With God in Russia

by Walter J. Ciszek

  We had to push the cars under the hopper by hand, then push the full cars down a siding until we had enough to make up a train. Then we’d signal for an engine to haul out the loaded cars and bring us another string of empties. The hopper was fed by scraper lines which pulled the coal up from below. Besides manhandling the cars into place, we also had to scoop up the loose coal that tumbled from the hopper.

  Here we worked ten hours at a stretch, with no break for dinner. The pace was hectic—we couldn’t hold up the work below—and the mine was constantly wet. In our section, there was enough water to flood the railroad tracks and cover the ties. It was pumped up from below as it dripped from the walls of the shaft, then pumped again from our section to the top. But the system wasn’t very efficient. We generally worked in water up to our ankles; the only protection we had were our valenki, which were quickly soaked through every morning.

  About 5 P.M., the men would begin shuffling up from the shaft below. By the time we finished the walk back to camp through the snow, our valenki would be frozen solid. It was lucky for us if our feet weren’t frozen, too. There was no running water in the camp at Zapadnaya, so we simply banged our coats against the snow to get the coal dust off, then washed our hands and face in the snow. Since we had only the one set of clothes, we slept in our work clothes, coal dust and all.

  Here at Zapadnaya, I was reduced again to the straight “guarantee” ration. You had to work at least a month in any camp before you could rate a “plus-one,” “plus-two,” or “plus-three” ticket. Unlike other camps, the food at Zapadnaya wasn’t brought to the barracks and distributed by the brigadiers; it was dished out at the kitchen. This had the advantage of keeping the food hot, but it also meant we had to shuffle through the wind and the snow to get our ration personally. Each man had his own tin can and cup, which we kept next to our bunks.

  Since this meal was, in effect, both dinner and supper, we got a half liter of soup and 200 grams of kasha—all at once in the same can. After we had worked in camp a month, we might occasionally get an extra ration. The theory, I guess, was that we would work harder in an effort to earn this extra ration. It never worked out that way. The brigadier got the ration tickets to distribute among his brigade according to merit and work done, but everyone knew they wouldn’t be passed on no matter how hard we worked. Just as in the prisons, the thieves practically ran the camp. They were the brigadiers, they were the orderlies in charge of barracks, they were the foremen of the various crews. Whatever extra food was available, they got.

  The weather at Zapadnaya was brutal. The wind never stopped; it only changed directions. If the snow got so thick we couldn’t see beyond an arm’s length, or the cold grew so severe no one could survive the long walk to the mines, we were excused from working for the day. The maintenance crews, however, were taken to the mines on horse-drawn sleds to prepare for the next day’s blasting. Guide ropes had been set up along the route to the mine shaft, for blizzards and “white storms” were common. On days like that, the trip for the maintenance crews would take a long time; even the horses would turn their rumps to the wind and refuse to budge. But still they went.

  In the barrack, I had become a favorite of the “Ottoman.” He was a savage, yet in many ways he was like a child. When he found out I was an American, he immediately took a great liking to me. He told me I was to sleep next to him (considered a tremendous honor) and be his personal orderly. He let it be known that if anything happened to me, or anyone displeased me, they would be personally responsible to him.

  On the bunks at night, he wanted to talk for hours about America. He was like a little boy, listening with wide eyes to my descriptions, asking questions, laughing, and shouting “Impossible! Impossible! Impossible!” to my answers. He couldn’t imagine buildings 50 or 60 stories tall. He refused to believe that people had houses with five or six rooms all to themselves, only one family to a house.

  That every family should have its own car, that every house had indoor plumbing, electricity, washing machines, radios, and vacuum cleaners (of which he had never heard), running water in the sinks and overstuffed chairs—all this to the “Cossack” was like a fairy tale, a vision of palaces and unbelievable people. He would ask me again and again to repeat the same facts, telling them over and over for him, for others and then still others, never tiring of the stories. I began to feel like Hans Christian Andersen.

  As the “Ottoman’s” personal orderly, I took care of his bed, fetched his meals, and looked after his personal belongings. Unlike everybody else, he had a sawdust mattress and a blanket. At the kitchen, I simply handed his dish to the cook and said “for the Ottoman.” He got a plateful of meat stew instead of soup, a special serving of kasha swimming in linseed oil and garnished with a piece of fat or bacon. I had to see that his dagger was always under his pillow when he slept, and that both dagger and knife were in his coat each morning. He had special pockets in his sheepskin-lined coat to hold the dagger on one side and a long ugly knife on the other.

  I also got along well with Grisha, the gypsy. He was another one who knew all the angles. He used to work every night in the kitchen to earn extra food, and he suggested that I join him. I got a job washing dishes, stoking fires, scrubbing floors. I’d report there after dinner every night and work for several hours, losing sleep but getting extra food.

  Next day, every day, the gypsy and I would almost be sleepwalkers—but this was no problem for Grisha. As soon as we got down into the mine, we would load up all the cars we had. Afterward, Grisha would grab a piece of coal and jam it under the scraper lines. Then he’d phone up to the head of the shaft and tell them the scraper lines were jammed. We knew it would be at least an hour, maybe two or three, before the maintenance crews would come. Meanwhile, we could go off into a side shaft and catch an hour or two of sleep.

  Grisha and I must have had the worst accident record of anyone in the mines. For a while, though, we got away with it. Either we would already have the scraper lines working again when the maintenance crew arrived, or else they would find the scraper lines actually jammed with coal, thanks to Grisha, so that it looked like a legitimate breakdown. Still, the mine superintendent must have suspected something, because it wasn’t long before he transferred us to drilling.

  The drillers were free men, miners and specialists, who came to Siberia to work at bonus wages. We were assigned to them as helpers. The drilling was done by compressed air drills, much like big jackhammers; our job was to help the driller manhandle the instrument and apply pressure to the face of the work. Grisha would have no part of it. As soon as we got down in the shaft in the morning, he’d take off. Where he went nobody knew.

  After the holes were drilled, we’d ram the powder charges home and attach blasting caps. Then everybody scattered for shelter in one of the other shafts while the work face was blown. I remember one day we blasted but the resulting gas wouldn’t vent—which prevented us from getting ourselves killed. We waited and waited, then finally went into the shaft. The gas was so bad, however, that we halted at the entrance to the work area. As we stopped to look around, the whole ceiling caved in. It was the last blast of the day, and we were so exhausted we never even budged. We just stood there, watching the huge slabs of rock crash within feet of us, coughing in the billowing dust. We were simply too tired to care or even to be afraid.

  I worked in these mines about a year. In the camp itself, there was a lot of disorder. Most of the men here were criminals and thieves, and they played rough. As usual, too, there was bad blood between the thieves and the political prisoners; the guards found it very hard to maintain discipline. Finally, it was decided to open a new camp in the valley at the foot of Schmidtika, 4 or 5 miles away from Zapadnaya. To help camp discipline, the officials sorted out all the political prisoners and sent them to work on this new camp. The “Ottoman” was our brigadier.

  At the new site there was only one barrack, built the summer before. It was full of drifted snow and ice, crammed
with barrels of some kind of chemicals that had been stored there. I was assigned to a crew to clean out the barrack; the majority of the brigade was put to digging post holes. You can’t have a prison camp without barbed wire, so the first order of business in constructing a new camp is to put up the posts and string the wire. It was bitter work. The ground was frozen and covered with 3 feet of snow. The men worked in the open, and it was the middle of the Siberian winter.

  The barrels full of chemicals weighed about 250 pounds, and they were frozen together in the ice. To get them out of the barrack, we made crude sleds from old slats of wood. Two of us, working together, would dig a barrel out of the ice, half roll and half slide it onto the sled, then push and pull the sled—using wire because we had no rope—until we got it outside. To spare our hands as much as possible, we used to wrap the wire from the sleds around our chests and haul away at the heavy sled like draft horses, puffing and sliding over the frozen ground.

  We worked this way from the time we got there in the morning until six, seven, or eight o’clock at night without a break. When we finally left for Zapadnaya late in the evening, many of the prisoners were so exhausted they simply couldn’t make it back the steep road up the hill. So we stacked them like cordwood on a rough sled pulled by the horses. It took us almost two hours to get back up the hill to camp, and it was sometimes eleven o’clock at night when we got there. We simply ate our kasha and fell into the bunks.

  After we had been working on this new camp only a week, the brigade was exhausted. Some men just couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Some of those who could refused to work; they had had enough. The “Ottoman,” though, wouldn’t leave with the brigade until everyone was present. If the men couldn’t stand on their feet, he’d have us drag them out by the feet and tie them onto the sled behind the horses.

  They were dragged to work that way, through snow drifts and all, down the steep, bumpy hill road. When we got to the work area, they were unhitched and left to lie in the snow. It seemed impossible they wouldn’t freeze to death, but somehow, around noon, you would find them sitting by the fire in the barrack, beginning to thaw out. By afternoon, the “Ottoman” would have them at work.

  By the end of a month, we had the barrack cleared, the post holes dug, the guard towers finished, and the barbed wire strung. But it was a monstrous job. The work was difficult, the food was barely enough to keep a man going, yet the weather was our worst enemy. There was always a wind howling, always snow in the air, blown by the wind into white whirling dervishes that stung.

  As soon as the barbed wire was up, however, the camp was officially in operation. It was to serve as a penal camp for the worst disciplinary offenders of the old camp. Seventy-two of them came down to join our brigade of politicals; all of us were quartered in the one barrack. Our only food was bread, sent out by train from Norilsk once a day. The railroad ran some distance from the camp, so the bread was simply thrown off the train into a snowbank and later fetched by the prisoners.

  On one of these bread gathering details, I was almost killed. As we hauled the bread on sleds back to camp, I watched the thieves grab off big chunks and eat them ravenously. The guards paid no attention. Finally, I snatched a piece of bread myself.

  In that same instant, I got a gun butt slammed between my shoulder blades which staggered me, a smash in the jaw which drove me to my knees, and a kick which caught me off balance and sprawled me into a snowbank 15 feet away. Immediately, I was looking down the muzzles of the guards’ guns. One of them told me to get up out of the snowbank. When I staggered up, I got a kick in the face which put me on my back again. This routine was repeated again and again. The guards threatened to shoot if I didn’t get up, then kicked me squarely in the face when I did. Finally, I was shoved back into line, almost unable to walk.

  Back at camp, I was put into the bur, the camp prison. In the bur, a prisoner gets just 300 grams of bread a day, plus a cup of water. Punishment is usually for three, five, or ten days at a time, depending on the offense. When they came out, prisoners were as weak as kittens from lack of food, if they managed to survive at all. It wasn’t uncommon for a man to die in the bur serving a ten-day sentence.

  I was lucky, however. After I had been in the bur only half an hour, I was called by the commandant to find out what had happened. I told him. He was amused both at the story and my attempt to tell it through lips that barely functioned. At the end, he smiled, said he guessed I’d been punished enough, and told me to get out of his office.

  Though we kept a fire going day and night, the barrack was always damp. The lumber never really thawed out. So every night after supper, from 8:00 to perhaps 8:30, we would have a louse hunt. Everybody was ordered to strip and kill the lice on his body, then we did the best we could with the bunks and the barrack itself. Because the camp was still so primitive, the medical aid was poor—in fact, it was practically nonexistent.

  At the end of May, when the snow began to melt, everything flooded as the waters poured off the hills into our valley. The water in the camp was a foot deep in most places, sometimes deeper. One night we were all chased outside to wash up; it was the first bath we’d had since our assignment to this camp. We stood there in the open compound with the wind still howling and the snow still deep on the hillsides. We bathed as quickly as we could, but it was welcome and it felt good. All through the spring, until the work crews finally dug drainage ditches, the compound was always flooded, and sometimes the barrack, too.

  Our main job at this time was to finish building the camp itself. Everything had to be done from scratch. We built our own sawmill for the lumber which was hauled in from the railroad, then set about building more barracks. After that, we built a kitchen, a storehouse for food, and finally an infirmary.

  The new infirmary was always full. When the doctor, a prisoner himself, found out that I was an American, he got me to translate the prescriptions on some American drugs and medicine with which he had been supplied. In return, he would have me assigned to work with him for three days at a time. In the infirmary, I’d get tea and sugar along with the bread, plus vitamins to build up my strength. These breaks from the heavy work of the brigades were literally lifesavers.

  The food in camp was still just the daily bread ration which came in on the railroad. Eventually, a spur line was built from the railroad to the storehouse we had completed. Our first delivery of food arrived when four boxcars were shoved into camp by the engine. As soon as the gates were opened and the cars rolled in, the thieves poured out of the barracks. They were halted at the boxcars by guards with rifles.

  The commandant then ordered these ruffians to unload the cars and carry the food into the storehouse. They jumped aboard the cars and began unloading all right—but they took the food and ran in all directions! The guards at first shot over their heads in warning, then in earnest. As far as I could see, no one was killed, but several fell writhing on the ground. Still, the thieves carried on. Nothing would stop them.

  Those in the cars threw down the boxes, smashing and scattering the contents over the ground. Others picked up the scattered food and stuffed it in their pockets. They completely ignored the fusillade of shots. Others came running at the guards with clubs. At that, the soldiers fled, fearing a riot. They came back later, and then only with reinforcements.

  Immediately, the commandant ordered a search of all the barracks for the stolen food. But the thieves weren’t fools; they had taken care to hide their hard-won loot in the snowbanks around the camp, where they could get it later. Those four boxcars had contained our rations for the week, so the rest of us got nothing that week except hot water, a little bit of sugar, and some very weak soup which might just as well have been more hot water. From then on, the boxcars were stopped outside the camp. Food was carried into the storehouse by political prisoners under heavy guard, and the thieves weren’t even allowed in the compound while the transfer took place.

  Since this was, in effect, the penal camp for all t
he disciplinary problems around Norilsk, it was not surprising that trouble was the order of the day. The few political prisoners were split up among the brigades, and we did our best to stay out of the way. Even with the “Ottoman” as my protector, I used to sit on my bunk or in a corner of the barrack at night, as inconspicuous as possible.

  If I ever had any doubts about how quickly I could get into trouble when the “Ottoman” wasn’t around, they were cleared up one night when I went to the kitchen in the hope of scrounging a little extra food. As I walked in, I was met by a thief who was there ahead of me with the same idea. He was a one-armed fellow, ugly, carrying a club in his hand. “What are you hanging around for, you Fascist?” he growled. “What about you, you thief!” I said. Instantly, he sprang at me with the club. I ducked under the blow, caught his arm, and hung on for dear life. Other thieves came running. Instead of breaking up the fight, they ganged up on me and worked me over quite professionally. I woke up outside in the snow, badly bruised, but mercifully with no bones broken. It was a hard way to learn a lesson, but it was one I never forgot.

  Among themselves, the thieves observed a rigid caste system. Sometimes in the morning, when we stepped outside the barrack, we would stumble over a body, stiff as a board and stone dead. The thieves were settling old scores among themselves; they left the burying to a work detail.

  One evening, just about suppertime, a thief from another barrack came to ours on some mission or other. He fell into an argument over it with the “Ottoman,” who began to curse him in no uncertain terms. In sheer bravado, the outsider ripped open his jacket and bared his chest to dramatize the fact he wasn’t afraid of the “Ottoman.” Before the gesture was even complete, the “Ottoman” had his knife out of his coat and plunged it full force into the bared chest. The fellow went down without a word. The “Ottoman” calmly retrieved his knife, wiped it on the fellow’s jacket, and told his men to throw the fellow outside in the snow. Fortunately, he was found, taken to the infirmary, and survived the incident.