The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom

by Slavomir Rawicz

  One of the parting instructions as the door was slid home was that we were to make no noise. But as the train lumbered slowly into some kind of speed and the wheels began to rattle more loudly, we began to shout. Someone would bawl, ‘Anyone here from Lvov?’ A voice would answer from the other end of the truck, ‘I come from near there,’ but any attempt at sustained conversation died in the general hubbub. There were calls for men from this regiment and that regiment. Then the yelling quite suddenly subsided and men began hopefully to engage the attention of their immediate neighbours. Some of the excitement of the occasion was still with me but I could not join in the general free-for-all of question and answer. It always took me time to thaw out. Up against the cold wall of that truck I listened to the others but still hugged my thoughts to myself, reluctant as yet to open out, to seek a friend, but happy just to be one of the crowd, to know I was not alone any more.

  Later I found myself inquiring of those near me if anyone knew Pinsk. From my left came a voice which eagerly replied, ‘Yes, I know Pinsk.’ We tried each other with the names of people we knew, of streets, of surrounding villages. But his Pinsk was not my Pinsk and we could find no common ground. The effort died away. I felt disappointed, irritated at his failure to know the people and things I had known. I think he made another attempt to continue talking, but I could not bring myself to answer. It had been a half-hearted effort on my part anyway and I felt vaguely sorry I had started it.

  The train stopped several times that first night and at each stop there were the sounds of men being unloaded from lorries and stuffed into the trucks in their hundreds. Men favourably placed against the long platform side of the truck found chinks in the planks through which to watch the proceedings in the light of searchlights shining down the train from the two engines and reported what they saw to the rest of us.

  That first leg of our journey eastwards soon developed into a nightmare. We stayed locked in throughout the first night and all through the following day. There were, of course, no toilet facilities of even the crudest kind and men relieved themselves standing up, unable to move. The smell was foul, the air stank. When the train drew up at a signal check, men would shout for food and water and the guards would race along the train hammering on the truck sides with their gun butts and ordering silence, promising the trucks would be opened soon. It was bitterly cold for the prisoners around the truck walls. Even if those towards the middle would have changed position it was impossible to move. Twelve hours or so after my first meal on the train, I wormed my hand into my blouse and slowly ate the remainder of the bread and fish.

  Those of us who had first joined the train had been locked in for nearly twenty-four hours when the train finally drew up on an isolated section of branch line and the truck doors were at last slid back. It was late afternoon and all we could see around was undulating, snow-covered country, with clumps of trees near the line and others dotted around in the distance. Some of my companions were too stiff from the long standing to get down unaided. All of us stretched and yawned and rubbed at our aching limbs to restore circulation. An old grenade wound in my ankle had started to open and the back of my right hand, on which the Lubyanka specialists had dropped hot tar, was puffed up and sore. There were ex-soldiers with much more serious untreated wounds than mine. I could only admire their courage. We could do nothing for them and the Russian first-aiders contributed not even an aspirin for their relief.

  A knifing east wind whistled around the train. The snow had stopped falling and the wind seemed all the colder as a result. Russian soldiers were strategically placed in a flat arc around the open side of the train and there were patrolling guards on the blind side.

  The first move was for security. We were ordered to squat in front of our truck and then were issued with the familiar lump of black bread. There was also a water issue which tasted of steam and train oil. Afterwards we were allowed to walk in a carefully prescribed area and the request that a few men be allowed to walk a little farther afield to gather branches to clean out the truck was granted – on condition it was understood that ‘Step to the right, step to the left’ would be treated as an attempt to escape. The wind outside cut through our flimsy clothes and there was no lack of volunteers for cleaning the truck. They worked awhile inside and then jumped down to gulp in the clean air. Standing against the truck door a little later I saw that the steel bar used to lock us in was itself finally secured with a loop of wire and a lead seal. Not only locked in, I thought, but sealed. A finishing touch of absolute security.

  The pattern of the journey became clearer thereafter. The general plan was to move us stealthily through sleeping towns at night and to halt on some branch line out in the country during the day. Signal delays and long stretches of inhabited country meant over-running the schedule until well into the daylight of a following day. On those occasions there was near panic among the soldiers and train staff. I often wonder what civilian Russians standing on station platforms made of the low murmur of voices which came from the long line of cattle trucks almost stopping or slowly crawling past them during these out-of-schedule morning runs.

  Towards the end of the first week our sixty men had organized itself with rough community rules. A rota system was started to enable everyone in turn to enjoy the close-packed body warmth of the middle of the truck. Everyone in turn experienced the numbing cold of the truck walls. It was getting colder and colder and those perimeter positions were grim. This meant, too, that the favoured daylight spot of observer at the cracks and knotholes in the truck sides also went round. A good, loud-voiced look-out with his eye to a hole in the wood helped greatly to relieve the general boredom. Some of them could turn in a really entertaining commentary.

  Shut in this dark travelling-box it was difficult to get any clear idea of the actual course of the journey. From the disjointed reports of men who may or may not have known the route followed I formed the idea that we must have made a number of fairly substantial detours in the progress through Western Russia. These may have been necessitated by traffic conditions and the points chosen for picking up prisoner road convoys. During the second week, however, when we approached the Urals and a third engine was coupled into the train, it became clear we were on the Trans-Siberian Railway and there could be no doubt that our destination lay somewhere in the vast reaches of fabulous Siberia. We clanked through nearly all the big towns and rail junctions at night. We always knew the junctions by the break in running rhythm as the wheels crossed a succession of points and by the noise of other trains and shunting engines.

  One incident sticks vividly in my mind, especially since it was daylight and I had my eye to one of the wider cracks in the truck side. The train had been moving for nearly a fortnight and this was one of the occasions when there had been a number of hold-ups and we had not reached our prearranged hiding-place when dawn came. It was a junction, a big place. The city beyond was remarkable only for the fact that all the buildings seemed to be in red brick. The train had been creeping tentatively at something like ten miles an hour. It shuddered to a heavily-braked halt. A minute or so later it jerked off again, barely moving. And then I saw, drawing slowly alongside, another train of trucks, just like ours, on the parallel track.

  I called out. Others at vantage points called out. ‘A train like ours,’ I shouted. ‘The windows are not covered. There are people in it.’ Our train halted. The other was already stationary. ‘Women. Women. There are women in it. And children.’ I don’t know if it was my voice telling the news or some of the others. I think we were yelling against each other. There was pandemonium. The men in the middle surged towards the outside and we look-outs were pressed flat against the woodwork. We hardly noticed the additional discomfort. The women looked startled. They could see nothing but the big blank sides of the trucks. The noise from our train became a swelling roar. Someone screamed, ‘They are Polish women. They are our women,’ and the men went almost mad. Perhaps they were Poles, or Latvians, or Estonians.
I don’t know. If they made any sound I could not hear it with the yelling of the mob all round me.

  Russian soldiers ran distractedly from their quarters at each end of the train, thumping on the trucks and ordering quiet. It was hopeless. The whole train was in the grip of hysteria. I can only imagine how the engine-driver of the leading locomotive was being ordered to get going, signals or no signals. That stop lasted seven or eight minutes and men who did not know where their wives and families might be were sobbing as we got under way again. The disturbing influence of that one incident lasted for days. It was the worst piece of organization of the whole rail trip.

  There was an ironic postscript. When we finally reached the secluded stretch of branch line that was our stopping-place for the day, the Russian train commandant – tall, smooth-faced and easily spoken – addressed us in batches on the need for obeying the rules of silence in transit. He wagged his head in grave admonition and told us, ‘The trouble with you is that you have no culture.’ He was quite serious, as far as I could see. Whenever he had occasion to warn us about breaches of rules he always reminded us of this cultural failing.

  Behind our flowing beards and our long, matted hair, we were beginning to know one another. It was not a question of names. Names did not count. Nobody bothered with them. Men became identified by character and characteristics. There were the leaders, the organizers, the men who automatically assumed some kind of command to make the rules so that as many as possible might survive. There were men, like me, who were determined not to die. There were the others in whom the spark of hope had already been almost crushed when they were first herded into these travelling coffins. They died without a whisper in the long nights when their turn came to stand out of the warmth of the truck. They died standing and we did not know they were dead until the door opened in the light of morning. They had no graves, the ground was iron-hard and impossible to dig. They were taken away and snow was heaped on them. They were names crossed off an official list. At least eight were taken out, stark and stiff, from our truck.

  The men I most admired were the jokers. They saved us often in our blackest moments. There were maybe four or five of them in our lot. They would joke about anything. Their quips were frequently macabre, almost always earthy and pungent with the good strong language that men use. They were irrepressible. Nothing stopped them. I bless their memory for the gusty belly laughs they gave us as they aped the train commandant, the Russian guards, anything and everything Russian. When there was speculation about the possibility of our working in the Eastern Siberian gold-mines, one of the jokers announced his plans for escape.

  He was a powerful, short, thick-set fellow with a magnificent black beard. ‘Gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘I shall eat handfuls of gold dust with my black bread, run like hell for Kamchatka, cross to Japan. I shall s – t Russian gold and live happily ever after on the proceeds.’ We laughed at the absurdity of it, laughed loud and long, without restraint, as men near despair will laugh.

  There was a bitter, hard edge to their humour when they watched the Russians stripping the trousers and blouses off the pathetic corpses before they shovelled the snow on them. ‘After all,’ said one, ‘Father Stalin only loaned the poor bastard the clothes for the duration of his stay in the U.S.S.R. He won’t need any for the next journey; he goes out as he came in . . .’

  Men, bound together by common misfortune, were talking together more freely. The outcome was not always comradely. Nerves were often taut and it needed only the wrong topic to start a violent flare-up. Politics were dynamite. I heard two men start arguing the role of Polish Foreign Minister Beck in the events leading to the German invasion of Poland. The argument simmered with barely suppressed passion and then one exploded the word ‘traitor’ to describe Beck. In a moment they were screaming with rage that knew no bounds. As other voices called to them to ‘cut it out’, they impotently struggled to raise their hands, tried vainly to use knees and feet, and then attacked each other with teeth. Somehow, the mass heaved itself to separate them. One man had the lobe of his ear almost bitten off, the other had deep teeth marks in his cheek. Tears of frustration rolled down their cheeks. For some time afterwards they mouthed threats. Then they were quiet and forgot all about it.

  Once, in the dark, the train stopped and all was quiet. Most of us were in that dozing, half-awake state which comes with long hours of travelling. A voice started speaking, in a dreaming tone, slightly above ordinary conversational level. Men stirred, shifted, began, in spite of themselves, to listen.

  ‘My wife,’ said the voice, ‘was quite a small woman. A happy little lady, she was. We got on very well, we two. She was a wonderful cook. Her mother was, too, you know, and she taught her. Let me tell you about the cake she baked for my birthday, this wife of mine. She knew I was crazy about her cakes . . .’

  The voice went on. It was throaty, the words came slowly and very clearly. We were fascinated, listening in on another man’s waking dream. He described it all exactly and lovingly. We followed the mixing of that cake in the big white earthenware bowl, the breaking of the eggs, the care of the whisking, the precise quantity of flour and baking powder and all those extra touches of candied peel and raisins and God knows what, the art that went into the rich almond icing. ‘It was,’ said the man, ‘a most beautiful, beautiful, rare, wonderful cake, this cake my wife baked for me. The smell of it cooking was like something from heaven.’

  Suddenly another voice howled – yes, it was a howl that shocked us, like the douche of freezing water that awakens a dreamer from his sleep. ‘Stop it, stop it! For the love of Jesus Christ Almighty, stop it!’ Other voices joined it. ‘Do you want to make us insane? Shut up, you bloody fool.’ The man with the dream cake said no more. I longed for that damned wonderful cake for days afterwards. I just could not remember what cake tasted like.

  4

  Three Thousand Miles by Train

  THERE WAS time and to spare for a powerful amount of individual thinking as the endless-seeming ride entered its third week, with the train well into Western Siberia. We had been losing interest in the names of stations, each with their white-painted bust of Stalin prominently displayed. The stopping-places all looked alike, stretches of bleak, snow-covered country sometimes wooded and sometimes not. They varied only in the degree of cold they offered. The further east we went, the lower became the temperature. We debouched on more than one occasion into the teeth of a shrieking, snow-laden north-easter and were not sorry to huddle back into the communal half-warmth of the truck.

  We went on gleaning things about one another. I discovered that no one in this crowd had a lighter sentence than ten years hard labour. My own sentence of twenty-five years was fairly common and there were a few even longer. Quite half of the men had one crime in common: they had served in the Polish armed forces. They talked, as soldiers will the world over, of their experiences and the places they had served in, of their regiments and their friends. It set me thinking back and to taking stock of myself. I did not want particularly to bring my mind back to Poland, but there was nothing else to do. I think it was an escape backwards to the memory of freedom.

  It was the little Jew who started me recalling it all. He posed me an odd question – for a Jew, a most odd question. When the Germans came through in the West and the Russians in the East, this little man with his little shop in Beloyostok realized on his stock and bought diamonds. He had relatives in Zyrardow, the textile centre near Warsaw, and a shoemaker friend who made him a special pair of boots into which he built the diamonds. So, his preparations made, he set out to flee Poland. Where was he going? Why, to Germany. Because, he said, he did not trust the Russians. But, I argued, the Germans would have killed you; they hate Jews. ‘Maybe, maybe,’ he answered. ‘But at least I was right about distrusting the Russians. Just look at me now.’ Perhaps it was well for him that he never was given the chance to test the Germans. The Russians caught him trying to cross the border and that meant an almost automatic se
ntence of ten years. Trying to escape from your liberators can be regarded as very anti-social behaviour.

  By going home to Pinsk after the collapse of Polish Army resistance to the Germans, I had virtually chosen to let myself fall into the hands of the Russians. Would I have fared better as a prisoner-of-war of the Nazis? It was an unanswerable question now, but it got me thinking of the Germans and the futile fighting of cavalry against tanks, the chaos, the bravery of a foredoomed army in those crowded, desperate weeks of September 1939.

  I was originally called up in 1937 while I was studying for my certificate as an architect and surveyor at the Wawelberea and Rotwanda Technical School in Warsaw, and served for twelve months at the infantry training school at Brest Litovsk. After seven months they asked for volunteers for training as cavalry reconnaissance. I could ride well and leapt at the chance. At the end of the year I passed out in the highest cadet rank. I went back to college and passed my finals in 1938, returning the same year to the Army for the big six-weeks manoeuvres in the Wolyn area near the Russian Ukrainian border. I became a second lieutenant and went home, fit, bronzed and pleased with myself, to help my mother run the estate at Pinsk. Mother was the bright and practical element in our family. My father thought the function of the estate was to provide the means for him to pursue his hobby – landscape painting. The house was full of his canvases, none of which he ever allowed to be sold, although dealers had made approaches to him.

  I followed my calling as estate manager for only a few months. On 1 March 1939, I was called up under an order of ‘unofficial mobilization’. Just six months later, on 31 August, on the eve of my twenty-fourth birthday, as I sat reading letters from my wife and my mother and was preparing to open the parcels they had sent me, a messenger rode into our cavalry camp near Ozharov to announce that the Germans were on the move. It was war.