Dancing Under the Red Star (23 page)

Tough or not, however, I had a miserable night there. The bedbugs were so vicious that we had to lie on the cold concrete floor, covered with wet towels and sheets, just to keep them from biting. To my dismay, even that method didn’t work very well; those insidious bedbugs, as if with a predetermined strategy, dropped down from the ceiling in unison. They were absolutely unrelenting! Maybe they could smell fresh flesh. It was a horrible experience, much worse than it sounds. The following morning my body was covered with bites and welts from head to toe and was swollen and itching.

After breakfast I was led to my new cell. As we climbed a steep, worn metal staircase, I had a strong sense that these were the same steps my father had first climbed when he was arrested in 1938. This was certainly a possibility, but my sensation went beyond that. I
knew
he had already been here, right where I was now walking. I don’t know
why
I knew or
how
I knew, but I
knew.

I could see the precipitous drop-offs from the different floors, all the way to the concrete basement slab. The sides of the stairwells were covered with a thick steel mesh, installed to prevent suicide attempts. Many prison stories later confirmed that prisoners had thrown themselves down to their deaths. I sensed a powerful, spiritual presence of desperation, hopelessness, and despair—voices from days gone by.

Gradually I grew accustomed to a new prison routine. The food seemed to be a bit better than before, and we were given more of it. “Enough to live on” would be my description of the usual portion, depending on just how much of the sickening stuff you were willing to stomach. Women prisoners did a lot of embroidery and sewing, not as a recreational activity, but as a necessity. Many of us had only the clothes we wore, a single garment. While walking in the prison yard one day, one of us found a piece of perfectly shaped glass, which we used to cut out and modify garments for the others. All of us soon became masterful improvisers. In this prison we could sleep whenever we wanted; there were no restrictions.

Much of the time we just sat around telling detailed stories, holding nothing back. We knew everything there was to know about one another’s nightmares and personal tragedies. We were sisters here, sharing the common denominator of pain. Most of the women were Russian, from Estonia, Latvia, and the Ukraine. There was also a Polish woman, an Italian woman, and a couple of Czechs, but no other Americans. The girls liked me to tell about the few American movies I had seen as a child, so I gladly did. Our group was on the guards’ so-called honor list, because we were relatively well behaved and didn’t have nearly the fights or arguments of most other group cells. So for a while I guess we received an A in conduct.

Most of the women had not yet had their day in court, so when the day of someone’s hearing arrived, we all used the contact with outsiders to smuggle notes to our families. That’s the way I was able to inform Mama of my location, circumstances, and needs. Not long afterward, she was allowed to bring me food and some embroidery thread, an unexpected treat. I had surrounded myself with five or six fairly pleasant girls, with whom I shared my goodies from home.

One day in May, without any notice, a prison guard entered our cell and ordered, “Citizen Werner, please stand to your feet.” I stood up and looked around, confused. He continued, “We are transferring you to a Siberian labor camp in the morning. Have your personal items ready.”

Though unprepared, I had known it was only a matter of time before they sent me to Siberia. I was an embarrassment to them; there was no way I could stay indefinitely in the city prison, which was reserved for common criminals, not subversive foreigners. And the Soviet officials were particularly careful about the disposition and handling of Americans (more so than other foreigners). I believed there was a pervasive fear when it came to the issue of detaining American citizens. People like me, who embarrassed the state, were disposed of in the northern slave labor camps, located primarily in Siberia. Also known as death camps, these labor camps had few survivors. By design, they intended to kill the inmates, be it quickly or slowly. Only the strong and determined few completed their sentences and made it out, but none escaped—ever!

Several women stood there with me, also awaiting transfer. We had to wait for the guards to return our personal items and clothing, which had been in storage. The following morning, carrying our baggage and belongings, we were marched on foot to the railway station, about ten kilometers away. Only essential items were allowed; there was no room for keepsakes. I hauled a large blue canvas bag that my mother had sewn for me, so heavy that I could barely strap it onto my back and tote it. Dressed in my winter coat, hat, and rubber boots, bent over and struggling greatly under this heavy load, I drudged along with the rest.

About four hundred men and women were led through the city streets of Gorky in a ragged, shuffling column in full view of the public. People lined the streets as we passed, as though they were accustomed to this routine. They were kind and sympathetic, discreetly passing us food and cigarettes, trying hard to smile at us through their own despair. Their worn and melancholy faces spoke of a hope that once was, but now was no more. Many of them, I thought, had already been in my shoes; their eyes seemed to say that. My thighs tensed and burned from the weight I had to drag, and I thought I would never make it to the railroad station.

I was nearing the point of collapse when we finally arrived about four o’clock. Like animals, we were herded into railroad cattle cars. These were enclosed, with double-decked platforms at each end, and the parasha, of course, right in the middle. For three days and nights we were locked inside our car, in the heat, and not allowed to leave this oxygen-deprived container for any reason, while the train stood on the siding. The nights were cold, and the days were extremely hot. With practically no ventilation, the stench was unbearable. We were stuck there with nothing to do but sit and stew and—at night—freeze. No one had any idea why we were sitting here, going nowhere.

During our second day in the cattle car, I heard two women talking as they passed by outside. Quickly scribbling them a small note, I maneuvered it through the tiny ventilation slats in the car. I was hoping that the women would see it, pick it up, and either take it themselves or have it delivered to Elisabeth Werner in Gorky. I had no other way to let Mama know the news of my transfer. I needed a providential act of God to make it happen. I didn’t really believe in luck. If I had been someone who could be called lucky, then what was I doing here? I did not know it then, but these women saw my note and picked it up, risking their freedom and perhaps their lives.

The note eventually found its way to Mama. I never got to meet these women or see or thank them, but I was eternally grateful to these faceless, nameless, unknown messengers of kindness. To those women, I was an anonymous human being, a complete stranger. Their benevolence was a small thing, an unselfish human gesture, the infrequent kind. But this small act altered the course of my life.

The following morning we received a small serving of hot millet. Our car finally began to move, but it would be several more hours before our train was on the main track. During our journey, we stopped at all the minor train depots along the way to take on more people, more prisoners. They were people like me, robbed of their youth, their entire futures contingent on this whim or that one, hanging by a thread. We were at the mercy of irrational government and political idiocy of the highest order, but their lives were not like mine for one important reason. They were not Americans. They did not know that life could be different. They had only experienced ongoing, lifelong despair, but I had hope. One day, I told myself, regardless of anything else that could happen to me, I would escape all this nonsense and return to the wonderful United States of America—land of the free and home of the brave!

Deep inside I knew that one day my life would be given back to me. I don’t know why, but I just knew. My hope was for and in that coming day. I hoped to live to tell this story to my children and maybe even to their children, when this time and pain would be nothing more to me than a very long and excruciatingly bad dream.
God willing,
that is what I wanted to live to tell.

But the other prisoners piling into our cattle car, these Russians, had no such hope. Their only hope was in their basic day-to-day ability to endure the crazy anguish of life here in their own country. They had no prospect of going elsewhere—like back to America some day. These simple Russians, good people at the core, were subject to endless oppression under these totalitarian conditions from which they were powerless to escape. The personal choices I took for granted while growing up in America—choices about health, happiness, and growth—these dear Russian people had never had. They never knew of such options, not even the simplest ones.

They could not turn to religion for hope; atheism was the Soviet religion. Hopelessness was deeply and permanently etched into their faces. It penetrated below the surface, into their souls. I can still see their faces clearly in my mind’s eye today: men and women, young and old, with a look of total resignation, no hope whatsoever. A country without God is a terrible place. A horribly cold, harsh spirit hovered over this country, like a cloud that would not lift. It thickened the air and filled your nostrils everywhere you went. You could feel it crawl into your skin, into your pores.
That
was the condition of their lives and the very look upon their faces, as best I can describe it.

As I hated the terribly oppressive life and conditions the Russians were forced to undergo, I came to love the people more and more. Every time our train stopped at a station, local people came to push things through the ventilation slats in the cars: candy, bread, fruit, sausage, and cigarettes. All were rare luxuries, precious to them. They never stopped trying to help us, to care for the invisible people who were even more oppressed than they were. The locals were used to this routine; they watched for the trains hauling new death-camp inmates to the north and eagerly awaited the next opportunity to provide help. There was a good chance that most of them had a family member jailed, killed, or wrongfully imprisoned as well. In any case, these dear Russian people wanted to apply whatever healing medicine they could to this dreadful cancer called Stalinism.

After another day and night, we finally unloaded, stiff and filthy from our journey. We were in densely forested terrain, somewhere several hundred miles north and east of Gorky, on the southern edge of Siberia. Exhausted and weakened, we had to walk almost four miles to a transitional camp, just outside the feared Burepolom, a lumber camp about which we had heard frightening stories. Prisoners in the log-felling brigades—the so-called
lesso-povalka—
routinely suffered severe injuries. They were also known to intentionally cut off an arm or a leg, a hand or a foot, in hopes of receiving a transfer out. Anyone caught in such an act would again stand trial and receive an additional sentence. Suicides were also a common and steady occurrence here. Pain and human suffering went deep, deeper than one could imagine, and then deeper still.

Fourteen

BUREPOLOM

O
ur introduction to this transitional camp was rough indeed. We were put to work immediately and left to fend for ourselves among the camp’s most violent members. Because so many of the prisoners were criminals, the camp was informally ruled by a powerful organization of robbers, petty thieves, and pickpockets. All too soon, the hardened leader of these Blatnoi men, a tough, gangsterlike fellow named Mikal, started paying attention to me. In short,
he wanted me,
but I was not available for him. One day he made what I perceived to be a backward attempt at a come-on. Trying to be sexy, he nudged me gently with his finger on my thigh and said, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to be afraid of me. I could really take care of you here. This is a place where you need friends. Do you know what I mean?”

“Nyet!”
I angrily snapped back, pulling away from him. “I’m not afraid of you. Get away from me!” I’m sure he hadn’t anticipated my brazen reply, but if he had wondered about the possibilities, he was clear about them now. He looked shocked, as if he couldn’t believe my defiance. It must have touched his machismo. A short while later another girl and I were at work, carrying some twelve-foot logs. Without a word, Mikal walked up to me and punched me so hard in my right arm that I nearly fell down. I spent the next few hours soaking my arm with a wet compress, trying to hold back the tears and the excruciating pain. Nevertheless, I still had to help carry logs to our camp for a building project.

I was struggling along, trying to hold up my end of a rough-cut log, and as we approached the camp gate, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Maybe I was hallucinating from the pain…or maybe not?
It was my mother, standing at the gate!
She saw me approaching. Our eyes locked, and she started walking toward me, trying to smile through her tears. But the guard cruelly pushed her back, saying, “Back off. You are not permitted.”