Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  On their first day free from work, Peter approached his brigade leader, Vladimir Antonovich, with a proposition. He had some money, he told the older man, which might be used to purchase several new tools or at least to buy materials with which to repair what they had. Once they had the proper equipment, he’d lead their brigade to the challenge of exceeding the norm, becoming, as the Soviets called it, a Stakhanovite. Alexei Grigorievich Stakhanov had famously mined 102 tons of coal—fourteen times the norm—in less than six hours in August of 1935. His prodigious productivity gave rise to the Stakhanovite Movement, a kind of competition common in settlements, factories, and corrective labor camps, which guaranteed high production yields. Aside from the glory of giving something back to the Soviet Union, the reward, Peter learned, was an increase in food, from almost nothing to twenty-six to forty-two ounces of bread, soup and groats, and either fish or a white roll at night.

  Vladimir Antonovich smiled. “You are enterprising, Piotr Ilyich,” he said, addressing Peter by his Russian name. “Much initiative. Come, let me show you something.”

  He took Peter to the supply shed and ordered the guard to open it. Inside were scattered all the tools available to the camp as well as a jumble of parts, handles, blades, nuts, and bolts.

  “You organize this mess and fix what you can,” Vladimir Antonovich said. They’d go to Yoshkar-Ola, the capital of Mariskaya, to buy new tools if needed, he promised. “Keep your money for now,” the brigade leader said.

  The shed’s interior looked as if it had been upended several times, but Peter didn’t let his surprise show. While he never once negotiated with an adult, let alone in a foreign language with a brigade leader in a Soviet labor camp, he had observed his father conducting business. He knew he must keep his face expressionless but attentive, and at the same time, use a firm and decisive tone when he spoke. He mustn’t seem weak, but he had to appear fair, generous, even.

  “Perhaps it would please citizen chief Vladimir Antonovich to give my mother and sister sewing work,” Peter suggested before the brigade leader walked away. He made sure not to slip and address the brigade leader as comrade, which prisoners were not allowed to use. “Both of them, citizen chief,” he explained, “are accomplished seamstresses.” They could make anything, including new linings for boots and coats, covers for the hay mattresses, pillow cases. They could mend torn clothing and socks and embroider. His mother even had some silk thread. Come winter, Peter said, if everyone in their brigade were warmer, maybe the quotas could be exceeded. His sister would also mind any small children and clean the camp commander’s quarters. This would keep her safe from those men in the camp who didn’t care about a girl’s virtue. And if the camp commander liked, his mother could even cook for him.

  Vladimir Antonovich responded with a deep laugh. Peter felt his face flush. But he maintained eye contact.

  “Very enterprising!” the older man said.

  SUZANNA WORRIED ABOUT KASIA, who had become quiet and withdrawn. Being alone frightened the girl, but there was no choice, she had to stay in the barrack during the day. The morning roll call took place at four in the morning. Before Suzanna left to eat and then work, she made a little nest around the child, using hay from the “mattress.” She wished she had a book or a pencil and paper to give Kasia. Instead, she instructed the girl to stay in the bed. She gave her the primitive doll she had fashioned from an old handkerchief and some of the straw bedding. Then Suzanna tucked into the girl’s coat pocket a portion of her bread from the night before and a precious sugar cube from the dwindling supply in her rucksack.

  “I will come back later,” she whispered into Kasia’s ear. “I promise.”

  The prisoners ate in the stolovaya, a crude dining hall whose walls were adorned with nothing, not even the ubiquitous portrait of Joseph Stalin one saw in most official places throughout the Soviet Union, though Suzanna would not see one for some time. And when she finally did see photographs of Stalin, she felt puzzled. How could someone who resembled a patient grandfather act with such disregard for the humanity of his people?

  The first “meal” of the day consisted of a thin soup and the unsatisfying ration of what was called “bread,” a waterlogged, sour, black mash hastily mixed and incompletely baked. Breakfast was not a leisurely affair, but the prisoners lingered on the benches—as much as they were able—so as to be seated instead of on their feet. In the winter, they remained as long as they could in an attempt to stay warm. Once fed, they were allowed to use the outhouse if they hadn’t already availed themselves of the parasha, that foul-smelling bucket kept in each barrack. And then they were lined up in formation outside the barracks for roll call, counted, often recounted, and marched to work. When they returned in the evening, they were counted again, sometimes twice. They were fed and given an hour to circulate. Then they were counted again and discharged into their barracks. Sometimes they were herded outside for a recount, even after they had settled into their bunks.

  Her mother said not to talk about much of anything with people they didn’t yet know. Because she wasn’t sure what to say, Suzanna kept to herself, but she could feel the eyes of other prisoners on her. She was tall, her posture impeccable from all those years of piano instruction, skiing, and her mother’s example. She looked older than she was and maybe rougher, too, what with the short haircut and layers of boy’s clothing she wore. And though modesty would have prevented Suzanna from calling herself pretty, in spite of the cropped hair and the fast-fading freshness, she was noticeably lovely.

  Suzanna was paired to work with a young Mari girl from Ufa who called herself Natalia. She was a little older than Suzanna and a bit younger than Peter. Arrested for some transgression of Article 58 of the Soviet penal code concerned with counterrevolutionary activities, the girl had been sentenced to five years of corrective labor. Shorter than Suzanna, Natalia was flatter and more muscular. She wore a brightly patterned shawl over her head. Underneath, instead of hair, a light brown layer of fuzz covered her scalp.

  “I came from the prison in Kazan,” Natalia had told Suzanna in an accented Russian. “They shaved my head there.”

  Suzanna wanted to tell the older girl that her hair had been cut in Lwów when her grandmother was still lucid enough to suggest such a thing. But then she recalled her mother’s admonition to be careful about what she revealed to others.

  “It suits you,” she said instead. The Mari girl smiled. She was already missing several teeth. But the warmth in her face was not only genuine, it was something Suzanna craved. She missed the welcome of kind faces. And she had known many at home in Teschen where a frequency of smiles and tender expressions were shown her.

  Natalia was lithe and strong and good at making and carrying the bundles of branches cut from the felled trees. Suzanna was skilled at quickly and securely tying them. They worked together mostly in silence. When they took their midday meal—another ration of bread and a watery gruel made from buckwheat—they sat on a stump that had not yet been dug up.

  “That girl with you—she your sister?” Natalia asked.

  “Kasia?” Suzanna shook her head, carefully chewing the last bite of bread.

  The Mari girl spoke again. “Daughter?!”

  Suzanna smiled. “Niet, niet,” she said, “No.” She almost giggled, but she didn’t want to attract the attention of the women’s brigade leader who, although fair, was tough and iron-willed.

  Before Suzanna could explain how Kasia had come to be her ward, they were back at work, gathering, tying, and carrying the sharp branches, gathering and tying and carrying, over and over again until even the small smiles they had offered one another were too much of an effort. At the end of the day, tallies of the prisoners’ work were made. Suzanna’s brigade had fallen short again, but were still within the range for the minimum kettle before the punishment ration. Only one brigade had come close to making the quota, and it was Peter’s.

  The inmates trudged back to camp. The sun cast dramatic shadows in th
e woods, and Suzanna understood why one might think, as the Mari girl had told her a few days before, that a grove of trees was sacred. After roll call, one final relief stop was permitted at the outhouse before they ate, and following the evening soup another roll call and the shuffle to their barracks and bed. Most of the men often passed up a visit to the outhouse and went straightaway to the food queue. The closer you were to the beginning of the line, the sooner you got to the soup cauldron, and the greater the chance of having some of the fat that floated to the top.

  Natalia was strong from a life of hard outdoor work. She came from a world of natural rhythms—the birth of spring animals, sowing and harvest, hunting and gathering. She was familiar with the living things of the woods: medicinal and edible plants and mushrooms; the ways of the forest’s wild creatures; how to make shelter in a storm; where to find honey and how to harvest it. Her high cheekbones, pronounced because she was so thin, were part of her eroded but once uncommon beauty. With the exception of the shawl she wore on her head, Natalia wore prison rags. In the Soviet jails, one was forced to exchange one’s own clothing for lice-infested, torn, stained garments. Suzanna would never ask how Natalia had managed to keep that shawl; she was unable to picture herself refusing to comply with the orders of the NKVD guards. Mama might disobey. Her father and Peter too. But she couldn’t imagine herself saying no to any authority, least of all someone with a rifle and a temper. Before the war, she had never seen the very personal violence she witnessed these last twelve months—of the Hitler Youth, the Nazis, the NKVD, and the Red Army soldiers. But what stunned her most was the degree to which the Soviets had become habituated to such maltreatment. Arrest was to be expected. Every kind of person was arrested or deported: Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Germans, Poles, Jews, indigenous tribal peoples, poets, economists, doctors, lawyers, farmers, peasants, hardened criminals. Even the heroic proletariat or lifelong Communist found his or her way to the camps. No one was spared denunciation or probable arrest, torture, deportation. The work camps were considered educational; one emerged after serving one’s sentence as a “re-educated” Soviet citizen, ready to participate in the collective. Suzanna also had heard stories from Natalia and other female prisoners, of terrible assaults and torture, things she tried to forget but could not. She was terrified of being on the receiving end of such brutality and prayed to have the courage to persevere should it come her way.

  Natalia, a girl not much older than Suzanna, had such courage, which is why she also still had her shawl. She knew its value as an essential item, and fighting to keep it was what Papa called a battle worth choosing. The shawl was thick and very large, the size of a small blanket, which was one of its many purposes. Wrapped around the face, it protected from mosquitoes and gnats; around the neck, it prevented sore throat; on the head, it retained warmth. Natalia could use it as a sling for an injured arm, or to carry things. Mostly, perhaps, the colorful Mari fabric—shocking as its reds and pinks and whites were against the gray of the rags and the pallid skin—was a reminder that Natalia came from somewhere and something else.

  “Your shawl is very beautiful,” Suzanna said softly. Beauty gives us hope, she thought.

  Natalia smiled in that bittersweet way of fondly remembering a perished relation. “It was my mama’s.”

  THE TWO GIRLS—one from the West, the other from the East—sat on the hard wooden bench at a table in the stolovaya and ate their soup. Suzanna contemplated all the things that had to occur for her to meet a girl like Natalia in a place such as this. If there hadn’t been a war, and her family hadn’t fled east and were then deported, would they ever have encountered one another? Or if she hadn’t been a Jew born in Poland, whose parents spoke German? How would things have changed if Natalia hadn’t come from a family speaking Eastern Mari? Or if the Russian Revolution never occurred, and the Soviets hadn’t thought to “re-educate” the people of these Mari lands and beyond? Suzanna thought of Joseph Stalin, the man whose name the Russians all feared to say lest they be reported for having said something only an enemy of the state might say. What if he had become a poet or a blacksmith or a horticulturist instead? The intersection of history and one’s own life, she realized, happened in small, almost imperceptible ways.

  Her reverie was interrupted by roll call. She and the others moved from their seats and made their way toward the door and then outside, where they stood and were counted before being dispatched to the barracks. Everything is counted, Suzanna thought: the amount of bread and soup they ate, the hours they worked and slept and recreated, the work they did, the relief opportunities they had, the baths they took, the weight of parcels they could receive, the number of letters they could send, the degree of fever or outdoor temperature that excused them from work, the years they were sentenced.

  Suzanna stood and waited. They could count all they wanted. Only one thing mattered: the belief they would one day leave this awful place, in spite of everyone’s advice to get used to it. Waiting to hear her name called, Suzanna promised herself she would count other things once she was no longer a zek, a prisoner in the Soviet Union. She would count the petals on a daisy, the stars in the night sky, the notes in a Chopin nocturne, the steps from a bed to a kitchen. She would count her babies, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. Suzanna would never have to count her blessings because they would be, she decided as the guard called her number and she made her way to the barrack, abundant to the point of being uncountable.

  Winter Wind and Wolves

  FEBRUARY 1941, MARISKAYA LABOR CAMP

  KASIA GROANED AND TOSSED. Her whimpering woke Suzanna. Frost glazed the little window next to their bunk. Outside, a full moon in a completely cloudless sky bounced its light over the snow-covered zona and into the barracks. Shadows from the trees beyond shook violently with the wind, which whistled through every crack in the walls and shook the windows and doors. Little snow squalls welled up from the ground, like tops made of spun sugar. From where the moon was positioned in the sky, Suzanna estimated it was three, maybe three-thirty in the morning. She felt Kasia’s forehead—it was hot.

  “Mama,” Suzanna whispered.

  Josefina breathed in deeply and cleared her throat.

  “Mama, she’s burning with fever.”

  Josefina propped herself up. She reached over and felt Kasia’s brow. She told Suzanna that the girl’s temperature was maybe as high as 104. But no one was awake at this hour save the guards in the watchtower. And no one would be foolish to provoke them by attempting to cross the zona and go to the infirmary in the middle of the night.

  Suzanna took Kasia into her arms and used her sleeve to blot the moisture from her brow. Now the girl was shivering and softly moaning. Her lips were so dry, Suzanna thought she could hear them cracking.

  “Aspirin,” her mother said. “Do you have any left in your rucksack?”

  She didn’t. Mama sat up and began to root around, as quietly as possible, in her belongings. She found none. There was not much else to do but comfort the child and wait.

  Kasia whispered something neither Suzanna nor her mother could make out. Mama thought the girl was speaking gibberish. But to Suzanna it sounded as if Kasia were saying winter wind and wolves. She was delirious with fever. Suzanna rocked her, pressing from time to time a sleeve gently to the child’s forehead. Kasia shivered intensely, whispering in a strange, hoarse voice.

  Reveille, usually a hammer banging on a length of rail hung at the guards’ quarters, would sound in about an hour, and then, maybe, they could take the girl to the infirmary. Until then, Suzanna tried her best to keep the child warm. Once someone fell ill, recovery was unlikely. Already several women in their brigade and barracks had caught pneumonia, went to the infirmary, and never returned. The only person Suzanna knew who had survived illness was the Mari girl, Natalia. She used things she gathered in the forest to make medicines. Perhaps she could help. But asking her would also have to wait until everyone was awake.

  One of the many unw
ritten rules in the barracks concerned sleep. So many things kept you from fully resting: the vermin; nightmares that left you shaking or crying or soaked in sweat and shivering; the hollow and never satisfied belly; and a persistent, everywhere-in-the-body ache caused by hunger, cold, fear, and exhaustion. Not to mention the workdays that sometimes didn’t end because the camp’s labor force needed to fulfill impossible quotas. Suzanna and Josefina were lucky. Because Peter had consistently exceeded the norms, he had been able to negotiate on their behalf—they had been rewarded in January with the so-called “soft” jobs coveted by all prisoners, which included secretarial and kitchen duties, or other work not requiring hard labor.

  Josefina’s sewing skills rapidly led to her promotion as one of the camp’s chief seamstresses; she repaired the worn clothing of the zeks, darned their socks, and embroidered prisoner numbers on jackets and coats. The sewing kits Helenka had assembled on the eve of the Kohns’ exile—strong stainless-steel needles and an assortment of thread—became one of the most valuable assets they had. Suzanna worked in the camp’s laundry. She assisted her mother with some of the sewing. For Olga Ivanovna, the woman in charge of their brigade, Suzanna ran various errands. These included standing on line when mail arrived, to collect letters or packages destined to members of her brigade; repairing the lining of jackets, taking and fetching clothes to and from the drying shed. Whatever her brigade leader asked her to do, she did. Without a single complaint or grimace.