimes became embarrassing. We could not abuse the offered hospitality. Very soon a solution came by itself. My sister Lola arrived in Lvov. This was her story. Her boy friend, a gentile officer of the Polish army, anticipating that Warsaw will be taken soon by the oncoming Germans took Lola to his mother who lived in a small town in the east. However, that lady recognized in Lola a Jewish girl and made her life miserable. Lola left the place and came to Lvov knowing where I was. In the new circumstances, we could not continue staying in Tusia’s house. Here we had luck. Tusia’s school-friend and her sister, whose father was abroad and mother dead, agreed to rent a room in their apartment. Lola, Adam and myself moved in, Lola had one bed, Adam with me in the other. This was war-time and nobody insisted on proper circumstances. Very soon, Adam found work as scenery maker in a newly opened theatre-revue organized by famous artists escaped from Warsaw. Lola also found a fitting occupation. In the main post-office she rented a niche where she opened a translation office. All formalities now were in the Russian language which Lola knew perfectly from the Moscow times. She did the translation work and there was always a lineup waiting for her services. With me there was a problem. There was no work available, and money became a problem. I stopped visiting Tusia to avoid being a guest at their meals, and many a times I was hungry being too proud to borrow from my sister. Occasionally, Adam took me along when his work in the theater was pressing and I made some money as an extra hand. The times were really bleak. Much later I learned that in the new circumstances, the black market was booming and people, those almost illiterate, were making fortunes. One day, in the local newspaper it was mentioned that the present director of the power station feeding the city has been removed from his post and a new director, by name Osadchy, came from the Soviet Union to take his place. On a hunch, I called the power station and asked to talk to Mr. Osadchy. Apparently, I was very eloquent because he asked me to come over right away. In his office he asked me about my professional experience. Willy-nilly I had to tell him how a Jewish engineer could not even dream of getting a job because of the general anti-Semitism. Mr. Osadchy was so touched by my spiel that he outright gave me the job in the power station. I assume that the deciding factor was my ability of talking with him in his language while he felt a stranger in a new place. The very next day, I was in my new office studying the drawings and charts, finally having a job in my true profession. The power station had its own cafeteria, I was not hungry any more. I proudly announced to Tusia that now I am an important man working for such a prominent employer. Life became easy and pleasant. Mr. Osadchy made me almost his assistant by calling me frequently as an interpreter when dealing with the station’s technical personnel.

Two rooms were separated from the office area and called a "special section." One was occupied by a political indoctrinator sent from Moscow, the other by the notorious "NKVD", the Soviet secret police. One day I was asked to go to the NKVD room. First the man asked me to write a list of all the people in Lvov I am in contact with. I assume that was done to soften me and to illustrate to me how vulnerable I and those close to me are. Then, he said: "Look, we know that there is a lot of hostility towards the new regime among the local population. Take the Chief Engineer of our power station. He practically runs the entire show. He is the one who decides that one of our four generators driving turbines has to be stopped and overhauled, a process that takes 4 months. How do we know that the overhaul is necessary at all, maybe this is his way of sabotaging our here work. I give just one example. You are an electrical engineer and we want you to inform us that all his directives are really required and we are not wasting time, man-hours and money. You will be scrutinizing every step programmed by the fellow. What do you say?" The entire proposition was so repulsive to me that I sat completely numbed. I knew that my straight refusal will lead not just to losing my job but to losing my freedom by being accused of some imaginary wrong-doing. I mobilized all my diplomacy and said: "Although I hold the title of an electrical engineer for about 7 years, this is my first job in my profession. On the other side, the Chief Engineer holds the job here for 17 years and knows every bolt and every gasket in the entire power station. How can I, a total ignoramus in the place be a judge that any procedure as dictated by him is really required or not. As to the turbine overhaul, it suffices to check the frequency of the procedure in years past and compare to the present time. Any discrepancy can be revealed at once." I don’t know if the man saw sense in what I am saying or he felt my determination in declining his offer which he tried to sweeten by promising what he was going to do for me if I complied. Anyway, he asked me to sign an obligation of not revealing the gist of our conversation and let me go. This was my first diplomatic encounter with the all-powerful organization that held 185 million population of the Soviet Union in a mortal fear.

Then events started taking place. First to go were families of the Polish Army officers (they themselves were already in the prisoner-of-war camps somewhere deep in the Soviet Union), who were visited during the night, given some short time to pack their belongings, taken to the railway station and rolled far to the taigas of Siberia. Women, children, old folks. Then came a registration of all local people, i.e. those who lived in Lvov before the war started. All of them were given passports (identity cards) making them citizens of the Soviet Union. Among the hundreds of thousands of refugees there were many who decided to go back to the German-occupied part of Poland where their families lived. I was not among them. The Germans sent a commission to Lvov who started registering those willing to return scrutinizing each individual for his previous anti-Nazi sentiments. The Russians called for another registration. Everybody had to declare his preference - to go back or to stay in the place. While registering one had to write the present address. That was exactly what they needed. Regardless of the declared wish - to go back or to stay - people started disappearing. In the morning, we heard the news that these and others were visited during the night, allowed to pack their meager belongings and taken away. Some people started spending nights in parks (it was the month of June) hoping to outsmart the NKVD. After a while, they returned home and that was the night they were taken. The city was teeming with informers. I lived under illusion that due to the importance of my new job, I and my sister will be immune.

One early morning, they came. Having anticipated that it will happen we were half-packed. All three of us, Lola, Adam and myself were taken to the railway station by a horse-drawn wagon, packed into box-cars and the door was closed. On two tiers were sitting about twenty people, some with small children, four small windows providing access of fresh air. Some time later we heard Adam’s surname being called from outside. When he answered he was told to take his belongings and leave the car. The administration of the theatre required his immunity as an important man for their production and vowed that Adam will accept the Soviet passport. That was the last that I saw Adam or knew what happened to him. Back home, our two landladies were petrified by the experience (one was madly and secretly in love with me) and one went to Tusia to tell her what happened. Tusia and her mother displaying their Soviet passports to the guards, walked along the stationary train calling my name. When I showed my head in the small window, both were in tears. You can easily understand their shock. Here is a man who only recently was freely walking the world, locked in a cattle-car and soon to be carted away, destination unknown, but sadly anticipated. I asked Tusia to go to the power station and to notify Mr. Osadchy about my predicament hoping that he might do for me what the theatre did for Adam. The son of a bitch declined to interfere. The scoundrel suggested to Tusia that she have a date with him. Tusia came again heart-broken and brought some money that I left in safekeeping with her but I asked her to stick to it and use it for future parcels after I notify her of my new address. That was the last time I saw Tusia. She promised to come next morning but at night the train started rolling on its long, long trip. A footnote: in 1941, the Germans entered the city of Lvov, the Ukrainian population greeting them as liberators from the hated Soviet regime. Immediately, the persecution of Jews started again, the Ukrainians helping with gusto. Tusia’s mother was beaten to death by Ukrainian passers-by when she went to buy some groceries. What happened to Tusia, her father and brother, I can only guess.

We were travelling for two weeks with many and lengthy stopovers. The guards allowed the door of the box-car to stay open knowing quite well that on the territory of the Soviet Union any escape would be futile. We would be recognized by the local citizenry by our clothes, denounced and caught in no time.

Then, late in the day, after having rolled through a dense forest for hours, the train stopped at a tiny settlement and we were told to take our belongings and come out. I and a man I befriended during the trip, went out as scouts to inspect the place. The settlement consisted of three or four big barracks each containing 20 or so beds and nothing else. They were empty waiting for us. We found a local man and asked him a few questions. He told us the cheerful news that here we are going to live, work in the forest as lumberjacks. The living conditions are miserable, during the day mosquitoes eat you alive. We returned to our car, reported what we saw and heard, and decided to fight the system. We refused to alight from the train (Oh, God! how infinitely stupid we were!). The guards did not insist, people from other cars got out and the train rolled on. After a short time the train stopped again. Another settlement, a carbon copy of the other one. This time, the guards did not smile. Oh, yes, in a jiffy we were out with our belongings and distributed in the barracks mostly the way we were travelling. Our compartment in the barrack sheltered 19 grown-ups and several children. The beds were pushed in such a way that each family had a number of beds to accommodate all its members, densely, side by side, with a space of about one foot and another group of beds. Lola and myself got two beds side by side. The only lighting consisted of a small petroleum lamp standing on a rough table near the huge oven. Everybody was dead tired after the long trip and deeply depressed with the circumstances we never anticipated. We called it a night. Something eerie happened. We lit the lamp. The entire barrack was crawling with bedbugs which got hungry waiting for our arrival. Any defense was out of question. They were highly experienced and had their own strategy, like parachuting from the ceiling and landing directly on the intended victim. All over the Soviet Union, people repeat constantly one proverb: "You will get used to it. If you don’t, you will perish." We got used to it.

It turned out that we were in the Maryiska Republic, north-east of Moscow, with its capital called Yoshkar-Ola. Inhabitants of the Republic are called Maryiets, of Mongolian descent, in appearance similar to Tartars. In fact, the Maryiska and the Tartar Republics are geographically side-by-side. The Maryiets with whom we have later established contact turned out to be very primitive people, living in poverty and filth, the entire families afflicted by a highly contagious eye-disease (trachoma), middle-aged folks already totally blind.

The closest station on the regular rail-line was called Suslonger, from there a branch line ran solely for transportation of timber. There were three settlements on the branch line named for their respective distance from the Suslonger station: 10th kilometer (where we had refused to alight), 17th kilometer, where we were now, and 19th kilometer a little bit further. Ours consisted of three huge wooden barracks each sheltering about fifty people, at a distance from one another, a separate shack containing a kitchen range, a big out-house, a better kept house for the administration offices and dormitories, and a store where bread was being supplied daily. No electricity. The settlement sitting in the middle of a dense taiga.

We were given one day to rest and to meet the civilian and NKVD staff which will direct our work and our life. There was the manager, a Russian, who looked quite decent, two foremen whose business was to issue tools in the morning, distribute work for the day and to measure the amount of work done by each team at the end of the day. One commander and two militia men represented the law at all three settlements. The commander was a human looking fellow, a Russian, the two militia hounds fierce Mongolian characters.

I was made the leader of a team (the blessing, or curse of speaking the language) and the assignment consisted of stacking up long stems of felled trees with their branches hacked off (the future telegraph poles) at the side of the rail track. The stacks had a special structure so that the circulating air will speed up the process of drying. The timber was piled up to about six foot height, and required a special technique of rolling up each pole. It was a hard work. From the entire population of the settlement, mostly a little educated and rough crowd, I picked out those more polished guys and we started our team work. Women were not forced to work. Nobody of the administration informed us about such trifles as food, we were left to our own resources although it was mentioned that a cafeteria will be arranged in the 19th kilometer in some undetermined future. Before being deported from Lvov, each family brought some products along so for a while we could manage. However, the hut with the range provided room for only several women and fierce fights took place about the access to the place. Lola was not used to the rough behaviour of the harpies, and mostly never had a chance to enter the place.

At work, we were never able to fulfill the required norm. We were not used to hard work, we were not supervised during the day by any foreman, it was the month of July, we were surrounded by a gorgeous forest, so for the lunch break each of us found a comfortable place and we slept for two or three hours. One day, I was called to the militia commander who had on his desk the Soviet penal code from which he read to me what penalty is being provided for those who sabotage the working order of the mighty communist society, and so on and so on. I as the team leader was responsible for the pitiable results in the assigned work and what do I have to say in my defense. Yes, I took the reprimand quite seriously, I knew that people disappeared for lesser fault. Right there I asked for a different assignment, where I am responsible for myself alone. I paired with a fellow whom I met in the place, an intellectual, by name Richard who was only too happy to join me in the so called "link" (translation of the Russian word).

One Sunday (a day off) the entire population of the settlement was gathered in one place and were addressed by a special visitor from Moscow. This is what he told us: " People, I want you to realize one thing. You are here, in this place, for ever. You will live here, and you will die here. Don’t cherish any illusion that it is only temporary and don’t expect any miracle. Just settle down and arrange your life accordingly. If you work hard and behave we will try to better the living conditions and make your life here more pleasant." He was talking Russian, of course, and I translated adding some comments at the end of a phrase, like "drop dead" in Polish. The speaker had an assistant who brought an accordion and started playing typical Russian tunes. They meant to give the gathering a semblance of a picnic. Nobody took the speech too seriously. Maybe they were somewhat naive, the history of Russia knows many instances when thousands and thousands of people were stuck somewhere in the vast territory of the country, and forgotten, they and their future generations in a permanent exile.

Out of necessity, we wandered around in the surrounding forest in search of the native Maryiets. A barter commerce developed. We were exchanging pieces of our clothing for an egg or two, some milk, potatoes, etc. Also the promised cafeteria of sorts opened in the 19th kilometer where soup was served once a day at a certain time. One of the inhabitants of the settlement, a woman by name Wygnanski (yes, it turned out later she was Adek Wygnanski’s of Montreal sister) treated Richard and myself as exceptional cases, and although we usually arrived when the place was closed some soup was left waiting for us. Lola also walked the distance to get the hot soup and meet some new people. The forest turned out to be the source of nourishment as well. Mushrooms of the kind and size not found in the most posh restaurants in the world, and in unbelievable abundance. You did not look for them, just bent down and in a jiffy your basket was full. Moreover, various wild berries just waiting to be picked. Also parcels started to arrive from relatives and friends in Lvov or other cities. I also received a parcel or two from Tusia. We were corresponding but always kept in mind that the letters are being censored, and developed a certain code understandable only to us. In the settlement we were not limited in our movement as long as it was within a few miles around. At night, say at nine or so, when everybody was supposed to be in the barrack, the militia man came and counted those present, mostly already in their beds.

A man in our barrack, by name Mr. Finder, became quite friendly with me. He was from the city of Cracow where he was owner of big bakery. As he confided in me, his wife was a Romanian princess, though in the barrack she behaved as if she was the Empress herself. They had a boy of six or so, and the latter’s governess who was deported together with her employers. Mr. Finder liked to wander around and in about ten miles away he found a place where a Maryiets had bee hives and was willing to sell honey. Finder suggested that after the night countdown, he and I walk to the bee-keeper with empty containers and buy a lot of honey to be sell among our neighbours. He financed the enterprise as I was a pauper. The business was successful and we did it again, nobody any wiser where the honey came from. The bee-keeper lived in a kind of "kolkhoz" which means a collective farm there being no private property in the Soviet Union.

In this part of the world where we now lived fall comes early. Days became short, cold and rainy. Neither Lola nor myself were prepared to spend winter in the circumstances, we did not have any warm clothes to speak about. We heard rumours that a son of a family living in the 19th kilometer settlement somehow escaped and reached the city of Lvov. He was about twenty, his name was Fulek Birnbaum. I suggested to Richard, with whom I was working daily in the forest, that we start planning our move too. Richard was with his wife Hilda, a very bright girl, they were newly married and very much in love. We secretly discussed our intention with Lola and Hilda, and they went along leaving all the planning to us.

A short time after we had arrived at the settlement, an accident happened to a small boy whose leg was badly crushed. The hospital in our capital of Yoshkar-Ola was not prepared to take the case; the boy and his mother were taken to the nearest big city of Kazan, capital of the neighbouring Tartar Republic. I forgot to mention that the only medical help available to us in the settlement was a periodic visit of a nurse, a native girl, who carried in her bag a few primitive medicaments, and in her head a very dim idea what medicine is about. Two months later the woman, who was Jewish came home with her son. From her we learned that while there she found shelter and moral support from the Jewish community in Kazan who never before heard about the exiles living in the taigas. She also told us that there is a kind of a synagogue arranged in a private apartment building where Jews congregate for holidays. This information started an idea in my head. If my co-religionists are so well-wishing why not make our first leg of the intended trip to be the city of Kazan. It is an important river port, the river being the Volga, and many opportunities are open from there.

While in the kolkhoz where the bee-keeper lived, I met another fellow, a Maryiets as well who was in charge of the transportation for the collective farm. I visited him and casually asked if he knows how to reach the city of Kazan. Oh, yes, in fact he sometimes takes some wares to the place or brings some supply, it being closer than another source. I asked him if he was willing to take two fellows to Kazan for a fat amount of money. He named the price to be 100 rubles, a fortune to him but an amount we could manage. The distance to be covered is about 100 kilometers, mostly through a dense forest and it will take the entire night. He will fake a purpose of his trip with his kolkhoz, which after all was not our business. The time of the departure to be set by me.

We in the settlement were allowed to go to a dentist, the nearest one in the city of Yoshkar-Ola. A written pass was given by our militia only in cases where another member of the family stayed behind as a guarantee of the person’s return. At a planned date, Lola and Hilda, without any luggage on them left seemingly to Yoshkar-Ola. The way to go was to reach the rail station of Suslonger (the bread bringing cart took people for a fee) and from there by train to the capital of the republic. However, instead to Yoshkar-Ola they bought tickets for the train going in the opposite direction, to the city of Kazan. Their destination was the synagogue whose address we got from the woman who was there. The day they departed, Richard and myself went to our work in the woods. Our total belongings were secretly packed and concealed, two fellows in our barrack knowing of our plan. We knew that there are informers among us and kept everything hush-hush. The two fellows were instructed to secretly take our belongings out of the barrack and to deposit them in bushes in a pointed-out place. At the end of our work, and it was already dark, we never returned to the barrack. Our parcels, containing all our property including Lola’s and Hilda’s clothing, were deposited where expected, and we were on our march of ten miles through to forest, burdened with heavy packs. I don’t want to be dramatic but, while still in the barracks, during the night we could hear wolves howling in the woods. In front of us was a long march trough dense woods. Naively, I held in my hand a flashlight with a fresh battery which was sent to me in the parcel. If attacked, I intended to frighten the wolves with the light.. No, there were no attackers, and after an arduous march we reached the hut of our man. When he saw us, he said: "No, not to-night, come to-morrow." Richard and myself felt like stricken by a lightning. We have passed the point of no return. Presumably, back in the barrack, the militia man who came to count the bodies, knew already of our escape and was on the phone spreading the news. I raised the promised payment to 110 rubles and out of my knapsack pulled out one of my shirts. The latter did the trick, most probably the man never in his life saw a European shirt, and within 15 minutes the horse and the wagon were standing in front of the hut.

We travelled all night, mostly through forest, without seeing a soul. At day-break, our guide stopped at a hut where his friend lived explaining that he does it each time he travels this way. He introduced us as two Estonian technicians on our way to Kazan where we are working, and after a crude breakfast we continued our trip. We reached the outskirts of the city early morning. So as not to attract attention, Richard and I were walking on the sidewalk and the wagon was following along. When planning our escape, I made sure that my appearance blends with that of the average Russian passer-by. Thus, one of our neighbours, a tailor, remodelled a winter coat given to me by my relatives in Vilno, to look like a car-coat. On my head I had a fake fur-hat bought in the store in our settlement. Not Richard. He wore a tweed long coat elegant enough to wear in London or Paris. Back to Kazan. This is a big city, and our guide had no idea where the street we knew by name is. Then, I noticed among the passers-by an elderly man who looked Jewish to me. I approached him and, using the few Yiddish words I knew asked him if he could direct me to the prayer house. He gave me very detailed information, and an hour later we arrived at the address we knew just by hear-say. I entered the building and the apartment and, Glory of Glories!, our girls were there. We took our belongings, and said good bye to our Maryiets. We considered it a good omen that the fact of our meeting based on such a flimsy information came through without a hitch. It turned out that the girls were not idle. They met a Jewish couple living a floor above, highly civilized and wealthy folks, who invited Lola and Hilda to spend the night on sofas in their place and asked them to bring the men as well after they arrived. We were all invited for dinner that night. We put on the best fineries we had in order to look civilized after the wilderness of the taiga where we had lived for the past few months. We met our hosts, a charming couple, and were told they expect another couple, dear friends of theirs, to join them for dinner. I almost jumped out of my skin when the newcomers entered the room. The man was in a uniform of the NKVD, a Jewish fellow. We had a very frank conversation, the hosts commiserating with the people with university degree (Richard was Ph.D in Economics) having to live and work in such degrading conditions as we were in the forests. For the night, the girls slept in their apartment, Richard and myself found accommodation with the synagogue caretaker. We spent two or three days in Kazan enjoying the atmosphere of civilized life we were deprived of so long. Our hosts asked us what are our plans were next. We intended to go by train to a city called Berdychow which was very close to the former Polish-Russian border. Travelling within the borders of the Soviet Union we will not attract any suspicion that might arise if we were going where we came from. While in Berdychow, we will find our way back to Lvov, we thought. Among our four escapees it was agreed that in case we are stopped by militia and asked what we are doing we will give them the following version. We just came by train from Lvov looking for relatives living in the city of Kazan. We did not find them, and we are going back. Any trace of our staying in Maryiska Republic should be destroyed, the NKVD should never associate us with that place.

Buying railway tickets was not a simple procedure, and our hosts helped us here again. A young man, somehow associated with the synagogue, went to the station and brought back four tickets for the train leaving Kazan that night. We said good-bye to our hosts blessing them for their hospitality and help, and accompanied by the young man, who was supposed to see us off, marched with our belonging to the railway station. It was a warm October day and, not wishing to attract attention in the waiting room we stood in a group outdoors in a dark place. The young man excused himself for a minute and disappeared. A few minutes later, we were surrounded by several militia men and the officer asked us to follow them inside the building. I managed to whisper to others in our group of our prepared version. When inside the NKVD office I started telling our spiel. At the same time I motioned to the girls to start crying hoping that the officer is soft-hearted and will let us go. Outdoors, we heard our train arriving and I asked the officer to speed up the interrogation or we will miss the train. So far everything went polite and civilized. He asked our permission to search our pockets, and out of Richard’s elegant overcoat inside pocket they pulled out a recently written letter from Lvov in its envelope addressed to Suslonger, 17th kilometer, Maryiska Republic. They knew now who we were. A couple of telephone calls made in our presence confirmed that we are the recently escaped inmates of the forest settlement. Oh, yes the NKVD man was still polite but now we were in the clutches of the most cruel government organization in the world.

There was no doubt in our minds that we were denounced. The group of militiamen with their officer did not just happen to be there, they surrounded us like a baited bear. Who did the dirty job? Obviously, the young man who fetched the railway tickets and came along to see us off. I spent a total of seven years of my life in the Soviet Union, I had a chance to find out that practically everyone is playing an informer, voluntarily to demonstrate his or her loyalty to the system, or being blackmailed by the dreaded secret police. I, myself had a brush with their cursed method of manipulating the population, and I will describe it when we come to the time.

For the night, we were taken to the local jail, a huge cell with a continuous sleeping shelf good to accommodate 50 people or so, but empty at this time, apparently a temporary detention place, clean but scary. Being locked in a prison cell was the first experience for each of us four. We were crushed by the misadventure, and were trying to console one another: at the worst they will take us back to the settlement and we will continue the miserable life as if nothing happened. What a bunch of idiots!

In my entire narrative, I am trying to present just facts, events, circumstances, etc. avoiding any philosophizing or dwelling on feelings, reactions, moods, and so on. I am not a novelist having no abilities in this field, besides I am writing in a language that became my colloquial tongue when I was already in my forties. Here, I want to point out the feeling of being led into an enclosed area and the heavy door locked from outside. Apparently, the human being is a free animal with inborn instinct of being able to move from place to place. The same door, locked from inside gives you a feeling of security, protects you from the hostile world outdoors whilst at any time you are in position to change the situation if you wish so. if the door is locked from outside after you were led in, you find yourself in a hostile environment while the security is outdoors, inaccessible to you. I realize that nobody can understand what I am trying to express here unless he found himself in a similar situation.

Next day, we were taken to an office where another NKVD man told us that we are being sent back to Maryiska Republic, to the city of Yoshkar-Ola to whose jurisdiction we belong. The two militiamen, our escort, went through a pantomime of charging their guns with live ammunition to show us that they meant business in case we cherish an idea of trying to escape again. We were packed into a rail compartment, with the guards close by and next day we were already in the building of the Maryiska NKVD. We were led into an empty room, warned not to communicate with one another, and were each assigned to another man to be interrogated. Of course, each of us repeated the version we scrupulously prepared in case we were in a position we now found ourselves in. Not a word about the synagogue or the nice people upstairs, not a word how Richard and I reached Kazan. We used the train same as the girls, the tickets bought for us by an occasional passenger in the waiting room, for a small remuneration. We did not care if it sounded unbelievable, the main thing was that we all repeated it as a truth. All documents, personal papers (I had a copy of my engineer’s diploma which I took with me when leaving Warsaw), photographs, etc. were taken from us. Then, we were taken to the local jail and in the office were separated from the girls. We were stripped naked, examined including our arse holes in case we were hiding there a cannon or such, our belts and shoe laces were removed so that we could not hang ourselves if we so wished, and we were locked in an an empty cell. Empty literally, just the ceiling, floor, four walls and a tiny grated window close to the ceiling. Outdoor, the window had a metal enclosure which prevented looking down, only a tiny piece of sky was visible. A bare electric bulb, not accessible from inside provided the illumination. Size of the cell is still vivid in my memory and I checked it presently with a measuring tape. It was four feet in width, seven feet in length, enough to evoke claustrophobia in you.

After an hour or so, I was taken out of the cell, led to a room where a barber, without any word of comment cut my hair army style. This was the first act of violation against my body and should incite in me feelings of anger. Surprisingly, even to myself, I noticed a certain euphoria. I knew why. In the last few years, I was shedding my hair badly and lived in fear that I will become bald in no time. My barber said that I could slow down the process by cutting my hair very short and, thus, strengthening the hair roots. Such a radical (no pun intended) method was out of question in my social life and I resigned myself to the inevitable. And, here life did to me what I had no heart to do myself. Next, they took me outdoors to a small courtyard, sat me on a chair and took two pictures of me, one en face and one in profile while I was holding a card under my face. In big digits the card showed a number, a multidigit number. I should feel elated because this was my personal number, no one else in the entire Soviet Union (population of 185 million at that time) had the same number. I was officially introduced into a multimillion society of prisoners spread over the enormous territory of the country, both in Europe and Asia, the realms of the GULAG , an acronym which, in Russian stands for "Main Administration of Camps". That number of mine entitled me to a personal file which even now rests somewhere in the archives deep in the cellars of the former NKVD building in Lubianka, Moscow. I would be very amused to be able to see myself, en face and in profile, with the number underneath. A historical moment in my life. Richard underwent a similar handling.

Next, our cell got its furniture. Two cots, each the size of an average coffin, with a thin mattress, rudimentary pillow and army-style blanket, a small table the size of a cafeteria tray, and "parasha." You would not find the word "parasha" in any ordinary Russian dictionary, the term is in the prison jargon and indicates a wooden pail with a lid. The prisoner stays in the cell for 24 hours, and the GULAG in their magnanimity allows such a human activity like urinating and occasional relieving oneself. The two cots were arranged along the two longer walls leaving barely a few inches space for legs, the table in one corner near the door, parasha in the other. The door had a flap which could be opened from outside to serve food or harsh rebuke when we deserved it, and a peep-hole which allowed the guard to watch us at any time.

Our life activity in the prison was strictly regulated, any breach severely punished. We were wakened early in the morning, I assume 6 o’clock (obviously, we had no watches). A few minutes later, the door opened and we were to follow the guard to the outhouse, one of us carrying the parasha in which function we alternated. We were given a couple of minutes to attend to our body functions, then taken indoors to the washroom, a minute or so to splash our faces and hands with cold water and back to our cell . Then breakfast, meager but adequate. Wooden bowls and spoons. After the breakfast there was the change of the shift. The door opened and the next shift guard stood in the door asking if everything was all-right. We were expected to get up and to answer in unison that everything is O.K. unless there was some complaint. We could even ask to see the prison commandant, surprisingly a decent looking fellow. At noon, we were taken outdoors for a fifteen minute walk in the courtyard, along an oval path, indian -file, hands clasped in the rear, no talking. In the evening, a meal similar to the one at breakfast time, at about 9 o’clock a command to go to bed. Sleeping was regulated too. Heads towards the door, flat on our backs, hands exposed on the blanket. The electric light remained on all the night. We did not undress for the night, just shed off our shoes (no laces, remember?). Once a week, we were taken to a steam-bath, just two of us and given adequate time. Incidentally, since ages, the steam-bath is a ritual among the Russians respected and taken seriously. Periodically, we were given numbered meshed bags where we deposited articles of underwear to be returned washed later on. If we had some money, when arrested, we could buy once a week additional food, mostly just extra bread, occasional lump sugar.

During the day, we were not allowed to lie down, all the time in a sitting position, each on his cot. Talking only in whispers, very low whispers. Altogether, I assume we spent 12 hours a day in the described position. We talked, and I was happy to have Richard for a conversationalist. He told me the entire history of his life, with details. Richard was blessed with an exceptionally long penis (we were in the steam bath together, remember?), and described how his girls were reluctant to be shed for another one. Then, we told each other the movies we have seen, books we have read, and so on, and so on and still it was impossible to kill the available time. One day, I asked the guard to bring along the supervisor. I told him : "Look, we are here in the prison because apparently we deserve it. However, the prison is in the Soviet Union, a highly civilized country, and here you have two educated fellows, both with university degrees, sitting idly and slowly becoming imbecile. How about supplying us with books, never mind on what subject, as long as we get a printed word?" I saw that my spiel worked. He said that he will arrange borrowing books from the city library, and asked what was our preference. I always liked books about the wide world, and now, being caged in a limited enclosure my soul was just begging for some opium of imaginary scenery of the wide world. Naturally, the guard who was sent to the library could not understand my cravings but I got a book on explorations of some Soviet scientists in the Siberian wilderness.

About Lola and Hilda we did not know anything but we knew that they are in the same row of cells, twelve of them. Our cell was number 2. When taken to the barber to be shorn we were taken along all the cells, twelve in number to the room where the barber officiated. So the girls were somewhere in a cell whose number was higher than ours. How did we know? Every morning, like ourselves the girls were led to the outhouse and they had to pass our cell. They were not allowed to talk but Hilda kept clearing her throat while walking until she heard the responding throat cleared by Richard. They were so intimate that they were sure they found the right "ahem." Every morning Hilda and Richard were exchanging this signal while the escorting guide was none the wiser.

As to our guards, there were four of them. Some were indifferent, some brutes. We did not know their names, naturally, so we referred to them by nicknames none of them complimentary.

We entered the prison on November 1, 1940. Week after week, the same routine, nothing unusual happened. One late night, I think it was the middle of December, we were awakened. Two militiamen told me to go with them, no outdoor clothing required. We used long underground passages, then long corridors not seeing a soul. This isolation is apparently the policy of the NKVD, during the entire stay in the prison I did not see a soul except our guards. Thus, before opening a door leading to a corridor the leading man made sure that nobody is using it at the time. We climbed stairs and I knew that I am in a building housing the NKVD offices. I was led into a room, the militiamen remaining in the passage. A man in NKVD uniform was sitting behind a desk. He greeted me politely and indicated a chair at the opposite wall across the room. Having my dossier he knew that the prisoner is an educated man and he wished to act sophisticated too. He offered me a cigarette and, when I declined as a non-smoker he called an orderly and asked for a glass of tea for me. He asked if they treated me decently in the prison and such small talk. I liked the guy. Then he asked for a few minutes so that he can finish what he was writing and offered me a newspaper from his desk to get some news of what is going on in the world from which I have been isolated for quite a time. He pointed out an article about the visit of Mr. Molotov, the Soviet minister of foreign affairs to Berlin to confer with his German opposite number, Herr Ribbentrop. After a while, he asked for my full attention because he is going to read to me my confession and he would like it to be truthful in every detail. I turned into a statue of salt. The confession described our every step as it really happened. The fictional trip of the girls to the dentist in Yoshkar-Ola, our trip with the Maryiets guide through the forests to Kazan, the place where we met in that city, our hosts upstairs, and so on. After he finished he asked me politely if I was ready to sign the document. Seeing that he was eager to maintain the friendly atmosphere, I asked: "Look, I know that your organization is highly efficient and all-knowing, but how did you establish all these details without using maybe torture on one of us four?" He was quite amused. It turned out that, after he returned to his community, our Maryiets guide got drunk, and asked about the shirt he was wearing babbled out the entire adventure. In the Soviet Union, if you were in a company of just a single person, one of the two of you was an informer. Consequently, the man was denounced, interrogated by NKVD, confessed and was sentenced to five years in a labour camp. I felt sorry for the guy. If not for our ill-starred escape he might evade seeing the insides of a GULAG camp, I repeat, he "might" as chances were 1:9 against him. I will return to this odds later on. I did not ask about the nice couple who took care of us in Kazan hoping that they might escape free having connections inside the NKVD.

My NKVD inquisitor, who I assume was a prosecutor, gave me my "confession" to read prior to signing it. I noticed a few minor inaccuracies and we agreed that they should be corrected. It was suggested that we postpone our meeting until the next time, after the document has been straightened, and I was led by the same escort back to the cell. Richard was sick with anxiety by my lengthy absence assuming even that I was taken away to be executed. I related to him how the entire truth is now known to the NKVD and what consequences can we expect now. A couple of days later, Richard was taken to see the same man and, seeing no point in procrastinating, signed the prepared "confession." During my second session with the NKVD prosecutor, after the document had been duly signed, I asked what can I expect now. He answered very sincerely: "You are a university-educated man, it was wrong to send you to the forest to work as a lumber jack. During the court procedure you will have a chance to explain to the judge that you can render a much more productive service to the community working as an engineer. Who knows, you might find work right here in Kazan. The same goes to the other members of your group." We said a friendly good-bye and I never saw the man again. If I did, I would spit in his face.

Back in our cell, I started preparing the speech that would convince the judge how much more use the Soviet Union will have by engaging my engineering services for the good of our glorious society. I have already proved my usefulness while working in the power station in the city of Lvov, just asked Mr. Osadchy, etc. etc. Having no paper or pencil I learned my prospective speech by heart, using Richard as arbiter. I was proud of myself .

Some time later I was taken out of the cell and led to the general purpose room where occasionally the barber did his job. A strange man sat there with documents on the table in front of him. From the paper on top, he read that I have been sentenced to three years of labour camp according to the paragraph of the Soviet penal code called SOE, an acronym which in Russian language means "an element dangerous to the society". All I have to do is to sign underneath, and he pushed the paper in front of me. I sat as if I was hit with a sledge-hammer. After a while, I came to my senses and tried to refer to my recent conversation with the NKVD prosecutor, there is some misunderstanding, I was assured that there will be a court hearing with a judge and I will have a chance to defend my case, and so on. I refused to sign the document. The man sat quietly during my harangue, then said: "This is only formality, if you don’t sign, we will sign for you" and dismissed me. I returned to Richard shaking from frustration and told him what to expect. After a while, Richard was taken away. He did not see a point in fighting the powerful NKVD and signed the verdict. An hour or two later, I was taken again to the man. He showed me that all the other verdicts were already signed by the respective prisoners, I was the only one who refused. It is not going to change anything, I will be sent to the labour camp as everybody else except a letter will follow which will notify the head of the camp that I am a rebel and I will get there a suitable treatment. He gave me the last chance to avoid the extra punishment by signing the verdict. Naturally, he did not give a hoot what will happen to me in the camp, all he wanted to show to his boss is that he fulfilled his assignment without a hitch. By then I was a broken man, and I put my signature on the cursed document. There was no doubt in my mind that the NKVD prosecutor, while describing to me the lawful procedure of a court case and a possible happy life in the freedom, knew perfectly well that the sentences were given "sight unseen."

In the near future that awaited me, I had a chance to get acquainted with the Soviet penal code, became friendly with hundreds of GULAG inmates and I wish to point out here briefly the niceties of the said document. I should stress that in the Soviet Union nobody is being sentenced to a "time" in prison. Prison is only for the duration of an interrogation if such is necessary, or for a short time until being sent to one of the GULAG camps. The camps have a name: "Corrective Labour Camp" and there are thousands of them all over the territory of the European and Asian parts of the Soviet Union, a veritable "GULAG Archipelago" as Solzhenitsyn called them. A major part of the Soviet economy is based on the pay-free strenuous labour of the inmates; major projects like the canal connecting the White sea with Baltic where thousands and thousands perished in adverse climatic condition and due to hard work, to name just one.

I learned all I know about the Soviet "Corrective Labour Camps" long before I even heard such names as Solzhenitsyn, Salisbury Harrison, Ginsburg, and others who described the unbelievable working and living conditions in those bottom holes of hell. I was in several of them and I survived. When I heard first about duration of the incarceration enforced on me, I was crushed. Where I came from, penal systems and prisons existed too. Depending on the crime committed, the terms of imprisoning varied from a month to maybe one year. Three years was given to a hardened criminal who had a list of crimes long as his arm. At the time I heard the sentence, I was 33, the prime of my life. What a stupid idiot, I was thinking of the immediate future as deprivation of my freedom, little did I know what a feat it is to survive just ONE DAY in conditions to be subjected to in a labour camp. Twenty years later, when I read the first book by Solzhenitsyn "One day in life of Ivan Denisovich" I laughed. His "one day" was a picnic compared to any of my "days". But, let us not jump ahead, there will be a "first person" description of the time never to be forgotten. The most repeated proverb in the Soviet Union goes like this (in the original language it rhymes, in English translation this feature is lost): "Who was not, will be. Who was, will never forget". The implication is that every Soviet citizen eventually will become an inmate of the labour camp, a truly "memorable" experience: about my sentence of 3 years meted out without any semblance of a court procedure. To cover the brutality of their system, the Soviet jurisdiction invented a name for the procedure: "Special Council" in the city of Moscow. Using this term they can convict anybody sight unseen to any punishment including execution by shooting. The document announcing my sentence also named the "Special Council" as the body who made the decision. Special Council, my foot! Presumably, a low rank clerk has a stamp bearing just a figure indicating the length of the sentence. Period!

It turned out that the sentence to 3 years is the shortest available. The next figure is 5 years and the appropriate paragraph of the penal code is called SVE meaning "element destructive to the society." Next come 8 years, 15 years and 25 years all covered by the well-known paragraph 57 with letters a, b and c, and meted out for "anti-Soviet propaganda", "counter-revolution activity" and other deviltries. I met people with sentence of 25 years, let me introduce them briefly. Arkadyi, a Russian, a poet, when I met him he was already 12 years in various labour camps, developed a certain muscled physique which guaranteed him better food, resigned himself to the lifetime incarceration. First of all, there is no such thing as a shortened sentence due to good behaviour. Thus, fifteen years is fifteen years. Now hear this! Suppose somebody did endure the fifteen years, was he released back to the society as a free man? No, sirree! They invite him to the camp office and read a new document: "Five (or seven, or ten) years ago, while sitting at the bonfire during the work break, you said ...." and they tell him something imaginary but sufficient to qualify as "anti-Soviet propaganda." Another 15 years. Please, believe me, I spoke to the people. Mr. Shtipelman, a Russian Jew, a man in his early fifties, an electrical engineer. He was a Chief Engineer in an important power station in Ukraine. In a substation, part of the same complex, a transformer exploded, something that might happen anywhere for reason simply technical. Mr. Shtipelman, as responsible for the equipment was accused of "sabotage" and given 25 years of labour camp. I will never forget the following occurrence. We were marching home from the long day in the forest, dead tired and apathetic, and Mr. Shtipelman burst into tears sobbing uncontrollably. In our group we had a fellow, a really rough individual, and even he reacted. He said: "Don’t cry, father, don’t cry". With the word "father" he wanted to express his sympathy and his understanding of the old man’s tragedy.

Now, that we knew what inevitable future awaits us, Richard and myself lived like in suspended animation. He was heart-broken, thinking of Hilda in the gruesome conditions of the labour camps, I felt responsible for what I drew Lola into. Granted, we were four mature people, they knew what a risky adventure we are getting into by escaping from the forest settlement, a lifestyle that was supposed to be permanent for us all. But I was the one who initiated the idea and worked out the details of our plan.

One day, the cell door opened and I was called out by name and ordered to take all my belongings with me. I understood that the moment arrived, they would take me for a trip to the unknown future. Richard and I had an emotional good-bye and I braced myself to the inevitable. To my great surprise, my guard opened the door of another cell we were passing by, let me in and banged the door behind me. Two curious faces were looking at me. I almost stumbled with surprise. One of the young men in the cell was Fulek Birnbaum from the 19th kilometer, of whom rumour said that he successfully escaped and was living happily in the city of Lvov from where we were taken away. It turned out, that Fulek was caught and arrested in the city of Kazan the same as we were and lingered in the prison for over six months. The other fellow was unknown to me, his name was Miloch, he and his younger brother tried to escape from another forest settlement, were caught, his brother is somewhere in another cell. Both of my fellow-inmates received their three year sentences at the same time that I did, did not look crushed by the experience and accepted my presence with great pleasure. We were supposed to stay in a space that was too small for Richard and myself, the cells being identical. Out of respect for my age (both of them were twenty or so), they ceded one cot to me while both were sitting on the opposite one during the day. For the night, both cots were pushed together forming one wide bed (not really, just a form of speaking) with me in the middle, a fellow on either side. The order of sleeping as usual. Flat on our backs, arms on the blanket, heads toward the door. Presumably, the prison got more newcomers than they could accommodate, hence the new arrangement. My new co-inmates were a different caliber of company from my previous ones. Both were from small towns, with a typical inborn intelligence but little schooling. They were somewhat awed by my university education, were eager to listen to what I could tell them and we had really good times together.

I wanted to somehow notify Tusia about my new situation. She was deeply in love with me, was heartbroken when I was so brutally taken away from her life. While in the settlement, I was getting her letters though heavily censored. She did not take too seriously the announcement of the NKVD Moscow representative about the permanence of our stay in the taiga (the censor did not erase that news!). One day, I asked the guard to bring the prison director on an important business. When he came I asked his permission for sending a letter and requested paper and pencil. Now, that I was not under investigation any more, my request did not surprise him greatly, however he asked what is the purpose of the letter. I explained, that we were taken from Lvov in the month of June, I had only light clothing on me. I am now destined to be in labour camp for the approaching winter months and I would like my family to send me the boots that I left behind. To stress the point, I showed the fellow my walking shoes which were in really bad shape. He agreed but pointed out that he will read the text and decide if it will forwarded. I got the paper and pencil. Now, both Tusia and I knew the English language very well, I was quite sure that the prison head did not. Thus I informed her that while in Lvov I left my heavy boots with my uncle and I would like her to visit him, take the boots, pack them and send them to me at the address shown. Of course, the letter was in Russian. And I continued: "You met my uncle once, he will remember you, and here is his name and address: Mietek Three years, Prison street No.25, apt.5." I repeat, everything was in Russian, the name of my uncle and that of the street in English and contained the information that I wanted to pass. Looking back, I am sure that my letter went directly to the fellow’s waste basket, if he had one.

One day, in early February the three of us were transferred to the main building of the prison of which our twelve cells were just an annex. We entered a cell with two cots at 90 degrees to one another, and nothing else. O yes, the parasha. Then, others were pushed in and we were eleven of us. Impossible? Take my word, it was. When we all stood up at the change of guard, you could not push a skinny child in. We stayed there about two weeks. How did we sleep? Two in one cot, two in another, seven on the floor including the space under the cots. Richard was there too with the two companions who joined him when I left. Unlike me, he was miserable all the time. One of his co-inmates was a barber from a small town, who typically, out of inferiority feelings while in the company of an intellectual, wanted to demonstrate his profound disregard of education and he was driving poor Richard to distraction. We were a motley group, but the atmosphere was rather comradely and pleasant. We had our funny moments. It turned out that the floor that our cell was on was, as a rule, assigned for female prisoners of which we did not know but, apparently, the old-hand prisoners on the floor above did. The little grated window at the ceiling was constantly open to give access to the fresh air. One day, we noticed something dangling in the opening. One of us drew in a small bundle tied to the end of a string. When opened, the bundle contained some "machorka" (crude tobacco) and some paper, also a note: "Cheer up, girls, we are with you spiritually, expect further contact." One of us had a pencil, answered something amorous and signed: Olga, Natasha, Maria, etc. Then we let the end of the string loose and it was withdrawn immediately. Believe it or not, the smokers among us had a ball since and the prisoners upstairs would massacre us all if they found out the truth.

Then, one day we all were taken out onto the courtyard where other groups of prisoners were already waiting. Many were escapees from settlements similar to ours apparently teeming in the forests of Maryiska republic, all of them caught and sentenced to spend 3 years in the corrective-labour camps, but there was also a big collection of Soviet citizens of various nationalities, and minors. In the Soviet penal system, children aged from 10 and up, if caught in a criminal act are treated the same way as adults. They represent the most vicious, most depraved and most feared element among the fellow inmates. They were like wild animals, commit crimes also inside the prison or the labour camp. I mentioned prisoners of different nationalities. Among the numerous groups of people living within the borders of the Soviet Union, there were many of the Mongolian race like: Tartars, Uzbeks, Kirghizs, Kazaks, etc. and they all are profusely represented among the inhabitants of the veritable nation of GULAG within the glorious USSR.

We were packed into the waiting vans. Did you ever hear the term "Black Maria"? Only, there they are called the Russian equivalent to "Black Ravens". And, when I used the term "packed" I described exactly what they did to us. We were "unpacked" at a siding of the Yoshkar-Ola rail station and taken into the waiting rail-cars. It was the first time that I have seen or ever been inside of a car of this construction. Later I learned the name of the car: the "Stolypin" car. Mister Stolypin was the Minister of one of the Tsars, apparently responsible for internal order in the realm, and he was the one who introduced a special type of car designed for the transportation of prisoners to Siberia, primarily political exiles accused of real or imaginary acts unfriendly to the Tsar. Like a regular passenger car the "Stolypin" version has compartments with benches, there is no window just a solid wall, the partition separating the compartment from the corridor built of bars as is the door. Thus, guards walking the corridor had a full view of what was going on within the "cages". The corridor has regular windows so we, inside the compartments could watch the moving panorama of the outside world from which we have been so brutally extricated.

Richard kept close to me, thus we two found ourselves in a compartment with a group of strangers. Not enough sitting room, we were standing. It so happened that the adjoining compartment was assigned to women among which there were Lola and Hilda. It was a short trip, one hour or so. For the entire duration of the travel, Richard and Hilda were talking to, but not seeing, each other. As I mentioned before, they were newly-wed, very much in love and now due to be separated for a long time. They were repeating over and over that no force in the world could separate them from each other for ever. I am a chronicler so I will return to the couple later on.

We arrived at the station of Kazan, again packed into the Black Ravens and taken to the inside of a huge prison complex located within a mediaeval fortress built in times when the Tartars had their own independent country. Of course, this information came later, right now our group of maybe two hundred were led into a huge room packed densely. As I said, our group tried to be close to one another just as animals of the same species would do, from the instinct of self-protection. Suddenly, Fulek established that someone stole his gloves from a side pocket of his coat. I spent with Fulek a few months and knew the fellow. He was the nicest possible creature, but a fury when angry. Fulek put his two fists in front of him boxer-like and called: "Never mind who took my gloves, return them immediately!" The crowd cleared around him and, whoever stole the gloves dropped them on the floor. People around whispered with respect: "A boxer!".

Next they started distributing the crowd into available prison cells. Our group of eight, and it included Richard, Fulek, Miloch and his younger brother whose name I don’t remember, and other non-Soviets, were led into a big room which already contained about forty prisoners. A wide wooden shelf was built around the three walls, the sleeping accommodation, people lying or sitting close to one another, a garden type table in the middle and a colossal parasha in the corner. One part of the shelf was assigned for our group and we lay down curiously observed by old-timers. Later on we had a chance to observe the ritual behaviour towards new-arrivals led in singly or in pairs. They were approached, asked the length of their respective sentences, their belongings searched for whatever could serve the entire community and led to their assigned place. Our group, due to our belligerent appearance was saved this treatment. We noticed that there was a leader among them who kept a semblance of discipline. I started a chat with him, he was doubtlessly an intellectual, at the moment on a hunger strike because his request for something unknown to me was not satisfied. Food, the usual soup, was being provided into the cell in a huge container and distributed under the supervision of our leader. Bread was cut right there on the table and portioned around. Here I will dwell some time on the method of distributing the bread portions, bread being the symbolic and actual means of survival in the prison and, later in the camps. A prisoner is assigned a certain amount of bread, the amount regulated by a higher authority. The mostly encountered amount was 300 grams (about 10 ounces). For a group, the bread was supposedly weighed at the distribution point, and brought in loaves to be cut right in the cell. The cutting ceremony was being observed by everybody and each portion laid on the table. Naturally, the portions were of different shape and size, and definitely varied in weight from one another. One prisoner was assigned to be the arbiter. He was positioned in such a way that he did not see the bread portions on the table or people gathered around the table. Then the leader pointed his finger at a portion at random and asked: "Who?" And the arbiter named a name. The person approached the table and took the bread whatever its actual size. This law does not know any appeals. In my career as prisoner of the Soviet Union, I travelled in many parts of this enormous country, was an inmate of dozens of cells and a number of labour camps, everywhere the ritual of bread distribution was the one I described and it was honoured by the most depraved criminal. Bread meant life, this was the unwritten law. Once, much later, and I will come to that, I was absent during the bread distribution due to a visit at the office. When I came to the barrack, my portion had disappeared. Someone pointed out to me the fellow who took my bread and ate it. If I killed the man right there I would get the approval of the entire barrack. However, I was not a killer type, any scolding was completely unproductive. I survived the incident.

We stayed in the cell in Kazan for maybe a week. One day, Richard and I were called out. Lola and Hilda who were somewhere in the prison complex, were notified that that evening they will start the journey to the place of their destination. Both requested a meeting with their close family members to say good-bye. Surprisingly, the prison administration complied. I was taken to the room where Lola was waiting. We were given five minutes. Then only I learned that both Lola and Hilda did not get the three-year sentence to labour-camp the way we did, they have been sentenced to permanent exile in one of the remote republics in the Central Asia to live as free but under periodical registration with the local NKVD. Lola gave me some money and a woolen scarf to wear in cold weather. We had an emotional good-bye. The next time I saw Lola was 23 years later.

A few days later, a man with a list entered our cell and announced that all those called leave with their belongings. My name was one of the first to be called, I gathered my pack and went out into the corridor where armed guards were waiting, then others followed and the door closed. That was all. Neither Richard nor Fulek was among us. I just could not be separated from them like that. I lied to the officer that part of my belongings was left with my friends and I would like him to permit me to enter the cell for a moment. He nodded his head. I entered the room to a big surprise of everybody inside, I embraced Richard and Fulek knowing that it is for ever. Back in the corridor, we were stripped, all our belongings searched for I don’t know what and we were lead out.

Before my descent into the depth of the GULAG hellhole, I wish to briefly describe the further fortunes, or mostly misfortunes of the main actors of my narrative.

Lola. As I said before, Lola and Hilda were sent to one of the Central Asian Republics. They did not get along with each other even when in the Yoshkar-Ola prison cell, their respective personalities clashed. I assume they separated. Lola made a living by giving piano lessons and occasionally playing in ensemble for some festivities. She had a passing liaison with a man who was there in transit, became pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl. She called the baby Maria in honour of our mother. These were hard times, one half of the Soviet Union already occupied by the German army, the baby did not get proper food or care and died at the age of one. Lola was heartbroken. In 1947, she returned to Poland. In Warsaw, she chanced to meet our cousin who told her that I survived, came back to Poland but after a brief stay moved to Austria. Imagine my surprise and joy, when, in Salzburg, Austria, I got a letter from Lola notifying me that she was back in the country, lives in a small town on the former German territory ceded to Poland after the war, supporting herself as a piano teacher. Knowing that Poland was destitute of everything after the war, I was periodically sending parcels containing food and articles of wear which Lola was selling there for a good price. After I immigrated to Canada in 1950, I continued doing it from there collecting from our friends here good quality clothing they discarded due to a changed fashion which was avidly bought from Lola in Poland. In time, that country became somewhat self-supporting and second-hand clothing lost its glamour. Then I changed my support to a certain amount of money sent regularly. At a certain point, I asked Lola if she would consider coming to Canada to live here but she wisely refused pleading difficulty in learning a new language and living in a new country. Since the general atmosphere in Poland was extremely hostile to the very few Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust or returned from exile, Lola adopted a new personality as a gentile. It did not come hard, even in her young years she gravitated to the Catholic company. In 1964, I visited Warsaw for the first time after the war, Lola came from her place to be with me. At that time, there lived in the city a few remnants of our erstwhile big clan of relatives, we spent emotional three days together. Some time later, Lola broke her hip and spent almost an entire year in a hospital. She never married, led a very lonely life and died suddenly, presumably from a stroke, in 1980. A lady neighbour of hers found my address among Lola’s belongings and wrote to me. In her words, the funeral took place with all the dignity with a priest officiating. Lola was buried, naturally, in a Catholic cemetery. It is an old Jewish tradition that survivors arrange gravestones for those of the family who passed away before them. Using my cousin in Warsaw as mediator, I contacted a mason in the town where Lola resided and ordered a gravestone. The man sent back a picture of the stone bearing an appropriate inscription, and I had to accept it as a proof of the accomplished work. Poor, poor Lola. What a wasted life!

Hilda. I know little about her adventures. From her distant relative here in Montreal I learned that Hilda and Richard divorced. Hilda remarried and redivorced. She lives here in Montreal, we communicate occasionally. Hilda was involved in a rather bizarre occurrence. Her son (not Richard’s) was taking his pregnant wife to hospital for a childbirth. On a highway, the car was involved in an accident, the woman was thrown out from the car onto the the path of an oncoming truck which crushed her to death. When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics noticed that the baby inside the dead woman was alive. They took the unharmed baby out. The boy is now 8 or 9, is in custody of his maternal grandparents. Hilda is trying, in court, to get the boy back.

Richard. In the labour-camp to which he was sent, Richard met a medical doctor in charge of the hospital serving several camps in the region. The doctor was of German descent, and Richard who was brought up in the German culture somehow was befriended by the man. An imaginary job was arranged for my friend and he lived the life of Reily. I met Richard briefly while in the Polish army organized within the Soviet Union. He was in a group of new friends and so was I, we just exchanged brief resumes of our respective adventures. Richard lives now in London, England, he has a new wife and son, a lawyer. About twenty years ago, while on my trip to Moscow with a delegation of Canadian scientists, we stopped in London for a day just to fight the jet lag. I dialed Richard’s telephone number. A woman answered. I asked to speak to Richard. He was not at home at the moment and she wanted to know who was calling. I asked her if she was his wife and if so may I speak Polish. When confirmed, I said: "Look, the last I spoke to Richard was 35 years ago." She interrupted me: "Are you the friend who lives in Canada, if so Richard just never stops talking about you." Anyway, we arranged a meeting in the hotel I was staying in at 8 pm. I was curious if Richard would recognize me after such a long time. I saw the pair when I entered the lobby, mingled with the crowd pretending to be just passing by. When he saw me, Richard called my name. It was an emotional greeting. I think that only during the war, in the battle, and in the prison can people establish such a strong bond in a short time. We went to the hotel restaurant and kept talking long past midnight. Since then, Richard had a massive heart attack but survived. We do not correspond with each other.

Fulek Birnbaum. For a short time he re-appeared in my life, and I will write about it later on. Then, he was sent for a long voyage to the most fearsome labour-camp called Kolyma from the name of the place. Kolyma is at the extreme north-east corner of the Asian continent, close to the Bering Sea. It is High Arctic and the work consists of mining for gold and diamonds deep in the earth’s innards. Both the harsh climate and the strenuous work killed people in a short time, thus the NKVD has a constant line of supply of new human cargo. The place is accessible only by the sea, the Arctic ocean, and only a few months in the year. Fulek was on such a ship, in indescribable conditions, when every day people died and were thrown overboard. The ship built to accommodate three thousand carried seven thousand. Luckily, he did not stay there long, was liberated by the general amnesty and was recruited to the Polish army formed within the Soviet Union. Together with the Red Army, the Polish soldiers fought on the eastern front, eventually moved to the territory of Germany. In one of the German towns, moving from house to house in search of German resistance, Fulek entered a room and noticed somebody hiding behind a curtain. He prepared to shoot when a girl came out and said that she is a Jewish woman pretending to be German for self protection. I don’t know how she convinced my friend, sufficient to say that he found a shelter for her and, after the fighting stopped returned to the girl. You guessed it, he married her. They emigrated to New Zealand where Fulek opened a jewelry store, prospered, bought a second store, became quite wealthy. Now he lives in Australia, has a beautiful house with a garden full of flowers, is surrounded by married children and grandchildren, lives a really happy life. In the sixties, on his visit to his sister who lives in Toronto, Fulek dropped in unannounced in Montreal to see me. It was not a successful episode. We write to each other quite often.

About my family in Warsaw and their tragic end I know very little. Father died in the ghetto in 1941 of dysentery, I assume hunger. Mother, Genia and Rola were working in a factory which was supplying the German army. Imagine, mother in her late sixties, what kind of work could she do? Anyway, by 1943, the entire population of the ghetto, reportedly 400 thousand people, were transported to the Treblinka annihilation camp where all of them perished.

My heart is bleeding for my unhappy family so brutally wiped out from the surface of the earth. When the Holocaust is mentioned the number of victims associated is given as 6 million people. But, in reality, it is many, many more. Each of these 6 million people was a member of some group of people, close family, distant relatives. Yes, entire families were transported to the gas chambers and perished but still somebody, somewhere was left with a lifetime grief. I escaped the sure death only due to the fact that I was geographically beyond the reach of the Nazi monster. But they wounded me deeply for life by murdering my immediate family. I am a victim of the Holocaust, too. My son, who was born after the war was over, is a victim of the Holocaust. As a rule, in every child’s life, grandparents play an important role, and even after the child becomes an adult he fondly remembers being a favourite pet of his or her grandparents. My son was never a grandchild and he does not understand what it means to be one. The entire American Jewry came to that continent from European cities and towns, mostly from Polish, Russian, Ukrainian "shtetls", where they had relatives: brothers, nephews, nieces, etc. The Holocaust wounded them too.

Here I was, with a new personality, a new status. People I met, and they were in hundreds, were not interested in my name, occupation, or nationality . The first question they asked was the paragraph by which I was sentenced and the next one, what was the duration of my incarceration. The first answer: SOE - "an element dangerous to the society". Mind you, I was not a person any more, I was an "element." Like a disease, a plague. The comparison was also fit because I was "dangerous to the society." A law abiding citizen should be wary of me, an "element" that might harm or even destroy him. Nobody was asking me what I did to be marked by a such ominous classification. What did I really do? I had been brutally removed from a civilized life I enjoyed, where I did work useful to the society (an engineer in a power station feeding a city of importance to the state) and transferred to remote taiga where I could only fell trees (highly inefficiently) and have a miserable subsistence for life as I was officially informed. At the time it happened, the Soviet Union was not in a state of war when a country can conduct a massive interning of nationals suspected of being friendly to the enemy. Moreover, according to international laws (Geneva Convention?) those interned can be removed to secluded area, should be provided with means of livelihood but cannot be forced to work. Please, don’t consider me a total idiot, all these musings and reflections come to my mind now, while I am writing these words. At the time of my "voyage" to the corrective labour-camp, of which I did not have even a shadow of an inkling, my entire attention was concentrated on the small but painful adversities encountered at each turn.

I am not commiserating with the GULAG but they created such an enormous penal state within the Soviet nation that it became impossible to run it efficiently. In my estimate, at any time millions of prisoners were being moved from one place in the country to another, a country covering two huge continents. They had to follow a certain "demand" by a camp for a number of human units to fulfill a certain work, like digging a canal connecting two seas, etc. Taking into consideration the fast turnover of the surprisingly "mortal" mortals. The notorious inefficiency of anything taking place in the USSR, lack of sufficient transportation means, primarily trains, forced them to create an "archipelago" of transit prisons and camps. In order to move a group of prisoners from point "A" to point "B" they had to bring them first to a transit prison "Al", "A2" where the group spent days and weeks in awful conditions. Alternatively, they brought the group to a transit labour-camp where they were engaged in the "specialty" of that place, say felling the trees in the taiga.

I am not going to describe all the prisons I "visited" in my travels from one labour-camp to another, their number and variety blurred in my memory, just a few that were different due to some event. My first "stopover" was in a city by name Arzamas. A huge cell, just four walls, ceiling and the floor to sit or lie down on. A huge parasha, of course. The cell was three-quarter filled by inmates when our group was let in and I found an available place on the floor beside a man who seemed quite decent. A good choice. The man, in his early fifties, turned out to be a typical representative of the pre-revolution Russian gentry, a character from novels by Chekhov or Tolstoy, and, although our encounter was but for a brief duration, we had a most pleasant time together. During our daily outdoor walks, when no special order of marching was required, my new friend (I don’t remember his name) confided that he was working for quite a time in the head administration of GULAG before he was arrested for some trumped-up mistake. In case you wonder how come a decent fellow was working in the gruesome organization like the one above, let me explain the general rules governing the obligations of university graduates. All education, including university is free to the students. In addition, each student receives from the government free lodging in special dormitories plus a monthly allowance. After graduation, the new professional is obliged to provide years of service in places assigned by the state. If a mining engineer is required in some of the remotest corners of the country, there he goes and there is no such thing as saying "No". Thus, my Russian friend, after his graduation was sent to a GULAG which needed his services. Please, keep in mind that I am describing the conditions in the Soviet Union while it existed. From the same individual, who apparently had a high position within the GULAG administration, I learned that currently a total of 18 million (read: eighteen million) people were inmates in the corrective labour-camps. I happen to know that the entire population of the Soviet Union at that time was 185 million, hence practically one-tenth of the country’s population was incarcerated and doing the hard labour for free. I would like to draw your attention to the term "corrective" preceding the word "labour-camp". Yes, my dear fellow, you were a bad boy, and we were forced to punish you. But we did not give up on you. We are going to correct you, and nothing corrects a fellow better that a hard work in the innards of a mine or, say, the fresh air of the Siberian taiga. And we are not going to rush you. Take all the time, like 15 years and or 25 years.

My brief stay in the Arzamas cell introduced me to another characteristic feature of the prisoner’s life. A fable. In the evening, the inmates exchange glances and whisper: "The fable". One of them, apparently an old hand in this "profession", sits down in the middle of a large group of listeners and starts a real, old-fashioned fable. You know, about the princess, and a prince, and the evil step-mother, and monsters and so on, and so on. I have never in my life heard such a compilation of inanities, the narrator mostly invents as he goes. The listeners are hanging on his every word and God have mercy on the inmate in the cell who would somehow interrupt the performance. After listening for a few minutes I mostly fell asleep and when I woke up let us say after two hours the story was still far from the end. The "end" was always the same. The prince got the princess and "they were fucking and fucking and fucking ...". Then only the audience went to their respective places on the floor for the night’s rest still commenting: "A good fable". I have been witness to similar scenes in many other instances and wondered why grown-up people are so fascinated by the naive plot of the crude "fables". After all, each of us in his or her childhood was exposed to genuine creations of fabulists and would not listen to the trash of the cell narrator. Not so in the Soviet Union. Children there are spared the stupid stories of Snowhite or Cinderella, they are being educated in the real life. Once, much later, I happened to open a reader written for little Vanyas and Sonias, and here is one. In a "kolkhoz" situated near the border with a "capitalist" country, one morning, the little Natasha was marching to the school. She was approached by a stranger who asked her what is the nearest way to the border. Natasha pointed in the direction where she knew the border NKVD unit had its post. The stranger followed that direction and walked directly into the hands of the NKVD unit. It turned out that the man was a foreign spy, he was arrested and executed. And the little Natasha became a heroine in her community and given a badge by the head of the local Communist party. End of the story. End of my comments.

Let me describe my "stopover" in the city of Gorky. The city was called Nizhnyi-Novgorod before, an ancient commercial center of great historical significance. It was given the name "Gorky" after the Russian writer whose stories concerned the proletariat as it was being oppressed during the Tsars’ reign, and this fact earned him the respect of the Communist regime. Our train arrived at the rail station early in the morning and we were marching army-style through the city. People were going to their respective places of work, were lining up at the bus stations, nobody gaped at us, nobody stopped for a minute, they knew perfectly well that we are the "enemies" and every one was afraid to show his or her true feelings, that of deep sympathy. I can bet that many of the passers-by had a family member or a friend incarcerated in the labour-camp and were wondering if and when their own turn come up. We arrived at the prison apparently too soon and the cell assigned for our group was not yet vacated of their present inmates. Our group, maybe a hundred people strong, was lined up along the corridors, one-deep, face to the wall and warned by the guard not to look back. There was quite a traffic in the passage and we were there for three or more hours until led into an empty cell. Empty, of course, but for the eternal parasha. We were literally packed into the space too small to accommodate our group. No room to lie down for everybody. Now, there is a certain strategy in grabbing a spot. Close to the parasha or far away ? Everybody knows that during the night he will have to use it , and he will have to step on sleeping men in order to reach it. If too close, the person has to endure a constant stench and risk of sleeping in the urine that will inevitably spill over from the parasha of an inadequate capacity.

For somebody who would open the door we looked like a snake pit. Luckily, the door did open and they started calling people out. The ritual is always the same. An NKVD individual enters with a list and calls the surname. The person called has to give his first name and the patronymic, say "Boris Ivanovich" as proof that he is really the one. Then he is told: "With belongings". And out he goes out the cell where in the corridor the escorting guards take him over from the prison after having him stripped right there and his "belongings" searched. I always wondered what would happen if the entire roomful of inmates conspired not to respond to the call. None of us had any identification on us, the NKVD men had no idea who is who, with the fantastic turnover of prisoners passing through the institution it would take them months to have us segregated by comparing the pictures of inferior quality against each individual. However, in all the rituals of the described kind that I witnessed there was never a single hitch. The prisoners, the vast majority of whom were citizens of the Soviet Union were well conditioned in their free (?) life to obey instructions coming from the all-powerful NKVD.

A day or two later, I was called and five more, three of which were the Polish speaking fellows of the original group of 11 in the cell in Yoshkar-Ola. Late in the night, we arrived at a small station named Sukhobezvodnaya (the name means "dry-waterless"). It turned out that the name was given also to the entire corrective labour-camp which covered a huge area and consisted of a number of individual sectors, all of them in dense forests. A single NKVD man was waiting to escort us to our destination, a distance of a couple of kilometers. The man was quite a jolly, chatty fellow and, although he called us "enemies of the nation", he gave us some information about the camp itself. Ours was Sector No.4, and it was a transit camp. Which means we could stay there for one week or for six months, or longer, depending on the demand. Due to the late hour, on arrival we were temporarily placed in a room side by side with the guard room at the entrance to the camp. From what we managed to see, the camp was surrounded by two parallel rows of barbed wire with dogs in-between.

When we were there a short time, a behemoth of a man came in. Tall, enormously big, with the physique of a Sumo wrestler. He looked us over, said that he is in charge of the feeding section, a prisoner like us. When he heard us whispering in Polish, he spoke Czech, a similar Slavic language, as he was of that nationality. I thought that the man deserves to be ingratiated to, reached into my bag and presented him with a silk navy-coloured shirt. There was no way that he could use it himself but an object like this is of tremendous barter value. A wasted gesture, because later on the man did not know me from Adam, or pretended not to.

We spent the night sleeping on the benches. In the morning, another individual came bringing with him two big bags. A decent-looking, fatherly Russian, he introduced himself as a "kaptyor", a term that was new to me although I know the Russian language very well. Apparently, the camp jargon. Another co-prisoner but a functionary. He warned us that whatever we have of any value, including the clothing we had presently on, will be stolen from us in no time. He brought for each of us a complete outfit to wear while we are in the camp, everything else will be deposited in his storage until we leave the place. So, we all changed right there. All I left from my private belongings were the undershirt, two shirts, one on top of the other, a woolen pullover, a woolen scarf and the fake-fur hat I bought when still in the 17th kilometer settlement. What I put on requires a real novelist to describe, my language is not colourful enough. On the other hand, considering that after putting on the outfit then and there I remained in it for about two months, day and night, without taking it off for a minute, and it became like a second skin to me, I will try to describe it to you relying on your imagination. Pants - originally they were made of the cheapest possible material, padded with wadding, but, before they reached me they were worn by an untold number of other inmates, some of whom used the wadding for smoking (yes, as "makhork", the crude tobacco is constantly in short supply, the desperate smokers smoke the wadding rolled in a piece of newspaper), others were sitting too close to the bonfire and had holes burned by the flying cinders. The pants were full of holes, unmended. Jacket - called "bushlat" - a car coat length, of a similar construction as the pants only in an infinitely worse condition. The back, practically empty of the wadding, open in the front with no means of buttoning or such. On legs, knee-high tubes with feet, again almost empty of the padding. They were called "bakhil". Now, we come to the culminating part of my apparel. Shoes - and I hesitate to use the term as the monstrosities that I put on my feet even in the richest imagination did not resemble objects that we know under that name. They were made of split automobile tires each layer a quarter of an inch thick. The pieces were stitched together to form a shape resembling an army tank. Even the camp lingo could not find a proper name for the things and they used an acronym designating the biggest factory of tanks in the Soviet Union: CheTeZe (Chkhalovskii Traktornyi Zavod). Naturally, the material is strong enough to last a march around the globe several times over, but the stitches are done of inferior string and let go. Can you visualize me in the described outfit?. Now, I repeat, I wore the outfit, DAY and NIGHT, for about two months, without once taking it off. As to the no-button bushlat, providence alone found the solution. The first day I was marching to the place of work, a distance of 6 kilometers (about 4 miles) from the camp, I noticed on the ground a piece of rope, the type used as harness for a horse. I picked it up, split into two more flexible strings, used one as a belt, the other at the throat to hold the collar flaps together.

Only, when inside the compound did I appreciate the kaptyor’s advice. Everybody had on a similar outfit and we did not attract anybody’s attention. Oh, yes. I had on my wrist a silver chain that somehow survived all my heretofore tribulations. While I was at the administration building to attend to some formalities, a decent fellow I never even met warned me that the camp already knows about my wrist ornament which they confused for a watch, and are making plans. I found the kaptyor and added the last personal item to my deposit bag.

Let me briefly describe the camp from inside. As I said before, there were two parallel lines of barbed wires with two watch-towers on corners diagonally. At any time, a man with a rifle looked down from the tower. There were four dormitory barracks, one gigantic barrack containing the kitchen and the mess room, one administration building, a bath-house and, remotely, an outhouse. One of the four dormitories housed female prisoners, usually a small group, who worked primarily in the kitchen. The inmates were grouped in "brigades" (no reference to the military meaning of the term, I am using it here because it is closest to the Russian name) consisting of about 30 people led by their "brigadier". At work, the brigadier divides his group into so-called "links" of three, four or five men depending on the assignment.

Early in the morning, all brigades were formed inside the compound, four men abreast, into a single column, counted and led out of the camp where the waiting escort of guards, each leading a dog, surrounded us. We were counted again, and the officer announced the following warning: "Stay in the column as it is now. One step to the left, one step to the right will be considered an attempt of escape and the person will be shot without pre-warning".

With my "luck", I got into the worst brigade in the camp. Our "leader" was serving his time for some criminal deed, did not care about the work assigned to us as a brigade, had no sympathy with us "politicals" - the "enemies of the nation". On the second or third day, he made me the leader of a link and gave me two more men for the task of felling the trees. With my past in the 17th kilometer settlement, I considered myself an experienced lumber jack. One of my helpers was an Estonian intellectual who did not even know which end of the axe to hold, his value in the task was almost nil. The other fellow, a young Polish Jew, who was recently separated from his girl-friend, heart-broken sat down under a tree and announced that he does not care what will happen to him, he is not going to work. Period. I did not yet realize what a catastrophic situation I got into. At the end of the working day, a camp official whose job was measuring the amount of work fulfilled calculated that our link had done only 7% of the expected norm. In the mentality of the Soviet people, this is equal to a "sabotage".

When our column came back to the guard-house of the camp, my two "helpers" and myself were stood aside. We were led to a structure we had not even noticed before. It was a dungeon, mostly dug in the ground with only the roof exposed. We were told that we will spend the next three nights therein, no food, and will be let out in the morning to go to our regular work in the forest. The grim jailer who took us in laughed when he saw the two pieces of rope used as parts of my "costume". They were removed so I would not use them to hang myself, a likely possibility. I was led into a small cell of the size of a closet, excavated in the earth, dark, with just a couple of planks on the floor to lie down on. No food. It was bitterly cold, February and the ground was frozen a couple of meters deep. I took off my bushlat, lay down in a fetal position and covered myself tightly to create a space that I will warm up with my own breath. I recalled a book I read in my young years, Jack London’s "The Jacket". The jacket in the novel was a strait-jacket, the type that is being used in mental asylums to restrain a patient who becomes violent. Only, here was a prison cell whose inmate was a university professor somehow involved in conspiracy against a tyrannical regime. The professor protests furiously, and to restrain him the jailers put a strait-jacket on him taking special care to tie the sleeves extra tight. The man falls into a partial coma, and suddenly sees himself in his previous life, before he was reincarnated. He is a boy travelling with his parents in a wagon train in the Wild West in the 19th century. Follows a week or so of this adventure when the group is surrounded by Indians and, during the ensuing battle the boy is hit by an arrow and dies. The professor wakes out to reality and is so fascinated by a chance of visiting his past life that he deliberately provokes the jailers to repeat the punishment . This time he lives in medieval France. Next seance - in ancient Rome. Back to me, on the floor of the veritable ice-box. I tried to utilize my brain to fight an impossible situation. No, I did not create visions of my previous lives, I just fell asleep. I was awakened by a voice at the door telling me it is time to get up. I got a bowl of hot soup and a piece of bread and told to get out and join my brigade. Yes, I spent three nights in the described circumstances. Unknowingly to me, Fulek arrived in the same camp during my last night, and from our friends learned about my ordeal. Of course, I could not know what the three nights in these inhuman conditions did to me but when Fulek saw me he wept.

Within my linguistic limits, I will try to describe the "living" conditions to which I was exposed. I am using the term "living" although it is far from fitting to describe our existence.

Our barrack, L-shaped, slept about 100 people. Two tiers of wooden sleeping shelves provided inadequate space so we were sleeping sideways, tightly one against another, sardine-wise. Everybody was fully dressed and shod, the way he was at work, sleeping on bare boards with one’s head-gear as a cushion. Our bladders reacted to the climatic and living conditions, thus, during the short night, each of us had to get up twice or thrice to get out of the barrack in order to urinate. The barrack entrance had a stoop and from this strategic position we were urinating to the left or to the right, take your choice. The outdoor temperature was in thirties below (Celsius) and in the morning on both sides of the stoop there were two yellow-coloured skating rinks. The fellow who returned to his place after having emptied his bladder had to wedge himself in to his previous sleeping place because both his neighbours, the one on the left and the one on the right somehow expanded filling-in the momentary gap. I have to grant one circumstance, there was no fighting. Everybody was dead tired and oblivious of the surrounding world. I just described our sleeping situation when our bodies were suppose to rest to be fit again for work the next day.

At 6 in the morning there was a signal to get up. Although at the door of the barrack there were three water taps with a sink, nobody cared to wait for his turn in order to splash his face with the ice cold water. Then we were given our daily ration of bread, according to the regulation, 300 grams, in size not bigger than my hand. I did not eat the bread but did a funny thing with it. Using my little finger, in the middle of the slice I drilled a small hole, wrapped it in a piece of cloth and put it deep in my bushlat pocket. Each brigadier took his group to the mess hall in a distant barrack. The door to the mess-hall was blocked by the Czech wrestler I described before. We had to wait outdoors until those already inside finished their meal.

The food served was not uniform for everybody. It depended on the percentage of the work norm you have fulfilled in days before. There were three categories or, as they called them, "kettles": kettle No. 1, kettle No. 2 and kettle No. 3. Kettle No. 1 was for those who overfulfilled the expected norm of work expressed in cubic meters of wood cut. Kettle No. 2 was given to those who with their best effort applied did not reach the norm but were close. Kettle No. 3 was for all the others. Yes, you guessed right, I was always among "the others". After a long wait, we entered the mess hall, a poorly lit huge barrack with picnic type tables and benches. We approached an opening in one wall leading to the kitchen. Our brigadier stood on the side with a list and indicated the category of meal each of us was entitled to. I repeat, I got kettle No.3. I beseech you to believe me. The wooden bowl of the so called "soup" was a murky, gray-coloured water in which were floating several slices of green tomatoes. Now, that I have the situation in a perspective of years, after spending seven years in the system called the USSR, I am surprised that the tomatoes reached my bowl of "soup". Let me explain. Everybody, I repeat everybody living in this system, steals. In the warehouse, where the goods (food, clothing, soap, whatever) is stored, the manager steals for himself, for the manager of the organization who gave him the job, for the bookkeeper who somehow is going to cover the shortage in his books and for the inspector who will visit the warehouse and expects to be bribed not to reveal the stolen merchandise. The stevedores who brought the load in or take it out for shipping have to live too, so they pilfer. The trucker who delivers the goods to the point of its destination has as a rule some "accident", either a bag fell down and split, or a crate containing glass jars dropped and the contents shattered, anyway he steals for himself and for the manager of the depot who assigned him to the task. Next, the consumer or user, in our case the camp’s cook. He has several persons waiting to be provided: the camp’s leader, bookkeeper, various administrative officials, and himself, of course. Whatever was left, goes into the kettles. I realize that unless he himself was a part of this kind of chain of pilferage nobody can understand how this system of husbandry survived for years.

After this nourishing meal, we formed a column and were led to our place of work after a ritual of counting and warning which I described before. The march itself provided problems. If it was snowing during the night, we had breast-high snowdrifts to fight. After years of tree felling, the place was now an empty space with hurricane-size winds. Once, after a hard day in the forest we were marching camp-bound and the guards were insisting that we maintain a tight column in spite of the deep drifts. As if by a signal we all just sat down in the snow. The guards took down their rifles from their shoulders and kept them threatening to shoot for insubordination. We did not stir. The confrontation lasted maybe two hours, and the guards agreed to us marching in a crowd. Naturally, when we reached the camp, the mess-house was already closed. But, back to our order of the day. In the forest, the brigadier divided us in so called "links" each consisting of 3, 4 or 5 men depending on the task. Around noon, after having built a gigantic bonfire he called a break for about twenty minutes. Each of us provided himself with a long tree branch the length of a fishing rod and sat down around the bonfire. From my pocket I took out the piece of bread I saved in the morning. The bread was by now frozen and hard as steel. Using the small hole I drilled in advance, I stuck my piece of bread on the end of my "rod" and extended the bread so it could melt above the fire. The operation required all your attention. If you withdrew too soon, the bread was still half-frozen. If held too long, it started burning or could fall into the fire and be lost. In the best of events, it was full of fire smoke.

After a long and hard day, back in the camp we went directly to the mess-hall for our final meal. Again the same ritual of waiting outdoors (people were falling asleep just leaning on one another) for our turn. When inside, this time I got a "soup" exactly like the one in the morning plus a spoonful of grits.

Initially, I was informed that the camp regulation calls for 10 consecutive days of work after which one day is given off for bathing, shaving, resting. However, our camp No.4 was far behind in its assigned "norm", consequently the administration cancelled all the off-days until the "norm" is fulfilled. I was in the camp for about seven weeks until, on my first off-day I went to the bath. When I undressed, I almost fainted. My arms, my legs were empty. Literally, all the flesh was gone, my skin was hanging on my bones like a shirt on a hanger. The strenuous work, the "diet" I described, lack of rest and sleep, all this caused that I was feeding my body on my flesh but now it was gone. After the first shock, I accepted the situation as inevitable, had a shave by a Polish fellow who served as a barber, and put my rags on again.

Let me say a few words about the climate at the latitude I was in. The regulations of the camp called that work in the forest continues unless the outdoor temperature drops below minus 42 degree Celsius (yes, you understand correctly, when the outdoor temperature is minus 40 degree Celsius, we still go). On a day like this, I covered my nose and my cheeks with the scarf leaving just the eyes exposed. It did not work. My breath went up to my eye-lashes, froze and shut my eyes in minutes. At work in the forest, it was bearable because my body was in constant movement and generated its own calories. Spring came late. It brought new miseries. First of all, we got up in the morning at 5 a.m.. Nights were still very cold, early in the morning the ground was still frozen and the horses had an easier task to slide the trunks on a frozen surface. Later in the day, the ground became mushy and the poor horses had a harder job pulling the load. Oh, yes. In the Soviet Union horses were given more thought and care than the human element which can be easily supplemented from the remaining 90% of population not yet domiciled in the GULAG "corrective labour-camps". The second problem connected with the warmer weather was more serious. The surface snow started melting but the ground itself was still frozen and not porous enough to soak up the melted snow. Thus, each time I put my foot down it penetrated the surface snow and landed in an inch or two of stagnant ice-cold water. Do you still remember my footwear, the one-in-the-world CheTeZe-s? Yes, water freely flew in and out soaking my "bakhilys" through and through for a number of weeks. I lived with my feet wet for 24 hours a day. A footnote: In normal times (they ended in September, 1939), I walked all the winter through in my dress shoes, galoshes being practically unknown. Granted, there was never an accumulation of snow on the ground to speak about. The amount of snowfall was negligible, besides the city bylaw demanded the janitor of every house to push the fresh snow into the gutter. Nevertheless, every winter, as a rule, I was catching cold with all its trimmings: running nose, fever, sore throat, the works. And here, practically barefoot in the ice-cold water for day and night, I never developed any symptoms of flu. I often thought about this phenomenon, and could not find an explanation. Apparently, our human body, unknowingly to us, contains a certain potential of generating a superhuman resistance to inhuman adversities. After all, I was not alone. One winter should wipe out millions of GULAG slaves subjected to the inhuman living and working conditions. But it does not. Even, if the scientists wanted to conduct studies on the hidden resistance of humans to adverse climatic conditions, none of them would have the heart to duplicate our suffering in the sub-Arctic taigas of the "corrective" camps. I do emphasize the term. The primary intention of the GULAG was, after all, to "correct" the "incorrect" elements. Presumably, some genius among the GULAG executioners came to conclusion that the least "incorrect" element is a corpse.

Not all inmates of our Camp No.4 were leaving the camp for work in the forest every morning. Only those whom the visiting medical individuals considered able-bodied. Others were assigned some internal tasks like keeping the camp and barracks clean, kitchen aid, etc. Then, there were the so called "Invalids" (I don’t know what qualified them to be named so) who were working in workshops mending clothing, footwear, or weaving crude slippers of tree bark. Finally, there were "urki". They formed a separate class, they did not go to any work, outside or inside the camp, they did not come to the mess hall for food, mostly they lived in separate compartments of the barracks. The urki were high caliber criminals, predominantly murderers. No threat to the communist regime like we the "politicals". Some of them held functions which allowed them to leave the camp unescorted to deliver this or that and opened for them possibilities of black marketing with food or other merchandise with some of the profit, no doubt, going to officials of the administration. They were our "mafia", a caste by itself, they even had women from the barrack where female inmates were sleeping. Even in transit, when we were moving from one camp to another and kept in transit prisons for a day or two, the urki kept in a group. To while away the time, they were playing cards. The stakes were the belongings of some unaware fellow around. Let me explain. As an ante a fellow pointed to some victim in the cell holding his belongings. If he lost, it was his duty to steal the designated ante and offer it to the winner. Matter of honour. The players had kibitzers. It happened to me once that a kibitzer on his way out whispered to me: "Careful, they are playing with your things as ante". Only the fact that I was called out for transport soon after saved me from a brutal robbery. Another encounter with an urka was more amicable. On the upper tier in the barrack where I slept, an urka had his sleeping area. His name was Vanya, a pleasant looking individual. One evening he approached me. He noticed that I used a very beautiful woman’s scarf to wrap my piece of bread. That was the scarf that my sister Lola gave me when I saw her the last time before parting. Vanya made a proposition. He offered me a ration of bread for the scarf. If I refuse, the scarf will be stolen from me anyway, and I believed him. I remonstrated telling him that I use the scarf for protecting my bread ration until I eat it in the forest. Vanya smiled benignly and brought from his place a canvas sack which will do the service. The transaction took place and Vanya liked me. In future I did some "business" with him. Another encounter with a non-political inmate was of a different kind. Among the females passing our camp in transit, they brought a tribe-woman from the Caucasus mountains who spoke a language that nobody understood. Let me explain that among our some 200 inmates in the camp we had representatives of practically of every nationality within the USSR. However, the tribe the woman belonged to was so small and so remote that it had its own language unrelated to other groups. The woman killed her husband and was convicted to eight years in camps. Compare it with other inmates who did not kill anybody, or actually did not do any harm to anybody but were just considered by the paranoiac regime as enemies. Back to the woman, the husband-killer. She was attached to our brigade temporarily. In the lot of the forest assigned to our group there was a huge tree stump that was already uprooted but had to be cut in pieces to be used as fire-wood but mostly removed from its place because it was blocking the route of the future rail tracks. Our brigadier picked me up as a pair for the woman. We were given a long saw, we sat down on the snow on either side of the gigantic stump and started the monotonous task of moving the saw forward and back, maybe millions of times because the wood was hard as steel. I could not help seeing the humour in the situation in which I found myself. Here I was, a civilized person of mild character sitting across a dumb, semi-wild man-killer doing extremely stupefying work while being "corrected" by the comrades of the GULAG.

Parallel to the deterioration of the body my mental capability suffered a lapse. In the mornings, when the various brigades were forming a single column ready to leave the camp, I was passing by a friend from the time of Kazan. We exchanged a word or two of greetings and somehow I was proud that I can still communicate with people and be understood. Otherwise, in the forest at work or during the brief break, in marching or in the barrack, we were too tired to talk. We were even moving around like zombies. Let me describe the following occurrence. It was rumoured that the camp got a new commandant, reportedly a retired rear-admiral or something of this kind. A plan was born in my dulled mind. I will try to speak to the man, describe my utter unpreparedness for the heavy work in the forest and ask him to transfer me to a lighter job like the one of the repair workshops. A footnote: all over the Soviet Union, people address one another as "comrade", for example "comrade commandant". However, if you are a prisoner ("enemy of the nation", remember?), he is no comrade of yours any more, you use the word "citizen" instead. The same "etiquette" is being applied by a free person when talking to the prisoner. He is using the form non-existent in the English language, a form used when talking to a child, with no respect. I somehow entered the administration building where I was before, knocked at the door and after answered, entered the office. I decided to utilize his surprise at seeing me in my attire and started my spiel: "Citizen commandant, I am a university educated man and ...." When he grasped the meaning of my visit, he interrupted rudely and told me that I am here to work hard and work hard I will. He finished his brutal rejoinder with words that I would like to pass to posterity. He said: "And stop moving around like a sated louse". I turned around and left the room. No, citizen rear-admiral, or whatever rank you held in the Red Navy, I was not a louse who could become sated whenever it felt like it. I was only a human being caught by your cursed Soviet system and slowly starving to death for no fault of mine whatsoever. Shame on you, and your future generations. It took Lenin or Stalin to build the foundation for concentration camps for millions of fellow-countrymen, but it needed brutes like you, citizen rear-admiral, to keep them running and prosper so magnificently.

A Pole I met in the camp told me that the brigade he belongs to consists of decent people, predominantly Azherbeijanis, a previously muslim nation living in the Caucasus mountains near the Caspian sea. He promised to speak to his brigadier about me and stressed that a gift of clothing would help. I had exactly what he had in mind. Back in Vilno, my relatives presented me with a pair of pants, striped charcoal, the kind that goes with a black cutaway. The bribe did the trick and I became a member of a different brigade. It consisted of about thirty people, we had a separate barrack compartment, partitioned from the rest. Two tiers of sleeping accommodation arranged in letter L, a cot for a our brigadier, a picnic type table and a bench. In the group were two Poles, one Russian engineer who kept to himself, Arkadyi the poet whom I mentioned before, a former Russian-Orthodox priest named Aronoff, my sleeping neighbour who, I think, still prayed silently to himself in the mornings. The rest were Azherbeijanis, people of fierce character and I have been a witness to their outburst of fury. Our brigadier whose name I do not recall was a uncommunicative fellow who ruled his group with an iron hand. I was accepted rather friendly. Some wanted to impress me with their civilized behaviour. When marching to the work, we had chats. One, a diminutive fellow was a chief engineer in the oil refinery in Baku, the capital. Another told me that he was a Soviet consul in France before he was arrested. Yes, I felt elated. We even had a janitor, one of the group, who stayed behind in the barrack, kept the room clean, brought water, had the furnace on all day and was a personal "butler" to our boss. There was no stealing. Then it was when I received my first and only parcel from Tusia. We were allowed one letter a month and I notified her where I was. Considering that in the camp we were completely deprived of vitamins and people were suffering of scurvy (sores over the entire body, teeth loosened in the gums), the things that we required most were onions and garlic. Tusia opened her entire heart in selection of goodies in the parcel and the letter it contained. That was the last I heard from her. Little did she know how close was her own doom.

Fulek who was in the same camp, had bad luck to be attached to a brigade consisting solidly of the former Latvian army men. They greeted the intruder with the utmost hostility, they being highly anti-Semitic and he a Jewish boy. Many a time, Fulek visited me in my new place and I saw that he was close to suicide. He got a parcel from his family in the 19th kilometer settlement and brought it to my barrack for safekeeping knowing well that it would be taken away from him by the brutes. A short time after, Fulek came to me to say good-bye, he was being called for transport. I did not hear from him for years.

Sometimes, even in the grimmest drama, or tragedy, there is a humorous or comic interlude. One day, and it was in early spring, two women joined our brigade. They were in transit, and had to do some work waiting for the next leg of their trip. They were still dressed the way they were arrested, quite a contrast to the ragged company around. They were assigned to easy work, collecting and burning branches of trees felled by the brigade. Apparently, somebody pointed at me to one of them, she approached me and started talking Polish. She was of German descent, engaged by a Polish rich family as a governess for their children and learned the language while in Poland. She asked me if we can march back to the camp together after the work. All my up-to-day life, I was a ladies’ man. It is hard to describe what this encounter did for my morale in the situation I was in. On our way back, Fraulein Helen took my arm (no doubt, because she was tired) and we trotted along having a lively conversation as if we were in a park in the middle of civilization. We must have looked a grotesque pair, she an elegant lady, me an unshaved bum in my dirty rags. We attracted everybody’s glances including those of the surrounding guards. The idyll lasted three days, and then Helen disappeared the way she came. I noticed that even our brigadier started to treat me with more respect.

Although my living conditions improved markedly, I still remained on the kettle No.3, which means that my food "menu" remained as I described before. Although I really forced myself to work with my utmost ability, I still was apparently behind the unreachable "norm". It was a vicious circle, the longer I was on the starvation ration the harder it was for me to reach that goal that would qualify me for better food. Besides, I had no control on how the efficiency is being measured. That was entirely in the brigadier’s hands, and he had his favourites in his group whom he assigned kettle No. 2 or even No. 1. It looked grim.

One morning, my brigadier told me that I was not going to the forest, I would stay in the barrack and wait what happens. He did not know what it was about, the order came from the office. Some time later, I was called to come to the administration building. A strange man approached me, shook hands with me and introduced himself as an engineer in the local power station which provided electricity to our camp. From my files he sees that I am an electrical engineer and he would like me to conduct a survey of the connected electric load. I will have to visit every building in the camp and count the number of lighting fixtures, add the outdoor lighting plus the security floodlights. He gave me the wattage of the bigger lamps, assigned a person from the office to accompany me to legitimize my access to various facilities, left paper and pencils and promised to come next day. No words can describe my feelings of being transferred from the bottom of misery to the level of a functionary who is being treated as a professional. The task itself did not present any problems for a person with both physical and mental capabilities at their normal level. But this was not the case. My mind was weakened to such a degree that I did not trust myself to speak and think coherently. On the other hand, I realized that successful fulfillment of the assignment might open some new door out of my present trap. I did the job to the best of my present abilities. I prepared lists, grouped the various load into tables, prepared a rough sketch showing plan of the camp with buildings, outdoor lighting poles, etc, indicated. Next day, the man expressed his approval using a typical term applied all over the Soviet Union: "very cultured". You don’t have to be Dr. Freud to understand why they are using the expression. For centuries, the Russians knew that Western Europe considers them uncouth, bear-like, uncultured. They wish to delude themselves that the new regime brought a new glamour to their behaviour, language, appearance, now everything is "cultured". Back to my visitor. He spent another hour with me, discussing various engineering problems. I knew that he is testing me for the amount of knowledge I still have at my service. I collected my superhuman effort to impress him debating as equal with an equal which was not the case. He did not starve for months doing hard labour at the same time. The man left satisfied and said I will hear from him. I did not. I returned to my miserable existence same as before the interlude.

A week or so later, I was told to prepare for transport. The kaptyor brought my belongings to the barrack, I took off the camp outfit (state property, after all) and put on my civilized clothing in which I was arrested. I have to admit, only a few small things were missing from my property deposited with the kaptyor: a fountain pen and the silver chain bracelet. To hell with them. I said good-bye to the group which accepted me amicably, after all, and was led to the gate. Just one more prisoner was already there, a technician as he informed me. This started me thinking, could it be the visit of the power station engineer has a sequence? We were marched to the railway station and transferred to guards expecting us on the train.

Followed the usual piecemeal trip with stopovers here and there. As a rule, the cars for transportation of prisoners stand on side-tracks at a distance from the passenger station. But, apparently due to the fact that we were a small group, the guards took us directly to the passenger platform and gave an order: "sit down". Here I had a chance to observe behaviour of the Soviet "free" citizens. They were moving around us as if we did not exist, in fear of somehow betraying their true feeling of compassion to the miserable creatures, quite innocent of any misdeed, who just had the bad luck to get in the clutches of the hated NKVD.

We were brought to the prison of Leningrad. I, the eternal globe-trotter (in my mind and desire, at least) was excited on being in the famous city. A huge, solid building. Our cell was on a high floor (six or seven) and through the windows I could see roofs and cupolas of magnificent structures. The cell itself differed from those I knew in other cities of this huge country. Regular beds with mattresses and semblance of cushions (granted, we slept two in a bed), good illumination and, miracle of miracles !, no parasha. Instead, the cell had a regular water-flushed toilet (no door, though). The side facing the spacious corridor consisted of steel bars with a wide door. And, another surprise. At intervals of two hours, or so, a pushcart stopped in front of our cell with a display of various kinds of bread, rolls, cookies, candies and such. If you had money you could buy anything you wanted. As some prisoners in our cell commented, you could not get such selection of bakery in the stores anywhere in Leningrad.

We were on our way north. By now, the grapevine brought us the full information. High up, above the Arctic circle, on the territory of the Karelo-Finnish Republic, the Soviet Union was building a gigantic aluminum plant. Considering that the plant requires huge amounts of electric power, a huge station was being planned in the area, on lake Vyg, about 20 kilometers from the White Sea. Hurrah! Good bye taiga and the degrading living and working condition I suffered for the past four months. Now I understood the visit of the engineer who wanted to test me for my qualification for the serious work required in the newly built camp. The camp was built in the middle of nowhere, empty space in whichever direction you looked. It was May, the weather was mild, the sun was shining 24 hours a day. This was my first exposure to the phenomenon of the so called "white nights". After some time of bewilderment, our bodies conditioned to darkness during the night, started suffering. We missed the darkness.

The living conditions were good, each of us got his own cot. And food! To hell with kettle No. 3 or 2 or 1. The engineering and technical staff got special rations, the so called ITR, every one of us, whatever his position. The food was good and adequate.

One barrack was turned into an office where we had also draughting facilities. We were about 10 people altogether, one of them a Pole, named Stefan, a student of the Polytechnics in Warsaw who somehow treated me with special respect for the sole fact that I was graduate of the same University. He expressed his attachment to me later on when the going was hard. Apart of us prisoners, the office had two free men, both electrical engineers who were salaried and had their living quarters in a building outside our camp. They treated us prisoners like colleagues in the profession, always trying to ignore the difference between our respective status. Occasionally they travelled to the closest town and served as our errand boys if we wished to buy something in the store like a bar of soap, toothpaste etc. The boss of the office was a brilliant engineer of Hungarian nationality whose surname was Egied. A tense fellow, taciturn, highly devoted to the task of the day. At a moment of frankness he told me his story. Egied was working in Germany for one of the most important electrical companies - the A.E.G. (Allgemeine Elektrizitats Gesellschaft). In 1937, he went to Leningrad to visit his sister who lived in that city. He was arrested as a German spy. During the investigation, he spent 3 years in a solitary confinement. In order to preserve his mind from becoming stagnant, Egied mentally refreshed all the subjects he had passed while studying engineering in Budapest. After that, he regurgitated all the technical problems he ever encountered while at his work in the company. His mental capacities in the cell were somehow less cluttered than while at the A.E.G. office and he made mental improvements in the equipment he was working on at that time. Actually it was an innovation, maybe even an invention concerning electric transformers. Somehow, Egied persuaded the prison administration to give him writing paper and pencils, and he put his idea on paper. The written work was taken away from him and he never heard what was done with it. Maybe a Soviet engineer passed it as his own. After being 3 years in the cell all alone, Egied got a companion. The man was a bee-keeper and the only subject he could talk on was bees and their behaviour. They were together for six months and, Egied said, that was the most dreary time he spent in the prison. Oh, yes, Egied was convicted as a spy first to death, and then the sentence was commuted to 25 years of "corrective labour-camp"

A small interlude of a personal kind, a brief jump to my remote past. I was twelve and visiting my grandparents Nadelman. You might recall that my grandpa Philip was a jeweller. He was working at his workshop on some piece of jewelry and I was standing by watching. From a nearby display, grandpa took out a small object and offered it to me saying: "Keep it for good luck". It was a green stone shaped like a cylinder, one inch in diameter, half-inch in height, well polished. I still don’t know what purpose it served or how it was to be used in the jeweller’s arts. Suffice to say that I took seriously my grandfather’s words and believed that the piece has some supernatural might. I carried it at all times on me in a leather pouch, shaped like a horse-shoe, that we in Poland used for carrying coins. The stone was my companion all through my childhood, young and mature years. Naturally, when I was leaving home in Warsaw for the last time, the stone was on me. When I was arrested in Kazan and stripped for the first time, the stone was found and thoroughly inspected by the guard who immediately suspected some kind of a communication gadget the spies are outfitted with, or maybe a new kind of explosives. It took me all my persuading abilities to assure the single-minded NKVD functionary that it is just a harmless keepsake. I have been stripped many times since, each time the scene was identical, apparently some soft spot in the even hardest-souled brute allowed me to stick to my amulet. Until my present time in the Karelo-Finn Republic.

It was a routine inspection of the camp. Every living person with all his belongings was taken outside the camp barbed wire while guards were inspecting the barracks looking for I don’t know what. When their inspection was finished we were let back in after having undergone a thorough inspection of our bodies and our belongings. Obviously, the stone found itself in the guard’s hand. When I explained to him that this is just a stone, the brute tossed it into a distance the way boys throw stones as far as possible. No, I cannot describe my feelings. Some inside force sent me to the officer commanding the guards. Apparently he noticed the passion with which I appealed to him, and said: "Go and look for it". Unescorted I marched in the general direction that I noticed the stone flew. Someone can say that Philip’s spirit came around and led me in my search. Deep in the dense green grass lay my green stone. Yes, I have it now, it looks exactly like the day I received it 76 years ago, maybe the polish disappeared due to handling. I don’t know if it has any supernatural might. On the other hand, who knows ...

And then, something else happened. The date was June 22, 1941, and that was the day the German army invaded the Soviet Union on the entire length of their common border. The Finns were allies of the Nazis and they attacked with gusto their eternal foe, the Russian people. Our camp was 80 kilometers from the border with Finland. A gloomy atmosphere pervaded our life and work. After two weeks we were told that the camp closes for the time being, and we will be transported elsewhere. Compared to the previous camp I was in, this was a paradise. Only in fables, and maybe in the Sunday sermon, an eternal life in Paradise is being promised. Mine lasted not more than several weeks.

We were loaded in cattle cars, two tiers of shelves, quite densely packed. This was war time, the railroads had more important trains to let through, we were travelling this way three weeks or more. The rail-line ended there and we were loaded on an open barge to sail up the Pechora river along the Northern Urals. After a few days, we landed on the bank of the river and some kind of a temporary camp was established. Don’t misunderstand me. Several machine guns were positioned strategically to discourage any outburst of emotion, the prisoners could sit, stand or march a few steps here and there, and that was it. Fall comes early to that geographical latitude and it started drizzling. All night through. Nobody slept. Next day, we started marching, helter-skelter, nobody required the forming of a column. The guards did not think anybody would try to escape. There was nowhere to escape to, we were surrounded by empty space all around us. At the end of the day we arrived at a camp. It was built recently, some of the barracks did not have roofs installed yet. You guessed it, we were put into the roof-less barracks, me on the upper tier although it was as wet on the lower ones. A funny thing happened to me. When the next day the camp commandant was pointed out to me I recognized in the fellow my co-religionist. I figured that the fellow might grant me some privileged attention if he knows that I am Jewish too. My knowledge of Yiddish is very limited, however I approached him and, using more German words than Yiddish started my spiel. He looked at me fiercely and asked my name. When he heard the name "Zimmermann" he became furious. "You are not a Jew, you are a German pretending to be one. Better disappear from my eyes". I had won an important enemy.

In this camp, work consisted of building a railroad bed for the future important rail line serving the coal mines in Workuta on the Arctic Ocean. It was a slow and laborious procedure. No road machines or excavators, just picks, shovels and primitive wheel-barrows. And man-power. The way they built the Egyptian pyramids. Soil was dug out from either side of the road to form future ditches.The camp was poorly supplied, no discipline, one could also feel in the air the tenseness of wartime. We, the prisoners did not have any inkling about the war-front situation, I think even those who had access to radio or press did not know about the catastrophic crumbling of the Soviet resistance to the triumphantly marching German hordes.

One day, while we were forming a semblance of a column prior to marching out for work, the commandant of the guards approached me and asked my name. After having heard it he said: "All right, you will be the brigadier and you are responsible for the group". He picked up about ten people telling them "you are the Zimmermann brigade now". The group consisted of Poles only and, surprisingly, they accepted me as a leader amicably. My new position freed me from doing the actual digging and shovelling, all I had to do was to distribute the work and to be around at all time. One of the group, a rough character, declared that he is not going to work, he covered himself with a kind of blanket as a protection from the drizzle, including his head, tent-wise, and busied himself with some kind of activity. Occasionally, the "tent" opened slightly and I saw that the fellow is sharpening a piece of metal, using a stone as a hone and forming a huge knife. One of my associates whispered to me that the fellow intends to escape. And true enough, I don’t know when and how, the man disappeared and was never heard of. I don’t think a guy of such low intelligence, without the knowledge of Russian, in the wilderness as the one surrounding us, had cherished his freedom for long. Personally, I was relieved to get rid of the brute and his "knife".

I was practically barefoot. The dress shoes I had on when leaving Warsaw, consisted only of the uppers, you could drive your fist through the sole. A young fellow in my group approached me, looked at my feet and said: "Don’t worry, I will get you a pair, just wanted to see the size." The very next day, confidentially, he handed me a pair a shoes. The shoes were of the type popular in labour-camps, the uppers made of small bits, cuttings from the regular shoe industry, sewn together, with the sole made of some rubber trash. Naturally, the fellow stole the shoes from somebody during the night. Fearing that the rightful owner of the shoes might recognize them on my feet (and, legitimately, kill me) I covered them completely with mud which dried and formed kind of a second skin. I presented my saviour with a package of "makhorka" (crude tobacco) I somehow saved from times when they were being distributed among the prisoners. At least I felt protected for the approaching severe winter.

One day, while at work at the slowly shaping railroad bed, I was approached by one of the guards who was walking around on the periphery. He heard us talking Polish and asked me if we are Poles. Then he just whispered: "Soon you will be going home" and walked away. I did not know what to make of this information which I communicated to my fellows. Nobody could make any sense of the news and we forgot about it

One day, without any warning, I became blind. As soon as the day turned into early evening, and where we were it started around 2 p.m., I was losing my eyesight totally, I did not see my hand in front of my eyes. Even indoors, with the petrol lamp illumination, all I saw was just the halo around the lamp. It came unexpectedly in a very awkward situation. As the work leader, after coming back to the camp I had to go to the office to report the amount of work done that day. I whiled away the time there longer than anticipated and when I left the administration barrack I did not see anything. The fact of blindness among camp inmates was no news to me. The total lack of vitamins in our food caused, among other symptoms, the so called "chicken blindness" but I did not realize what kind of calamity it is in the circumstances I was in, until I was hit by the scourge myself. I started moving slowly in the direction I remembered, step after step, and I fell into an abyss. The camp territory was crisscrossed with ditches dug there since the war started, to be used as a protection in case the camp is bombed from the air. The ditches were six feet deep and arranged in zigzags. A passing man whom I did not even see extended his hand and helped me to climb out of my temporary grave. He also brought me to my barrack. I was a total invalid, helpless and with no chance of survival. And again, Providence sent an angel in form of Stefan. You might remember the student who was working with me at the engineering office back in the Karelo-Finn Republic, who somehow developed respect for me as a senior colleague. Stefan was the one who brought me food. Our camp had no mess-hall. At the time of the meal, everybody had to line up at the window with his own container into which soup was poured. Without this container, usually formed from a discarded preserved food can, you were lost. Those who did not possess one, formed partnerships. They joined the line at a substantial distance from each other. The one in front was served his soup into the container, ate the soup right there fast and carried the empty vessel to his partner in the line. Once, I witnessed a scene when a desperate fellow, with no container at the moment when he approached the kitchen window, took off one of the galoshes he was wearing on his bare feet, and produced it to be filled with the soup. Back to Stefan. He brought me my container filled with soup, having somehow convinced the supervisor that it was for his blind pal. When I took out my wooden spoon and immersed it in the soup, I felt somebody gently taking the spoon and turning it around. I was holding it the wrong side up. This single gesture amid the harshness of the surrounding life touched me deeply and I expressed it by saying: "Stefan, I don’t know what our future is going to be, but wherever I am I would like to be in touch with you." No, it did not happen that way.

I would like to explain here briefly what the term "lekpom" means in the jargon of the labour-camps. Every camp, however remote from civilization both geographically and as to the life conditions it offers, has a "lekpom". In the hierarchy of the camp the individual represents the noble calling of the medical profession. The term itself consists of two words: "lekarskaya" meaning "medical" and "pomoshch" meaning "help", in short, a kind of paramedic. In real life, the man has as much in common with medicine as I, for instance with the noble science of astrophysics. At a certain point, the lekpom of our camp was a lawyer who was given this post solely for the reason that he was the only man in the group with university degree. What did the lekpom do? Nothing. Maybe he had a bottle of iodine and a roll of bandage. Maybe not. What he did have was a separate room, partitioned off the barrack, with two or three cots, called "infirmary".

Then it happened that I fell sick, really sick. Stefan took me to the lekpom who diagnosed that I have a high fever. As both the cots were already occupied I was allowed to lie down on the floor between the wall and one of the cots. Next day, the two "patients" from the cots were sent back to work as cured of whatever was their complaint, and I was given the comfort of a cot and solitude. The lekpom who had his cot in the same room had a chat with me just to kill the time and boredom. The fellow was intelligent enough and had sympathy with me for being blind and so experiencing extra privation in the camp life. I asked him what is the procedure if a camp inmate becomes really sick, when the patient requires a hospital or even surgical aid. It turned out, that some distance from our camp, there is another penal compound with a professionally run hospital manned by doctors of various specialties, prisoners as well. In serious cases, the lekpom is empowered to send a sick prisoner with the escort of a guard to the hospital. A desperate idea was born in my fevered head as I felt that my chances of survival in the fast approaching arctic winter were nil. If I get to the hospital, speak to the doctors and explain my difficult position of a blinded inmate, appeal to them as a university confrere, maybe, just maybe they will find some more suitable occupation within the hospital itself than digging a ditch. Under my car coat, I had a jacket from the time I left home in september 1939. I made an offer to the lekpom. I will express my gratitude to him in the form of my jacket if he arranges my trip to the hospital as a patient too sick for him to take care of. He liked the jacket, and I think he was really frank in his compassion with me. He kept my present, and said that in few days there will be an opportunity to have a transport going that way. In the meantime, I will stay in his infirmary.

There is a Polish proverb whose gist, in translation, is: "The man shoots, God carries the bullet". This time it was not God, but General Sikorski of the Polish Government in Exile, with offices in London, England. Unknowingly to us prisoners in various labour-camps, Stalin and General Sikorski signed an agreement by which all previous Polish citizens, both men and their families, will be amnestied and a Polish army will be formed on the territory of the Soviet Union in order to fight, side-by-side with the glorious Red Army, against our common enemy, the barbaric German hordes which already swallowed a big portion of the European part of USSR. No, we did not know all this background, all we were told was that Poles are being registered and we have to go to the administration office to report. On that day, whoever reported as a Pole was not sent to work, we all gathered at the administration barrack. A man, a recently arrived emissary, had our files in front of him in which he found the place of our origin. A footnote. You might remember that, in 1939, Poland was divided into two parts, the western part annexed to Germany, the eastern, inhabited mostly by people of Ukrainian and Byelorussian descent, - to the Soviet Union. In the Stalin-Sikorski agreement, only Poles born in the part of Poland occupied by the Germans, were taken into account as those covered by the amnesty. Poles from the eastern part of the country were considered to be Soviet citizens. As one born in Warsaw I did qualify. Then, I was asked to serve in the peculiar role of an expert. When I entered, there was a Jewish man of about fifty who maintained that the place of his birth, an obscure hamlet, somewhere in the eastern outskirts of former Poland, was near Warsaw and he lived and worked all his life in the city. The Soviet official wanted me to examine the man if he is telling the truth and if he knows the city as he tells he does. First of all, using a Yiddish word or two which I introduced among my Polish phrases, I assured the man who was desperately pleading with me using his eyes although being mute, that I was on his side. Then I asked him how to reach one address from another place, and while he was giving me an incoherent answer I nodded sagely as if he was giving a satisfactory itinerary, although it was obvious that he never put his foot in Warsaw. I asked him some more questions, like where was the main Post Office, etc. and, in the end, assured the Soviet official that the man knows the city like his own pocket. The man was registered as one covered by the amnesty.

I still had some fever but the excitement of the recent event made me forget any ills and I was preparing for our "freedom march" next day. The lekpom turned out to be a gentleman, he returned my jacket and congratulated me on the unexpected and timely solution. Much later, the jacket was used as lining to a parka sewn of a military blanket made available to me.

A small group of Poles, still under escort of guards marched out next morning from the camp followed by the unbelieving eyes of other inmates destined to linger in the camp for years. We were about forty people strong, somehow I was the only one with higher education and this fact, by a mute mutual agreement, made me a leader. I was walking in the front, my belongings carried by somebody behind me, presumably on account of my recent sickness. It is impossible to describe the feelings of a man who only recently was at the very bottom of misery, sick and most of the time blind, in the harsh environment, and abominable future. After a few hours, we reached another camp where Poles were already segregated to join us in the exodus. I met a few interesting individuals and, somehow, we kept together. In a couple of days, we were already a column of couple of hundreds and we were brought to a compound made available for those subject to the amnesty. We were given good food, and what was most important to me personally, herrings. The latter were the only cure for my "chicken blindness" and in few days I could function in the dark as good as before.

Each of us was called to the office, given a document stating that the person named has been released from the "Northern-Pechora Corrective Labour-Camp", the said document to serve as our only identification card in case we are stopped by militia as a suspicious individuals, an everyday occurrence. We were also given bread and some preserves to see us through for several days. The door in the gate opened, and each man was let out, one by one, as he had been processed. The intervals were about three minutes, and a continuous line of marchers formed leading to the nearest railway depot a few miles away. I was waiting for Stefan to join me as arranged, but there was some delay in the camp, and I followed the line hoping to meet my friend at the depot. I never saw him again, or heard of him. I will also never forget him. His friendship and kindness at the time of my ordeal with blindness was a first for me. You see, Stefan was a Roman Catholic.

A train consisting of passenger cars was waiting at the depot. I had a very pleasant group in the compartment, the mood was understandably high; after several days we arrived at the town of Buzuluk in Bashkirian Republic where the headquarters of the forming Polish army were located. And here, I encountered the general atmosphere exactly as I remembered it to exist in my Polish Fatherland (?). Now, dear reader, no explanation of the question mark is needed. When the registering officer heard my first name he visibly stiffened. Inwardly, he wished me back in the Northern-Pechora Corrective Labour-Camp. Later on, a fellow I met, also of Jewish faith told me about his problem. His first name happened to be Stanislaw, a truly Polish name. When he gave it to the officer during the registration, that individual did not want to accept it and said: "No, give me your real first name. It cannot be Stanislaw. That is a Christian name". Hearing that vicious anti-Semitic remark, I somehow developed warm feelings for the labour-camp I recently left.

Quite by chance, in Buzuluk I met Richard who escaped with me from the 17th kilometer settlement and later spent months in the prison cell. It turned out that Richard had an easy life in the labour-camp he was in. Richard’s mother language was German. In the camp he chanced to meet a medical doctor, of German descent, who was working in the camp hospital. The doctor found an easy job in the facility for Richard and the latter lived the life of Reily. Compare it with mine! Richard was in company of some doctors and decided to stick with them.

I also encountered the other Richard, the one who was with me when we were leaving Warsaw. He had a different story. While working in the forest in a labour-camp, he broke his leg. That turned out to be a blessing, he spent almost the entire time until the amnesty in a hospital. Why did I not think about it ?

In a day or two, Buzuluk facilities became crowded and most of the recent comers were sent 40 kilometers further to a tent camp built in a veritable steppe. The month was November, cold and very windy. All of us had to undergo a medical examination, a routine operation. I was given category "C" meaning I am not fit for the army service. Granted, I was emaciated after the hard labour and starvation food served to us in the camps, but so was everybody. I was somewhat puzzled, but inwardly pleased having seen the prevailing hateful atmosphere in the forming Polish army. Then, I established that all the enlistees of the Jewish faith were rejected, whilst from among the Catholics only those with a leg or arm chopped off. The fact did not escape the American reporters active in the Soviet Union; American Jewry raised the question with their Government, a small scandal developed. In our tent-town, a proclamation was posted on the wall of the administration tent. I will try to bring it in translation verbatim: "Rumours are circulating that medical examiners of the Polish Army rejected enlistees of the Jewish faith only because of their nationality. The truth is that Jews are of feeble physique and that was the only reason of rejection". Signed by Gen. Anders. I don’t think anybody bought this inane explanation, another medical examination was ordered apparently by the Polish government in exile. Those rejected, exclusively of Jewish faith gathered around the place of the medical examination waiting to be called. A young officer approached us and whispered that he would like to talk to us confidentially. He hinted that anyone who does not wish to serve in the army even if found able-bodied by the medical examiners, may declare that he had a family to support, and he will be excused from active service as the sole breadwinner. I cannot guarantee for everybody, but the entire small group I was with was determined to put any contact with the entire anti-Semitic Polish army behind them and to build their future as civilians. The entire comedy proceeded as pre-arranged, I was found hale and healthy, fit for active service. Then the head of the medical commission asked me if I have a family to support, I answered that I have a wife whose name and present address were duly noted although everybody in the room knew that the entire story is a fiction. I was issued an official document, in both Polish and Russian languages stating that I have been excused from active service in the Polish Army due to conditions as provided by paragraph number so and so, etc. etc.The document did not quote the reason for my release and that is why it helped me later on, a situation that will be dealt with in my narrative in pages ahead.

A few words about further developments concerning the Polish Army formed in the Soviet Union, or "Anders’ Army" as it was popularly called, Gen. Anders being its Chief of Staff. It did not fight the German army side-by-side with the Russians. Somehow, Stalin agreed that the entire Polish army leave the territory of the Soviet Union, including the families of those conscripted. Prior to their massive exodus via Teheran, Iran, without giving any explanation, the Polish General Staff decreed that Jewish officers and soldiers, with few exceptions, shall be removed from the list and left behind. And so it happened.

The time was December, 1941, the German army occupied almost one-half of the European part of USSR and was approaching Moscow. The inhabitants of that city, the entire staffs of factories, universities, etc. were being massively transported to the rear, primarily to the Central Asian republics where the climate was mild and life was easier. Our small group of rejectees of the Polish Army had to find some place where we could start taking care of ourselves and we decided to join the fleeing masses and to go to Central Asia. Our total knowledge of the place we chose was based on the book that was a best-seller shortly before the war started; its title: "Tashkent, the city of Bread". Tashkent is the capital of the Uzbek Republic, in Soviet Central Asia. Very exotic, very alluring. Mind you, we were a group of vagabonds, with no attachments, no luggage, and practically no money. We marched the several kilometers to the railway station and climbed aboard the first train that stopped there. It happened to be one of those evacuation trains whose destination was the city of Chkhalov, already east of the Ural Mountains, i.e. in Asia. Good enough, the general direction of our final destination. The cars were packed, our group of four was happy to stand on the open platform of the car while the train was taking us away from the tent town and the bitter taste of the Polish community. We were boisterous, singing and jumping to keep warm. The toilet of the passenger car was adjoining our platform, and those using the toilet could not help but seeing us there. Russians are very warm-hearted people, the majority of the car passengers were women, apparently we were the subject of their discussion. A delegation of two women came out and said: "Look, you cannot stay here in the cold, the night is approaching, come we will somehow find a seat for each of you separately". I was lucky, one half of the car was filled by students of the Moscow University, mostly girls, men being in the army, and I got a seat there. I became a sensation when they used a few words in English under the impression that it is confidential and here I started talking fluently in this language. We had a wonderful time. In Chkhalov, we said a warm good-bye to our co-travellers, and entered the railway station. The huge waiting rooms of the station resembled a camp of refugees. People were waiting there for days for any train going in the direction toward Central Asia, complete chaos and pandemonium. We met there also a large group of Polish people who were released from various labour camps, and were now trying to reach the same destination as we were. We were stuck in Chkhalov station for a week of so. One late evening, when I was idly walking near the station, I banged into a fellow I knew from before. He told me that there is a train on a remote siding, due to start soon and its destination is Tashkent. I ran into the station to secretly alarm our group, but only one fellow was around and it was Richard, the one from Warsaw. We ran in the direction pointed out to me before, and true enough there was a train already filled to the roof. We sat down on the floor and the train started moving a few minutes later. The few square feet on the floor were our means of travelling, we sat there during the day and slept there during the nights, and every hour brought us nearer to our destination. By now, we were experienced hoboes, satisfied with everything that was available at the time. Another little encounter with my Polish "compatriots". The car next to the one we were travelling on, turned out to be occupied by a large group of Polish citizens travelling to Central Asia where another batch of Polish troops were forming. On one of the stops, a very pleasant lady entered our car, introduced herself as the leader of the group, she somehow heard that two Polish fellows are travelling on the floor and suggested that we join her group where we could find better accommodation. I went to explore. I entered a big compartment and introduced myself aloud as engineer Zimmermann. For those unfamiliar with customs prevalent in the European countries, similar to the title of doctor on this continent, people with University degrees, like engineers and lawyers use the title while introducing themselves. Back to the car. Immediately, a voice from the crowd asked: "And what is your first name, Engineer Zimmermann?" I knew the smirking tone and the element I was dealing with here; I just left them behind in the tent town of the Polish Army. I answered: "I introduced myself to you, you don’t have the grace to do the same. Besides, I don’t think I and you will be on a first name basis ever, so my name is none of your bloody business." (only, in Polish the word "bloody" sounds more like "shitty"), and left the car.

The city of Tashkent turned out to be a bedlam. The weather was mild, the huge square in front of the rail station packed with refuges sitting on their luggage. It was early evening when we arrived, darkness fell and the juvenile thieves lurking among the crowds had their field. Here and there you could hear people screaming that an item of their possession was grabbed in front of their eyes. I reversed my pitiful knapsack hanging it on my front to prevent an urchin from cutting it with a blade. We met a few people we knew from before, and sat all night through. Always a globe-trotter, I wanted to see the city, ancient and exotic, with magnificent mosques and palaces built at the time when it was the capital of a thriving independent country. Before the night, we returned to the station and climbed the first train travelling away from the nightmare of Tashkent. Next morning, the train stopped at a station called kokand, and from the window I saw a market near-by where local women were selling some vegetables. I told Richard to mind our things, I will be a minute and am going to buy some tomatoes. I took a small linen sack to carry the tomatoes in. Ten minutes later I was back on the station platform, but there was no train. A solitary girl was sitting on her suitcase. I asked her what happened with the train and was told that it left the station about 5 minutes ago. I had a standing agreement with Richard: in a case like this, he has to leave the train on the next station and wait for me. My informant on the platform turned out to be a pretty girl from the city of Crakow in Poland, likewise released by the general amnesty and now trying to reach some relatives already established somewhere about. Her train is due only the next day. I suggested that we stick together and she gladly accepted the proposition. I excused myself for a while and visited a barber to shave off the week’s growth on my face. The girl, by name Bronka (no, not my present wife, just a coincidence) appreciated my gallantry of trying to look civilized in her presence and we sat down chatting amiably. After a while the girl looked somewhat peculiar and I asked what is the matter. She said: "I don’t know how to express it but a louse is marching on your scarf under your chin." Here I am trying to be a man of the world, and suddenly this! Of course I knew about the lice in my clothing. The millions on the trains and anywhere in the country were covered with the vermin. Apparently I blushed visibly because the girl said: "If I knew you would react so deeply, I would not tell you. But, for your information, I have an assortment of lice in my clothing, too". We sat all the night in the station talking, and in the morning I helped the girl with her luggage to her train after she gave me the address where she was going to stay in case I wanted to write. Yes, we did exchange letters once or twice, and then events interrupted the correspondence.

I was still stuck in the station of kokand with no means of getting on any passenger train which were surrounded by troops while at the stop. To buy a ticket you needed a special document, I had little money and only the sack with tomatoes which started to leak bloody drops. Close to the station there was a building housing the Soviet military post. I decided to try my luck there. When I entered the office, the commandant was just leaving dressed in his coat, and I stopped him. I explained that I am a Polish citizen just released thanks to the amnesty granted to us by comrade Stalin, I was on the train destined to the Polish army forming in the city of Bukhara (true!), I left the train just to buy some tomatoes (here, I produced my bloody sack) and I am marooned here with no means of reaching my destination. The commandant bought my spiel. He returned to his office, gave me a document which allowed me free transportation on the train going to Bukhara and also a coupon to get free bread from the military store near-by. I legitimately entered the train going in the desired direction and alighted at the very next station whose name I did not even know. According to our plan, Richard with my knapsack should be there. He was not. I stayed there a day and a night. Having no paper, in the post office I bought several post cards, hand-printed a message: "Richard, I am here looking for you. Don’t go away." I pasted the cards in strategic locations. Then I marched to the town, a distance of a couple of kilometers assuming that maybe Richard waits for me there. I have to make a brief digression to describe the meaning of the word "chaikhana". Uzbekistan where I was now was a Moslem country and some of the old customs have been preserved. The Uzbeks are compulsive talkers, when two of them meet, they sit down on the ground right there and will talk until the night. But of course, they prefer the chaikhana, a combination of tea-room and a club. Even the smallest hamlet has its own chaikhana or two. It is a big, crude hall with wooden shelves at the height of a chair-seat. You can sit with your feet on the floor or lie down the way the ancient Romans did. The owner of the place brings to your place an earthenware teapot full of piping-hot tea and a "piala", kind of a large cup without the ear. To keep the tea hot longer, the client covers the tea-pot with part of his long, padded coat and spends hours sipping the brew. The tea was of a green colour supposed to cool during the hot summer spells. If there are two Uzbeks talking, each ceremoniously treats the other fellow from his pot. The chaikhana serves also as a hotel. For a small fee, you can sleep right there on the shelf covered with a threadbare carpet. I spent two nights in the chaikhana, hoping to meet Richard somewhere in the streets. I visited the local hospital in case he was sick or something. I even went to the local militia to inquire if he was not arrested for some violation. No Richard. In the process, I was arrested myself. It happened this way. I saw a short line-up in front of a store. It turned out that they were selling some canned food, no big deal but vital to me. Problem was that I had no money. I took my place in the line, and when a man joined me I explained to him my predicament and offered to sell him a small package of crude tobacco that I had on me. He offered a ridiculous price and I said no. The man disappeared and in a minute came with a militia man pointing at me as a "speculant" meaning a black-marketeer, an offence which is punishable by years of labour-camp in the Soviet Union. I was arrested and taken to the militia post near-by. Alone with the the militia man I had a long speech. First of all I produced the document given to me by the Soviet military commandant allowing me free transportation to the city where the Polish army was being organized. I stopped in this place to recover my belongings which were with my friend. I am due to be enlisted in the Polish army in order to fight our common enemy and he, the militia man is going to deprive his own fatherland of one fighter by jailing me in this place. He can keep the bloody package of tobacco, I am not a smoker anyway as he already ascertained finding nothing else in my pockets. To save his face, the fellow wrote a note which I had to sign. He gives me 24 hours to leave the place, after which I will be arrested as a black-marketeer. I had no business to stay in the bloody place anyway, and I marched to the station. Glory, hallelujah! Richard was there in the station having seen my messages displayed all around. My knapsack he had deposited for safe-keeping right in the station. I redeemed it saying hello to my measly possession, the only one I had in the whole wide world. Also we met there a small group of men we knew from the tent town of the Polish army. Like us, they were released from the active service and were at loss what to do next. Some were advised by the Soviet local authorities to go further to a place named Pap and to report to the local NKVD office which will find jobs for us. Eventually, only four of us reached the destination: Tadek Honigsztok, Stefan Finder, Richard and myself. We duly reported to the Commandant of the local NKVD, and as an introduction, laid the documents given to us by the Polish Army in front of him on his desk. After having read the Russian text, the fellow said: "I see, you are invalids and I will arrange some light work for you". We looked at one another and did not try to straighten his error. Of course, he read that the army releases us from service which means that our health is the only reason. It so happened that an official from a near-by "sowkhoz" (state farm) was in the town and he was ordered to take us there and to give us some light work. The distance was about 10 kilometers including a ferry over the river Syr-Daria. The name was familiar to me from books about Dzenghis Khan and also from history of ancient eras. I felt like Dr. Livingstone in the jungles of Africa. Not that the scenery resembled a jungle. On the contrary, it was flat and empty of vegetation. Our guide informed us that the farm we are going to call our home, grows only cotton, has several subdivisions but we will be in the main sector.

Our first stop after the arrival was the local chaikhana, the substitute to a hotel. The few Russian officials of the farm came to look at us. The way our guide explained to them we have been recently invalided while fighting the Germans being soldiers of the Polish Army. We did not try to contradict the deception, behaved quietly and demurely as the "invalids" should. The well-wishing store-keeper provided us with an extra ration of bread and we were treated gently by all around. Stefan Finder, whom I met only recently, was a sickly young man, coughing and constantly running high temperature. He lost his health in the labour-camp where working and living conditions were killing the inmates. We were told that the farm has its own hospital and we went there to explore. A young female doctor, of Volga-German descent, was aware of our arrival at the farm, was most sympathetic and, after having examined Stefan, accepted him as a patient of her surprisingly well run infirmary. He stayed there for months, his problem was tuberculosis which he contracted while a prisoner. We visited him occasionally, he was quite comfortable, well fed and in sleeping accommodation that I remembered from my pre-war times.

The fact that one of us four landed in the farm hospital confirmed only the general deception that we are genuine invalids. After several days, we were transferred to the dormitory where two of the local tractor-drivers had their sleeping accommodations. The latter consisted of primitive cots covered with a semblance of mattress. A crude table, two benches and a kitchen range completed the decor. At least we had a roof above our heads, a rarity in our recent existence. We were also assigned work, a light work fit to our physical possibilities. A footnote. Uzbekistan is a cotton growing country. Our state farm was also in this business and we arrived there already after the seasonal harvest. When mature, the cotton bud resembles the bud of a poppy. The woody petals open and their contents, which look like surgical wad, hang out. The stuff is collected in huge bins and transferred to gigantic storage structures for the natural drying process. However, some of the buds were late in blooming and remained un-opened. These have to be torn off their stems, forced open and their contents taken out like sections of an orange. They were later processed as inferior quality cotton. Tadek, Richard and myself were taken to the field, given huge sacks and instructed how to handle the job. After having accumulated a sackful we brought the contents to our dormitory, emptied it on the floor and occupied ourselves with the process of opening the buds. The woody peelings were used as fuel for our range, the cotton sectors loaded into the sacks again and carried to the collection place where they were weighed and the amount noted in records. Each of us was paid for the amount of cotton he delivered to the storage. One day, and it was January 1, 1942, we were in the field, dressed only in shirt-sleeves, busy with our work in a huge empty field, with sky-scraping peaks of the famous Tian-Shian mountains on the horizon, I stopped the work and called to my two companions: "Look around and imprint in your memory this sight and this moment. If ever, in the future we will tell our story, nobody will believe us. The date which we associate with a fierce winter cold, and the scenery around us, the work we are doing." Alas, I am the only one of the three of us left, I cannot share my memories with anyone.

The pay for our work was regulated by the local rates, and we decided to apply some ingenious trick to enhance our income. A heavy stone was placed at the bottom of the sack and attached so that it could not fall out. The sack filled with cotton was put on the scale and weighed after which we had to take the sack and empty it in the collection place. The cotton poured out, the stone remained in the sack. Our pay grew by about 10%. It is quite possible that the Uzbek servicing the scales guessed our fraud but remained silent. We, the "invalids", were generally liked in our small community. There were refugees from the European part of the USSR working on our farm but we did not socialize with them. The farm had a communal bath, and we noticed sometimes other bathers looking curiously at us and wondering what makes us to be invalids. Our limbs were all there. Once, much later, I had to give some explanations. One of our farm’s subdivision had a diesel-powered generator that was not used for years due to some defect that was never fixed. Knowing of my profession, the head of our farm suggested that I have a look at the power station and, if I make it run and take care of it, my position will become very important and, consequently, my pay will increase significantly. I was on a dangerous ground. God knows in what condition the entire shebang was, secondly responsibility for an installation of any kind may lead to the accusation of "sabotage", so frequently used by the NKVD against innocent people. Here is when my stature of "invalid" became useful. I explained to the man that a grenade exploded close to me at the front. I did not suffer any wounds but my entire nervous system is out of kilter. There are days when I suffer terrible head-aches, my limbs stiffen, I have to lie prone and wait until it goes away. Such fits come unexpectedly, and there is no cure. The man, an Uzbek, nodded his head during my spiel, I don’t know how much he believed the story, anyway I was never bothered anymore. Besides, soon my position changed for the better anyway as I will describe later on.

The season of the unripe buds was over and we, the invalids, were given some other work to suit our feeble state of health. With its climate of long summers, Uzbekistan is densely overgrown with all kinds of weeds with their thick, hard stalks. After they had dried, the weeds form a passable fuel for cooking and such. Using the local version of spades (the blade at 90 degrees to the wooden rod) we cut the dense bushes of the stuff and spread them on the ground to dry in the sun. A child’s play compared to what I was doing in the taigas of the labour-camps.

You might ask what were we eating. Bread, our main staple was provided daily from the store. I do not remember what was the weight of a ration . It was regulated by the law of the country and did not deviate even by a gram. We had plenty of boiled water, a huge pot on the range provided it at any time. Fuel was the stalks of the cotton bush, hard and long-burning. Uzbekistan has no freely growing trees, just orchards. For the measly money that we were earning by collecting the immature cotton bulbs we were buying some vegetables from Uzbeks who were growing them in their garden plots. Tadek was our self-proclaimed cook, and occasionally we had some soup. Altogether, these were hungry times on our farm and in its subdivisions, people were starving. It was an early spring, and rains came. The soil in Uzbekistan is pure clay. The roads became impassable mires, transportation came to a standstill. Our bakery was located in one of our subdivisions several kilometers from the center we lived in. Even oxen could not move the wagon over the roads. There was no bread. Period. I do not know what other people were doing, Tadek said we have to find something to fill our stomachs with. There was an abundance of weeds growing in the ditches and we collected the more juicy ones. Tadek cooked a kind of spinach and we ate it. Nobody dropped dead, we did not get stomach cramps, there was no limit in supply. As a variety, Tadek cooked a soup of the same stuff. With the flair of a chef he asked us daily what is our preference, soup or spinach. There was one phenomenon associated with our peculiar diet. Our excrements were brightly green. Honest.

After several days, the transportation was resumed and bread arrived. No compensation for the missed rations, just the daily supplies.

A Russian, our farm’s official who was travelling on some business to the capital of our district, a town called Namangan, told us upon his return that there is some kind of Polish consulate in the town which provides aid to Polish citizens. We decided to explore this very vague information. From the two tractor drivers, our dormitory co-tenants, we got four bottles of naphtha which they used as fuel for their machines and which could be easily sold on the black market in the town. People used naphtha to fill their lamps. The transaction was supposed to finance our trip and stay in the town. No corks were available, we somehow improvised some stoppers that threatened to slip out at any moment. Tadek had two bottles hidden on his body, and so had I. We realized that we became thus walking bombs, and accepted the risk with humor. While marching to the rail station, a distance of five kilometers, on a bumpy road, I reminded Tadek to develop a smooth stride otherwise the liquid will push out our improvised stoppers. We arrived at the station, and sat outdoors waiting for our train. A Russian woman was sitting at our table and holding something in her hand. Time again she put that thing in her mouth. We asked her what is she eating. Out of her pocket she produced two more pieces and offered them to us. Some explanation is in order. The cotton plant contains small seeds. These seeds are pressed exuding oily stuff which will be later processed and used for cooking as cotton seed oil. A secondary product of the pressing process is a pizza-shaped mass of compressed stuff, very hard and impossible to break using fingers.You cannot bite it either, just to keep in your mouth and suck. It is being used as food for cows.

Our train arrived and we mounted it. No seats available, we prepared for a three-hour trip in a standing position. To while away the boredom we were talking. After a while, a man sitting near by, approached us and said, in Polish: "I could not help but hear your conversation, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Leon Katz, I am a lawyer, I am going to Namangan on business, And who are you?". First, Tadek and I spat out the small pieces of stuff we were sucking, and introduced ourselves to the pleasant man using our university titles of engineers. He wanted to know what was it that we were holding in our mouths and we explained. The man was genuinely touched. It turned out that Mr. Katz is one of the officials of the organization whose purpose was to help needy Polish citizens scattered in various state and collective farms in the area. We arrived at the town in the middle of the night and sat outdoors chatting until the morning hours. Then we walked together to the place where the organization had its office and warehouse. When we approached the entrance, Mr. Katz asked us to wait here, and entered the place. Few minutes later, another man came out, introduced himself as the head of the organization and ceremoniously invited us to enter the office. Later on, Leon Katz with whom we became good friends, told me that when he entered the office, he said to Mr. Galusinski, the boss: "On the train, I had an eerie encounter. I met two Polish engineers who were munching cow’s food to kill the hunger. They are here, outdoors."

Sitting at the office, we briefly explained how we came to be on the farm, and also informed the listeners that we represent two more fellows in the same predicament, one of them a sick fellow temporarily in the local infirmary. Nobody doubted the veracity of our story. Mr Galusinski took us to a huge warehouse and instructed its keeper to select for us whatever is available, for four people. It was an odd selection. We were given high rubber boots to be worn on the ground arid for most of the year, artistically finished sleeveless sheepskin jackets useless in the climate we lived in, to name just two. But, there was food, too. We got rice, flour, preserves, etc. Altogether, two big bags we barely coped with. The Polish organization we were so richly outfitted by was financed by American philanthropic organizations and it had its subsidiaries in smaller districts of the country. Leon Katz was in charge of such a subsidiary and he asked me to contact other Polish citizens who lived in the district that our farm was in. The only way for me to accomplish it was by word of mouth. Since time immemorial, every Sunday, in the regional town of Pap they were having an open air bazaar. From all over the region, Uzbeks in their national attire and head-gear, artistically embroidered caps, were displaying their wares and foodstuff. A typically oriental commercial enterprise visited by anyone wishing to buy anything. That was the point of contact of people living in various state and collective farms in the area who were marching miles to attend this weekly event. As they were always short of money, you could see the refugees offering for sale pieces of their meagre supply of clothes.

But back to our visit in the city of Namangan. While at the office of the Polish agency, Tadek met a friend from his home town who invited us to spend the night with him. He also bought our four bottles of naphtha and paid handsomely for them. He bought them for resale and even a more handsome profit.

A brief digression. Both Tadek and myself were not aware what risk we were taking by transporting the bottles of naphtha on us. Only much later, I had a chance to find out what was involved. A Polish fellow, one of our crowd, bought a bottle of naphtha to use it in his lamp at home. He was stopped by a militia man, a frequent occurrence in the system we lived in, and the object of his purchase was revealed. The man was arrested. Justice is very speedy in this country and open to the public in order to scare the people from similar temptation. I attended the court procedure curious about the verdict and the fate of the poor fellow. Here is what the judge said: "Our fatherland is fighting the barbaric enemy who invaded our beloved land. Our tanks defending the front line are being run on naphtha. The bottle of the stuff that you bought on the black market would enable one of our tanks to move some distance forward. You deprived our heroic warriors in the tank to do their brave exploit. You are an enemy of our beloved fatherland and I am going to discipline you accordingly. Ten years in the corrective labour-camp. There is no such thing as appeal in the Soviet Union.

Next day we travelled home loaded like camels. We displayed our wares and were generous towards the two tractor drivers, our co-tenants. Now, Tadek could really amaze us with his, so far, theoretical culinary abilities.

There were unexpected developments. A day after our return from Namangan, we were visited by two militia men who came to arrest us as suspects in a burglary case. It turned out, that a day before our departure, two Russian ladies on our farm had their room broken-in, some items, including jewelry pieces stolen. Fact that the very next day Tadek and myself disappeared from the farm and returned two days later loaded with food and other goodies, convinced everyone in our small community that we are the burglars. When the representatives of the law saw the heaps of goodies on our cots, they took out the handcuffs from their pockets. The fantastic story that we told them about the chance meeting with a stranger on the train, his interference and ensuing generosity of the the new Polish agency, sounded like fable from a children’s book. Then, I showed the two men the labels on our gifts: the rubber boots made in India, the sheepskin jackets in Iran, the preserves in some similar exotic country and asked them if these items are really available locally. This argument convinced the two representatives of the law, they left each holding in his hand a can of foreign preserves, a gift from two, after all, honest Polish citizens.

The very next Sunday, I was attending the bazaar in Pap. Anyone of Polish origin was told of the existence of the philanthropic agency, asked to spread the news among their countrymen wherever they lived in the area, and informed about the registration that will start a week later. In the USSR, any activity of this kind has to have approval of the local NKVD. When I went to inform the appropriate official of our intended registration of the former Polish citizens, the man, quite intelligent and polite, knew of what I was about to do and assigned a room in the local school as my temporary office.

Back on our farm, I persuaded the administration of the necessity of having a separate room where I could do my "office" work and have a storage for food products soon to arrive for distribution among the Polish citizens. Somehow, I reached the stature of a consul of a foreign country. A large room was assigned to us, with three cots for our small group, a table with three chairs and a bench plus a padlock to secure the door during our absence. Forgotten was any work assignment at the farm, we moved around importantly pretending to be busy with vital foreign affairs.

The ensuing registration revealed quite a crowd of former Polish citizens who had found refuge in local farms after they had been liberated due to the general amnesty. It was only natural that they treated me as an important official of the remote agency of whose existence they did not know. Unintentionally, I became the leader of a large group of people mostly of peasant descent. The fact revealed itself much later and I will come to it in due time.

The registration resulted in another happy occurrence. Our fourth companion, Stefan Finder, knew that somewhere in the Soviet Union he had a married sister but did not know the address. One day, unannounced, his brother-in-law, a noted physician from Crakow, arrived at our farm to take Stefan to their home. I was away on that day and did not witness the encounter, it was quite weepy. The good doctor did not expect to find his relative in such poor health. He learned of Stefan’s whereabouts from the registration list provided by the Polish agency. For a while, we were getting letters from Stefan, later the correspondence petered out.

Leon Katz came to our place bringing with him two big sacks one of powdered milk, the other of flour, for distribution among those on the list. He also confided to us that he intends to organize a kind of orphanage for Polish children of families scattered all over the territory in order to provide adequate food and some sort of national atmosphere. In that case, he might use the services of Tadek’s second profession - that of a cook- and possibly mine. There was also a plan of bringing the Polish families scattered all over closer to one place and that place was supposed to be our state farm and its subsidiaries. That way, distribution of the aid will be made easier.

From that point on, events moved quickly. Polish families started arriving to our farm, the distribution of aid widened, although very reluctantly Tadek left us for his new job at the neighbouring county of Chust where Katz resided.

Looking back, I am amazed myself how lightly we were treating a distance of say 20 or 25 kilometers dividing one town from another. There was no public transportation. Occasionally, you could catch a ride on a truck going from one place to another, for a fee. That was spotty, sometimes you could wait half a day and no truck in sight. I relied on my own two legs. After I left the town, the sheer desert started. Not a single dwelling, not a single tree, not a single bush. Emptiness all around you, not a single wanderer. The sun shining down, the temperature around 60 degrees Celsius. The Uzbeks were usually travelling on donkeys, and avoided the heat of the day. My march took 4 or 5 hours, my only extra protection against the sun was a handkerchief that I attached to my Uzbek cap to cover my nape. I was copying the soldiers of the Foreign Legion whom I saw in movies. Sometimes we were two of us going on the same business, and that made sense. When I was by myself, I often wondered what would happen if I suddenly lost consciousness due to the heat, or slipped and broke my leg. It did not scare me from doing it again when the next time came.

Early in the spring, as a legitimate member of the farm I was given a small plot of field to cultivate for my own use. Tadek and Richard declined theirs as too straining. First of all I had to prepare the soil, hard-beaten and clay-like. I used the strange spade I described above.The plot size was 100 x 100 meter. The administration presented me with seeds of a grain called "mash", a tropical variety of green-peas which grow abundantly and fast. In this climate, there were two harvests per year. Also, in this climate, when there is no rain between March and November, agriculture is dependent solely on irrigation. Water is being supplied by narrow canals to each plot according to a strict sequence and stealing water is considered a major crime. My plot got its share of water in a ceremony attended by two officials. It was responding beautifully.

As a part of their national attire which consists of a long satin robe of colourfully striped design, white linen pants and rubbers on their bare feet, the Uzbeks have long knives attached to their belts. The knives are most useful in their daily chores. A friendly Uzbek presented me with such a knife and I had it hanging from my belt. Originally, I was stopped by the local militia and warned that it is against the law to carry a weapon (the knife was 6 inches long) and only tolerated on Uzbeks as part of their tradition. However, I ignored their warning and it was tacitly accepted by the "law". That gave me the nickname "the Pole with a knife" as I was the only exception.

An invitation came from Katz to come to the town of Chust and take over the children camp as its leader. The offer was very tempting and I decided to accept it. An Uzbek whose plot was neighbouring mine offered to buy the harvest which was imminent off my hands. Here I had a chance to see how much I was respected among the native community. Twelve Uzbeks formed a committee which was to evaluate the worth of my harvest. We all visited the plot, then sat down for a sumptuous feast prepared by the buyer, there was a long palaver in the Uzbek language of which I had a smattering but could not follow the noisy conversation and finally a sum in rubles was named. Without hesitation it was accepted and hand-shaking all around finished the transaction.

I was warmly greeted by Tadek upon my arrival at the Chust "orphanage" as it was popularly called. A huge building, previously a mosque was given to our disposal including the couple of small buildings belonging to the complex. Although it was standing empty for many years prior to our occupation, the mosque interior was well preserved including the hand-painted frescoes decorating the white-washed walls. A large roofed patio was adjoining the main building. A crumbling eight-foot wall surrounded the now wildly overgrown terrain.

I met the children and the two female tutors, mother and daughter, both of little charm. Children, aged from 6 to 13, a total of about forty, were a tough bunch of semi-adults who had experienced many an adventure in travels with their parents since they left their respective homes in Poland. I knew that introduction of discipline had to be immediate or I will be lost in my position as the principal.

I somehow did not mention the scourge of Uzbekistan so far. It is called malaria. The disease is spread by the bite of a mosquito called "anopheles". There is practically no protection, mosquitoes are swarming outdoors and indoors which means actually the same. Buildings used as residences have no paned windows or doors, just openings of the proper size and shape. The Uzbeks are particularly vulnerable to the disease and succumb to it massively. The sickness appears in cycles, attacking every other day at exactly the same time, mostly at 2 pm, and then disappearing for weeks. At the time of the attack your temperature soars up to 41 Celsius and you are freezing and shaking as if you were placed in a meat freezer although the outside temperature is 60 degrees of Celsius, or more. Malaria comes in several varieties the worst being the tropical kind, which results in jaundice. Yes, I was victim of the tropical malaria.

A lady doctor visiting our orphanage periodically advised us to keep the children overnight within the building rather than on the open patio which they preferred due to the heat. It so happened that I was suffering from my periodic malaria attack and was prone on the floor (there were no such things as cots available, everybody slept on the floor). The two lady tutors were told about my directive of having the children spending the night indoors. Before the usual hour of bed-time, a delegation of the children walked to my abode pleading to be allowed to sleep on the patio as the night was quite warm. They saw me in my condition and I whispered: "No". After a while, someone from our personnel crept to see if my directive was obeyed. The information was that the children and the two tutors are resting on the patio floor ready for the night. I got up from my place, threw the two or three blankets upon my shoulders poncho-wise and walked toward the patio. I realized that every pair of eyes was watching me, challenging my authority by the fact of having disobeyed my instruction. I silently reached the middle of the seemingly sleeping mass and then, at the top of humanly possible voice which probably carried a mile or so, I hollered an ear-shattering: "Everybody inside. Right away." A hurricane would not clear the patio in a shorter time. That was the only time that I had to raise my voice with the children although we have been months together. They feared me, they respected me and each was eager to earn some praise from me. Our orphanage was a truly well functioning organization. Apart from Tadek, the cook, there were two women to help in the kitchen and to keep the place clean, a night guard (personal friend of Katz, a Ph.D. in archeology who needed some job) and the two lady tutors. The latter kept the children busy organizing some games and teaching Polish songs and poetry. When the time of the cotton harvest arrived, the farms in the area asked me to send groups of older children to help with the work in fields. The work consisted of gathering the cotton from the open buds, and depositing it in large bins. The children were fed on site and enjoyed the work immensely. The farms reciprocated by providing fuel to our kitchen.

And then, the Blichers arrived, Adek and Hanka. As it later transpired, this couple was uniquely privileged all over the country. Hanka’s brother-in-law, a highly intelligent columnist in pre-war Poland, by name Mr. Berman, or Comrade Berman as probably he preferred, was an active communist, an abomination in the rightist country. After the Soviet Union annexed one half of Poland to its territory, Berman was invited to Moscow and, reportedly, became a member of the small circle of Stalin’s advisors. The splendor somehow spread on the Blichers and the local NKVD was aware of it. Adek Blicher was sent to our orphanage in the capacity of the new principal with proviso that I remain in the place and continue my function as before. Blicher was an electrical engineer, assistant to a professor of Warsaw Polytechnics, author of a scientific book. A self-centered individual, humour-less, snobbish but decent enough to feel slightly embarrassed by having so brutally pushed me aside from my so deservedly gained position. Adek was exactly my age. Hanka was a total opposite of her husband. She was no beauty, but radiated happiness and mirth and instantly became a favourite of everybody around. Tadek, furious because of the arrival of the new boss and feeling my "degradation" deeper than myself, appealed to my reputation of the lady-killer and urged me to take my revenge on Blicher by seducing his wife. Adek never established any contact with the children, only on rare occasion visited the place of their activities, represented our organization only with authorities or some official visitors inspecting the premises. Hanka, on the other hand became an idol all around, omni-present in activities and classes for the elder children.

Very few good situations last long in the Soviet Union. I don’t know what had caused the cooling of the alliance of the Polish Government in exile and Moscow, we were officially advised that our orphanage is being taken over by the local Educational Authority, and the entire Polish staff has to leave the premises on the named date. The very next day, strange individuals arrived in the orphanage in order to get acquainted with our facilities and daily program. They met with ferocious hostility from the children, we the personnel were cool but accommodating. Then we left never to return. We had to vacate our living quarters and moved all of us into a rented room. The children visited us stealthily and from them we learned that they were making life of the two new lady tutors who slept in the dormitory a hell. During the night, one of the small children would up waking up the lady and ask to be escorted to the outhouse. After she returned to her place, fifteen minutes later another child took over the performance, the older children keeping vigil and waking up a tyke to do his duty. The two poor Russian tutors, who never had any hand in the conspiracy of the Soviet authorities against the Polish institution, were groggy all the day from sleepless nights.

Our small group lived in limbo. I somehow forgot to mention that Tadek was not with us. A few months ago, he accepted the chef’s position in the Polish orphanage in the town of Namangan, with about 100 children, much bigger than ours. Times were critical for the entire country, Germans were at the outskirts of Moscow, Leningrad was surrounded. After the good time while at the orphanage, we suffered shortages of everything.

Then, another turn of the screw came. It was announced that all the former Polish citizens will be given a standard Soviet passport with its validity of five years. In the USSR, every individual has to carry a valid passport which serves as his identification card and it has to be produced on many occasions of everyday’s activities. Until now, we, the many refugees from Poland temporarily on the territory of the Soviet Union could always be distinguished from the Soviet citizens. The moment we accept the Soviet passport our chances of ever claiming the right of returning to Poland will be gone. Our small group decided to decline acceptance of the Soviet passport whatever the consequences. Then, we received visitors. Panicky Polish people living in various farms in the area, considering me a leader of the community, came to enquire what is Mr. Zimmermann going to do about the problem. I declined forming any common front, a risky proposition in Soviet Union, but informed them that I personally will refuse the passport.

On the day preceding the date of registration at the offices of the local NKVD, each of us packed his or her belongings in a most portable form knowing quite well from one’s past how to behave being a prisoner. A mounted militia man came next morning to advice us of the registration time. We poured out of our residence like a band of refugees with our knapsacks, parcels, kettles, etc. Not just the militia man, even his horse looked puzzled. We started our march through the streets drawing attention of the few passers-by. The closer we were to the building housing the NKVD, the more we encountered Polish people marching in families, or groups of families, laden with their paraphernalia to the utmost of their respective carrying ability. The square in front of the NKVD building looked like a gypsy camp, people sitting on their bundles, children running around, etc. There is very little that the NKVD does not know, there being such a supply of informers. I was called by name to enter the office. A man, dressed in a suit, introduced himself as a delegate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, arrived with a mission of distributing Soviet passports among the part of population that so far were deprived of this privilege. He is going to fill in a questionaire which I will sign and, in few days, a Soviet passport will be issued to me as a rightful citizen of the glorious country of USSR. In a similarly civilized and polite manner I informed the official that I decline the high honour and will stick to my Polish citizenship. Presumably, the man expected my response and remained civil asking me what is my motive. I knew in advance that the conversation does not lead anywhere, but still I answered: "Look, you are a Soviet citizen and, I am sure, proud to be one. If somebody suggested to you, even under duress, to renounce your citizenship you would not do it. And so it is with me." The man stood up, opened the door and called a militia man telling him to take me to the jail. The latter was on the opposite side of the square so we had to cross it. Every single eye in the crowd was directed at us, everyone understood what is going on. I entered an empty large cell just as I was during the conversation, with all my possession left outdoors. Then, one-by-one, others came in until the cell was packed. There were other cells, of course, equally filled-in. Later, I found what happened. The embarrassed NKVD men could not jail the entire families with their children, so only the head of each family was jailed, the rest of the crowd were ordered to go home. The Blichers were politely notified that they were going to receive special passports reserved for foreigners temporarily in the country, and the present action does not concern them. They gathered all belongings left by men in our group and returned to our residence.

Compared to jails I had experienced during my entire career of prisoner in the Soviet Union, the one I was in at present felt like a vacation spot. There was just the floor to sit and lie down on, but we were all friendly to one another, the food was not bad, the mood was pleasant although we did not know what to expect. After about ten days, one of the jailers told us that our leader is coming. This information puzzled us, we did not understand whom he had in mind. In the evening, several of us were led to the office of the NKVD commandant. Sitting there was a friend of mine who was working as Leon Katz’s secretary but lately lived in the town of Namangan where there lived a large colony of former Polish citizens. He walked all day to our town to inform us that people there reached an agreement with the Soviet authorities. Instead of the regular passports of 5-year duration that are issued to Soviet citizens, we will be given temporary 6-month identity cards. There being no religion in the USSR, the passport carries information about the nationality of the bearer (about 80 nationalities are represented by the Soviet citizens), while people of the Mosaic faith are recorded as those of Jewish nationality. Polish gentiles had no problem, we Jews wanted to be marked differently than Soviet Jews, and the passport authorities agreed to call us "Polish Jews".

After the interlude with the passport and the jail business, we returned to the day-by-day existence not knowing what the immediate future will bring. We learned it very soon.

When I started this narrative rolling out the panorama of my life, the intention was to stick to actual events only, leaving the inner emotions to myself. Everybody has a personal cache of emotions, feelings, reactions that he reveals only either to a very close friend at the time of depression, or to a psychiatrist looking for help. This is my first, and last, attempt of using the medium of print in order to chronologically record the adventures and tribulations of my life. It is not meant to be entertaining, amusing or linguistically impressive. I know my limitations in using the vocabulary of a language which, after all, is foreign to me. When revealing my innermost feelings I might seem to be pathetic, or the situation might sound trivial. However, some developments would not be clear if their cause is not revealed to the reader.

A strong feeling developed between Hanka and me. You never know how and when it started, maybe the constant propinquity, to each the so called "affair" has a different beginning. Ours started almost from the moment we met. In our small circle of people in the orphanage, everybody had an inkling, except, as it usually happens, Adek. But, in the present crowded situation we found ourselves, even he noticed some hidden signs. He confronted Hanka, and she admitted. A very explosive scene ensued, including a fistfight. It precluded any continuation of our lifestyle, and, in private conversation with Hanka and to her profound despair we agreed that I have to distance myself from the scene.

I did not have much choice. Next day I arrived in the town of Namangan where Tadek lived with his girl friend in a rented room. He lost his job when the Polish orphanage he was working for was transferred to the new Russian administration. I was welcomed warmly by my friends who were aware of my involvement with Hanka. I stayed in their place only two days. Next day, I found myself in the local hospital. What brought me to that hospital can be attributed to two reasons. One, a massive attack of malaria with temperature reaching the top of the thermometer scale. Two, the destiny of meeting there my future wife. The admitting doctor was Tadek’s friend and he promised to take care of me. The hospital was filled to the roof, people dying like flies, of typhoid, malaria and other tropical diseases. There were no medicaments, the priority being given to military hospitals. It was wartime, after all.

Apart from a high fever, my body developed nervous spasms that in short intervals were shaking my entire trunk. A suspicion was that I suffered a sunstroke. Looking back, I can say that the technique of the spasms, applied intelligently, maybe saved my life. I will explain later what I am talking about.

I remained in the hospital about a month. While in my room, I could not help but hearing a woman who behaved very loudly in a room adjoining mine. I was curious who the noisemaker is. So, one day I peeked in and saw two beautiful girls conversing in Polish. I stepped in, introduced myself and started a light conversation. If in your imagination you see me in an elegant robe and glossy hairdo, forget it. I was wearing an ill-fitting hospital-issue linen outfit, dirty and full of holes, buttons long gone. Nevertheless, my presence was readily accepted by the two females, and my visits became a daily occurrence. Unknowingly to me, one of the girls was in the hospital due to the typhoid, a highly contagious disease. Her name was Bronka. When she felt better, we spent evenings sitting on the bench on the hospital stoop and having friendly conversation. This fact was brought to our good doctor’s knowledge, and suddenly he found me cured and sent home. Only, I did not have a home. So, I came back to Tadek’s place but not for long. His landlord declared that I have to go or he will inform the authorities. After all, he could not be blamed. There were shirkers of military service and those hiding them were being severely punished as well. I had to go again. Men of military service age not in uniform were looked at with suspicion and denounced to the NKVD. I had no choice, I had to go back to the town of Chust where I had many friends.

A friend of mine who lived in a tiny hut accepted me as a co-tenant. Very soon he was called to the Army and I was left by myself. You might remember the Polish army of Gen. Anders which left the country for Iran. A new Polish brigade, this time organized by Gen. Berling, a dedicated communist, was forming in the Soviet Union in order to fight the Germans side by side with the Red Army. My friend was conscripted. Very soon, they discovered that I am back, and I was called to report for the medical examination prior to being conscripted. Since my return to Chust, when in public I simulated the spasms of my body and maintained my version of the sunstroke when asked what happened to me. On the day I had to report to the medical commission I met my former (before Hanka) girl friend, a refugee from Odessa where her husband was a university professor, now in the army. She had an office job in the local NKVD and knew all important officials in the town. She almost cried when she saw me in my present "convulsive" condition and promised to talk to the lady doctor, the head of the medical commission, her personal friend, on my behalf. Later on, in front of the medical examiners I gave an Oscar-deserving performance of a spasmodic cripple, presented a document stating that I recently spent a month in the Namangan hospital, and got a three month deferment.

Now, with the official document temporarily releasing me from the military service, I could look around for a job. A collective farm about four kilometers from the town of Chust was looking for a Russian-speaking recorder of daily results of the ongoing harvest, and I got the job. It was an all Uzbek community and I was accepted on rather friendly terms as I knew their language. As a member of the collective farm I was entitled to a daily ration: one middle-sized pita-bread. I also received a place to live: an empty room with the Uzbek-style cooking facility. Several armfuls of dried grass covered with a blanket formed my bed. The amount of work was negligible, I had plenty of time to kill, and nothing else. On Sundays, I marched to Chust to browse in the bazaar and to buy some vegetable or such. Yes, clandestinely, I was in touch with Hanka. Since I touched the subject, let me also briefly report the conclusion. The period that we were separated assured Hanka in the priorities she wanted to give to her future steps. At that time, the Blichers were comfortably established in a collective farm where he was working as some official. One day, Hanka declared that she was leaving him to be with me, packed her belongings and walked out the door. Adek called her name and she turned around. Then, while she looked, he cut the veins on both his hands using a shaving blade. Hanka turned back. A short time later, Blichers moved to a town hundreds miles away from Chust though still in Uzbekistan. A year or so later, when Poland had been liberated from the German occupation and communists formed the new government, Adek Blicher was invited to come to the country and take a job as the president of the Polish radio network. Due to uncertain living conditions in the war-ruined city of Warsaw, Blicher was to travel alone to be joined by his wife later on. Then it was when Hanka was left free to act. However, from her friends who knew me and about me, she learned that in the meantime I had directed my romantic interests elsewhere. Let me narrate briefly the sequence. Hanka joined her husband in the newly liberated Poland. Some time later, Blicher was sent to the United States in order to purchase some equipment for the radio station he worked for. He took Hanka along, and they never returned to Poland. In 1953, when in New York for the first time, I called Hanka. As she later told me, she almost fainted as she was completely in the dark about my whereabouts since we parted. We met. She had a son of five or six, her life was uneventful, by mutual agreement with Adek, the interlude in Uzbekistan was never mentioned. From mutual friends, Adek heard that I lived in Canada. Over the years, the Blichers travelled a lot. On his insistence, never to Canada. Lately, they lived in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1993, Hanka died of heart failure. Soon after, Adek Blicher established a liaison with our good friend who for many years lived in Montreal and only recently moved to Princeton. Her name is Jadzia Wygnanski. Incidentally, Jadzia is the sister of Leon Katz of whom I wrote before. Small world, isn’t it? Diplomatically, Jadzia never mentions being our friend although she corresponds with us and calls long distance.

Time came to report to the medical commission again. This time, the examining doctors decided to investigate some more. I was directed to the nearest big town, meaning Namangan, to a clinic which had a specialist in nervous diseases. The latter, after having conducted a few tests did not find anything wrong with me which was too true. I knew that I will not fool a knowledgeable doctor with my antics. An appropriate document was given to me and I was supposed to return to Chust and to report to the military authorities. I never did. I decided to stay right there in the town of Namangan. In case you wonder if I was not pursued by the authorities as a shirker of military service, surprisingly it was not the case. The moment you left the area under their jurisdiction, they left you alone. It was war-time, many affairs were handled helter-skelter.

I found a lodging. A Russian woman had just a one-room abode, with three beds. One bed was that in which she slept herself, another was rented to a teacher of the local military Academy and the third to a prospector who was working in the area and only rarely spent the night in the town. Our hostess rented me the latter’s bed with an understanding that on those nights when the legitimate renter of the bed is back I will sleep on the big table that stood in the middle of the room. The hostess was an extremely nice, good-hearted female as so often happens with the Russian women, and we were a compatible group.

My first job was with the district office of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs. I took it because I needed a bread ration card and this was issued only to working people. The office was close to my residence, my boss was a highly intelligent architect with a sharp sense of humour though handicapped and on crutches. Seven regional posts reported to our office and we, in turn, sent monthly resumes to the Republic’s capital, Tashkent. When the time came for me to compile my report based on information provided by the regions I became desperate. Not a single report arrived. I went to see my boss. He explained that the regional offices are run by Uzbeks who are mostly illiterate in Russian and with little feelings of obligation. With a twinkle in his eyes he said: "Look up, what do you see?" "The ceiling" I answered naively. "Not so. You have there all the information you need to compile the composite for the ministry in Tashkent; we call it the "ceiling statistics". Do it and be happy." In existing old files I found some information from years ago, and worked out an elaborate chart containing information on the number of trees planted, houses renovated, streets watered, etc. I worked in that office for almost a year and not a single report from regions was provided whereas I was feeding the ministry with my fictional statistics on the day it was due. The minister in person called my boss and thanked him for the exemplary way we do our job. Out of eleven districts in his jurisdiction ours is the only one that handles it so "cultured" and on time. Since then, each time I was reading about the "glorious" achievements in Soviet agriculture, industry, sciences, etc. I had a hearty laugh.

My next job was with the local power station which was part of a huge complex of cotton mills. Due to the war-time shortage of fuel only one generator was operating and only a few important organizations and officials in the town could be fed electricity. My job was to visit those recipients and make sure that connected appliances were reduced to minimum. Also, there were instances that people unlawfully connected their houses to the pole-mounted feeding wires and my job was to expose them. I liked my work. It was too good to last long. In one of the subsidiary warehouses of raw cotton, miles away from our town, a fire started and burnt hundreds of tons of stuff. The guard at the warehouse at that critical moment was a fellow of Polish nationality. Immediately, the Soviet authorities suspected a sabotage. I don’t know what happened to the poor guy but an order was given to let go all employees of Polish nationality all through the complex. I was fired from my job outright. Without the bread rations it was very hard to manage from day to day. I tried to find some other job but the ban was widespread, Poles were considered enemies. In one organization I visited, the official, himself a refugee from Romania, seeing my rather desperate situation offered me an available job, that of a night guard in the children polyclinic. All I had to do was to arrive late in the evening and sleep on the premises until the nurses arrive in the morning. I took the position. There was nothing in the clinic to attract the prospective thief but the rules provided for a position of a night-guard and thus it was available. I slept on a table used for the examination of the children, not very much different from the one I used as a bed at my landlady’s place. What was most important, I received my rations card. That job lasted several weeks.

One day, an opportunity knocked. A fellow I happened to know was working in an industrial complex which consisted of various workshops, like tailors’, shoe-making, etc. among others also manufacturing the street name signs. The head of that section suggested that I find a locality which so far has no street signs and I will get commission from the amount earned. I had a brilliant idea. The town of Chust where I lived before when in charge of the orphanage had no street name signs. Moreover, I knew important people in the city hall and I was positive they would go along if properly interested. Our industrial complex was offering a made-to-measure pair of leather boots to the officials who have to be bribed, an offer no full-blooded Uzbek will refuse. The success of the enterprise was beyond expectations. The owner of each house in the town of Chust was obligated to order a sign bearing the number of the house. The majority of men were in the army, and the women pleaded lack of funds for the cost of the sign. The town mayor used a harsh method to enforce his ruling. He stopped issuing the bread rations card to those who refused to pay for the house number sign. It worked. Over the next couple of months the organization I represented was busy manufacturing the signs for my clients, I earned a lot of money, and in the end, the town of Chust joined the civilized world sporting street name and house number signs.

I cannot but help make a general remark on the typical Soviet treatment of events. Actions move with waves, once the wave moved further there is no trace of its presence a moment ago. Let me explain. I am talking about my own status as far as the authorities in the town of Chust are concerned. As you, no doubt, remember I was ordered to report for a medical examination which would determine my ability of being drafted to the Polish brigade formed by Gen. Berling. The medical commission sent me to a specialist in the city of Namangan for his diagnosis. I never returned. Thus, I became a deserter, a nasty crime in wartime. What happened to my file in the enlistment office? How did they close it? During the time of my absence in Chust, the recruitment to the Polish army was over, and nobody cared about problems associated with that affair. And, here I was back in Chust, quite openly and officially, visiting the city hall almost daily and meeting its head, and never stopped and asked: "Hey, wait a minute. Are you not the same fellow who so cleverly duped us ... etc., etc."

In Namangan, I had a very pleasant social life. Though a comparative newcomer to their group I was readily accepted by a circle of interesting, bright people which included also the lady I met in the hospital while its patient, Bronka and her husband Oscar.

Although I had no steady job there, I appeared every morning in the offices of the organization. On my way there I used to buy my ration of bread in a store catering to employees of the company. One day, I was told that the chairman would like to talk to me. When I entered his office I saw a man whom I did not know but I knew who he was. Once he was pointed to me in the streets by my friend. He was a high official of the dreaded NKVD though not in uniform. It so happened that the building housing offices of this organization was close to my home, and I saw this individual walking the streets often enough. The chairman informed me that the man wishes to talk to me, and left the office. Here is what the man said, and I remember every single word: "Look, our organization, the NKVD knows everything about you. We know that you joined the Polish army of Gen. Anders and, when they left our country, you stayed behind. They left you here with a purpose. Your function is to be a spy. And, we have sufficient proof so there is no purpose in denying it. However, we are going to be lenient if you are ready to work for us. We also know that among your people in our town there are those who are unfriendly to our regime. We are now in the state of war with our bitter enemies on the battle-front and we cannot ignore our enemies in the rear. We have to disclose them, and we need your help. You meet them almost daily. I want you to meet with me in unobtrusive circumstances when you will inform me what is being said in your circles. Moreover, I will recommend to you certain subjects so that you will initiate conversations during your meetings, and later on you will report to me what was the response. As an incentive for cooperation with us we are ready to help you materially. We will find you a better job. Also, for your own good, I hope you are not going to deceive us. Because, you are not the only one working for us. We will know about your every step." To prove his point, my inquisitor started telling me what he knows about my everyday goings-on in such detail that only a person closest to me knew them. I was aware that the population is teeming with informers but it was a surprise to me that they penetrated our close circles. Obviously, people were doing it under duress. I knew that I was in a deep trouble and I knew that the NKVD could crush me like you crush a flea. No, I am not a hero in the form of James Bond of whom we know in advance that he will end victorious. My crisis was very real and in a situation like this I became stoic. I knew that nothing I said will be accepted as truth because his entire approach was based on lies. He knew why Gen. Anders’ army did not take me along. I also knew that I was NOT going to accept his proposition. I told the man why the Polish army really did not keep me in their cadres, I am a not a spy and he knew it, and I just do not see myself being an informer because I simply do not know how to behave. I will be disclosed as such right away and ostracized by my close friends and my usefulness to him will be short lived. Seeing my position, the fellow decided to change his tactics and said: "You are a Jew. You know how the Germans are behaving with your brothers and sisters. By not helping us you help our enemies who oppress your relatives and friends in their part of Poland." To that my answer was that I intended to fight the Germans myself when enlisting in the Gen. Anders army but was deprived of this privilege by the anti-Semitic elements there. Seeing my firm position, my interlocutor got up and said that I am going with him. When we were passing the office, my friend, also a Polish refugee, saw us together and understood what our leaving together means. He knew who my companion was, too. Within an hour or so, the entire circle of my acquaintances knew that I have been arrested.

I was taken to the dreaded NKVD building. In his office, the man sat down behind his desk while I took a chair in its front. The man said ominously: "Here, we will talk differently. Actually, you should sit there" and he indicated something behind me. When I turned around and saw just another chair at the distant wall, wishing to show me how worldly he is, the man said: "No, it is not an electric chair, but a chair where a prisoner is customarily sitting during the interrogation". That preamble was to inform me about my present status. Don’t for a moment think that I remained cool and indifferent to what was happening to me. Like a snail, or a turtle, I withdrew from the outer world knowing that no force can help me in my predicament. The all-powerful NKVD did not need any legal justification to destroy me, people disappeared without a trace before. Then, the man started again cajoling me with a promise of a good place to live, appealed to my Jewishness which should make me his partner in revealing the common enemy, etc. To all his verbosity I had just a single answer: "I am not material for an informer, I am too simple-minded and would be recognized as your agent right away". I know, it sounds stupid but that was exactly what I wanted it to be: stupid. The man got up and said: "Let’s go". In all this situation, I felt just one consoling circumstance. I had my ration of bread with me. My experience with the Soviet prisons that I was an inmate of was that the first day you do not get bread, they get it for you only from the second day. I also speculated how to get a blanket from my home knowing its importance in my imminent future. I don’t think a person who never experienced the circumstances I am describing can follow my way of thinking.

Passing through many corridors, we reached the entrance to the prison, apparently a temporary one. To the guard on duty the man said to keep his eye on me and went on by himself. I was standing there passively waiting for further developments. After maybe ten minutes, the man reappeared and in passing barked: "Come with me". That was the moment, when I understood that the man was bluffing all the time. The visit to the prison was supposed to be the breaking point, but it did not work. We returned to the office where we had our conversation as before, the man wrote a brief note and shoved it to me to sign Under a penalty, I was not to reveal to anybody the gist of our conversation. Then, a brief: "You may go". And, a moment later I was outside of the infernal building. I took the text of that short note very seriously. I already knew, that within my immediate circle of friends there is somebody who, decidedly under duress, informs on me and, presumably, others too. Much, much later, already outside the USSR, when we were reminiscing about our times in Namangan, I found how many persons from our milieu were forced to inform. A girl I knew, after her first clandestine visit with the NKVD blackmailer, was so desperate that she volunteered to the army as a nurse as the only escape from the clutches of the cursed organization. On the front, she lost her life soon after.

My first step was informing my friends that I am still around. Everybody was discreet enough not to insist on knowing what it was about, I faked some story concerning the times I was still in the town of Chust, which either was believed or not. Later on, when alone with every one of them, I recommended to that person not to be too exuberant in conversation about his or her opinion on important developments. Talk about trivial things. Quite possible that I gave that advice to the informer him- or herself. Over the next couple of years, when I used to pass by the NKVD man, we never acknowledged knowing each other.

My enterprise with the street signs and house numbers for the town of Chust being so successful, I was asked by the industrial complex I was working for to revive another business that became dormant with time. Scattered in the town they had a number of kiosks from which they used to sell a cold drink called "mors". They still had a supply of ingredients for the manufacturing of syrup which mixed with cold drinking water formed a pleasantly refreshing drink. Summer in Uzbekistan lasts 10 months, the average temperature is 50 degrees Celsius. Uzbeks are quenching their thirst with piping hot green tea available in the chaikhanas. The Russian population is still thirsty for a cold drink. Good enough! The kiosks were reopened, re-decorated and I spread news that a profitable business is available to anyone among the Polish people who will pay me 100 rubles, oh yes, a bribe. That is how business is being handled in the Soviet Union. I had more candidates than kiosks. The problem in Namangan is drinking water. The town has no piped water or sewage. On either side of main streets there is an irrigation ditch through which water from the river is flowing. This is the only source of water for any household. Every evening a bucket of water is taken home so that the silt and other impurities have a chance to settle down on the bottom overnight. Occasionally, the settling includes a live frog and how you dispose of it is a matter of your whim. There are artesian wells in the town but they are properties of the plants manufacturing products for human consumption like breweries, canneries, etc. One of these organizations was contracted to provide drinking water to our kiosks. Everything was dandy and rosy. People were lining up to buy a cheap soft drink, a novelty which became a favourite even with the Uzbeks. But something went wrong with water supply, it became inadequate and spotty, I had constant aggravation with the kiosk keepers, legitimate but little that I could do. The business petered out. Of course, I have no way of knowing how is the situation with the drinking water supply in Namangan at the present time. I am describing the problem with which we had to live 50 years ago.

My next career was that of the agent of a bread bakery. Every morning I had to present myself at the flour depot and accept a certain number of sacks of the stuff. It was weighed with an accuracy reserved for precious metals. Then, I engaged two or three horse-drawn carts, the so called "arbas". An arba consists of a platform the size of an average kitchen table riding on two wheels of 6-foot diameter. The entire caravan moved then through narrow winding lanes to reach the bakery at the other end of the town. Sitting atop one of the arbas I had to watch like a hawk that nothing untoward happens to the precious cargo as I was responsible for it until delivered at the bakery where it was again scrupulously weighed. These were hungry times and bread was the symbol of survival. Apart of my salary which bought very little on the black market, my daily under-the -table reward was half a loaf of bread.

I somehow forgot to mention that, to make some extra money I was teaching English to groups of people from our colony of Polish nationals who were planning to establish their presence in America in some distant future.

Finally, an opportunity knocked at my door. The Soviet Union was receiving technical equipment from the United States, in fact total industrial complexes to rebuild their industries which were in ruins. All the accompanying literature like installation manuals, operating instructions, lists of spare parts, etc. was in the English language. Crates containing machinery arrived also at the cotton mills in Namangan. It was essential to make use of them in the shortest possible time. It so happened that one of my English students was a member of the high brass in the industry. He mentioned there my name and I was invited. They produced stacks of catalogues, manuals, charts etc. and asked if I can translate them into Russian. No problem. At least, that was my answer. Let me describe the situation. By profession, I am an engineer. I knew the English language which I learned in Warsaw years ago but that was a conversational level of knowledge, a far cry from the technical terminology. The same concerns the technical nomenclature in the Russian language specific to this or that field of industry. On the other hand, I knew that at last I have an upper hand; in the radius of hundreds of miles there was nobody else who could handle the job. I dictated conditions: I need electric lighting as I will work nights too in view of the job urgency, I will need better food to maintain my energy, and I named a money compensation in rubles that awed even myself. No problem. This time, it was their answer. To my utmost surprise, in the nearby bookstore I found a comprehensive English-Russian dictionary which covered technical terminology too. My house was connected to the electric net, to the utter amazement of my neighbours; I visited a warehouse catering to the high echelon of the party executives and got a supply of goodies unavailable to the man in the street, and I sat down to do the work. I was feeding my translation piecemeal, so that the actual work on the installation could be started right away. The Minister of Industries of Uzbekistan who came from the capital to see the work in progress asked to bestow on me his praise and appreciation for the job well done.

Other things happened to me, too. I got married. You might remember the girl I met in the hospital where I was suffering from the symptoms associated with sunstroke. I was cured of the sunstroke, but not of my interest in the girl. I assume the interest was mutual because she left her husband and became my wife. Recently, we celebrated our 50th Wedding Anniversary.

The war was over. Russian refugees in our town started returning to their home towns liberated by the Red Army and needing people to restore them. We, with our temporary Polish passports were not sure what to expect. However, Stalin and his Politburo had plans concerning us and all we had to do was just wait and continue with our respective affairs. In summer, 1946, only after a reliable regime had been firmly established in the new communist satellite we were told about our imminent transfer to Poland.

For a contemporary citizen in any country of the world a trip abroad does not present any particular difficulty. You get your passport, buy a ticket for the means of transportation of your choice (flight, train, bus, ship, automobile, etc.), procure a visa if required and away you go. Not so for inhabitants of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics and I am referring, of course, to the times I am describing in my narrative. With the exception of diplomats and special delegates, all highly reliable adherents of the governing circles, nobody, repeat nobody was allowed to travel abroad. Even correspondence with anyone living in a foreign country was discouraged and was sufficient reason to be considered a spy. This paranoia was not without reason. The omnipresent propaganda that a citizen was being fed from the moment he awoke until he fell asleep, indoctrinated everyone that he or she lives in a paradise. For contrast, life in the so called "capitalist" countries was described as that of utter misery. Anyone visiting a foreign country would expose this diabolic lie, hence the tight isolation. By now, I lived in this "paradise" almost seven years. I had plenty of opportunities to experience being enclosed in a prison cell, literally. To me, the entire gigantic territory of the USSR felt like a prison cell, figuratively. And, here we are on the eve of leaving this enforced existence never to return. Or, at least so I thought. Little did I know that, years later I will return to this hated country, in a different role, and enjoy it tremendously. But, that is another story.

We were warned that currency is not allowed to leave the country. By now, I was comparatively opulent and had to convert my cash into something of value in the place of my new life. Rumours said that rice, a staple food in Uzbekistan is particularly treasured by the Polish population cut off from foreign countries during the German occupation. Thus we bought tens of kilos of rice. The grapevine also warned that precious metals or jewelry is being confiscated from Poles crossing the border between the two countries. Only wedding rings are being allowed. Consequently, I bought gold coins on the black market, used them for shaping heavy wedding rings for both of us by a jeweller and felt ready to meet the new life.

The entire populace of Polish returnees, a total of about 1000 souls gathered in the rail station. The majority of people of the Catholic faith had left the country with the Gen. Anders army in 1942; thus, Jews formed a significant percentage of those returning to Poland now, a fact ominous to us although we did not realize it yet. The provided train consisted of cattle cars equipped with two wide shelves at each side of the entrance forming two tiers to carry passengers. In anticipation of a long journey, thoughtful groups of travellers brought with them a crude semblance of a toilet shaped of sheet metal.

Little can be said about our trip "home". I use quotation signs because very few of us were going to the place they used to call home before they left the country in 1939. Take my case. Home was Warsaw, home was where my immediate family used to live. My family has been wiped out. The city of Warsaw presented one gigantic heap of ruins. Besides, the authorities which allowed us, the Polish returnees to leave the USSR, had a definite plan for us. The big chunk of former German territory ceded to Poland was supposed to be cleared of the native population and we, the newcomers were to fill their place. Our train had a definite destination where to unload its human cargo. It was a small town whose name I don’t recall. We were told that each family will get a furnished apartment and start their life right there in the community we were familiar with. Sort of a forced resettlement, only a geographically different exile. Of the journey itself I would like to describe an incident which could separate Bronka from me for ever. Our train stopped at the platform of a station bearing the name Kursk. Incidentally, it is a large city in the European part of the country, important in the history of Russia, a busy railroad junction. From our previous experience we expected a small market to be somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Bronka expressed a wish of having some fresh milk. The day was very hot and I did not have my shirt on. So, bare-breasted, with a container and some money I ran in direction of the expected market. I was not alone, about 10 people were following me. We did not see the expected stalls, and decided to go back. We were away maybe 10 minutes. However, when we arrived at the station platform the train was not there any more. Men working on the track near-by told us that the train left a few minutes ago. We went to see the stationmaster. The visibly harassed individual told us that tens of trains carrying Polish returnees are passing his station every day, there is nothing he can do for us, and turned to some other business waiting his attention. We were a sorry group of people. Take me, for instance. I had no identification on me, money enough to buy a bottle of milk and not a stitch from my belt up. Others in my group were similarly destitute. We were standing on the platform forlorn and without any plan. A freight train consisting of open platforms stopped in front of us. We went to speak to the locomotive driver asking his destination. He named it and it had nothing to do with the destination of our train which was supposed to be the city of Kiev. But roughly going in that direction. We had no choice and acted on an impulse. We jumped on the train which moved a few minutes later. We were travelling for about three hours. And, suddenly, miracle of miracles, on a side track at a small station we saw our train with most passengers out from their cars sitting and waiting for the group of missing individuals. Bronka was in hysterics. She was sure, and justifiably, that we would never be together again. Later I was told, what happened at the Kursk station. Nobody warned us that the stop is just for a minute. When the train started rolling, in various cars somebody was missing. A wail started but nothing could be done. From the car you could not communicate with the train leader, these were cattle cars after all. I don’t know how, after hours, they eventually informed the locomotive driver about the missing passengers and he stopped the train at a siding. From the telegraph room, they cabled the station at Kursk where we were supposed to be that our train is at the small stop waiting for us and we should find means of arriving there. The meeting of our two trains was purely coincidental, or an answer to their prayers as I was informed by passengers in our car who saw Bronka shattered in her utter despair. What deepened our belief in providential interference was the fact that the weather changed suddenly, it was pouring for the next two days and the temperature dropped significantly. In my situation, in the middle of the country ruined after the recent war, with no charitable organization to appeal to, without a document, I dread to think how would I ever find my way to a distant Poland. I do not wish to sound dramatic but, call it what you want, the chance meeting of our two trains was little short of miraculous. A couple of days later, we arrived at the the border between the Soviet Union and the contemporary Poland, a town called Przemysl.

---

Back to Key Words and Abstract

To Chapter V