With God in Russia

by Walter J. Ciszek

  The officials again called out the names, and the prisoners reported to a table where name, surname, destination (Norilsk), charge, and sentence would be checked once more against the documents on the table. Then, in groups of ten or twenty, they were led down the river bank by the guards, over the gangways, and loaded into the holds. The guards and dogs stayed with them all the way so they wouldn’t jump into the river and escape—or drown.

  All through the long day, I sat there watching the procedures. My name wasn’t called until evening. Then I was checked through and joined a special group to one side of the table. Instead of being taken to the barges, we were taken to the tow ship Stalin that was to pull the barges up the river. We went onto the gangplank and up on deck, then were herded through a small hatch down into the hold of the ship.

  The Stalin had two large holds, one in front of the engine room and one at the stern. Our group was loaded into the stern hold. It was a large, dark vault, with curving timber sides covered with iron plates on the outside. There was a false floor of rough planking raised off the keel, extending about 10 feet on each side of the propeller shaft. At the wall, the planks ended and angled wooden beams ran up 3 or 4 feet along the curvature of the hull for the bilge to spill over. Across the engine-room bulkhead at the foot of the hatch stairs was a long shelf of rough planks fixed a few feet off the floor. A similar platform ran across the stern. Down the center of the hold ran a row of thick beams to support the deck above. On either side of these pillars was another raised platform of rough planks. These were our bunks.

  As we came down the hatchway, a group of us Poles stuck together near the base of the stairs along the forward bulkhead. As usual, everyone tried to stay with someone he knew; we had talked it over on the river bank and decided that the first one down into the hold would try to reserve space for the others. The thieves also hung together; they took over the bunks along the stern. The other prisoners filled up the center bunks, and some groups even decided to make camp along the slanting boards against the outside hull. The guards stayed topside. Two of them were stationed at the top of the hatchway stairs, and down at the stern end of the hold there was a trapdoor in the deck through which the guards could observe the prisoners. Two more guards were stationed there.

  It was now the 2nd of July. The sun was broiling hot and the hold soon became almost intolerable. The timbers of the hull were covered with a tar or rosin of some sort which gave off a pungent odor. The only ventilation was the hatch itself, the trapdoor over the stern, and the practically useless portholes high up near the deck. Practically everyone undressed, and the air in the hold was so close you could taste rather than smell the odor of sweat mixed with the tobacco smoke and the rosin from the planking.

  The one good feature of being aboard the Stalin was that the galley was also on board. The meals were served regularly and on time. Between seven and eight o’clock in the morning we had breakfast—600 grams of bread plus hot water. Between 12:00 and 1:30 we had dinner, a half liter of soup. Then at six o’clock, supper. Aboard the Stalin this was a special kind of kasha, a yellow porridge popular in Russia called pshonnaya kasha, made with corn rather than oats or some other cereal.

  There were 400 men packed into the hold, with almost no room to move about without falling over someone else. For those 400 men, we got fifty tureens to serve the meal; we ate in turns. And, as usual, the guards had put the thieves in charge of distributing the food. From our vantage point at the foot of the steps, we had a perfect view of the proceedings in the stern. We noticed that when the leader stirred the soup ostentatiously with the ladle, to prove he was mixing it up thoroughly, the ladle never went deeper into the kettle than a foot from the bottom. The thick soup stayed there. Of course, the political prisoners were always served first, and therefore always got thin soup.

  For two days, we sat in that sweltering hold and waited. The decks of the Stalin and the barges were being loaded with machinery, rails, hardware, cattle, and produce for the trip up the river. By the time they were fully loaded, we could see that the barge decks were nearly awash, the holds completely under water. On the third day, the engines on the Stalin started up. They were just the other side of our bulkhead, and the noise was terrific. Moreover, the oil and exhaust fumes were overpowering, the vibration was so bad my eyes wouldn’t focus—all the images were blurred—and our speech was throaty in response to the vibration.

  We soon had a headache all the time from the fumes and the heat. The bulkhead became unbearably hot. We were forced to climb down off our bunks and lie on the floor to breathe the cooler air along the keel planks. As a result, there was very little conversation. Everyone huddled on the floor, trying to ignore the heat, the noise, the vibration—and the splitting headache.

  After the ship began to move upriver, it rocked constantly. The river currents would catch hold of the barges and swing them from one side of the river to the other, and the Stalin would heel over from side to side under the pull of the towlines. Some of the men got sick, which did nothing to improve the atmosphere or the air down in the hold.

  By the end of the first week, the political prisoners, who outnumbered the thieves two to one, had organized. One day when the soup was brought down, a group of them went over to the thieves and told them to take a seat. “You can watch us for a change to see we don’t make a mistake, but we’re going to distribute the soup today.” The thieves told them to get back where they belonged. The politicals didn’t move. “We want the soup distributed equally and justly,” they said. “That food is the only thing that keeps us alive and you bloodsuckers are getting the best parts of it and giving us practically water. Now stand aside!”

  At that, the leader of the thieves smashed the spokesman for the politicals in the face and knocked him into a heap on the planks. In almost the same motion, he reached for his knife. A full-scale riot broke out. From all over the hold, politicals began streaming toward the stern, pinning the thieves against the wall. I could see a flashing of knives among the thieves, and some of the political prisoners began to tear up planks and wade in on the run. The shouts of the rioters were mixed with the screams of the wounded. Blood began to spatter on the plankings and stream down the faces of the rioters. Those who fell were simply trampled underfoot.

  Within seconds, the guards were down the stairs, crying out to the men to break it up or they would shoot. It was useless. The words couldn’t even be heard over the noise of the motors and the shouts of the crowd. An officer ran down the stairs and also shouted in vain. Then he shouted a command, the soldiers unlimbered their machine guns, and fired from the hips. Bullets slammed into the timbers above the heads of the rioters, ricocheted off the wall, and went ringing around the hull. Those not engaged in the fight immediately dove for the deck and hugged the planks.

  When the first burst produced no effect, the soldiers lowered their sights. The bullets stopped hammering into the timbers and began to thud into the crowd itself. Men dropped as if they had been poleaxed; one whole rank of rioters went down like cornstalks before a scythe. That stopped the riot. The soldiers came to the foot of the stairs and lined everyone up against the wall, their backs to the guns and hands high above their heads.

  Then the first-aid crew came tumbling down the hatchway to haul out the dead and the moaning wounded. How many they carried out of the hold I have no way of knowing; the rest of us were facing the hold walls with machine-gun muzzles at our backs. After they cleared the floor of bodies, the first-aid crew washed down the planking to get rid of the blood, and scattered disinfectant all over the floors and the walls. At last, the guards told us to return to our places in absolute silence. They themselves stayed on the stairway all night with machine guns at the ready, permitting no one to move, except to go to the toilet barrel one at a time.

  In about an hour, a commission of the ship’s officers and some of the guard officers came down into the hold. They asked very few questions. They walked up and down in front of the bunks, lookin
g over the crowd, from time to time saying curtly to one of the prisoners, “You! Get up!” The men they singled out were taken upstairs for questioning, then transferred to one of the barges for the rest of the trip.

  Actually, the affair was a black mark against the officials themselves; they would be held accountable for the prisoners they had lost. They received a certain number at Krasnoyarsk and they were to deliver that number at Norilsk—or else have a good explanation why they were short. These prisoners had been sentenced to hard labor, they had been transported and fed all the way across Russia, and they were expected to prove useful where they were wanted; the shooting of so many would weigh heavily on the careers of guards and officers alike. They would have to prove they used guns only as a last resort.

  Few of us got any sleep that night. The memory of the slaughter was too fresh, the scenes of stabbings and the sound of bullets thudding into flesh were too vivid to be driven out of mind. After that, though, the food was distributed justly. With so many gone, there was even enough food to give everyone an extra portion at least every second day. The guards remained on the stairwell for a few days, but afterward they returned topside. Life settled down again to the monotonous clanking of the motors, the pitching of the ship, and the day-long attempt to ignore the headache caused by the noise and fumes.

  We reached Dudinka on the morning of July 22nd. At that time, the town was nothing but a riverbank with houses strung along it and wharves built out into the river. Afterward, a big complex of port facilities was built there by workers from the prison camps, but then the water was so shallow the Stalin couldn’t even pull into shore to unload us at the wharves. We couldn’t even tell when we arrived, except that the motors slowed and we heard the heavy rattling of chains up on deck. The winches screamed, there was a loud thunk, the splash of anchors. The motors revved up briefly to set the anchor, then coughed into silence.

  Immediately, we began to feel the cold. As the furnace died, the hold of the Stalin took on the chill of an icebox. We sat there waiting, putting on what extra clothes we had, listening to the shouted commands on deck and the splashing of the water against the hull. After a while, we heard the sound of oars slapping the surface of the river, and a loud hail to the Stalin. At last we heard the cranking sound of gangways being lowered and a final, uneven and muffled shriek from the Stalin’s whistle—the signal to begin unloading.

  A troop of soldiers appeared at the hatch, then came halfway down the stairwell to line it on either side. An officer walked down the middle of the ranks to address us: “This is Dudinka! You will line up and leave the boat, in order, in small groups of ten. Line up, line up! Any sign of trouble or attempted escape means instant death. My men have standing orders to shoot anyone who gets out of line for any reason!”

  As we came up the hatchway, blinking in the daylight, we were amazed to find that it was snowing! We had left the sweltering heat of Krasnoyarsk just two weeks earlier. On deck, in the full face of the wind, the air was so cold it took the breath right out of us. We were forced to gasp for air. Everyone immediately began to pile on anything left in his bundle of clothing. It looked like a Chinese fire drill, with everyone trying to stand on the lee side of everyone else. “My God,” said a man next to me, “it’s winter! What’ll we do?”

  The water of the Yenisei was gray and rough, the air swirling off the water was cold with a peculiar biting bitterness that cut right through as much clothing as we had. The soldiers around us were already dressed in long greatcoats reaching to their ankles, with collars turned up against the wind. The skies were cloudy, but somehow the heavens seemed far, far away and the mottled gray vault above us looked almost infinitely high.

  My first view of the famous Siberia came from the deck of the steamer Stalin. The land stretching away from the riverbank was hilly and rolling, but the ground itself was bare, with only small patches of shrubbery or gorse. On the other side of the river, more than 2 miles wide at this point, I could see just a distant blue contour of rolling hills. Way off in the distance, beyond the near bank, I could see something like the camp at Krasnoyarsk, a gaggle of barracks surrounded by the black etchings of barbed wire.

  Dudinka itself was just a long line of log houses looking barren in the gray-blue landscape, straggling over the hill and down along the river. The only big building in the town was on the hill overlooking the river. It was the Port Authority terminal which commanded the wharves and the railroad yard. Out north, toward the sea, there were big steamers anchored in the river, and along the near bank to the north was a big black mountain of coal for the ships.

  We stepped down the gangplank in groups of ten and into a rowboat. My legs were rubbery again from lack of exercise, and numb from the cold. It was like trying to walk when your feet are asleep. We were rowed to shore, unloaded, and the boat returned immediately for another group in a continuous shuttle operation. Those who landed were taken in tow by the guards, led aside about 200 yards up the bank, and told to sit down.

  The snow was stopping but the wind was out of the north and cold. Dudinka is well inside the Arctic Circle; the polar wind is channeled down the river by the banks and the twin rows of hills. When the wind is fully out of the north, it’s like being in a polar hurricane. To unload 2,000 men in rowboats, ten at a time, takes a long time. After the Stalin was unloaded, they began to unload the barges. And all the while, we sat huddled together on the bank in the stinging cold. And this on July 22nd!

  COAL-LOADER IN DUDINKA

  I WATCHED THE prisoners disembarking from the rowboats, slipping clumsily up the riverbank. The guards kept them in strict files, as they hugged themselves and their bundles tightly to keep warm, walking with eyes down in a forlorn silence. Then, far off down the road toward town, I noticed big columns marching toward us. I watched them approach for a while, wondering where they were from and where they were going, whether they, too, were new prisoners or had been here a while. Meanwhile the tugs were nudging the unloaded barges into the bank.

  Just as we were ready to leave, the columns I had seen came abreast of us—prison brigades reporting to work. They seemed to stir into life when they saw us, and as they passed alongside they saluted and shouted, “Where you from? Is so and so there? Anyone from Moscow, or Leningrad? What kind of prisoners are you?” We began shouting back. The guards were swearing and forbidding us to talk, but the prison brigades paid no attention. “When you get to camp, look up so and so! Where are they sending you? Good luck!”

  The same questions and shouts were repeated again and again by each brigade as the column passed us. They were certainly a ragtag bunch, dressed in quilted coats, with hard and rough features, faces grizzled with several days’ growth of beard. It was my first glimpse of men who had spent some time in a prison camp, and I must confess I thought them a rather bizarre mixtum-gatherum. Just beyond us, they turned and headed inland. Behind them, we could see other columns coming down the road in the same direction.

  Finally, we were formed up and led off along the riverbank ourselves. The guards were cold, even in their greatcoats, so they set us a stiff, quick pace. It was difficult at first, but after a while it felt good, as the blood began to circulate and my body warmed to the activity. We marched about 2 miles to reach the camp at Dudinka, a collection of weather-beaten barracks all encircled by a double row of barbed wire.

  We didn’t enter the camp. Instead, we were led around it, down a little cut-off road and up a hill, to a big ramshackle barn of unpainted boards, black from the weather. This, we found out later, was the processing center at Dudinka. We entered through a zone of barbed wire, then a gate. Once inside the gate, we were told to sit down in the courtyard, despite the biting wind.

  Here in the courtyard, our papers were checked, one by one, by an official of the camp. Then we were turned loose to find a place for ourselves in the blackened barn. Inside there was nothing but a dirt floor and a long row of planks along the wall, not nailed into place, but just lying loosely on som
e crossbars; those were the bunks. There were gaping holes in the walls and roof, and it seemed colder in the barn than it was outside. This was Dudinka; we had arrived!

  The first thing to do was to look around for friends. It was impossible to be a loner in the prison camps; a man either had friends to keep him going, or he didn’t survive. I found my friends the Poles, and together we picked out a place along the wall where the boards fitted more snugly and the draft was somewhat less. We left one of the men to stand guard over our belongings while the rest of us went out to look for information—or for food. Actually, food was uppermost in every mind. The last meal we’d had was the bread we got on the boat that morning, long hours ago.

  We stepped out of the barn to look for the orderlies from Dudinka who worked around the processing camp. We could tell immediately they had been through a lot. Their big, watery eyes seemed to start out of the sockets; they were unshaven and their teeth were bad, almost rotting. Their clothes were ill-fitting, their shoes plopped loosely on their feet as they shuffled along. They wore no socks, but instead had rags tied with string over their shoe tops and around the ankles. Some of them were bareheaded, even in the cold, and their hair had been cut so closely by the barber they looked almost shaved.

  They were glad to see us and dying to know what was happening in the outside world. “At least tell us,” they said, “what was happening when you were arrested. We heard the war is over, is that true? How are the people at home? How is the food?” Eager as they were to talk, they talked very little about themselves or life at Dudinka; they were much more interested in learning the news from us.

  I did find out, however, that there was at least one other priest in Dudinka: Father Casper, a Pole and a Roman Catholic, who had had a parish in the eastern part of Poland where he, too, was arrested for allegedly subversive activities. He had been in the camp almost a year, one of the orderlies said, and was very popular among the men. We also learned that supper was being brought up from the main camp, so we quickly returned to the barn.