Day and night for those three days, the Germans bombed Moscow, and the railroad yards were one of the principal targets. By some miracle or other we were never hit, nor was anything close by, yet it seemed impossible it could be so because the bombs were raining all about us. Several bombs hit near enough so that we could see rubble and sections of track mushroom into the air, but nothing came in our direction—although we sometimes prayed fervently that it would! The idea seemed to be that if we were hit with a German bomb we would be free one way or another: either we would be dead and escape the Russians that way, or we might be lucky enough to pick our way out of the bombed train and get away.
About October 8th, the train made an abortive move as far as Pieski, identified by an army officer in the car as a suburb of Moscow. There we sat through most of the night; the next day we backed up into the Moscow yards again. The area where the train had sat the previous day was a mass of rubble, with boxcars stacked high atop one another like the children’s game of pick-up sticks. Here and there a twisted rail stuck out of the piles like a giant corkscrew.
Finally, on October 9th, we began to move by slow stages. During the day we would halt on a siding, for the Germans were sure to aim a bomb at anything that moved. We traveled only at night. While we sat on the sidings, we continued our “stolipinski courses.” The old general, who had served in the army since the days of the czars, lectured us every morning and evening on military strategy. One of the factory directors gave us a long, technical lecture on how he had changed over from making cigarettes to making bullets. Other factory directors and the engineer gave us a rundown on the progress of the war effort, the scarcity of practically all the materials needed for war, the demands for full production when there was nothing to produce with. One of the directors, in fact, said he had been arrested because he had failed to meet his quota—and no explanations were accepted. Most of them were pessimistic about Russian chances to match the German onslaught in matériel, and they felt that the motherland’s only chance of winning the war lay in her manpower—and in the United States.
For the first three days, while we were in the yards, we had been given a ration of bread. Then the bread ran out. There was not much anyone could do about it in the light of existing conditions; even the guards missed their regular rations. Any system of supply would have been completely disrupted by the continual bombing. After twenty-four hours without food, for the next few days we received as a ration three or four small herring, frozen solid. We would warm them in our hands until they became soft, then simply eat them raw, beginning at one end and working straight through to the other—tail, head, bones, fins, and all.
We ate them because we were absolutely famished. Yet we had no water ration either and, as a result, our thirst was simply intensified by eating the fish. After a day or so, we were almost wild with thirst. Some of the men in the car began to cry out violently, almost mad with the need of something to quench the burning in their mouth and throat. Things began to get completely out of hand, and there was even a rumor (which one of our officers heard from a young soldier on guard) that we might be shot to solve the whole problem.
The bombing was still intense and the train could only creep along at night, showing no lights, hoping the track in front of it was still there. One night, after we had been running for a while, the train suddenly stopped in the middle of a forest. We thought the moment had come. In the dim half-light of the night, we could see the guards walking around the train, silhouetted against the snow with machine guns in their arms. The hours stretched out interminably, until the muscles in our empty stomachs were churning with the tension and we were sweating despite the cold. The NKGB men marched back and forth with the dogs they had brought along on the train. It looked very much as if they might be going to herd us out into the forest. Yet dawn came and nothing happened.
The next morning, we pulled into Ryazan, where we got our first bread in two days and our first water. It was another two days before we saw bread again. Again we subsisted on herring, and again some of the prisoners began to get violent. At last we pulled into Tambov, one of the main rail junctions. The station yards were packed with troops and ammunition trains—every track was loaded. Still the bombing continued. For, while we had been moving all the time, we had actually been running almost parallel to the German lines along the Moscow-Stalingrad front. At Tambov, we were shunted off onto a siding so that essential armaments could move through to the front.
Despite our own wretched condition, we watched with sympathy as the people of the town—some of whom had even pitched shanties along the edge of the railroad yards—begged for food from the passing troop trains. We sat there on the Tambov siding for two days, and at last we got some bread. We were told it would have to last until we reached Atkarsk, 150 kilometers away; at the rate we had been moving, there was no telling how long that would take. When we finally began to move, though, it took us only two days; of course, our bread had long since disappeared. As for the bread promised at Atkarsk, we sat on the siding and waited—nothing happened. After a while, the prisoners began to cry out, cursing the guards and demanding that we be fed.
We finally were. Big baskets of black bread were brought to the train and we each received half a loaf. It was marvelous, homebaked country bread, fresh and chewy, with the unmistakable aroma of newly baked bread. Again, we were told it would have to last until we reached Saratov, but the smell was overpowering and we ate it in huge gulps. I never tasted such delicious bread in my life as that thick, black rye bread in Atkarsk. At Atkarsk, too, we got as much water as we wanted, and with all that bread and water our stomachs swelled up until they were bloated and we could no longer feel the pangs of hunger.
We reached Saratov on the 18th of October. It had taken us almost thirteen days to make a trip normally made in a day and a half by passenger train. It was pouring rain when we arrived, but rain or no rain we had to stand in line while the officials ran a head count and checked our documents, name by name. We were worried, above all, about the little bits of bread we had squirreled away, trying to keep them from getting wet. Then we were crowded into prison vans and taken to the old governmental prison in Saratov.
INTERLUDE AT SARATOV
WHEN WE REACHED the prison, we were checked off again in the pouring rain, and at last led down into a basement with old stone walls, black with age. Once again we went through the usual routine: we were fingerprinted, photographed, barbered and shaved, examined by the doctors, and disinfected. While our clothes were taken to be steamed, we were herded into the showers. After almost two weeks in the cramped quarters of the railroad cars, we were glad to be clean again. The showers themselves at Saratov were filthy, for this section of the prison hadn’t been used for a long time; the walls of the showers were damp, grimy, and covered with scum. But we did the best we could and felt better for it.
After all the processing, I was put back in the van along with others and taken across town to an old school building. The prison itself couldn’t accommodate the crowds coming down from Lubianka, so the school was hastily pressed into service. The classrooms had been cleared, except for some platforms in the middle of the room on which we sat or slept—at least as many of us as could get a place on them. There were about one hundred fifty of us in a room which had probably accommodated fifty, or at most sixty, pupils in former days.
Our group was composed mainly of the political prisoners from Lubianka, a cultured and intellectual group on the whole, so we soon established a daily order similar to that which the old general had set up on the train. There in those classrooms, the professors would lecture and some of the artists would perform—singing or dancing or working up impromptu monologues and skits—anything to pass the time. Between times, we engaged in the usual prison pastime of exploring each other’s backgrounds, finding common interests on which we could while away the hours in lengthy conversations, comparing notes on our interrogations at Lubianka, etc. As always, you had to take ma
ny of these stories with a good dose of salt, because everyone would color the stories to protect himself. No one ever completely trusted anyone else. There was always the danger that someone in the group might be a spy or an NKGB informer.
One night while we were there, for instance, I woke with a start at the sound of loud talking and great commotion in the cell. By the time I was awake enough to get my bearings, the guards were already in the room, carrying out a bloody corpse. The officials came immediately, lined us up, and demanded to know who had killed the man. No one had done it, of course; everybody had been sound asleep. The inquiry went on for over an hour. The officials threatened that it would last all night if necessary and nobody would get any sleep, but they got nowhere and finally gave up. In the excited hubbub before we got back to sleep, I heard that the victim was an NKGB informer who had been discovered and dispatched. It may have been true, or it may have been just another prison story; perhaps the man was killed in a fight over tobacco or bread.
At the end of a month, the groups in the old school building were split up again, and I was sent once more to the main prison at Saratov. The cells there were small rooms about 7 by 12 feet, with grimy stone walls and one little window high in the wall. The room was always dark. It was also very damp, with a dank, musty smell which permeated everything, so penetrating that I never got used to it. As many as seventeen people were sometimes packed into these rooms, but in our cell there were twelve.
Even at that, there wasn’t much space to move around. At night, we all huddled together on the rough-hewn benches to sleep. If someone turned over in his sleep, he was liable to wake the whole crowd. On the other hand, the food was a little better than average. The bread, of which we got 400 grams at breakfast with hot water, was delicious. We got the usual half liter of soup at noon, but instead of kasha in the evening we were handed three frozen fish, what we called okun (like little perch), and some warm water. We ate the fish, entrails and all, from head to tail, like sardines. Moreover, we had a gentleman’s agreement—possible in such a small group—not to eat between meals. In this way we avoided the common prison experience of having our appetites whetted by watching someone else eat.
At this time, they began to call us out for interrogations again, one at a time, beginning sometime after breakfast. The first part of our daily business, therefore, was speculation about who might be called that day. Afterward, we observed the daily order which had become standard fare—lectures, monologues, and skits to pass the time—at least until someone returned from questioning. Then everything would stop and we’d turn our complete attention to finding out how things had gone, what line the interrogators were working on this time, whether there was any news.
Here in the main prison at Saratov we also had another means of daily communication, the Morse code telegraph. The prison was built in the form of a hollow square, with a courtyard in the middle. On the second floor where we were, there was a line of about thirty cells all around the four sides. Every day, while one man stood at the door to watch for the guard, the telegraph would go into operation. Prisoners would tap on the walls in Morse code, passing messages from cell to cell.
We would try to find out if there were any new arrivals and what news they brought, especially news from the front. Names were passed from cell to cell, in the hope of finding friends, and we would ask how many were in each room and who they were. The first messages of each day concerned those who had died during the night—mainly from dysentery—or those who were sick in other cells. Tobacco would be traded over the “telegraph” for extra food, or perhaps even for clothing, if the need was desperate. The telegraphers would rap out an appointed time and place (usually the toilet) for hiding the items to be picked up in exchange.
One morning, there was an excited rap at the wall. Word was passed around the corridor like wildfire that Steklov, a former editor of Izvestia, had hanged himself in one of the cells. He had been in Saratov almost a year, increasingly despondent, and the prison life and enforced confinement had finally driven him to this act of self-destruction. Because of his former position and reputation, this was a juicy tidbit for the prison telegraph and the subject of lengthy conversations all day.
About my second week in this cell, I was called for interrogation. As usual, I tensed up with that peculiar feeling of repugnance I always felt when starting one of these sessions. The whole business seemed so futile and frustrating. I knew I had done nothing wrong, yet their whole attitude seemed to be that I simply must be covering something up. To be sure, I had entered Russia on a false passport, for which the maximum penalty might be two or three years’ imprisonment, but that subject never received any serious consideration at all. They knew about it, but the fact itself never seemed to disturb them, except insofar as it tended to confirm their suspicions that I must have had some subversive purpose in entering the U.S.S.R.
That morning, I was led into a room before a whole group of interrogators. I sat down stiffly, and they began to fire questions from all sides about my life or my work as a “spy.” “You priests,” said one of them, “come into Russia as agitators under the pretext of religion, stirring up the people! Why don’t you just come right out and admit it?” “I’m no more a spy than you are!” I flared back. He bridled immediately. “Who do you think you’re talking to like that?” he said. “Just answer the question and don’t get flip.” “I’m not being flip,” I said. “You know you’re not a spy, don’t you? Well, I know I’m not a spy, and that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
All told, it was a very confusing session. It was difficult to stay calm or accurate in answering because the questions came in rapid fire from various interrogators, and not necessarily on the same subject. When I told my cellmates about it afterward, or at least as much of it as I could remember, we could come to no conclusion about what they had been driving at. Not that the cell was a particularly good board of estimate in these matters—or entirely without prejudice.
Three days later I was called out again, this time in the middle of the night. My interrogator was a tall young blond with a boyish face, and he was alone. It didn’t take long for me to suspect he was a novice at the job; I had had experience with the professionals at Lubianka. He looked so young, and yet he tried to be so stern, that I couldn’t help being amused. Instead of the detailed cross-examination I had learned to respect, and even dread, he would break in with exclamations such as “What! What are you trying to tell me? What did you say? What’s that supposed to mean?” Once I smiled and said, “Well, what do you want? You tell me!” “Hey!” he said, “who do you think you’re talking to!” He got up, trying unsuccessfully to look tough, and shook his fist in my face. “You see this fist? Well, watch it!” I lowered my eyes and tried to look respectful, but I could hardly keep from laughing.
All through the interrogation, he kept insisting that I sit up straight on the front edge of the chair. Yet he himself could barely keep his head up; he kept nodding off to sleep. By early morning, he was dozing at almost thirty-second intervals. He couldn’t even write a complete sentence on the papers in front of him. Finally, he slammed the pen down on the desk, stood up briskly, and said, “Good! Now you go back to your cell and think that all over and tomorrow”—here again he tried to look stern—“you better decide to tell the whole truth!”
Late the next morning I was called out again. It was the same young fellow. I looked at him very seriously as I sat down, but I honestly couldn’t take him seriously—he seemed such a beginner in the trade. He had obviously been brushing up on his techniques, and decided to take a new tack. While we were still chasing around in circles on the usual preliminaries, a young girl came in with a tray of sandwiches, tea, bread, and butter, and put it on his desk. After she went out, he put one of the sandwiches and a cup of tea in front of me. “Eat it,” he said. I shook my head. “No, it’s all right,” he said, “eat it.” “I won’t,” I said. “Come on,” he said, “I know you’re hungry, eat up.” “I
don’t want it,” I said. Of course I wanted it, but the gambit was so transparent that I just refused to play the game. So the sandwich and the cup of tea sat there on the front of the desk throughout the interrogation. It seemed to bother him more than it did me, for he kept looking at it nervously, then glancing away again.
When he learned that I had been “Driver, First-class” at Teplaya-Gora, he started in on a lot of technical details about motors and machinery; “What’s this screw for? Where is this valve located? Where does this wire go?” “I don’t know,” I’d say, or “I forget.” “You call yourself a first-class driver? I thought Americans were supposed to be so technically inclined. Why, I wouldn’t trust you to change a tire!”
For a while, we went around in circles on wires and screws and valves; then he became aware we were talking nonsense. “How many times do I have to tell you what you’re here for?” he said. “You better start giving me some straight answers.” Finally, the session ended without much of anything having been accomplished. “Now look,” he said, “tomorrow will be your last chance to tell the truth. So think it over.” But I wasn’t called the next day, or for a long time after that.
Meanwhile, the conversations in our cell centered on the battle for Moscow. New men were coming into the prison daily, and the reports were spread over the Morse code telegraph. We even had a new member in our group, an officer from the garrison in Saratov, who told us that the Germans were not far off. A battle was expected in Saratov itself at any time, he said, and the town was full of soldiers.
With God in Russia Page 9