With God in Russia

by Walter J. Ciszek

  The processing took almost all night: registration, the classification of men according to work qualifications, the routine bath, haircut, and disinfecting procedures. What took the most time, though, was a rigid physical examination. The camp officials here didn’t trust the medical records we brought with us; if anyone in the étappe was found to be sick, he was sent back to Norilsk. They wanted no deadwood here in the mines.

  I slept that first night in the clubhouse and wasn’t assigned to a barrack until sometime the next day. Here at Kayerkhan, newcomers weren’t immediately assigned to work brigades. We were turned over to a special supervisor who settled us in temporary barracks, while we were instructed in the theory and practice of mining, and the rules of safety. We also learned the whole layout of the mines from charts. These lectures lasted from nine to twelve in the morning, with a fifteen-minute break, and from one to three in the afternoon. The whole course took three weeks, at the end of which we had to take both an oral and written exam.

  During those three weeks, too, the instructor took us into the mines three times, a different shift each time, to show us in practice what the mine was like and how each step of the operation was done. When we had passed the exam and signed a pledge to observe the mine’s safety rules, we were finally assigned to a brigade. That afternoon, we moved from the beginners’ barracks to a brigade barrack, and started to work the next day.

  Even in the mines, it was bitterly cold. The earth was frozen solid and the huge ventilators used to prevent the formation of gas pockets created a terrific draft in the shafts. As a result, we wore winter clothes in the mines all year round: underwear, topshirt, padded jackets and pants, valenki, and scarfs and fur caps under our helmets. Some of the men preferred to wear boots on the job, instead of valenki, but if you wore boots, you had to keep moving or your feet would freeze.

  Usually, there were about eight sections being worked off the main shaft at any one time. From the cars which took us into the mountain, we walked perhaps a quarter of a mile down a slope into the work shaft, which was well-timbered with heavy beams. The wood was whitewashed to prevent it from rotting and also as a safety precaution. About every 150 yards, there was a bulkhead to prevent warm air from the main shaft entering the work area and thawing the still-frozen ground. From that approach shaft, we stepped immediately into the work area. Actually, there were always two shafts parallel to the working vein of coal: one for the network of belts which carried the coal up to the collecting bunkers, and one on the other side of the vein to bring in wood for shoring up the shaft.

  Above each vein of coal was a layer of shale about 3 feet thick, and above that was sandstone. The working shafts were about 90 yards wide across the face of the vein, but no shaft could go much deeper than 120 yards at a time. Even as the shaft approached that length, we could hear the sandstone in the ceiling cracking like pistol shots and screaming as huge slabs scraped against each other. Some of the timbers shoring up the work shaft behind us would snap in two from the weight of the sandstone.

  As the length of the shaft became critical, these noises increased. Sand would begin falling into the shaft from the ceiling. That was the danger signal. Immediately, the brigadiers would order us to pull the equipment out of the shaft and lie down in the side shafts. Before long, the whole ceiling would fall in with a rush, driving the air out of the chamber with such force it could hurl a man against the wall and smash his ribs if he wasn’t lying down. The big timbers would be snapped like matchsticks and hurled in every direction, occasionally banging into the walls over our heads as we hugged the ground.

  Sometimes I’d lie awake at night, shivering, when I thought about being trapped in a shaft with the ceiling falling. Each day, as the shafts grew longer, some of the crews developed pretty bad cases of nerves. After the ceiling fell, we would bypass about 15 yards of the vein, cut a new working face between the two service shafts, and start again. We would drill into the vein about 10 or 12 yards at a time, fill the holes with powder, cap and blast them.

  After the blast, we broke up the resulting blocks of coal and shoveled them into the scraper lines, which pulled them out and dumped them onto the belts leading to the hoppers above. The shaft was immediately shored up with timbers, 24 inches in diameter, about a yard and a half apart. But first of all, the shale had to be knocked off the ceiling. Otherwise, water would form between the shale and the sandstone as the ground thawed, and if it fell, it could split a helmet right in two.

  There was one night when I nearly got killed that way. We were making a new cut across the vein face, preparing a space for the scraper winch. I noticed the ceiling wasn’t well stripped of slate; I didn’t like it and told the foreman so. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, with a professional squint at the ceiling, “nothing will happen until tomorrow.” I was shoveling out a pile of slate and coal with another man, and every time I looked at that ceiling I could swear the cracks were getting wider and grains of sand were dropping down. I got nervous and called the foreman again. He looked it over and decided it was safe enough; he told me we had to finish the cut and get the scraper winch in place because the morning crew was supposed to begin blasting. We didn’t have time to spare a man for de-slating the ceiling.

  We were still nervous about it, so my partner and I got long-handled shovels in order to work as far away from the faults in the ceiling as we could. We both knew what could happen if the slate fell. It was a bad night before the day shift reported to work at 7:45. I was happy to leave, but I pointed out the faulty ceiling to the new crew and the brigadier. “You better get some lumber under there fast!” I said. Before they could get to work, though, the whole ceiling collapsed. It caught one man, a Chinese, across the back and snapped his spine in two. He lived just long enough for them to get him to the mine hospital.

  If the work was dangerous, conditions in the camp itself were better than in almost any other camp I’d seen. The coal from these mines was badly needed in the electric plants and furnaces around Norilsk, and for export from Dudinka in exchange for farm machinery and industrial equipment from abroad. The officials, therefore, wanted the prisoners to be able to work, and work effectively, so they did what they could to make life bearable.

  The barracks were well kept up, the beds were clean and comfortable, the food was good. Besides the normal rations in the dining room, there was a cafeteria out by the main gate which we shared with the free workers and where we could always buy a meal. Such a meal would include meat (!), kasha, pancakes, and a dessert of custard or possibly dried apples, sometimes even prunes. The meal was expensive, but it was worth it. And here at the cafeteria, as well as in the camp store, you could also buy candy, cookies, cigarettes, and other luxuries.

  The miners, both prisoners and free, received substantially the same wages: about 3,000 to 5,000 rubles ($300–$500) per month. The government, however, deducted a certain percentage of prisoners’ wages, and the camp deducted another percentage for room and board, so our actual pay was between 100 and 300 rubles ($10–$30) per month. With the money, we could buy meals and other luxuries, as well as onions and garlic from the farmers of Krasnoyarski Krai, who were allowed to sell a certain amount of their produce to the miners.

  Everyone bought as much of these items as he could. They were both a source of vitamins and a protection against scurvy, which was more prevalent here than anywhere else I had been. I noticed it most in my arms and legs, which would develop blue spots and begin to feel like iron, so heavy it was really an effort just to walk. And despite the good conditions in the camp, the prisoners here in Kayerkhan were always exhausted and pale, never rested enough, and forever tired.

  We could also get extra food from the free workers who worked so closely with us in the mines. Sometimes they made outright gifts to friends among the prisoners, but all of them were willing to buy whatever we wanted in town if we gave them the money. For that reason, checkups at the camp gates after a shift were frequently stricter than usual. The guard
s would make everyone in the brigade strip at the gates to see if we were smuggling meat or butter or, especially, vodka.

  During one of these checkups, the guard, a young boy from Lithuania, found in my clothes a little handwritten prayer book with the whole ceremony of the Mass in Latin. He was going to confiscate it, but I talked him out of it. I admitted frankly I was a priest, since he was a Lithuanian, and told him they were the prayers of the Mass. “It means a lot to me,” I said. He quietly handed the book back to me and let me pass on.

  For the most part, nobody bothered about my work as a priest in this camp. Once or twice I was warned by the interrogators about “subversive activity,” but I said Mass daily and distributed Communion, gave weekly talks to groups of prisoners, sermons and conferences, even some retreats. And at Kayerkhan, too, there were three other priests as well.

  One was my old friend, Father Casper, who had been with me at Dudinka and Camp 4. As soon as I arrived, he welcomed me and arranged for me to say Mass. There was a Lithuanian, Father Henri, tall and lanky, partly bald, with a gray mustache and goatee, who had been a monk before he was arrested. He didn’t work in the mines, but was an orderly in one of the barracks; his barrack, therefore, was a perfect place to say Mass while the brigade was in the mines. He also received quite a few packages from his people in Lithuania, which meant his barrack was also a good place to cadge a meal.

  Finally, there was Father Nikolai, a tall, heavyset Ukrainian priest with a soft voice; he, too, had been a monk, but in the Oriental rite. He was very popular among the Ukrainians here in the camp, and they would do anything for him. One of our best men, in fact, was a Ukrainian named Dmitriev, a thin, black-haired fellow with pointed nose and a goatee. He made most of the contacts among the prisoners and was an outstanding lay apostle.

  The prisoners felt much freer here because of the relaxed policies. It was astonishing to note the number of men who proved religious now that there was no outward persecution, and religion was “tolerated,” or at least winked at. On Christmas and Easter, we even had feast-day celebrations in the camp. The guards knew about them, though they pretended they didn’t; they would make an evening check about 5 P.M., but all they did was tell the men not to be too boisterous.

  Each religious group would arrange to have a barrack to itself on these feast days: Uniates in one, Orthodox in another, Baptists in a third, and so on. Because of the spirit among the prisoners, we could even arrange that those who were believers wouldn’t work on religious feasts; in return, they would work the shifts for the nonbelievers on governmental holidays. The men showed marvelous ingenuity in fixing up the barracks for such celebrations. They covered the long tables in the barracks with bed sheets, somehow managed to get dishes, silverware, and glasses from the camp cafeteria, and prepared bowls of their various national dishes. Many of them got packages from home, with bologna, macaroni, meat, butter, and other delicacies at this time.

  On these occasions, each of us priests celebrated Mass in a different barrack. Here in Kayerkhan, for the first time in almost fifteen years, I said a “public” Mass for a whole barrack full of men—and did they sing! No wonder the guards had warned them to keep quiet. Practically everyone went to Communion, and then I preached a long homily on the feast after Mass.

  Before we ate, we blessed the food and sang a solemn prayer of thanksgiving in Russian, then blessed the barrack with holy water. After that, we settled down to feasting. Whiskey was strictly prohibited in the camp, but it was all over the table on these occasions. Even the guards would drop in for a glass and a bite of holiday food, warn the men again to keep things quiet, then walk out. They never reported any of this to the officials.

  Here at Kayerkhan, many of the prisoners were coming to the end of their sentences. Almost every day, it seemed, someone was liberated from the camp. To replace those who left, new prisoners were being brought in all the time. There was a constant turnover. You could pick out the oldtimers in a crowd, though, by their tired walk, and the way they handled their arms and legs, heavy with scurvy. Many a man took to riding the coal belts up the shaft after work, which was strictly forbidden, rather than walking home. I fell asleep doing this one day and wound up on the coal bunker, with lumps of coal raining down on me. I was lucky I wasn’t killed, and I got out of there fast. Others were not always so lucky.

  The most tragic cases, now, were the men killed in the mines with only a few days left to go before they would be free. Everyone talked about it, everyone thought about it, and there were men who were close to a nervous breakdown just thinking about it. Men became reluctant to go down in the mines, terrified that they might be killed by accident, with the end in sight, after having survived all these years. This tension did nothing to decrease the number of accidents; in fact, they reached an all-time high.

  Seven men were killed in a flash explosion one day during blasting. This particular crew was blasting a new cut, working in a confined space with poor ventilation. In such a situation, you can feel the coal dust in the air, tingling and sparkling. They were actually outside the work area in a supposedly safe shaft at the time, but they were simply burned to a crisp in a flash explosion following the blast.

  I shuddered at the story, because it had happened to me one day. We had finished a new cut and were ready to blast, so I had been sent up the safety shaft to prevent anyone from entering the area. Somehow, in the dark, I got lost and stood in the shaft just opposite the opening for the new cut. When the blast came, I was blown halfway up the shaft—just picked up bodily and slammed against one of the timbers at the top of the mine. Luckily, I wasn’t killed or maimed, but I was unconscious for over two hours.

  By the spring of 1955, a young Lithuanian doctor named Janos, in the medical center at Kayerkhan, told me I’d have to get out of the mines if I wanted to survive. I told him my sentence only had three more months to run, so perhaps I could last it out; he told me unless I got out of the mines, I would never make it. Janos was a medium-sized fellow with chestnut hair, red cheeks, and a little mustache, a very quiet man, but he knew his business and was determined to do something about my condition.

  Here, work assignments were changed every three months, rather than every month, as they had been in other camps. When the spring assignments were due, he wrote a long medical history on my card of various illnesses, not all of which I had. There was no doubt, though, that I was beginning to weaken noticeably. At Mass the next Sunday, Janos, a devout Catholic, told me he thought I’d be invalided out of the mines on the next duty roster. When the names were read out in the barracks, however, I was still slated for the mines.

  I saw Janos that morning and he was furious. He told me to go to work that day, but he would see what he could do. As we were lining up to leave the camp that morning, though, he came running after me and told me to go back to the barracks. Then he went to the infirmary and entered my name on the sick list for the day.

  About 10 A.M., Janos stormed into the office of the camp doctor, who was in conference that morning with three women doctors (free) from town. Waving my medical record card, he asked the director why I hadn’t been exempted from duty in the mines. “If he dies,” he shouted, “I’ll report you! It’s not my responsibility anymore. I made out this card and recommended that he be exempted. If he drops dead in the mines, I’m filing a full report!” With that, he threw the card on the desk and walked out.

  The director hurried after him into the corridor and called him back. He was terrified. With the best will in the world, doctors in the prison camps simply can’t do what they should for their patients, and they know it; therefore, they don’t want any investigation by the city board concerning their practice. The director accompanied Janos straight to the foreman; my name was put on the list of those to be changed.

  When he was finished at the medical center that day, Janos looked me up to report that I was officially out of the mines. I was elated. Just the news made me feel stronger and more alive; I couldn’t thank Ja
nos enough.

  The next day, I was officially assigned to a brigade which worked in the stables. The brigadier put me down for the night shift, by myself. I worked from six in the evening to six in the morning, because it was “light” work. All I had to do was clean and water the horses, make up their stalls, clean out the stable during the night, feed the horses at night, then again in the morning. Actually, despite the hours, it was a good job. I was my own boss, and there were long periods when I could catch a nap; and I was out of the gases and dust of the mines. My health began to improve almost immediately.

  We had only eight horses in the stable, and six drivers. The horses were used especially to haul supplies—dynamite, machinery, tools, lumber—to the mine on sleds during the winter, or for unloading supplies and food products from the railway sidings. The horses were young and lively, but they were on the go more than twelve hours a day, and they got a good workout.

  The drivers were also young, mostly farm boys. At first, I was a little afraid of the horses, but they showed me how to handle them, how to harness them, how to clean them. There was one stubby little Mongolian horse named Vashka, however, who almost proved my undoing. A compact little white stallion with grayish spots, he had the biggest stall in the line because he kicked like a mule and bit as well. The eyes glowing out of his forehead were always fiery red; I was convinced the horse was mad. The first two nights, I couldn’t even get near him to feed him. If I so much as set foot in the entrance to his stall, he’d begin snorting and kicking viciously at the walls and the gate.

  After a couple of days of this, his driver told me one evening, “There’s something wrong with old Vashka these days. He doesn’t seem to have his usual strength and I can’t get him to pull at all.” “Well, I might as well admit it,” I said, “I can’t get in to feed him. Every time I try to get in, he almost kicks my brains out. I’m not going to get killed by a crazy horse with only two more months to go on my sentence.”