About mid-year 1948, rumors began to reach our camp of a big copper factory to be built just outside Norilsk. Some of the Camp 5 prisoners who worked in the office first heard of it from the camp officials. It was so important that construction of it was going to be directed by a general named Zveriev, a man with a reputation for getting things done on time. Then, one evening, there was a sign posted on the camp billboard: “The following are to prepare for an étappe . . .” My name was on the list.
CAMP 4 BUILDS A COPPER FACTORY
CAMP 4 WAS two miles away. At the pace we marched, it didn’t take us long to reach it. As we swung up the path toward the main gate, I admired the two-story barracks of cinder block or brick, smart and well-kept, looking like a city out here in the tundra. Yet it was still a prison camp: there were the double rows of barbed wire which formed the zapretnaya zona. We stopped at the gate and waited while the camp officials checked our documents with the convoy guards.
The process took well over an hour, which gave us plenty of time to look over our new home. The camp itself was flat, surrounded on all sides by tundra and thick, high grass. On the east, Schmidtika, 5 miles away, stood out massively, and just beyond that familiar peak was a mountain range stretching for miles, the natural-resource treasury of Siberia. On the west, the landscape again was flat, with just the barest silhouette of snow-covered hills in the far distance beyond the Yenisei. To the south and north, the land was open for miles, stretching like a valley between the two mountain ranges.
While we waited outside the gate, the prisoners inside the camp came up to the barbed wire. They welcomed us excitedly and told us conditions at Camp 4 were excellent. Everyone seemed to be in good spirits, calling out to find out who we were, asking for friends or fellow countrymen, joking a bit among the nationalities. The guards didn’t seem to mind. Finally, the command was given to form up. We were called out by name, one by one, to be checked through the gates.
The checking-in process involved a whole litany of questions: Name, father’s name, surname; place of origin, date of birth, what was your charge? Where were you charged, where were you sentenced, and who sentenced you? In what city or town were you sentenced, on what date? What camps have you been in, how much time have you left to serve? Are there any charges outstanding against you in any previous camps? If your answers to the questions checked with the facts on your documents, you were let through the gate; if not, you were told to step aside for further interrogation when the whole group had been checked in.
Once inside the gates, the guards subjected us to a thorough search, then passed us on to the naradchik (foreman), who would assign us to brigades, and the pompobyt (manager), who assigned us living quarters. The foreman and manager led us to the bookkeeping department to register our belongings. We were supposed to have, and were only permitted to keep, the regular prison-camp issue: in summer, a cap, jacket, trousers, work shoes, one pair of underwear, and a long cloth to wrap around our legs like puttees, instead of socks. “Later on,” the manager warned us, “when you get your assigned bunk, you must register with the bookkeeper your mattress, pillow, blanket, and any other utensils given for your personal use.” When winter came, we would turn in our summer clothes and get a pair of valenki, wadded pants, wadded jacket, a wadded winter cap with dogskin earlaps, a heavy undershirt and heavier pair of puttees, a pair of canvas gloves, and, if we worked outside, a pair of cotton gloves. This winter issue had to last us through two winters, but the summer wear was only for a year.
After we registered, the foreman led us to the “clubhouse,” a spacious one-story barrack in the center of camp. It was equipped with cards and chess sets, a few papers and pamphlets, and good workers won the privilege of reading books. Sometimes, on big holidays such as May Day and the October Feast, there might also be movies in the clubhouse for the outstanding workers. We weren’t free at the moment to walk around the camp, since we had not yet been assigned to a brigade or barrack, but the men from the camp began to mill around the clubhouse, looking for old friends. They simply ignored the guards who tried to keep them away.
Here, for the first time, I met a priest I hadn’t seen since 1941. He had been told I was in camp, so he came looking for me from group to group. I heard him asking for “Ciszek,” but since I didn’t recognize him, I kept quiet. Finally, he came over to me and greeted me warmly. The fact he recognized me didn’t necessarily mean anything; I asked him who he was. “I’m Father Viktor,” he said. “Don’t you remember me?” “No,” I said. “Remember the day you came to see Archbishop Shepticki in Lvov? I was the one who met you at the door and let you out afterward.”
Father Viktor asked what had happened to me, what camps I’d been in, and how I was. He went on to tell me how he himself had been arrested, and how the officials in Lvov had been afraid to move against the Archbishop for fear of the people. He told me I was the ninth priest in Camp 4. Immediately, I hoped that Nestrov might be one of the others, but Viktor hadn’t seen him. There were two Polish Catholic priests, three Lithuanian Catholic priests, one Latvian, and now me. I told him about Father Casper, who had come, too. He asked if we had said Mass; I told him about the arrangements in Camp 5. Viktor told me they all said Mass regularly in Camp 4 and assured me he would make arrangements to supply Father Casper and me with whatever we needed to celebrate Mass.
By this time, it was getting late and I was still waiting to be assigned to a brigade and barrack. As a matter of fact, it was well into the early morning before I was finally called and appointed to a brigade. I followed the pompobyt to my barrack and was assigned to the second floor of a two-story building. The barracks were in good condition; they even had radiators and central heating, because this had originally been built as an army camp. But the rooms were crowded because so many new men had been brought in to work on this new project.
Since we had been told we were to report for work next morning, I lost no time getting to sleep. At 5 A.M. the rising signal sounded through the camp; an hour before that, the orderly was up getting our morning ration of bread and kipiatok. The reason for his move was obvious when the gong sounded: there was a monstrous traffic jam in the barrack. It soon became apparent that despite the comforts of these barracks, there were just too many people in them. Not all the men could get to the washroom before we left for work; breakfast was the proverbial commuter’s nightmare, eaten on the run.
The site selected for the new copper factory, the Kombinat, was about 3 miles south of the camp. There was no road to it, but we made a road by tramping, thousands at a time. It was the guards who had it rough; as always, they walked parallel to the columns, which meant that under the circumstances they were walking and jumping through gorse up to their waists.
We newcomers first saw the site as a large, open, level area more than a mile square. It was practically all cleared off by the time we were assigned to Camp 4, though not yet completely surrounded by barbed wire. When all the brigades—well over 4,000 men—were present, assigned jobs, and given their tools, the place looked like a battlefield. At the signal to begin work, everything exploded.
There was the rattle and bang of jackhammers and air compressors; steam shovels growled and the loud shriek of metal on metal rang out in the warm, clear air. Prisoners shuffled everywhere with wheelbarrows, loading trucks with earth and rock, dumping it over an embankment to the north as the foundation began to take shape. Through it all, unruffled and unhurried, walked General Zveriev and his staff. They went from job to job, inspecting, encouraging, promising prisoners good rations and extra food for completing the job on time.
As a result, the work tempo was amazing. Earth was flying in all directions, almost exploding out of the ground. By noon, there were heaps of it higher than a man’s head lying all over the work site, earth that couldn’t be carted away at the pace it was dug. There was no rest, no time out from the furious pace until dinnertime. But at dinnertime—wonder of wonders!—hot soup was brought out to the site in trucks. It
was the first time I had seen anything like it in Siberia, and the soup was what the prisoners called “mirovaya” (wonderful), thick enough to stand a spoon in.
During dinner, I looked around and saw trainloads of machinery and building materials being unloaded on the sidings, even while the foundations were still being dug. Groups of trucks were roaring up from town, bringing in more machinery lashed down on trailers, unloading, then swinging off in a swirl of dust to get more. After dinner, we went until 5 P.M. without a break. If the pace slackened for a second, the brigadier or an official would be right on top of us, urging us on, promising us better rations.
By evening, everyone was bone-tired and exhausted. The brigades collected at the gate slowly, though everyone was anxious to get home. We returned to camp sometime after 7 P.M., after almost twelve hours on the job, washed up, and waited for the meal. What we had been promised was true! There was more soup for everyone, kasha, a piece of fish, and another 200 grams of bread for every man. It was almost a feast. That was the ordinary day at Camp 4. We also worked Sundays, if the weather was good, and in fact holidays were rare. The pace was a driving one to finish digging and pouring the foundations while the weather was reasonably good. We were told we’d get our holidays and our rest when the weather turned bad. If the work was especially hard, the brigade would get a couple ounces of whiskey per man, on the General’s orders, to keep up their strength. They would also get a “plus-2” or a “plus-3” meal ticket. This was the first camp I had ever been in where we were really fed well and, as a result, the men grew perceptibly stronger. Their frames filled out, their faces were fuller. There was plenty of makhorka and other small comforts, and a man could easily earn an extra portion of kasha or soup on the job.
All these changes for the better had a good effect on most of the men, but not all. Family men, for instance, had more time to think about things other than food, so they thought of their families—some of them to point of depression. Now that the most elemental needs of clothing and food necessary just to survive were easily satisfied, some of the men began to look for ways to satisfy other appetites. If you knew the right people, you could arrange with the guards to get you a woman for about 25 rubles. They weren’t allowed into camp, but they worked at various jobs on the construction site, so procurement wasn’t exactly impossible. There was also a certain amount of homosexuality in the camp, especially among the younger men.
Here at Camp 4, most of the nationality groups stuck together. They were clannish in the sense that they took care of their own, especially the sick or emaciated workers in the group, but surprisingly enough there was very little bickering between the various groups. The Baltic peoples, the Poles, and the Ukrainians were the workhorses of the camp, the backbone of construction work. The Georgians, Armenians, and Latvians usually worked in the kitchen, though quite a few of them were brigadiers and foremen of the work crews. The Chinese and Japanese worked for the most part in the laundry, the kitchen, and the infirmary.
One of my first new friends here at Camp 4, surprisingly enough, since I always tried to avoid his kind, was a thief named Yevgeny. He was a stocky, well-built man in his thirties, slightly taller than average, very good with his fists. The small, restless eyes that dominated his face were an indication of his seemingly boundless energy. Yevgeny somehow took a liking to me, and taught me many a trick for scrounging food; he was considered a pro even by his fellow cons. Since he was feared and respected by his fellow thieves, his friendship often stood me in good stead. Yevgeny knew I was a priest, and, like most thieves, he had a very primitive idea of religion, mixed with any number of superstitions. He asked me, for instance, to bless a little cross for him, which he wore from then on. Yet he wore it more as a talisman or good luck charm. He did bless himself as he put it on, but he also pulled out a knife and warned the crowd around him, “If anyone laughs at this cross, he’ll get this knife right in the belly!”
Yevgeny had been baptized a Catholic, but he hadn’t practiced his faith in so long there was little left except these superstitious externals. He was a loyal friend, though, and little by little, over the months I knew him, I brought him back to the point where he finally made a confession and received Communion. After that, he went to confession and Communion almost regularly, but he still retained his own peculiar moral code and violent ethics of fist and knife when the occasion offered—and the occasions were frequent enough.
I once saw him stand off three other thieves with his bare hands, though I doubt if the Marquis of Queensbury would have approved. With his back to a wall, he laid out the first with a sickening smash to the throat, caught the second with a kick in the groin, flattened the third with his fists. The whole process couldn’t have taken more than a minute. Afterward, Yevgeny looked around for any other takers, then walked nonchalantly away, leaving the three men stretched out on the ground. He was equally good with a knife, and since in his code of self-preservation just about any use of the knife could be justified as self-defense, it was never exactly clear to him why I should make such a fuss over incidents of that sort.
Practically every day, Yevgeny would drop around and ask if I needed anything or if anyone was giving me trouble. If so, the implication was, I had merely to let him know. Every once in a while, he would come into our barrack, catch my eye, and nod for me to follow him outside. We’d go straight to the kitchen, where he would rap on the door and tell the cook to give me some kasha. The cook wouldn’t even blink, just fill up a cup, add a slice of fat, pour in a little linseed oil, and hand it to me. Yevgeny would tell me to beat it and eat the food. That was that. He never volunteered any further information and I knew better than to ask any questions.
Yevgeny was a brigadier and, because of his reputation, his brigade was the roughest in the camp. He took good care of his men as to food and extra favors, but he drove them unsparingly at work. One day he bawled out two surly young Lithuanians for loafing on the job. As he turned to leave, one of them split his skull wide open with a sledgehammer. Yevgeny died without a sound. I had been working on another project that day, and I found out about Yevgeny’s death only late that night. I was heartbroken. I wished I’d been able at least to give him absolution, but I had to console myself with the thought that two weeks before his death he had confessed and received Communion for the last time.
Another good friend here was a young graduate student from New York’s Columbia University, a Chinese Catholic named Chung. His father had been a wealthy merchant in China, so Chung had been sent to America to study. I never learned why he was arrested, for he never talked about that. He spoke English quite well, though, and when he found out I was an American, he looked me up and introduced himself in English. He came to Mass regularly after that, and on Sundays I sometimes gave him a short sermon in English. Because of his education, Chung was influential with the Chinese community in Camp 4. From time to time, he invited me over to converse with them; he introduced me as “a good man,” so I was warmly received.
From then on, my shirt was washed, ironed, and mended every week, although normally our laundry was done (and this itself was an innovation) once every three weeks. Without fail, my shirt would be picked up Saturday night and returned to me Sunday morning, with a few pieces of bread tucked into the pockets for good measure. Eventually, Chung and most of the Chinese prisoners in Camp 4 were repatriated as a result of the Moscow-Peiping Pact. When Chung told me he was going home, I asked him to write my Provincial at Fordham Road in New York. He promised he would, and I gave him the address. That was in 1949, but I never saw or heard from him again.
HOSPITAL AID—THANKS TO MISHA
MEANWHILE, THE WORK on the factory was proceeding under forced draft. I decided the strain was beginning to tell, so one night I reported to the medical center. The place was jammed as usual. Many of the “patients” were simply playing the odds; the doctors had a special limit they could free from work each day, without consultation, simply by filling out an exemption slip
on their own. Some men had friends among the doctors who would slip their name on the list if they didn’t already have a quota of urgent cases. Others came just to talk to the doctors, who were prisoners themselves, on the chance of conning their way onto the exemption list.
It was like a lottery. Some of the men came back night after night with a different story or a different illness until they hit it lucky and got a day or two off. There were many, of course, who really did have a serious illness or some physical injury that needed immediate attention. But a lot of the men in the waiting room that night were simply men like myself, worn out and beginning to notice the daily strain, looking for a day off.
And the prisoners knew a lot of ways to help the “odds” along. Many of them simply drank tobacco juice or swallowed a piece of soap. But since any temperature over 100° was enough to ensure medical treatment, the men had all sorts of devices to induce a fever. They put hot compresses under their armpits or pepper plasters on the soles of their feet; the quickest way to get the thermometer to register, though, was to slip a piece of bitter root under the gums. Family men, especially, were not particularly eager to work themselves to death here in the camps.
As I sat in the medical center waiting my turn, the registration room door opened and a young fellow about thirty years old came out. He was medium-sized and blond—at least what was left of his hair on an almost completely bald head. He hesitated, looked around the room, then looked at the cards in his hand and was about to go back in. I thought I recognized him; I caught his eye, then I was sure. “Misha!” I said. He looked at me without even blinking, though a bit startled, then said very softly under his breath, “Cito!” (the Italian equivalent of “Quiet!” or “Ssh!”).
With God in Russia Page 23