Legion of the Damned (17 page)

We were examined by a young commissar. The examination. lasted five hours and we had to tell everything about ourselves and our families. Two days later we had another examination, when they asked us exactly the same questions, only in a different order. They continued with that for a couple of days, and in the end we were on the edge of a nervous breakdown and so bemused that we began contradicting ourselves. Then they shouted at us that we had told them a pack of lies and they tried to make us admit that we were SS men and spies.

For the next three days there was no examination, and then we were taken before a court of sorts and I was sentenced to ten years' hard labor and Fleischmann to fifteen, but what we were sentenced for no one told us. The whole thing took five minutes.

Shortly after this we and about two hundred other male and female prisoners were driven late one night to the railway station and loaded into a freight train. They selected one man in each car and made him a sort of head prisoner who was responsible for all those in his car. These head prisoners were mostly those whom the GPU men, for some reason or other, had picked on, and whom they made suffer for all real or fancied offenses.

Those in our car came from all strata of society. There was a peasant in quilted clothes and clumsy felt boots. Beside him lay an elderly man in a gray suit, dirty and crumpled but of a good cut, and he was wearing shoes, a thing that only the highest classes do. Opposite me sat a woman in furs and smart silk stockings. Beside her was a young girl in working clothes, and there were one or two others in summer dresses despite the piercing cold.

The train was heading eastward, but where we were going none of us knew. Thrice a day we were ordered out for roll call. The method of counting us was to line us up in one rank, then a soldier went behind, struck the first man a swishing blow with his horsewhip and called "One!"; and he continued thus all down the line. One morning a prisoner had vanished from our car. This proved to be a former officer who, during the night, had managed to get the door open and jumped out. Our head prisoner paid for this escape with his life.

At Kuibyshev, on the Volga, several more cars of prisoners were coupled onto our train. Every single day some of us died from cold and exhaustion. We were made to keep the corpses in the car, and we had to haul them out for each roll call, when they too received their blows from the whip. One day, when we stopped at Bogolowsk, deep in the mighty Urals, the guards seemed to go crazy, for the door was suddenly flung open and a burst of shots fired right into the car, where we lay as close as sardines in a tin. The door was then shut again with a great roar of laughter. Two of the women became quite hysterical and began to howl like dogs, their eyes rigid and staring and foam frothing at their mouths. Fleischmann and I attended to one while a couple of former soldiers dealt with the other. We had to bring them to themselves with a ringing smack on the face, as you did at the front when someone went crazed. That is almost always effective when it is done properly and the smack comes as a shock. Both the women stopped their mad noise, gave a convulsive start, then for a long time they sat and wept the rest of their agitation out of them.

We were let out in Toboisk. The labor camp there had nothing to learn from the Nazis' terror camps. We were told that we would be put to work in the forest for the first few days and then be sent to various factories and works. In our weakened state the hard work in the forest was incredible toil and it was a good thing it only lasted a few days, for otherwise we should not have survived. Fleischmann and I were then sent to work in an underground factory making radio tubes and, judging by what others told us, we were lucky. Those who were sent to the ammunition factories apparently died like flies.

We were allowed five hours' sleep a day. We slept in a hut, where three men had to share a bunk that had no mattress and only one blanket. We were given miserable fish soup three times a day, but no bread. Bread was a luxury, presumably because the rich wheat country by the Black Sea had been lost in the fighting.

After some time we were transferred to a camp for free prisoners. That was a place from which you were loaned to factories and other undertakings that were not under direct GPU supervision and where conditions were much more humane and humanly muddled. You were treated decently and also given a little pay. If you were really smart you could get the work leader to put you down as a specialist, and that made you indispensable.

Our train sauntered along for five days till we came to Jenisseisk on the Jenissei River. On the way we passed Lake Kalunda, and there we got hold of a lot of dried fish and almost killed ourselves by overeating. It was the first occasion for a very long time that we had eaten our fill--and how sick it made us! Our debilitated stomachs could not digest such a mighty meal, though it was also questionable whether even a sound stomach could have dealt with more than thirty such fish. We were accompanied by a couple of decent elderly men of the so-called blue GPU.

The new camp in Jenisseisk was a considerable improvement as far as we were concerned. There was not much space, it is true, but we were never more than two in a bunk. Also, we were reasonably free and not exposed to cruelty. On the contrary, there was quite a pleasant relationship between the prisoners and those in charge of them. We had to attend roll call every morning and evening, and this took the form of reporting to a GPU guard who wrote your name on a board. When the roll call was over the board was wiped clean with a knife. There was no paper for that sort of thing. If you neglected to report at roll call it might earn you a box on the ears, but there were no brutal beatings. Very often the GPU soldier on duty merely asked one of the others whether he could guarantee that the missing person was in the camp, and if the answer was "yes," then the GPU man said admonishingly:

"Tell him that he is written up now, but he must come tomorrow or else I will be really mad with him. We must have a little order in things here."

In this camp I had one of the craziest experiences that has ever come my way. This was the way in which they selected "specialists."

"Tell me what you can do."

Knowing that it was vital to be taken for specialist work, Fleischmann and I both coolly told them that we were "motor specialists."

That put us in the specialist group. When we drew the GPU man's attention to the fact that he had written "specialist" instead of "motor specialist," he smiled cheerfully, winked and said:

"What would you do if a cook was wanted and you were down as a 'motor specialist?'"

He was a practical man.

We began by making wooden wrenches. No one had any idea what they were to be used for. The factory that made them employed twenty-five men on the job. After ten days we were moved to another department that made compasses and that sort of thing.

I had never in my wildest imaginings thought it possible to sabotage work to the extent that was done in that factory. Fifty per cent of all that was produced had to be scrapped. For an example, they were building an engine shop, a job on which at least six hundred specialists were engaged. All sorts of precautions were taken to see that it was a nice building. The architects and leaders from the GPU measured what was done several times a day and they wallowed in drawings and blueprints. The work was followed with great interest by the entire town. When at long last the engine shop was finished it was as cockeyed as the tower of Pisa and everybody, except those responsible for the masterpiece, laughed loudly and unrestrainedly, including our GPU men.

It was the same with the machines in the factories. They were continually breaking down, and then the workers shouted delightedly: "Machine bust! Machine bust!"

No matter how tiny the fault, it was certain to take the rest of the day to remedy it, while a handful of sand in a dynamo would always give us a longer interval. If a part was needed for one machine, you stole it from another, and that replaced it from a third, and so on till the last was taken from a halted machine waiting for a something or other from Moscow before it could run again. We had a big engine, and one day this broke down, making a whole department stop work. After a lengthy palaver we specialists decided that there must be something wrong with the spark plugs. Not having that kind of spark plug in the store, we had to send to Moscow for a new set. When they eventually arrived three weeks later there was a whole box of them, only the box, when opened, was full of screws. Another requisition was sent to Moscow. Another three weeks passed and then another box of plugs arrived, and this time it had spark plugs in it. But in the meantime the engine itself had quietly vanished. There was nothing of that big engine left but the flywheel. The works leader stared at the remains for awhile, then he shook his head and went in to see Captain Turgojski, the GPU chief, and drank vodka.

It would be wrong to think that you can conclude from this that everywhere in USSR things were as chaotic and sabotage as rife as at Jenisseisk. The army that was put up against us functioned perfectly. If its equipment was not better than the German--as it not infrequently was--it was at least as good and also less complicated. And the human material was better. More primitive, but also more reliable. That could not have been possible in a land that was corrupt through and through. Many people would like to think that everything in the Soviet Union is rotten, as it was at Jenisseisk, but you should be careful about drawing conclusions. That things were as they were in Jenisseisk is not to be wondered at when you realize that there were thirty thousand of us forced laborers, six thousand of whom were foreigners. There were thirty thousand people who only thought of sabotaging the work they did or, at the very least, were utterly indifferent whether things were produced or a decent job done or not. We were there and we were relatively well off, so our only concern was to stay there. In other words, we had to see that things stayed as they were for as long as possible.

The big canals and power stations that have been built, the irrigation works completed, the development of heavy industry and expansion of general education are all things that show that there cannot be nothing but saboteurs in that huge land. It is merely that dimensions there are so large that the mistakes and blunders, of which no community is altogether free since people are not machines, necessarily loom up huge in the eyes of the Western European and attract instant attention. Added to which is the factor that the country was at war, and for that reason alone conditions must have been abnormal.

I met a German Communist, Bernhard Kruse, from Berlin Lichterfelde. He had taken part in the fighting at the barricades after the First World War. In 1924 he crossed over into Soviet Russia and was received with open arms. He was a machine fitter and got a good job in a factory in Leningrad, where he became works foreman and instructor of several hundred men. He was well off, had a good salary and enjoyed all the privileges of the upper-class Soviet citizen, including that of being able to shop in the big Party stores where everything was to be had. He married a young woman from Moscow. Then, in 1936, he was arrested and put in Lubjanka and kept for two years without any idea of why he was there. When an officer came to his cell during an inspection of the prison he asked the officer if he could tell him why he had been arrested. The officer sent for the register, turned to Kruse's name and read out:

"Your name is Bernhard Kruse; you were born in Berlin in 1902 and are married to Katja Wolin. You are a machine specialist and have been engineer in several factories in the Leningrad district. You have been given a diploma of honor for services in training Russian workers and you are a member of the Party."

The officer read on. Finally, he shook his head.

"This seems peculiar," he said.

Then, finally, he exclaimed:

"Aba! Here we have it. In 1924 you crossed the Polish frontier and entered the Soviet. That sort of thing is illegal."

"Yes, but I had been given a Russian passport and everyone knew how and when I entered the Soviet, and I have been here for twelve years."

The officer shrugged his shoulders.

"You must have kept something or other from the GPU which they have now found out," he said.

A year later Kruse was sentenced to fifteen years' hard labor for having entered the Soviet illegally and by stealth, probably in order to spy. He was informed of the sentence in his cell and thus never so much as saw the shadow of a judge.

Many such stories were confided in me. Whether the tellers were all as innocent and unaware of the reason for their sentences as they made out is a question I cannot answer. One old Russian said:

"If anyone has really done something they shoot him at once."

I became really good friends with the commissar for distribution of prisoners' labor. He came to me several times at the factory and wanted something made for him privately. One day I asked him if be could get me a better job, which he promised to do. The very next day he came with a mad proposition:

"You can speak English and German. What do you say to becoming a teacher of languages? You can certainly teach the children something. When there's an inspection you just invite the commissar to have a drink and then he forgets to inspect. That's what we all do."

I laughed. "It would never work," I said. "I can speak Russian fairly reasonably, but I can't write it at all. You must think of something better."

He shook his head in amazement. "The children must teach you to write Russian in return for your teaching them English and German. I'm sure it would work."

However, I did not become a schoolmaster, but a "specialist miller." If anyone questioned me I was to say that I had been commissar for all the mills in Scandinavia.

A young Russian showed me round No. 73 Flour Mill. We went to some sieves with the whitest flour I have ever seen, such flour as was not to be bought legally. He then filled a fourteenpound sack, tied it, tramped it flat and told me to put it under my jacket and shape it a bit, so that it should not be too obvious.