With God in Russia

by Walter J. Ciszek

  Wearing extra clothing, presuming a man had any or could borrow some from one of the sick prisoners, was strictly forbidden. If the adjutant or commandant during the morning roll call detected that a man was wearing an extra shirt or a second pair of pants, he would force him to strip right there in the freezing wind of the compound. The clothing would be confiscated. And if a man got away with it in the morning, he was almost certain to be caught during the evening inspection and search after work.

  After the day’s work, we were issued small work tickets to be used for meals. They were given out according to the day’s performance and determined the ration you got. The ordinary ticket entitled you to the minimum or “guarantee”—600 grams of bread, 200 grams of kasha, 10 grams of sugar. A “plus-one” ticket got you an extra 100 grams of bread, another 5 grams of sugar, and perhaps a little piece of herring. A “plus-two” ticket got you another 200 grams of bread, 10 grams of sugar, a piece of herring, and some baked goods, a roll perhaps or a piece of corn bread or a muffin. A “plus-three” ticket got you another 200 grams of bread, 25 grams of sugar, a piece of herring, some bakery goods, and a handful of rough dough that could be mixed with the soup or kasha, or perhaps baked on the stove.

  “Plus-two” and “plus-three” ticketholders also got a different soup than that served at the ordinary mess, much thicker, with chunks of potatoes or herring or cabbage mixed into it. Prison life being what it is, of course, the brigadier and his helpers usually got the “plus-three” ration (there were never more than three or four of these rations to any brigade). The rest of us were lucky to get even the “guarantee,” as our numbers were thinned out by sickness and our work quota took us longer than ever to fulfill.

  Our whole aim in life, therefore, became the acquisition, somehow, of food. We thought of it constantly; men would go to any lengths to get it. After the first week in camp, when I got my second wind, I went out almost every night to work for food. After the night meal, I’d report to the kitchen and spend the next three or four hours—sometimes as long as six hours and well into the early morning—cleaning the floors or washing kettles, scrubbing pots and pans, all for an extra 200 grams of bread or an extra liter of soup.

  Next to me in the barrack slept a Pole named Gorny, a tall, thin, gaunt man built along the lines of Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane. He was one of the greatest scavengers I’ve ever seen, and I saw some pretty good ones in the prison camps. He regularly shared his spoils with me, for he was one of the closest friends I had here at Dudinka. A very religious man, he knew I was a priest, and he went out of his way to look after me.

  Working in the kitchen, Gorny had developed an almost surefire technique for scrounging extra food. When no one was looking, he would grab a big slab of fish or fat or butter and shove it down into the coal bucket. Then he’d very dutifully carry out the bucket, empty it, fish and all, into the ash pile, refill the bucket, and ceremoniously lug in the coal. That night, about two o’clock in the morning, he would duck out of the barracks and dig into the ash pile until he found his treasure.

  Gorny’s greatest triumph was the night he brought home a whole pail of bean soup. It was very thick, mostly beans, and quite salty, so we stirred in just about our whole monthly ration of sugar to make it palatable. Between us, we finished the whole pail of soup. Not surprisingly, we suddenly felt thirsty. We strolled out to the yard and drank about two quarts of water each; then we returned to settle in for a good night’s sleep. Even less surprisingly, we got little sleep that night. We developed severe cases of diarrhea and made regular trips to the latrine all night long. By dawn, we were so sick and weak we could talk only in whispers.

  Gorny and I, of course, were not the only ones who worked for extra food or managed to steal it. Pilfering at Dudinka attained almost epidemic proportions. From time to time the guards would make surprise raids, usually about three o’clock in the morning, on different barracks. They would order everyone to line up in the middle of the room, while they went through the bunks and our few personal belongings, scrap by scrap. Sometimes they came up with enough food to feed the entire camp for one meal.

  But for all our ingenuity at scrounging food, the hard work and the cold began to take their toll. Scurvy became general. Eventually, there were just too many men sick to be let off work. The camp cooks boiled big kettles of pine branches in water, and the concentrate from this boiling process became our “medicine.” It was terribly bitter stuff, but if you didn’t drink it, you got no supper. Some men just couldn’t get it down, but I used to take a half liter a day.

  Many in the camp suffered horribly from the disease; their teeth rotted away, their breath was terrible, their gums festering, their lips bloody. A man’s legs might become so weak he couldn’t stand for more than ten minutes at a time. But the pine-branch medicine worked for me. I managed to avoid the worst effects of the disease.

  On the other hand, I developed a severe case of boils on my hands and face, my back and legs. Finally I went to the camp hospital. When the prison doctor learned I was an American, he went out of his way to give me a break. According to camp rules, the doctor (a prisoner himself) couldn’t sign rest permits for more than three days at a time. After three days, if he thought the patient still needed rest, he had to send the patient to a commission of three doctors from the town. That commission rarely passed anyone for additional rest permits, unless he was absolutely moribund. So the doctor would give me three days’ rest, I’d work a few more days, then he’d sign a new permit for me. With his help, and the pine-branch medicine, I gradually regained my strength.

  On the days when I was permitted to rest in camp, I would go around looking for work. I’d help the orderlies clean the barracks or work in the kitchen, spending four or five hours at these chores in exchange for a half liter of soup. One day I was working in the kitchen when a barge-load of potatoes arrived in port. I went with some other prisoners under guard to haul them to the camp warehouse.

  We found the potatoes dumped in huge piles on the barge decks, already frozen solid in the arctic cold. We attacked them with picks and shovels, and loaded them on sleds. As we pulled and hauled the sleds through the camp, we threw some potatoes off into the snow whenever the guards weren’t looking. We worked at this for half a day, then were given a full meal (i.e. a day’s ration) of kasha and soup by the cooks.

  After that, we ducked out as fast as we could and ran to rescue the potatoes from the snowbanks. We took them to the barracks, put them in a bucket of water, and boiled them on the stove. When they were more or less cooked, we ate them with salt, a bucketful at a time. Still we didn’t have enough. The constant hunger of the prison camps has to be experienced to be believed, but these examples give some indication of it.

  About October, when the temperature occasionally dropped to 30° below zero Fahrenheit, we turned in our summer clothes and got the winter issue. We had to account for everything that had been issued to us; if anything was missing, it was charged to our account at ten times its nominal price. In return, we got a somewhat heavier undershirt, quilted jackets and trousers padded with some sort of pulp, and a pair of boots called valenki—a sort of high-topped, one-piece overshoe made of a mixture of clay and hair. They were more or less snow-repellant and fairly warm.

  The valenki we put in a drying room next to the stove every night; otherwise, we slept in the same clothes we wore all day. When we got up in the morning, the padded coats and trousers would be frozen to the bed planks. Ultimately, this cold took a terrific toll. There was so much sickness in our brigade we were finally transferred from the tent to a wooden barrack.

  This new barrack was made of rough lumber, plastered inside and out with a clay compound to seal up cracks and serve as insulation. It was whitewashed and it was clean. What was far more important to us, it was warm. We kept the stove going full blast all the time, and everyone in the brigade brought home coal every day from work. For every three pieces we brought, the guards took two when they sea
rched us. It was understood, though, that unless we got to keep our share we would bring none at all; the stove in the guard room could grow cold along with ours.

  One of the last ships into Dudinka that year before the river froze was an American one. It stood at the dock for two days without being unloaded; none of the officials could read the cargo manifest in English. Then, a prisoner working in the dockyard offices remembered I was an American. I jumped at the chance to help, hoping I might get a chance to talk to the crew. I even wrote down the address of my sister and a little note to pass to one of the sailors, as well as a note to my Jesuit Provincial at Fordham Road.

  The next morning I went down to the dockyard. The prisoner explained to the officials and the secret service man in charge that I knew English. The officials were eager for help, but the NKGB agent didn’t want me on board that ship. He questioned me closely, then apparently relented and told me to come along. I walked down the dock behind him toward the gangway with a new spring to my step and hope in my heart.

  Suddenly, the NKGB agent changed his mind. He told me to return to the office and wait for him there. He came back with a copy of the cargo manifest and told me to translate it right there in the room. I worked all afternoon and on through the night to make Russian copies of the manifest; then I was sent back to camp immediately. For the next few days, the sight of that big ship at the dock almost broke my heart.

  Practically the whole camp was now formed into special brigades to get the last ships loaded and underway before the river froze. By this time, the piles of coal were frozen solid. We had to break them up with picks and chop them into manageable hunks before we shoveled them onto the conveyor belts. We were being driven at a furious pace and were on the verge of total collapse. For the first time, I really began to fear that I’d give out and never see another spring.

  I went to see my friendly doctor. He told me the ship-loading crisis was considered an emergency; orders had been issued that no rest permits were to be given until the work was finished. If a man wasn’t ill enough for the hospital, he was to work. So the doctor told me to report in the morning for a hospital examination; he also told me what symptoms it would be best to have.

  The next morning, after breakfast, I started right for the infirmary. The brigadier came charging after me. “Where are you going?” he asked. “I’m going to the infirmary,” I replied. “I’m sick.” “You don’t look very sick to me,” he said. “That’s because you’re not a doctor. I saw the doctor last night and he told me to report to the infirmary this morning.” The brigadier looked at me suspiciously for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, and walked away.

  When I reported to the doctor, he told me that the new orders required two doctors to certify a patient for hospital admission, so he briefed me again on my symptoms. The other doctor, whose name I have forgotten, was a Jew who had been one of those accused in the Gorki case. I don’t know how convincing I was in describing my symptoms, but he also certified me as a hospital case.

  The camp hospital was just another barrack building, but the beds were arranged in wards, with a few private rooms for women patients. According to my symptoms, I wasn’t suffering from anything which confined me to bed, so I did the work of an orderly. I scrubbed the floors, washed dishes, helped to serve the meals and clean up the other patients. I was busy from morning to night, but it was indoors, it was warm—and it wasn’t shoveling coal!

  My case wasn’t particularly special. The prison doctors, because of their profession, were humane men. They would do anything they could to help the other prisoners as long as their own risks were not too great. My case was peculiar only in that it was a favor done to me because I was an American. That was often the case in the camps; the magic word “America” was like a charm which held listeners spellbound for hours and made friends of total strangers.

  When I got out, our brigade was working on the river, blasting lumber out of the ice. The lumber had been floated upriver during the summer for use in construction and the mines around Norilsk; now it was frozen into the river. The way we got it out was as dangerous as it was simple. Dynamite was scattered over a given area of ice, then detonated. The logs bobbed to the bottom of the river under the blast. Then we’d go out with pike poles to snake them out as they floated back to the top.

  These were huge logs, 2 or 3 feet in diameter and perhaps 12 yards long. Handling them in the ice and wet was no joke. Time and again, men fell into the icy water; our padded jackets and pants were soon soaked through from handling the logs. After an hour or so, ice began to cake on the backs of our hands and wrists, and our jackets and pants would be frozen. We worked out in the middle of the river, twelve hours a day, with no place to get warm. Sometimes, too, as much as 2 feet of snow would fall in a single day, freezing our eyelashes and making the log jams treacherous underfoot.

  By the end of November, there were still logs in the river, but we had to give up lumbering because of the weather. After that, we were put to work loading trains with food for the camps around Norilsk. All summer long, the food had arrived by barge. The essential business of the short summer months, however, was the loading of coal, so the crates had simply been stacked up along the riverbank in mountainous piles. There were crates of beans, flour, canned fruit, and meat, all frozen solid now and covered with as much as 10 feet of snow. We had to break it loose and load it on flatcars for the trip inland.

  We worked at this, twelve hours a day, until December. Then certain brigades were left in Dudinka to complete this job and unload the coal which came down from the mines all winter long to build up the fueling piles for the next summer. Most of us, however, were shipped on to Norilsk.

  A YEAR IN ARCTIC MINES

  WE WERE CRAMMED into tiny boxcars on the narrow-gauge railway for the trip. We got no food except our morning bread ration, since it was only a day’s ride—perhaps 40 or 45 miles—to Norilsk. The boxcars weren’t heated and the plank walls, with all their cracks, weren’t much protection against the polar winds and bitter cold. We stood for the whole trip, jumping from foot to foot to keep warm; even if we had wanted to, there was no room to sit down.

  We reached Norilsk in late afternoon, piled out of the boxcars, then sat for three hours in the snow while the officials sorted us out for the different camps. At that time, Norilsk wasn’t much. It lay at the base of a mountain range rich in coal, iron, copper, cobalt, and other mineral deposits, an area just beginning to be heavily developed. The city itself resembled a mining or frontier town. It was right at the foot of Schmidtika, one of the highest peaks in Siberia, named for the German explorer who climbed it in 1937 and whose monument is erected on its top.

  There were about a dozen prison camps around the city, each assigned to two or three jobs. The idea was to build an industrial complex right there near the ore deposits. That way the raw ore would not have to be carried long distances down the river, which was only open to navigation in the summer months. Plants were built right on the site, and they could operate all year round. Some of the prison camps were at the mines, and other prisoners were building the new plants to refine the ore. Still other prisoners were building the city to house the workers, who were just beginning to arrive in ever-increasing numbers to develop the nation’s resources.

  I was finally assigned, the only political prisoner, to a crew of criminals and thieves about 120 strong. Under relatively light guard, we marched off toward the mountain. There were no roads to speak of; the snow was generally knee-deep and some drifts were as high as our belt buckles. Blinded by the swirling snow in a stiff wind, we crested a saddle leading to the peak. Just over the other side was a mining camp called Zapadnaya.

  It was dark by the time we entered the camp. Again we stood around in the freezing cold while the officials went through the routine of assigning us to barracks. I finally stumbled in, long after suppertime and having had nothing to eat all day, to my new home. It was a wooden barrack much like those at Dudinka, but it had one improveme
nt: a brick stove in the center of the room. The barracks at Zapadnaya were always fairly warm.

  The leader of this barrack was a fierce wild Tatar. A mixture of Cossack and Turk, he already had eight murders to his credit and made no bones about it. He was a stocky, sturdily built, medium-sized man with black hair and stern squinting eyes. He must have once had a name, but everyone, including the guards, called him simply “Ottoman” or “Cossack.” He assigned us newcomers to a work brigade, told us the order of the day, and pointed out a bunk for each of us. Luckily, I was assigned an upper berth. Even with a good stove, the corners of the room were still icy and the walls had a thick coating of ice to a point a few feet above the floor. On the top bunks, though, the air was warm and dry.

  I was exhausted after the long day in the open air and the long climb up the hill. I just threw myself down on the bunk in all my clothes and was asleep before I finished my prayers. Rising time here was 5 A.M., not 6, and almost as soon as the morning’s ration was distributed, we were given the signal to leave the barracks. Here at Zapadnaya, there was always a wind. Clouds of blown snow swirled so thickly that morning I couldn’t see 3 feet across the courtyard. The older prisoners, however, led the way. Lined up near the guardhouse, we were counted off and formed into fives, as usual. But the commandant in this camp didn’t waste much time; we were off almost immediately to the mine a mile away.

  It was one of the oldest mines in the area, a horizontal shaft which ran deep into the mountain. Practically all the work was done by hand; there was little mechanization except for the scraper lines which carried the coal to the hoppers and the electric cars which hauled it to the tunnel mouth. It took us almost half an hour to walk from the tunnel mouth to the work area. I was assigned to work with a gypsy named Grisha, loading the loose coal into the cars. The rest of the brigade went farther down the shaft to do the actual mining. Grisha and I worked at the top of the shaft, where there was a hopper for loading the cars.