With God in Russia

by Walter J. Ciszek

  By fall, the walls of the main factory were up. Work was begun on the roof. The weather turned worse, but the work went on; even in wind and snow the prisoners worked on the girders overhead. I saw men fall from the topmost girder to the concrete floor, and when a man fell from that height, he was a goner. The cause of the accidents, though, was not just the weather. It was also the prisoners’ inexperience at working on high iron, and the furious tempo of the work. General Zveriev was determined to finish the job on schedule. The price might be three or even four men a day, but what were these among so many?

  Zveriev’s determination paid off: the Kombinat was finished by New Year’s Day 1952. The next day, the first melt of copper was to be fired up, so the brigades were kept home while the city officials and citizens of Norilsk came to witness the opening of this great new plant. The first test they made of the new furnaces, however, was accompanied by a gigantic explosion!

  For the inaugural celebration, the tops of all the Kombinat buildings had been covered with electrified billboards bearing the names of Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Engels. After the blast, which blew the roof off the furnace section, the lights on Stalin’s name were out. Some of the men in camp took it as a joke, but to others it seemed a curious omen. We were continually hearing rumors about Stalin’s health, and this accident caused a lot of comment in the camp.

  THE REVOLT

  IN FEBRUARY 1952, I was transferred back to Camp 5. Father Viktor stayed behind in Camp 4. Since there was very little work at that site anymore, now that the Kombinat was finished, he came to one of the common construction sites in Norilsk, called “Gor Stroi,” every day. He was put in charge of a warehouse which stored the gasoline and oil for the heavy machinery. Here again, he had his own little work-shack office. I used to visit him daily during the noon meal and we would take turns saying Mass in the shanty.

  Because of his job as watchman, Viktor could also be a great help to the women prisoners. There was a women’s camp now, about 100 yards from the front gates of Camp 5; the women, too, had been put to work on the construction of the city. In the women’s camp, there was a group of Ukrainian nuns who had been arrested. They were a great influence on the young girls, especially, helping them and arranging for their confessions. The women couldn’t cross out of their zone, but from time to time it was possible to arrange for those of them who wanted to go to confession to stand in a certain place along the barbed wire between zones, and Father Viktor would pass by to “hear” their confessions.

  Most of the time, they wrote down their transgressions on a sheet of paper and handed it to Viktor as he passed. The notes were numbered, but no names were given, and Viktor burned them in his shanty stove immediately. The next day, the women would come back, make an Act of Contrition, signal the proper number with their fingers, and receive absolution. If it was impossible or sometimes inadvisable either to pass the notes or to absolve the women one by one, we would try at least to give them general absolution. All of us helped with this work, but Viktor, by reason of his job, had more free time at the work site, so he did most of it. Some of the notes sent this way, obviously, could have been intercepted. The women’s willingness to take this risk to receive the sacrament, their openness and confidence in us, was a source of great edification to us as priests.

  In general, the women had a much harder life in camp than the men. They were often considered fair game not only by the men in the camps, but by the free men as well who worked on the various construction jobs, by the guards and even the camp officials. The fact that there were two big barracks in the women’s camp full of children under five years of age was obvious testimony to the way things went. Moreover, a woman who had a child was immediately put on better rations until she recovered, and she didn’t have to work for the period of her recovery. If this wasn’t an inducement to the women, it was at least no deterrent. This doesn’t mean that all the women succumbed, by any means. The women from the Baltic states especially, as well as the Ukrainians and Poles, were often of extremely high character and most devout, despite the conditions to which they were subjected. On the other hand, like all prison camps, the women’s camp, too, had its share of professional criminals.

  By the summer of 1952, brigades from Camp 5 were engaged in a wide variety of activities. The main effort of the camp was still what was called “Gor Stroi”—or, the “building of the city”—but to accomplish it we had to man a whole host of supporting industries which had sprung up around the camp. I was working again, for instance, in the old two-story brick factory and kiln a short 200-yard walk from our main gate. A railroad spur ran just to the south and west of the camp, leading to the clay pits, where the women’s brigades now quarried the raw material. Along the railroad track to the west was a string of small factories which turned out cement, concrete blocks, fiberglass, resin glue, and kepenit (a special heat-and-cold-resistant, very strong glass). Still other brigades worked in the completed sections of town, digging drainage and sewage ditches, finishing the roads.

  Conditions in the camp itself, though, were much worse. The lack of spirit among the prisoners was quite noticeable, especially after Camp 4, and the officials responded with stricter discipline. Rough handling of the prisoners, even beatings, grew common. We were aware of a general tightening up all across the board. The prisoners resented it and grew sullen. It was a vicious circle.

  In January 1953, the unrest in the camp was stirred by new rumors. Free workers from the city, who supervised work at the construction sites, spread the news that Stalin was sick. Then came the startling rumors that a number of Kremlin doctors had been arrested and imprisoned. Next we heard, unbelievably, that the doctors had been released and rehabilitated. And mixed up with all of this was the stubborn rumor that Stalin himself was already dead.

  Such rumors occasioned a lot of wild talk in the camps. Camp officials were as badly disturbed as the men. It wasn’t long before the gathering of more than two people was prohibited; violations were punished by extra hard labor in the camp or the penal brigade. The general atmosphere, bad enough before, deteriorated even more.

  More and more, now, the prisoners began to resent being called by number. They considered it degrading. More and more, the camp officials and guards began to insist on the numbers; at the morning inspection, they would check to see that the numbers were plainly visible on prisoners’ clothing. The foreman would go through the ranks of fives lined up to leave camp and drag out anyone whose number was erased, illegible, or hidden. If there was any grumbling or murmuring from the other prisoners, the brigade wouldn’t move until the person who had made the remark was identified and, possibly, beaten.

  Several other disciplinary measures were now introduced into the camp routine. Previously the barracks had never been locked at night; now they were locked after the 9 P.M. checkup. If a man wasn’t in his own barrack when the checkup was taken, he was automatically slated for the bur. But if he hid, or was still missing when all the barracks had been checked, the alarm would be rung and a control check made of the whole camp. There were times when such control checks were made two or three times during the night, and on such nights the camp might not get to sleep until 2 or 3 A.M. Still, we were expected to be ready to get up for work at 5 A.M.

  Inspections at the gate in the morning, and when the brigades returned home at night, became much more stringent. It became almost daily practice for the guards to search every prisoner thoroughly, looking for pieces of iron, knives, letters, notes. In the process, they would confiscate any extra clothes a man was wearing, and they also began to take such things as medals, holy pictures, scapulars, or homemade crucifixes. All this was done in the compound, despite the cold. The guards wouldn’t hesitate to make a man strip naked if they suspected anything. Sometimes they would even insist he take off his valenki and the rags around his ankles, so that a man might wind up standing in the snow, barefoot, without a stitch of clothes on.

  Work in Gor Stroi had slowed almost to a sta
ndstill. Where before the brigades from Camp 5 had put up whole buildings in two months, now they were averaging one floor of one building every six or seven months. The truck drivers who brought our supplies also brought news of similar unrest in other camps. The trainmen who ran from Norilsk to Dudinka talked of similar discontent among the prisoners at the port.

  Some of the brigadiers still tried to drive their brigades hard, though. Several times after work the brigades were held at the gates of the construction site for hours while the guards went looking for a missing brigadier. He might be found immersed in the newly poured concrete, badly mutilated or even completely dismembered. Yet the officials hesitated to take drastic action for fear the prisoners might get out of hand.

  “Squealers,” who were always detested, were now in continual danger as a result of the growing spirit of vengeance. Many of them refused to work outside the camp; the occasions for reprisals and “accidents” were too great at the work sites. They tried to be appointed orderlies or get jobs in the office, and they tried especially to change barracks. The camp officials felt more or less obliged to help them, for the sake of the information they could supply.

  I remember a young Lithuanian lad who was suspected by his fellow Lithuanians of being a “squealer.” One evening, two thin, nearly emaciated Lithuanians in shabby clothes waited for him on the porch outside his barrack. When he stepped out, they jumped him and split his head open with an axe before he could say a word. They kept swinging at him over and over again. Then they didn’t even bother to run. They cleaned the axe carefully, left their victim lying in a pool of blood, and went off to the camp prison, freely confessing their actions.

  Another morning, just after the signal to rise, and as soon as the barracks were unlocked, three men masked and caped down to their ankles appeared at one of the barracks. Before anyone could move, they strode straight to a bunk, tore off the blankets, and grabbed at the occupant. As the poor man tried to dive for the door, he was knocked to the floor and hauled into the corridor, where he was stabbed repeatedly. No one in the barracks moved. Nobody wanted to get involved in a case which didn’t concern him. It wasn’t necessarily a case of “squealing”; men who had grudges and personal vendettas took advantage of the unrest to settle old scores.

  The acknowledged leader of the prisoners in Camp 5 was a man of uncertain nationality known only as “Mikhail.” A talented fellow, he worked in the clubhouse taking care of the library, the bulletin board, and the Stien Gazeta (camp newspaper) which was tacked up on the bulletin board and contained announcements of prisoner activities, outstanding performances by the camp Stakhanovites, or the brigade percentages for the day. Mikhail was middle-sized, tanned, and bald, sturdily built and seemingly without a nerve in his body. It was rumored that he had been a former army official before his arrest; in any event, he was the brains behind the prisoners’ operations as they became more and more organized.

  Something certainly was in the air, not only in Camp 5, but in the city of Norilsk itself. Even the trains coming up from Dudinka now carried slogans scrawled across the cars and engines: “We demand higher wages,” “Better food and more of it,” “Better conditions for work and less of it.” News trickled in from the continent, and rumors spread of unrest and trouble in the camps around Karaganda, Kazakhstan, and Vorkuta to the west.

  There was still much talk of Stalin’s illness, and of turnovers in the Kremlin, but we had few hard facts to go on. Even the free workers in town had heard only rumors and conjectures. Suddenly, one morning during the first week in March 1953, the news was broadcast over the camp loudspeakers that Josef Dzhugashvili Stalin was dead!

  The immediate reaction throughout the camp was one of shock. Men met each other and whispered the news in little knots, making the sign of the cross and murmuring, “Gospodi!” Tension and fear were general, and the expectation that something must happen now. The camp officials were bustling about, traveling into the city and back again. Different officials, in their turn, came out to the camp from town and returned. Work was at a standstill; the foreman and his helpers seemed bewildered and pensive. The atmosphere resembled a vacuum, and I thought almost anything might happen.

  The guards outside and inside the camp had been doubled. There were two men now in every tower along the barbed wire, twice as many sentries at the gates as ever before. Comments on the death of Stalin rippled like an undertow through the camp. The camp officials began to shift prisoners from one camp to another, hoping to separate leaders from their followers. Groups arrived at our camp from as far away as the continent. For the most part, these were either hardbitten, professional criminals or else Benderovcy, a famous band of tough Ukrainian partisans who hated the Soviets. None of them went to work at Gor Stroi or elsewhere, but they walked around the camp as if they owned it. They were well dressed, not in camp clothes but civilian clothes, and they just refused to work. They dealt with the camp officials in a way which plainly indicated that they didn’t want to be bothered. They weren’t.

  The camp was soon buzzing with the tales they brought of a revolt in the camps of Karaganda. Troops had had to be called in to quell the riot there. They also told of rumors of other camps already in revolt. It seemed to me that officials at Camp 5 had just about let things get out of control now. In any event, our own revolt was not long in coming. We were already at work in the brick factory the morning it started, and as the brigades from the women’s camp passed between the brick factory and Camp 5 on their way to the clay pits, they engaged in the usual morning banter with the men. As their brigades turned east around the south end of Camp 5, though, some of the newcomers were there along the barbed wire to greet them. The guards began hurrying the women along and the newcomers hooted.

  As usual, the men began to throw little notes over the wire to the girls. Some of them were intercepted by the guards, which occasioned some curses from the prisoners. The girls threw back notes of their own; a couple of them landed in the zapretnaya zona between the two strands of barbed wire. For some reason, the newcomers decided to retrieve them. The young guard in the tower yelled at them to get back, but they ignored him; the guards had no permission to shoot into the camp. As they approached the fence, though, this young guard opened fire with his machine gun. Two of the Benderovcy were killed instantly, three others were wounded.

  The prisoners hauled their wounded and dead into a nearby barrack, then threatened to assault and pull down the tower. Others ran through the camp, spreading the news of the guard’s action. The women, who had watched the whole thing, were quickly pushed along the road to the clay pits. Within half an hour, the camp was in an uproar.

  The camp officials themselves didn’t know what had triggered the uprising. As soon as they found out, they came to the barrack where the prisoners were holed up and, in a conciliatory gesture, ordered the young guard to come down off the tower. The young fellow climbed down, amidst the threats of the prisoners, but the Benderovcy ordered the officials to get away from their barrack. All over the camp, men began shouting, “Murderer! Murderer! We don’t want to die! You can’t kill us!” The officials, growing alarmed, retreated to the north gate.

  With the officials gone, a crowd of prisoners went to the bathhouse looking for two orderlies suspected of being “squealers.” “Where’s Marco?” they shouted as they burst through the door. Marco was taking a shower. He ran headlong out the other door, heading for the barbed wire. He gashed himself badly, but clambered over the fence and jumped into the zapretnaya zona, hoping to make a dash for the main gate. A guard on one of the nearby towers shouted “Stoi!” Marco kept running down the lane between the barbed wire, dodging stones hurled at him by other prisoners. He got about 5 yards; the tower guard dropped him with two shots.

  While this was going on, the other “squealer” ran out and climbed over the barbed wire. The officials at the north gate finally signaled the tower guards not to shoot; the “squealer” ran along the death zone to the guardhouse at the gate.
There he turned and shook his fist at the Benderovcy. Infuriated, a mob surged closer to the gate.

  All work stopped. Many of the prisoners in the factory ran the 200 yards or so across the railroad track to the barbed wire fences of the camp to find out from the prisoners inside what was happening. By this time, a committee of prisoners was already forming with Mikhail and some of the Benderovcy at its head. They told the brigadiers not to return to camp, but to have their men take over control of the factories. “Did you hear that, men?” shouted the brigadiers. Nobody went back to work.

  After a short lull, a number of cars came sliding down the road from Norilsk with officials from the city. They stopped at the gates, talked to the camp officials, and tried to enter the camp. The mob howled at them and they stopped just inside the gate. Mikhail’s committee went to meet them. Immediately the prisoners accused the camp officials of cold-blooded murder. The camp commandant acknowledged that the tower guard had no right to shoot inside the camp; he promised that the man would be punished. But then the committee demanded that conditions in the camp be changed completely.

  They listed some specific details: The numbers should be taken off prisoners’ clothing; letters should be permitted to relatives of the prisoners once a month, not once a year; no more than eight hours of work a day; prisoners should be paid for their work; the prisoners should be given credit, in the form of a reduced sentence, for extra work, e.g. for every day of work in which a prisoner over-fulfilled his quota, three days should be taken off his sentence.

  While the revolt committee was talking, prisoners surrounded the officials on all sides, everybody talking at once, shouting their gripes, relishing this sense of freedom and power, hurling shouts, accusations, and threats of all kinds. The camp officials agreed that injustices had been done; the Party officials from Norilsk wrote down the prisoners’ demands. Everybody assured the prisoners that the situation would be remedied, their demands met.