With God in Russia

by Walter J. Ciszek

  The lieutenant spent most of his time in the corridor. When we pulled into towns along the route, he’d hop off the train to pace the platform, stopping now and then to buy a sandwich or a cup of coffee at the station kiosk. The guards also took turns bringing food to one another from the station platforms, but none was given to me. I began to realize that the loaf of bread and the sugar had been intended as my travel ration and were supposed to last me until we reached wherever we were going. By now, I regretted the fact I had eaten half the loaf in the detention box at Perm. I decided I’d better ration the rest as best I could.

  At dusk, I ate a small bit of bread, then propped myself up against the window, this time hoping to sleep. The guards took turns sleeping in the compartment while the other remained on guard; the lieutenant found a place to sleep somewhere else on the train. Just before nightfall, we crossed a river, probably the Cheptsa, somewhere west of Kez. Then the landscape faded into blackness. I finally fell asleep to the rough rocking of the train and the steady rhythm of the wheels.

  The next morning, one of the guards woke me and took me to the washroom before the rest of the passengers began to move about. I ate another piece of bread, then watched hungrily as the guards breakfasted on milk, bacon, and some white bread they had picked up at the last stop. We pulled into Kirov late that morning, and the two husky guards put away another whopping meal of fried fish, huckleberries, bread, and more milk. Again they gave me none, but no doubt they had their orders. Their constant snacks along the way, though, were making me even hungrier. I began to nibble from time to time on the bread despite the ration I had set myself.

  That evening, in spite of my best intentions, I finished the loaf of bread: when I started to eat it, I just couldn’t stop because I was so famished. I also finished the last of my sugar and licked the paper cone to get the last few grains. The next morning I was starved. One of the guards brought in from the station a breakfast of rye bread, butter, cheese, and some cups of coffee. The aroma was overpowering and the saliva began to run down my throat as if someone had turned on a faucet. I couldn’t keep my eyes off that food all the time they were eating it, and I would have given anything to have a bite.

  As we pulled into the station at Uren, one of the guards jumped up to get off the train. As he did so, he knocked a piece of bread and butter out of the lieutenant’s hand. It fell to the floor half-eaten, the butter side up. The lieutenant swore at him briefly for a clumsy ox, kicked the half-eaten bread under the seat, and followed him out of the compartment.

  The temptation was too much. For the rest of the afternoon, I kept fishing under the seat with my leg, trying to make my movements as inconspicuous as possible so the guard sitting opposite me wouldn’t notice. Whenever he’d turn to look out the window or into the corridor, I’d swoop my leg around more violently until I began to get a cramp. That piece of bread now occupied all my thoughts; I spent the whole afternoon trying to retrieve it. I don’t think I ever worked so hard for a meal in my life.

  At last, I felt the bread with my toe and kicked it forward. Then, when the guard would look away, I’d bend down and try to pick it up. When he’d look back, I’d pretend to be scratching my ankle, pulling up my sock, or tying my shoe. Finally, he looked back quickly and saw me reaching for the bread. I caught his eye and, in desperation, said, “Pozhalusta!” (Please!). He didn’t say anything one way or the other, just looked at me, so I snatched it up.

  Just then, the lieutenant came into the compartment. I clutched that piece of bread and butter in one hand, tucked it under the elbow of the other arm, and tried to look nonchalant—at the same time wondering what the guard would say. He said nothing. When the lieutenant went out again and the guard turned to watch him go, I jammed the whole half-piece of bread and butter into my mouth and finished it at a gulp. At last I had my meal.

  That evening, we pulled into the station at Gorki. In accord with special wartime precautions, troops boarded the train here, all lights were extinguished, and we crawled through the night toward Moscow. At dawn, we were in the railroad yards around the city. As far as the eye could see, the tracks were covered with ammunition trains, troop and transport trains loaded with tanks, trucks, armored vehicles of all sorts, bulldozers, and equipment of every description.

  As soon as we slid to a stop, I was led out—again with instructions not to look around—and immediately transferred to a waiting van. It was just a big, empty truck with benches, a screened-off section in back, and a place for the armed guard. We drove only a short while before the van came to a halt again. Nothing happened immediately, but I could hear the soldiers talking outside, then shouted commands. The van doors swung open and about thirty young people were shoved in with me. Though there was hardly room for us all, I was happy to see them just to have someone to talk to.

  This crowd seemed to be boys and girls from the kolkhozes (collective farms), ranging in age from perhaps fifteen to the early twenties. We bounced around in the back as the van careened through the city, but still I managed to get acquainted with some of them. Five of the young boys told me they had been arrested for “killing a nanny goat.” Others had been arrested for stealing chickens; some of the girls said they had been arrested for stealing wheat. There was such a crowd in the back of the truck we couldn’t sit down, so we rattled around, sliding into one another, bumping elbows and knees, everyone talking at once.

  All of a sudden, the van lurched to a stop. The doors opened and the guard began to call out names, one at a time. When all the young people had clambered out, I was still in the van. The guard slammed the door, and I heard the driver shout, “Come on, climb in, I’m leaving!” The gears ground and we raced off again. Once again, I sat down on the benches all alone. After a while, there was a sudden stop—then nothing. I heard the guards in conversation, then they seemed to walk away and I could hear nothing but ordinary street sounds. Moscow in September can be very cold; the guards on the van were already wearing their big army greatcoats. There was no heat at all in the van and the metal was getting so cold it stung to the touch. At last I stood up in the truck and began to jump around, trying to keep warm in my thin clothing.

  After perhaps an hour, I heard the exploding steam and screaming metal of a braking train. The doors opened and again a crowd of people were herded in with me. They were older people, in their thirties and forties, and again we exchanged the customary greetings and the now-familiar question, “What are you in for?” They were peasants for the most part, arrested for robbery, or draft dodging. Some, like me, had been picked up on political charges. Again we drove off, rattled along for a while, stopped, and backed up. Again the guard opened the door and called out the names; again, everyone was called but me. I was beginning to think they had forgotten about me.

  The van returned to the railroad station. This time, I could hear the whistles and clanging train bells in the distance. It had been a long day, and I was cold and hungry, very hungry. I had had nothing to eat since that stolen bread and butter the day before. This time, when the doors opened, I could see that dusk had fallen outside. A small group of soldiers were shoved into the van, some in uniform, some in greatcoats. Most of them had been arrested for desertion, although they insisted they had simply gotten lost or had been separated from their outfits in transfer. One or two, however, admitted they had simply stayed behind when their unit moved off for the front.

  We went off again, stopped again, backed up. Again the guard called every name but mine. The doors clanged shut and I was left alone once more in that cold iron icebox of a truck. Then the doors swung open and a guard called out to me, “What’s your name?” “Lypinski, Wladimir Martinovich.” “Birthday?” “November 4, 1910.” “Charge?” “58:10:2.” “Vihoditie!” (Get out!) he said. As I jumped down from the van, the stiffness in my legs betrayed me. I stumbled and almost fell. I felt the jolt of the impact stab through my cold ankles and feet. The guard led me down into a basement somewhere, though I had no idea where I was,
and put me into a “box.” Obviously, a prison. Only much later did I learn it was Lubianka.

  CHAPTER 2

  Moscow Prison Years

  DREADED LUBIANKA

  AT LEAST AN hour passed before a guard came to unlock the door of the detention cell, ask me the three routine questions, and lead me away. My hair was clipped short again, I was photographed again, front and profile, then fingerprinted. Back to the box again. More time passed. I was called out, registered, locked in the box again. Still later, I was led out, ordered to strip, and went through the routine medical examination. This takes a little getting used to, since most of the doctors in the prisons, as elsewhere in Russia, are women. Their whole approach, however, was one of quiet efficiency and even boredom, so I soon learned to accept their probing and thumping and tapping like any other medical examination.

  After the medical examination, my clothes were thrown into the disinfecting room and baked for an hour at such high temperature that they turned dark from the intense heat. Meanwhile, I was led to a shower, then led naked back to the box, where I waited for my clothes. What with the long intervals in the box between examinations and all the other routine operations, the whole night passed. It was nearly morning before I was led down a long corridor, up several flights of stairs, and into a cell.

  I call it a “cell” because the building was a prison. Actually, it was more like a hotel room. Small, neat, and very clean, it had a shiny wooden floor, and white-washed walls and ceiling lit by a naked light bulb hanging from the center. A radiator behind a grill in one wall didn’t seem to be throwing much heat. There was a bed in one corner with clean sheets, a blanket, and a pillow. The only other furnishing in the room was a parasha (a toilet bucket with a lid) in a corner near the door. The one window in the room was about normal size for a hotel room—and I found out later Lubianka had formerly been a hotel—but it was completely barred and covered over with a huge sheet of tin. The only thing I could see, if I stood up close to the window, was a little bit of sky through the “muzzle” at the top where the tin tilted away from the window frame. There was a round peephole in the door so the guard could see in, with a hinged cover on the outside to prevent the prisoner from seeing out.

  After the first few minutes of inspection were finished, and I had gotten my bearings, a deep lethargy overtook me. I was sleepy, hungry, and cold, despite the weak heat from the radiator. I simply couldn’t get warm. I began to walk up and back, up and back, in that little room 6 by 10 feet, from the bed to the wall and back again. From time to time I could hear a clock chiming the hour; later I discovered it was the big clock in the Kremlin itself.

  Then, as the clock chimed 7 A.M., I began to hear movements in the corridor. Suddenly, I heard the guard at the door. The guard was a woman, as were most of the guards in Lubianka, and she brought what seemed to me a feast fit for the gods—400 grams (¾ pound) of bread, a cube and a half of sugar, and a cup of kipiatok (boiling water). That was breakfast at Lubianka and it never varied. By this time I had been without food for more than thirty-six hours. I sat down on the bed and tore into the bread, ripping it off in chunks and chewing it ravenously.

  I learned later to be more miserly and more leisurely in savoring the delights of breakfast at Lubianka, but right now I was starved. Between bites of bread, I bit off pieces of sugar and drank them down with a mouthful of hot water; the mixture was sweet and it felt warm going down. I also learned later that you could get more than one cup of kipiatok by banging the cup against the door and asking the guard for a refill. But that morning I finished the bread, the cube of sugar, and the hot water, and let it go at that. I was still hungry, but I felt warm and almost human for the first time in more than two days.

  To be completely honest, however, I should admit that my first thoughts after eating breakfast were about dinner. I wondered how long I would have to wait. After the guard had come to collect the tin cup, I began to walk up and down again endlessly—partly to keep warm and partly to have something to do, to keep active. There was no sleeping allowed during the day. If you tried to lie down, the guard would spot you almost immediately and order you to get up. At Lubianka, there were only five or six cells on each corridor, and the guard was continually checking. I wondered over and over again why I was here, what they wanted of me. I was still tired and somewhat dazed, so I simply walked up and down, back and forth, going over the puzzle endlessly—and rather blankly—and listening to the clock chime the quarter hours.

  No one bothered me until sometime after the clock struck noon. Then again I began to hear sounds in the corridor, the clatter of dishes, and my salivary reflexes started to work like those of Pavlov’s dog. At length the guard opened my cell door and handed me a tin tureen of soup and an aluminum spoon. The soup was very thin, with a few grains of cereal in it we called magara, little pellets of grain that look something like birdseed. It smelled of fish, and there were a few bones in the bottom of the tureen. Since I had heard in the prison at Perm that bones are good for you and keep you strong, I ate the soup bones and all. I simply ground them up between my teeth like powder and swallowed them with a mouthful of soup. No sooner had I licked the tureen dry than I began to think about supper.

  Sometime that afternoon there was a twenty-minute exercise period when the guard led me down into the courtyard for a walk. The time for this exercise varied from day to day. It might be as early as eight o’clock in the morning or as late as six o’clock at night, depending on whether the guards began at the top or bottom of the prison. I didn’t relish the trip to the courtyard, for I had just gotten warm, and the air in the prison yard was crisp and cold. Moreover, I was still wearing nothing but light pants and jacket, the clothes I had worn ever since Chusovoy.

  Supper was at 6 P.M. Sometime after 5:30, I began to hear the clatter of dishes down the corridor, and I waited impatiently for the sound of footsteps, the rattle of the key in the lock, and the crash of the big bolt on the outside of the door. At last the guard handed in the same tin tureen, this time containing two or three tablespoons of kasha. The menu at Lubianka, in other words, was no different than it had been at Perm, and, indeed, Russian prison fare rarely varies. Two or three tablespoons made the evening portion. I learned to eat it slowly, savoring it almost grain by grain, then running my finger around the tureen and licking it clean until there was nothing left but the shiny wall of the bowl.

  About an hour after dinner, the guard began to take the prisoners on her corridor to the toilet one by one. Like the medical examination, this is another operation which takes some getting used to, because the prison guards watch you through a peephole even when you are in the toilet. The toilet itself consists of nothing but a hole in the floor, with two indentations for your feet on either side, and the wall to hold you up. Anyone who has ever traveled in Europe will recognize the description; there was nothing unusual about it except the feeling of being constantly watched. There were faucets in the room, so you could wash up, and a large slop sink in the corner in which to clean the parasha, which you brought along at this time. There was also a can of disinfectant to complete the job.

  Everything had to be done quickly. If I was in the toilet for more than two minutes, the guard would rap on the door and tell me to hurry up. After that, it was back to the cell and the eternal walking up and down until bedtime at 10 P.M. The lights stayed on all night, unless the warden or the interrogator gave a man special permission to have the ceiling light turned off, with only the small blue emergency light over the door left on. That night, however, I had no difficulty getting to sleep, since I had been more than forty-eight hours without any. I eagerly undressed when the signal was given, crawled between the clean sheets, and threw the thin blanket over my shoulders. The mattress was thin, so thin in fact that I could feel the iron strips of the frame under my back, or sticking into my ribs when I turned on my side to try and get comfortable.

  I said my night prayers, then lay for a time flooded with thoughts. Above all,
I wondered what was going to happen to me now. I couldn’t believe I was so important that I had to be brought all the way to Moscow after the weary months of interrogation at Perm. I searched for a reason to explain this special handling of me; I couldn’t find one. I went over and over those sessions at Perm. My head began to ache, but I was still puzzled. At last, I took refuge once more in the thought of God’s Providence. I dwelt on the idea of His protection—and I fell asleep.

  The next day began at 5:30 in the morning. The bell shrilled, and a few moments later the guard opened the door to shout “Podiom!” (Get up!). If she got no answering movement, she shouted again, then came over to double-check. In a short while, we were led in turn to the toilet, then returned to wait for breakfast. Seven o’clock came, but no breakfast. I learned by experience that breakfast, like the other meals or your turn at exercise, might be served anywhere from 7:00 to 8:30 in the morning, depending on from what end of the prison they began to serve the meal. I also learned by experience to hope that breakfast would be served as late as possible, so that the wait until dinnertime would be as short as possible.

  A number of days passed without incident. As the days stretched out, I became more anxious to find out what I was doing here and what was going to happen to me. Since the guards were not supposed to talk to prisoners, there was no way to find out and nothing to do but wait, walking up and down, praying, or thinking endlessly over the same question, reviewing the interrogations at Perm for some hint or clue as to what might happen. In the end, for all my meditations and worrying, I knew precisely what I had known when I left Perm: I was a political prisoner, charged with subversive activity under Section 58:10:2.

  After some days of such anxious waiting, I sprang up from a sound sleep one night at the sound of the bolt crashing in the door. This is all part of the psychological process, I suppose, because it immediately puts you on the defensive. Anyone who has ever been awakened suddenly at night will know the feeling. The guards wear special cloth shoes so you can’t hear them approaching until they are almost on top of the door; when you’re sleeping, the first thing you normally hear is the sound of the bolt springing back. You wake up completely tensed and confused.