Anne Kane became Mrs. Henry Osborne in October of that year at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral just as the golden and red leaves were beginning to fall, a little over nine months after they had met. William feigned illness in order not to attend the wedding and remained firmly at school. The grandmothers did attend but were unable to hide their disapproval of Anne’s remarriage, particularly to someone who appeared to be so much younger than she. “It can only end in disaster,” said Grandmother Kane.
The newlyweds sailed for Greece the following day and did not return to the Red House on the Hill until the second week of December, just in time to welcome William home for the Christmas holidays. William was shocked to find that the house had been redecorated, leaving almost no trace of his father. Over Christmas, William’s attitude to his stepfather showed no sign of softening despite the present, as Henry saw it—bribe, as William construed it—of a new bicycle. Henry Osborne accepted this rebuff with surly resignation. It saddened Anne that her splendid new husband made little effort to win over her son’s affection.
William felt ill at ease in his invaded home and would often disappear for long periods during the day. Whenever Anne inquired where he was going, she received little or no response: it certainly was not to either grandmother, both of whom also were missing him. When the Christmas holidays came to an end, William was only too happy to return to school, and Henry was not sad to see him go.
Anne, however, was uneasy about both the men in her life.
CHAPTER NINE
“Up, boy! Up, boy!”
One of the soldiers was digging his rifle butt into Wladek’s ribs. He sat up with a start and looked at the grave of his sister and those of Leon and of the Baron, and he did not shed a single tear as he turned toward the soldier.
“I will live, you will not kill me,” he said in Polish. “This is my home and you are on my land.”
The soldier spat on Wladek and pushed him back to the lawn where the servants were waiting, all dressed in what looked like gray pajamas with numbers on their backs. Wladek was shocked at the sight of them, realizing what was about to happen to him. He was taken by the soldier to the north side of the castle and made to kneel on the ground. He felt a knife scrape across his head as his thick black hair fell onto the grass. With ten bloody strokes, like the shearing of a sheep, the job was completed. Head shaven, he was ordered to put on his new uniform, a gray rubaskew shirt and trousers. Wladek managed to keep the silver band well hidden and rejoined his servants at the front of the castle.
While they all stood waiting on the grass—numbers, now, not names—Wladek became conscious of a noise in the distance which he had never heard before. His eyes turned toward the menacing sound. Through the great iron gates came a vehicle moving on four wheels but not drawn by horses or oxen. All the prisoners stared at the moving object in disbelief. When it had come to a halt, the soldiers dragged the reluctant prisoners toward it and made them climb aboard. Then the horseless wagon turned around, moved back down the path and through the iron gates. Nobody dared to speak. Wladek sat at the rear of the truck and stared at his castle until he could no longer see the Gothic turrets.
The horseless wagon somehow drove itself toward the village of Slonim. Wladek would have worried about how the vehicle worked if he had not been even more worried about where it was taking them. He began to recognize the roads from his days at school, but his memory had been dulled by three years in the dungeons, and he could not recall where the road finally led. After only a few miles the truck came to a stop and they were all pushed out. It was the local railway station. Wladek had seen it only once before in his life, when he and Leon had gone there to welcome the Baron home from his trip to Warsaw. He remembered that the guard had saluted them when they first walked onto the platform. This time there was no one saluting and the prisoners were fed on goat’s milk, cabbage soup and black bread, Wladek again taking charge, dividing the portions carefully among the remaining thirteen others and himself. He sat on a wooden bench, assuming that they were waiting for a train. That night they slept on the ground below the stars, paradise compared with the dungeons. He thanked God that the winter was mild.
Morning came and still they waited. Wladek led the servants in some exercises, but most collapsed after only a few minutes. He began to make a mental note of the names of those who had survived thus far. Twelve of the men and two of the women, spared from the original twenty-seven in the dungeons. They spent the rest of the day waiting for a train that never came. Once a train did arrive, from which more soldiers disembarked, speaking their hateful tongue, but it departed without Wladek’s pitiful army. They slept yet another night on the ground.
Wladek lay awake below the stars considering how he might escape, but during the night one of his thirteen made a run for it across the railway track and was shot down by a guard even before he had reached the other side. Wladek gazed at the spot where his compatriot had fallen, frightened to go to his aid for fear he would meet the same fate. The guards left the body on the track in the morning as a warning to those who might consider a similar course of action.
No one spoke of the incident that day although Wladek’s eyes rarely left the body of the dead man. It was the Baron’s butler, Ludwik—one of the witnesses to the Baron’s will—and Wladek’s heritage—dead.
On the evening of the third day another train chugged into the station, a great steam locomotive hauling open freight cars and roofed passenger cars, the floors of the former strewn with straw and the word Cattle painted on the sides. Several open cars were already full of prisoners, but from where Wladek could not judge, so hideously did their appearance resemble his own. He and his small group were thrown together into one of the open cars to begin the journey. After a wait of several more hours the train started to move out of the station, in a direction that Wladek judged, from the setting sun, to be eastward.
Every three open cars there was a guard sitting cross-legged on a roofed car. Throughout the interminable journey an occasional flurry of bullet shots from above demonstrated to Wladek the futility of any further thoughts of escape.
When the train stopped at Minsk, they were given their first proper meal—black bread, water, nuts and millet—and then the journey continued. Sometimes they went for three days without seeing another station. Many of the reluctant travelers died of starvation and were thrown overboard from the moving train. And when the train did stop, they would often wait for two days to allow another train going west the use of the track. These trains that delayed their progress were inevitably full of soldiers and it became obvious to Wladek that the troop trains had priority over all other transport. Escape was always uppermost in Wladek’s mind, but two things prevented him from advancing that ambition. First, there was nothing but miles of wilderness on both sides of the track; and second, those who had survived the dungeons were now totally dependent on him. It was Wladek who organized their food and drink and tried to sustain their will to live. He was the youngest and the last one still to believe in life.
At night it was now bitterly cold, often 30 degrees below zero, and they would lie up against one another in a line on the car floor so that each body would keep the next body warm. Wladek would recite The Aeneid to himself while he tried to snatch some sleep. It was impossible to turn over unless everyone agreed, so Wladek would lie at the end and each hour, as closely as he could judge by the changing of the guards, he would slap the side of the car, and they would all roll over and face the other way. One after the other, the bodies would turn like falling dominoes. One night a body, one of the women in his group, did not move—because it no longer could—and Wladek was informed. He, in turn, informed the guard, and four of them picked up the body and threw it over the side of the moving train. The guards then pumped bullets into it to be sure it was not someone hoping to escape.
Two hundred miles beyond Minsk, they arrived in the town of Smolensk, where they received more warm cabbage soup and black bread. Wladek was
joined in his car by some new prisoners who spoke the same tongue as the guards. Their leader seemed to be about the same age as Wladek. Wladek and his eleven remaining companions, ten men and one woman, were immediately suspicious of the new arrivals, and they divided the car in half, with the two groups remaining apart for several days.
One night, while Wladek lay awake staring at the stars, trying to get warm, he saw the leader of the Smolenskis crawl toward the end man of his own line with a small piece of rope in his hand. He watched him slip it around the neck of Alfons, the Baron’s first footman, who was sleeping. Wladek knew that if he moved too quickly, the boy would hear him and escape back to his own half of the carriage and the protection of his comrades, so he crawled slowly on his belly down the line of Polish bodies. Eyes stared at him as he passed, but nobody spoke. When he reached the end of the line, he leaped forward upon the aggressor, immediately waking everyone in the car. Each faction shrank back to its own end of the car, with the exception of Alfons, who lay motionless in front of them.
The Smolenski leader was taller and more agile than Wladek, but it made little difference while the two were fighting on the floor. The struggle lasted for several minutes, which attracted the guards who laughed and took bets as they watched the two gladiators. One guard, who was getting bored by the lack of blood, threw a bayonet into the middle of the car. Both boys scrambled for the shining blade, with the Smolenski leader grabbing it first. The Smolenski band cheered their hero as he thrust the bayonet into the side of Wladek’s leg, pulled the blood-covered steel back out and lunged again. On the second thrust the blade lodged firmly in the wooden floor of the jolting car next to Wladek’s ear. As the Smolenski leader tried to wrench it free, Wladek kicked him in the crotch with every ounce of energy he had left, and in throwing his adversary backward, released the bayonet. With a leap, Wladek grabbed the handle and jumped on top of the Smolenski, running the blade right into his mouth. The boy gave out a shriek of agony that awoke the entire train. Wladek pulled the blade out, twisting it as he did so, and thrust it back into the Smolenski again and again, long after he had ceased to move. Wladek knelt over him, breathing heavily, and then picked up the body and threw it out of the carriage. He heard the thud as it hit the bank, and the shots that the guards pointlessly aimed after it.
Wladek limped toward Alfons, still lying motionless on the wooden boards, and knelt by his side, shaking his lifeless body: his second witness dead. Who would now believe that he, Wladek, was the chosen heir to the Baron’s fortune? Was there any purpose left in life? He collapsed to his knees. He picked up the bayonet with both hands, pointing the blade toward his stomach. Immediately a guard jumped down into the car and wrestled the weapon away from him.
“Oh no, you don’t,” he grunted. “We need the lively ones like you for the camps. You can’t expect us to do all the work.”
Wladek buried his head in his hands, aware for the first time of a cold aching pain in his bayoneted leg. He had lost his inheritance, to become the leader of a band of penniless Smolenskis. The whole car once again was his domain and he now had twenty prisoners to care for. He immediately split them up so that a Pole would always sleep next to a Smolenski, making impossible any further warfare between the two groups.
Wladek spent a considerable part of his time learning their strange tongue, not realizing for several days that it was actually Russian, so greatly did it differ from the classical Russian language taught him by the Baron, and then the real significance of this discovery dawned on him for the first time when he realized where the train was heading.
During the day Wladek used to take on two Smolenskis at a time to tutor him, and as soon as they were tired, he would take on two more, and so on until they were all exhausted.
Gradually he became able to converse easily with his new dependents. Some of them he discovered were Russian soldiers, exiled after repatriation for the crime of having been captured by the Germans. The rest consisted of White Russians—farmers, miners, laborers—all bitterly hostile to the Revolution.
The train jolted on past terrain more barren than Wladek had ever seen before, and through towns of which he had never heard—Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk—the names rang ominously in his ears. Finally, after two months and more than three thousand miles, they reached Irkutsk, where the railway track came to an abrupt end.
They were hustled off the train, fed and issued felt boots, jackets and heavy coats, and although fights broke out for the warmest clothing, they still provided little protection from the ever intensifying cold.
Horseless wagons appeared not unlike the one that had borne Wladek away from his castle, and long chains were thrown out. Then, to Wladek’s disbelief and horror, the prisoners were cuffed to the chain by one hand, twenty-five pairs side by side on each chain. The wagons pulled the mass of prisoners along while the guards rode on the back. They marched like that for twelve hours, before being given a two-hour rest, and then they marched again. After three days, Wladek thought he would die of cold and exhaustion, but once clear of populated areas they traveled only during the day and rested at night. A mobile field kitchen run by prisoners from the camp supplied turnip soup and bread at first light and then again at night. Wladek learned from these prisoners that conditions at the camp were even worse.
For the first week, they were never unshackled from their chains, but later, when there could be no thought of escape, they were released at night to sleep, digging holes in the snow for warmth. Sometimes on good days they found a forest in which to bed down: luxury began to take strange forms. On and on they marched, past enormous lakes and across frozen rivers, ever northward, into the face of viciously cold winds and deeper falls of snow. Wladek’s wounded leg gave him a constant dull pain, soon surpassed in intensity by the agony of frostbitten fingers and ears. There was no sign of life or food in all the expanse of whiteness, and Wladek knew that to attempt an escape at night could only mean slow death by starvation. The old and the sick were dying, quietly at night if they were lucky. The unlucky ones, unable to keep up the pace, were uncuffed from the chains and cast off to be left alone in the endless snow. Those who survived in the chains walked on and on, always toward the north, until Wladek lost all sense of time and was simply conscious of the inexorable tug of the chain, not even sure when he dug his hole in the snow to sleep in at night that he would waken the next morning. Those who didn’t had dug their own grave.
After a trek of nine hundred miles, those who had survived were met by Ostyaks, nomads of the Russian steppes, in reindeer-drawn sleds. The prisoners, now chained to the sleds, were led on. A great blizzard forced them to halt for the greater part of two days and Wladek seized the opportunity to communicate with the young Ostyak to whose sled he was chained. Using classical Russian, with a Polish accent, he was understood only very imperfectly, but he did discover that the Ostyaks hated the Russians of the south, who treated them almost as badly as they treated their captives. The Ostyaks were not unsympathetic to the sad prisoners with no future, the “unfortunates,” as they called them.
Nine days later, in the half-light of the early Arctic winter night, they reached Camp 201. Wladek would never have believed he could be glad to see such a place: row upon row of wooden huts in stark open space. The huts, like the prisoners, were numbered. Wladek’s hut was 33. There was a small black stove in the middle of the room, and projecting from the walls were tiered wooden bunks on which were hard straw mattresses and one thin blanket. Few of the prisoners managed to sleep at all that first night, and the groans and cries that came from Hut 33 were often louder than the howls of the wolves outside.
The next morning before the sun rose, they were awakened by the sound of a hammer against an iron triangle. There was thick frost on both sides of the window, and Wladek thought that he must surely die of the cold. Breakfast in a freezing communal hall lasted for ten minutes and consisted of a bowl of lukewarm gruel with pieces of rotten fish and a leaf of cabbage floating in it. The ne
wcomers spat the fish bones out onto the table, while the more seasoned prisoners ate the bones and even the fishes’ eyes.
After breakfast, they were allocated tasks. Wladek became a wood chopper. He was taken seven miles through the featureless steppes into a forest and ordered to cut a certain number of trees each day. The guard would leave him and his little group of six to themselves with their food ration, tasteless yellow magara porridge and bread. The guards had no fear that the prisoners would attempt escape, for it was more than a thousand miles to the nearest town—even if one knew in which direction to head.
At the end of each day the guard would return and count the number of logs they had chopped; he had informed the prisoners that if their group failed to reach the required number, he would hold back its food for the following day. But when he returned at seven in the evening to collect the reluctant woodsmen, it was already dark, and he could not always see exactly how many new logs they had cut. Wladek taught the others in his team to spend the last part of the afternoon clearing the snow off the wood cut the previous day and lining it up with what they had chopped that day. It was a plan that always worked and Wladek’s group never lost a day’s food. Sometimes they managed to return to the camp with a small piece of wood, tied to the inside of a leg, to put in the coal stove at night. Caution was required, as at least one of them was searched every time they left and entered the camp, often having to remove one or both boots and to stand there in the numbing snow. If they were caught with anything on their person, the punishment was three days without food.
As the weeks went by, Wladek’s leg became very stiff and painful. He longed for the coldest days, for when the temperature went down to 40 below zero, outside work was called off even though the lost day would have to be made up on a free Sunday, when they were normally allowed to lie on their bunks all day.
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