When at last the bread was distributed, nobody touched it. Everybody waited until the guard returned with a big kettle of kipiatok and they had received the morning’s ration of a half liter. Finally, they cut up the 400 grams of bread into four pieces: one piece they ate now, one was saved for dinner, and another for supper, the extra piece to serve as an afternoon snack or, in many cases, as barter for a puff on a cigarette.
After breakfast, there was the morning ritual for striking a fire and the first cigarette of the day; then things would settle down for the morning round of stories and conversation. So I began to walk around and meet people, listening to their stories and picking up all the snatches of news I had missed during my years of solitary in Lubianka. A director of a freight station was telling of his arrest:
“Most of my work was to get things in order to ship to the front, and during the height of the German invasion it was hectic. One day a train pulled into the station with five cars of wheat in open bins, covered over with wicker tops. I immediately stationed guards around the cars, because it was my responsibility to see that the wheat got to the front. But the townspeople found out there was wheat to be had, and they poured down to the station in droves. I pleaded with the dispatcher to get it moving, but I never got an answer. The wheat was wet and beginning to spoil. Well, I just couldn’t stand it any longer. I got my crew together and sold it off to the poor townspeople while it was still edible. As soon as I sold it, of course, the order came through to get it moving to the front. I was arrested with my whole crew and put in jail. I got twenty-five years.”
A young private recalled how he had sat in the trenches, day after day, worrying about his wife. She had been very sick when he left home. He was so concerned about seeing her again that one day, when his unit was ordered on a dangerous mission from which chances were he might not return, he stuck his finger in front of the barrel of his gun and shot it off. He was taken to the hospital in great pain; while they were treating his wound, in his delirium he revealed that he had shot the finger off himself. After the wound healed he was taken off to prison: ten years. “Well,” he shrugged, “at least I’ll probably stay alive.”
Then, just before noon, as we were beginning to count the minutes until dinnertime, the cell door opened with a bang. There were loud voices in the corridor. Suddenly a young soldier marched in, saluted, and shouted out: “Howdy, tovarishchi!” A young country boy of about seventeen, he looked as though he should still have been in grammar school. He wore a soldier’s fur cap that was far too big for him, an army greatcoat that reached all the way to his ankles, with a collar five sizes too large and sleeves so long they covered his hands. And yet he was a happy-go-lucky lad whom nothing bothered, not even the following days of prison life.
I had a chat with him later on and found out he was from the countryside around Moscow. He was actually in the reserves and had never seen a battle. His whole platoon was arrested one day when they came to a village recently captured from the Germans and found the people raiding the supplies the Germans had left behind. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know what we were supposed to do, but we figured we might as well get in on a good thing, so we did. I couldn’t get over how much better German rations were than ours, and I said so.” Then he chuckled: “I got ten years for subversive talk.”
The moments after the noon meal were always the best moments of the day. When everyone had finished smoking, a sort of quiet settled on the cell by mutual consent. Many of the prisoners took a nap. I used to sit there by the door, looking around the cell and watching the human scene. There was a row of sick over by the windows, for instance. We put them there hoping the windows would dissipate some of the stench, because the poor fellows were dying of dysentery. There was nothing left of some of them but skin and bones. The odor was so foul the other prisoners complained to the nurse who used to visit these poor wretches once a day. “I know, I know,” she said, “but I can’t do anything. There is simply no room left in the hospital.”
All she could do was give them some sort of fluid every day, but most of them were too far gone for help. Sometimes, at night, I’d wake to hear a loud cry followed by that peculiar breathing called the death rattle; then the doctors would hurry in and take somebody out in the darkness. In the quiet period after lunch, I talked to the sick from time to time, trying to encourage them as much as I could. But there wasn’t much anyone could do. I could—and did—give many of them absolution, and I’d sit close alongside them sometimes, whispering the prayers for the dying. I only hope it consoled them as much as it did me to be able to act as a priest again. It also served to remind me constantly to thank God for the marvelous health I had enjoyed all during these past years. I realized that without His protection, this sickness could strike me at any time, contagious as it was.
I spent seven months in that cell at Butirka. Then, one day in January 1945, I was called out and led up to a small room on the fifth floor. It was clean and neat, with dark green walls and a high upper window with the usual tin shield on it and—wonder of wonders!—two real beds in it. I didn’t know why I had been singled out for such treatment. I remember thinking that perhaps, at last, I was about to be sent off to the labor camps. An hour later, the door opened and in walked Nestrov!
We couldn’t believe our eyes! Together again at last, there in the fifth floor room of Butirka, we simply didn’t know what to think or say to one another. We stammered and stuttered in greeting, pounding one another on the back, half laughing, half shouting, almost crying. Then we just stood grinning at each other, not knowing where to start.
At last, we began to compare stories. Nestrov, too, had been interrogated by Sedov in Lubianka. He, too, had been sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor. We spent a while going over our interrogations point by point, comparing what he said and what I’d said, trying to figure out how it went. About the only real difference in our treatment was the fact that with him they had concentrated on the idea he was a Russian, playing on his patriotic spirit for the motherland in wartime to win his co-operation.
Our reunion was a wonderful experience in those years of hardship, and we made the most of it. Nestrov and I formed a little Jesuit community right in the heart of Moscow. First of all, after all these long years of being without the sacrament, we went to confession and made a manifestation of conscience. Then we made up a daily order for ourselves which was little different from that of any Jesuit community anywhere. We rose at 5:30—as did everyone else in the prison—made a morning meditation and said Mass (i.e., the prayers of the Mass) before breakfast. Then we’d talk or work until time for our examination of conscience and the Angelus at noon.
In the afternoon we said more prayers, including the rosary, in common. We’d say the Angelus again at six o’clock before supper, then after supper make our evening devotions, taking turns giving one another points for the morning meditation. Morning and afternoon, during the times between prayer, we kept busy. We spent some time reviewing our theology studies together; we preached extempore sermons or gave lectures, criticizing one another—then we’d fall to laughing over similar criticisms or incidents in our earlier training.
Occasionally we would turn to lighter diversions and impromptu skits. I was usually the comedian; Nestrov played the straight man. I’d be Stalin, for instance, and Nestrov would be a kolkhoznik, perhaps a “hero worker” from the collective farms whom “Uncle Joe” had called to Moscow to receive a medal. After the presentation, I’d take him through my office on a grand tour to impress him with the glories of Communism. All the poor kolkhoznik wanted, though, was a loaf of bread. Yet every time he’d start to ask about bread, “Uncle Joe” would launch into another panegyric about the glorious revolution and a patriotic plug for the war effort.
Finally, I’d send him back to the waiting group of his proud co-workers from the collective farm. As soon as my back was turned, the look of pride would disappear from his face and the faces of his co-workers, and they would cr
owd around him, asking him anxiously, “Well? Well?” Nestrov would shrug his shoulders and lift his hands in the peasants’ expressive gesture: “Oi, what can you expect? The way it was before, that’s the way it’s going to be! The Kremlin, it is still the Kremlin.”
If all this sounds silly, it was meant to be. There was nothing better than a joke to break the almost trance-like state of boredom that occasionally crept into the most active schedule in the midst of prison routine. Every group of prisoners I was with had certain standing jokes, or pet phrases, which almost never failed to evoke a smile, if not a laugh. Prison slang itself reflected this. Some of the phrases didn’t necessarily mean anything; they grew out of a situation among a group of prisoners, such as a phrase somebody garbled in a moment of stress. Immediately, that would become a catch word, a rallying cry for other prisoners in times of temporary depression.
So, too, with Nestrov and me. We had been sentenced to hard labor, but there was no reason we had to be depressed. We were together again; we weren’t being bothered for the time being. And so, we set out to make the best of it and have ourselves a good time. We did have a few problems; one was tobacco. Nestrov had begun to smoke in prison in order to relieve the tension, but there on the fifth floor of Butirka he had no tobacco and no one was sending us gift packages. We did have a whiskbroom, though, so we manufactured our own tobacco.
The whiskbroom was used to clean the cell. The guard would hand it to us daily, then come back later to collect it and pass it on to the next cell. I had a small knife made out of an old piece of tin I’d found in the courtyard and sharpened on the stone walls. Every day I’d cut off about an eighth of an inch of whiskbroom and chop it up into tiny pieces. Nestrov would roll the ersatz tobacco into a piece of paper, and I’d try the prisoners’ technique of getting a light from a piece of cotton. I couldn’t get it to work the first few times I tried it, but eventually I got the little piece of cotton to glow enough to light Nestrov’s “cigarette.” I felt like the first man in pre-recorded times who had “invented” fire.
Smoke from our whiskbroom “special blend” was terribly acrid. It even made me cough, and I wasn’t smoking it. Nestrov puffed away at it, though, as if it were the finest Havana leaf. One day our turn to use the whiskbroom came late in the afternoon, just before a changeover of guards. When the new guard came to collect the whiskbroom, we told him the other guard had already collected it. He never did find it. And there we were, tobacco millionaires with a 6-inch piece of whiskbroom. When that ran out, we started in on the straw mattress.
Another problem was food. It was getting worse and worse all the time because of the war. But one day about this time we got an unexpected treat—soup made of powdered eggs. When the guards brought the soup ration into the building, we could smell the pungent odor of sulphur all the way up to the fifth floor. Nestrov and I caught a whiff of it and wondered what on earth it was. When the soup came, and the smell came overpoweringly with it, we decided it must be egg soup. Hunger in prison doesn’t stand on ceremony; despite the sulphurous fumes, we both said, “What a treat! And a full bowl, more than ever before!”
The odor was really nauseous. To give up a big bowl of soup, however, would have been a crime under the circumstances. So to it we went, eating and smiling, sipping it out of a spoon first, then drinking it right from the bowl. After about half the bowl, my stomach began to feel queasy. I wondered whether I ought to finish the bowl or not. But hunger overcame caution and—down the hatch! Before the last gulp reached the bottom, the first gulp came back up with such force that it shot out of my mouth and splattered all over the wall. Nestrov was not far behind me. Eventually, the whole bowl came up and the cell stank to high heaven.
We salted that experience away in our treasury of prison lore: sometimes it’s better to be hungry than to be sick. A man has to be careful what he eats, hunger or no. We found out later the egg powder had spoiled in shipment, but the cook had decided to boil it in the hopes it would somehow be decontaminated. We also found out later the reason we got such big portions: the older hands on the floor below wouldn’t take the soup.
During these weeks with Nestrov, I decided to write another petition to Stalin. (I had written two others in Lubianka during my “university days.”) Nestrov laughed at the idea, but I felt I had nothing to lose. The procedure itself was simple enough; I just told the guard I wanted to write a petition. “To whom?” he’d say. “To Stalin,” I’d answer. Then he would tell me to wait while he found out from the commandant whether I could write such a petition. I was never refused. The guard would come back with pen, paper, and ink, then stay there outside the door while I wrote the petition. That was all there was to it.
What I wrote was also simple enough. I told the Premier I was Walter Ciszek, a priest and an American, and asked him to inform the American Embassy, so they might in turn be able to inform my relatives in America that I was all right. That was all. I asked for no favors and I made no charges; just a request for an act of diplomatic courtesy. What happened to the petitions after I turned them over to the guard I never knew. After a while, when I got no answer, I just stopped writing.
Nestrov and I were together for two pleasant months. Then, one evening as we waited for supper, the guard told us to get ready with all our things. We knew that meant a move of some sort. In the few minutes before the guard came back, we made one last confession. We blessed each other, then shook hands. There were no words we could think of better than “God be with you.”
Nestrov was led out first into the dim corridor, and I waited. When the guard came back for me, I looked around in the corridor but couldn’t see Nestrov anywhere. Downstairs, I was put into one of the small, dark detention boxes. After only a short wait, the guard opened the door, asked the usual three questions, and led me out to the courtyard and a waiting prison van. It was the type with closed individual compartments or cages, hardly room enough to stand.
As soon as I was locked in, the van drove off; I presumed I was the only one in it. As we bounced out of the prison courtyard, though, I heard someone call out in a loud whisper, “Lypinski!” It was Nestrov! “I’m here,” I answered. We tried to talk above the noise of the motor and the rattling of the van, but I couldn’t understand much. There really wasn’t much to say, anyway, except to wonder where we were going.
After about half an hour, we stopped and the doors opened. One by one, the guard called off the names of the prisoners; I was surprised to find that the van I had thought empty was really full of men. Nestrov was called before I was. Finally, my turn came. I jumped down out of the van with my hands behind my back in the approved fashion. We were back at my old alma mater, Lubianka.
LAST DAYS IN LUBIANKA
PROCESSING PROCEDURES AT Lubianka were always strictly observed, so it was 3 or 4 A.M. before I had finished with all the questions, the medical exam, the bath and haircut, the disinfecting, and another session with the photographer. Then the guard led me up the old familiar corridors with their green dado and whitewashed walls, and the smell I would recognize anywhere. Frankly, it felt so familiar it was almost like a homecoming.
I followed the guard down the corridors, looking around surreptitiously. I figured I must be on the fourth floor, but it was a section of Lubianka I had never seen. When at last we reached the cell, I saw it was a large one—eight beds. There were seven people in it already. As I entered, they looked at me immediately as one man, that eternal question in their eyes. “Zdravstvuite!” I said, and smiled. They welcomed me warmly, showed me my bunk, my cup, and wooden spoon; in this section of the prison, we were allowed to keep utensils in our room.
The first one to introduce himself was Nikita, a young construction worker from the island of Sakhalin, but a native Russian. He was a small, bandy-legged little fellow, thin and swarthy, with a big nose and darting eyes, friendly and extremely talkative. The next was Porphyry, a lanky, fair-skinned Russian, with a small head and finely chiseled features. An atheist and a Party
man, he had actually studied theology with a view to writing atheistic propaganda for the Party. The other five were just young soldiers from the front, concerned only with getting enough to eat and surviving in order to return to their families.
Since it was almost four o’clock in the morning, after a few brief interchanges we agreed to get some sleep. Next day, though, I found them a lively group; they wanted to hear all about me. When breakfast came, of course, all conversation stopped. Breakfast, in this section of the prison, was better than average. We got our ration of bread plus a kettle of boiling water which held about 4 quarts, so we could each have as much as we wanted.
After breakfast, I noticed the table in the cell was covered with books, checkers, dominoes, and a chess set. “Well,” I said, “how did you get that stuff?” “Oh,” one of the soldiers said, “we’re not in here for very long. Our charges are already over and they’ll be sending us back to the front soon.” Nikita, too, had been told he would soon be sent to Warsaw to supervise the reconstruction of bridges and buildings; Porphyry said there was a chance he was going to get his job back with the Party. In this section, everyone seemed to be just waiting for notice to move on. Perhaps I’d soon be leaving for the labor camps.
When they asked about me, I told them I had been sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor in July 1942. “So far,” I said, “it’s been almost three years and nothing has happened, except that they keep shuffling me around from prison to prison and calling me in for supplemental interrogations.” Nikita got a big kick out of that. He launched into a long satirical tirade on the system in general and the bureaucracy of prisons in particular, and soon had us all laughing until the tears came. When Nikita got warmed up, he was a marvelous comic, more entertaining than any book or movie.
With God in Russia Page 14