The Long Walk (2 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the morning when I came back to life I pulled my face away from the wall of my cell and smelt a new and peculiar smell. In the dim light the wall where my mouth had rested showed a wide,
greenish stain. I was really frightened as I stood there, weighed down by a truly colossal feeling of oppression, like the father of all hang-overs. They drugged you, I kept telling myself. They
drugged you with the fish. What have you told them? I didn’t think I could possibly have signed their damned paper, but I couldn’t remember. I felt ill and low and very worried.

Quite soon afterwards I was moved to Moscow and the Lubyanka. The guards were chatty and smiling as I left. This was a feature of Pinsk and Minsk, now Kharkov and later Moscow. The guards acted
on my departure as if they were glad I was leaving. They talked freely, joked a little. Maybe it was their way of showing a sympathy in which earlier they could not indulge.

Conditions at the Lubyanka were a little easier. My reputation as a recalcitrant had obviously preceded me because I was very soon consigned to the
kishka.
But this
kishka
was
clean and the periods I was forced to spend in it were shorter.

The interrogation team at the Lubyanka nevertheless tried out their special powers of persuasion on me. It was possibly a matter of metropolitan pride to try to succeed where the provincial boys
had failed. There were the usual questions, the repeated demands for my signature, some manhandling, references to the filthy, spying Poles. But there was only one torture trick of which The Bull
might have been envious.

They strapped me with my feet pulled stiffly out under the now familiar ‘operation table’. My arms were stretched out along the table surface, each hand tied and held separately. My
body was arched in a straining bow around the table end and the pain grew into searing agony as they hauled taut on the straps. This, however, was preparatory stuff like climbing into the
dentist’s chair with raging toothache. The operation was yet to come. Over the table was suspended an old-fashioned small cauldron fitted with a spout. It contained hot tar. There followed
the usual pressing invitation to sign, with a promise that if I agreed I should be released immediately and returned to my cell. I think they would have been most disappointed if at that stage I
had agreed to sign. The first drop of tar was hell. It burned savagely into the back of my hand and held its heat a long time on the puckered and livid skin. That first drop was the worst. It was
the peak of pain. The rest were faintly anti-climax. I held on to consciousness and to my will to resist. When they said I should be glad to sign with my left hand at the end of the session, I
proved them wrong. I had learned my fortitude in a very hard school.

That was the last major assault. I had been in the Lubyanka only about two weeks when I was led forth to my first and only experience of a Soviet court of justice.

T
HE LIVELY
buzz of conversation in the courtroom suddenly died down. Mischa, his snow-white collar and shirt and elegant
grey silk tie eye-catching among the uniforms and the normal utilitarian Russian civilian dress, said brightly, ‘Well, I suppose we might as well make a start.’ I had been standing then
for about half-an-hour and for the first time the members of the court looked at me. The guards behind thumped to attention. Sheaves of papers were handed round.

The central seat on the long table was taken by a quiet-voiced, white-haired Russian of about 60. He wore the customary long jacket over his buttoned-to-the-throat blouse, which was black,
ornamented at the neck and cuffs with cross-stitching embroidery in green and red. Flanking him were two N.K.V.D. officers in their dark blue uniforms with red flashes on the collar and red
hat-bands round their military peaked caps. Mischa’s seat was at the end of the table to my left. He, I was to learn, was the chief prosecutor, and as the court prepared to start work he sat
coolly looking me over. I hitched my trousers and looked at a point just above the President’s head.

It was the President, who, after a whispered consultation with the officers beside him, started the proceedings. The opening gambit was one I now knew by heart. Name? Age? Date of birth? Where
born? Parents’ names? Their nationality? Father’s occupation? Mother’s maiden name? And so on through the long catalogue lying before him, complete, I have no doubt, with the
answers I had wearily repeated in all my encounters with the N.K.V.D. from my arrest in Pinsk to my arrival in Moscow. If by this repetition they hoped I might vary an occasional answer, it was
poor psychology. So often had I answered that any one of these questions produced always the same reply because I had ceased to have to think. It had become habit, a reflex action. The same old
questions, the same old answers . . .

The charges were read over to me. The President (this may not have been his title but it appeared to be his function) took a long time going through the indictment. It bristled with place-names,
the names of alleged Polish ‘reactionaries’, and dates covering a period of years on which I was accused of having committed specific acts of espionage against the Soviet Union. Their
scope was so sweeping that I have never ceased to marvel that they missed the occasions when, as a teen-ager looking for danger and adventure, I
had
indeed crossed the Polish-Russian border.
These charges were completely without foundation and I felt some satisfaction in the thought that if they could not torture me into admission of them in the specially-equipped interrogation rooms
of a series of Russian prisons, they were unlikely to get me to change my tune in the comparatively pleasant and civilized atmosphere of this court.

As the questioning really got under way I found myself grudgingly admiring the resolute singleness of purpose of the official Russian mind. All this I had gone through before in a series of
appalling nightmares. Now, in the light of day, having emerged from the twisting, horror-filled corridors of frustration and despair, I found the dream persisting. Shortly stated, the indictment
might have read:
You, Slavomir Rawicz, being a well-educated middle-class Pole and an officer in the anti-Russian Polish Army, having a home near the Russian border, are therefore beyond any
question of doubt a Polish spy and an enemy of the people of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
It remained only for the court to ask, with some asperity, why waste our time with
denials?