The Long Walk

by Slavomir Rawicz

  The day before, when I had been expansive and friendly, I had talked about the happy days when I went duck-shooting with my father in the Pripet Marshes. Today, Mischa used this as a theme for a blistering, blustering attack on my character as a spy and saboteur. Beyond the Pripet was Russia and Mischa did not intend that either I or the court should forget it. Yesterday I had quietly boasted of my prowess with a sporting gun. Today I was not only the most despicable of spies but also a well-trained potential assassin, a crack-shot hireling of Polish Army Intelligence. And so it went on.

  It was a crazy trial, run by madmen. It became in the end a test of endurance between one weak, half-starved, ill-used Pole and the powerful, time-squandering State machine. I had been given no food before I came in and I received nothing throughout the long day’s trial that ended, astonishingly, at midnight. Seventeen hours I stood there. There were no cigarettes, no coffee. Mischa would occasionally step out and punch or slap me, especially when I looked like keeling over or nodding to sleep on my feet.

  Everyone else in the court, Mischa included, took a break at intervals during the day. Other people took over the examination. The composition of the court was constantly changing. During the afternoon the President came in for a few hours to allow his deputy a rest. The guards were regularly changed every two hours. Only I went on standing there, dry-throated, swaying, wondering dully if this day would ever end.

  When I stumbled back into my cell there was still no food for me. At 7 a.m. the next day when I was led back again I was still without food and again, hungry, aching and deathly tired, I survived another marathon madmen’s session of Soviet justice. Why do they do it, I kept asking myself. Why do they waste all this time on one Pole? Why don’t they just sentence me and have done with it? For myself, I could have admitted all the things they charged me with and ended it all. But I still did not want to die. For me it was a struggle for life.

  They did not break me down. They even re-introduced the Kharkov trick of taking me off my staggering feet and sitting me on the edge of a chair for a few hours. It got painful, but it was at least a change from trying to stop my knees buckling under me.

  The fourth day was the last. There seemed to be many more people there than at any previous stage. I imagine all those officials who from time to time had acted as stand-ins for the principals wanted to be present for the last act. The atmosphere was much the same as it had been on the first day. The President was back in his accustomed position, riffling through his sheaf of papers. Everybody talked and Mischa was in laughing conversation with an N.K.V.D. captain.

  The old preliminaries were gone through. Again I identified myself. I was tired, sick and still unfed. There were some more questions, which I answered automatically. They were straightforward and unbaited.

  The President then asked me if I would give the court a specimen of my signature. When I hesitated, he made it clear that I was not being asked to sign any document. Someone came forward with a small piece of paper, a slip only big enough to take my name. I turned it over in my hand. Someone said, ‘We only want to see how you sign your name.’ I took the pencil held out to me and wrote my name. The President glanced at the slip, passed it along to the two N.K.V.D. men. All three remained in a huddle for a couple of minutes. The President looked at me, held up the slip in his right hand, screwed it up and threw it away.

  The President held up a document. A court official took it from him and brought it over to me. ‘Is that your signature?’ asked the President. I looked closely for a full minute while the court waited. It was my signature. Wavery and thin. But unmistakably my signature. Kharkov, I thought. That night at Kharkov.

  ‘Is that your signature?’ repeated the President.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I do not remember signing and it does not mean I admit anything contained in this document.’

  ‘That document,’ he continued, ‘is a full list of the charges against you.’

  ‘I know it well,’ I replied. ‘But no one would ever let me read it. I never knowingly signed it.’

  ‘It is your signature, nevertheless?’

  ‘It is my signature, but I cannot remember writing it.’

  There were whispered consultations up and down the table. The President stood, the court stood. He read the charges at length. He announced that the court had found me guilty of espionage and plotting against the people of the U.S.S.R. It took quite a long time to get through all this and all I was waiting for was the sentence. It came at last.

  ‘You will therefore be sentenced to twenty-five years forced labour.’

  ‘And that,’ said the blue-uniformed major on the President’s right, ‘should be ample time to restore your shocking memory.’

  I stood there for a moment looking down the table. I caught the eye of Mischa, the elegant, well-groomed Mischa. He was standing back slightly from the table. He smiled. There was no malice in that smile. It was friendly, the smile of a man who is stepping forward to shake your hand. It was almost as though he were encouraging me, complimenting me on the show I had put up. He was still smiling when one of the guards tugged at my blouse to turn me round. I passed through the curtain and was taken back to my cell.

  Food was brought to me, a big meal by prison standards, and drink. The guards talked again. I felt a great weight had been lifted from me. I slept.

  3. From Prison to Cattle Truck

  THERE WAS evidence the next day that the prison authorities had taken immediate note of my change in status from having been a prisoner under interrogation and trial to that of prisoner under sentence. I was restored to full rations — coffee and 100 grammes of the usual black rye bread at 7 a.m. and, in the evening, another 100 grammes of bread and a bowl of soup. The soup was merely the water in which turnips had been boiled, without salt or any seasoning, but it was a welcome change of diet.

  I was awarded, too, my first hot bath since my arrest. The wash-house to which I was escorted by my two guards was about twenty yards from my cell and differed from the others I had used only in having two taps in the wall instead of one. Off came my rubashka, I stepped out of my trousers and canvas shoes and stood in the shallow sink let into the stone floor. I turned on the right-hand tap and the hot water gushed out. There was no towel, no soap, but this was luxury. I jumped about, bent down against the tap and let the water run over me from head to foot, rubbed myself until my pale skin began to glow pink.

  The two guards, one armed with a Nagan-type pistol in an unbuttoned holster, the other with a carbine, lounged one each side of the door watching my antics. Said one, ‘You will be all right now. You are going away from here.’ ‘When?’ I asked quickly. ‘Where to?’ Both guards ignored the questions. I carried on with my bath, making it last as long as I could. Then I turned off the tap and danced about to get dry. I dabbed at myself with my blouse and finally ran some water over my clothes and kneaded the prison dirt out of them until it flowed away in a dark stream down the hole in the sink. I rinsed them, wrung them, shook them and put them back on my body, the steam still rising from them. ‘You look a nice clean boy now,’ said the man with the carbine. ‘Let’s go.’

  Back in my cell I was given a cigarette. One of the guards rolled the cigarette, lit it and then put it down on the floor. As he walked back I moved forward and picked it up. This was always the procedure when I was given a smoke. No guard would directly hand the cigarette to me, and if it went out before I took my first puff a single match would be thrown to me. The used match would be picked up and removed from the cell. Most of the many rigid security measures had obvious significance, but I could never quite appreciate the need for this elaborate care over a cigarette in the presence of two fully-armed men in the heart of a prison like the Lubyanka.

  In spite of the fact that a prisoner was hopelessly equipped to attempt escape, the security drill was unvarying. A prisoner leaving or returning to his cell was always escorted by two guards. When a man was being taken out the guards took up position one
at each side of the door. The prisoner would advance between them and halt a pace ahead of them. The instruction would then be given, to quote a typical example: ‘You will walk down this corridor on the left, turn right at the end and keep going until you are told to stop. Keep to the middle of the corridor all the way.’ These instructions were usually ended by the recital of an ominous little jingle which went:

  ‘Step to the Right,

  Step to the Left —

  Attempt to Escape.’

  I must have heard that warning hundreds of times during my captivity. All guards used it, all prisoners knew it. The Russians took great pains to explain to a prisoner exactly where he was to go and the prisoner was left in no doubt that a deviation off course to right or left would mean death from the carbine or pistol of the guards marching two paces behind him. In the Lubyanka it seemed to be an excessive and almost ridiculous precaution, but later, when thousands of captives were being moved from one end of Russia to the other and escape became at least a possibility, the warning sounded sensible enough from the Russian point of view.

  On the morning of the fourth day after my sentence an N.K.V.D. lieutenant entered my cell. ‘Can you read Russian?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I answered. He handed me a document which I found was a movement permit. Even convicted men apparently needed a permit to change their place of residence, although it might be a move only from prison to prison. The officer handed me a pen and I signed my name on the paper. He pocketed the permit and left.

  Towards dusk on this mid-November afternoon in 1940 I quit my Lubyanka cell for the last time. I was marched out into the prison yard. Snow was drifting down and the cold had an edge which made me draw in my breath. Around the yard were a number of small buildings. At one end were the massive main gates, near which were two red brick storehouses. I was led to one of these and handed a brown paper parcel. The man who gave it me said, ‘This is for your journey,’ and smiled.

  As I stood in the yard, one hand holding on to my trousers, the other gripping my parcel, I felt myself shivering with cold and with excitement. There was a great sense of freedom. I told myself, ‘Slav, my friend, this is goodbye to prisons. Wherever they take you, it won’t be to another stinking prison.’ I felt faintly elated. Whatever was ahead of me, here I was already breathing in good, clean, cold air and knowing I was going somewhere — not from cell to cell, from prison to prison, from one interrogator to another, but to a new life, a chance to work, to use my hands again, to meet and talk with other men…

  Those other men, my fellow prisoners, were even now being escorted in small batches into the yard. I could feel my heart thumping as I watched each one of them arrive. I stared and stared. They eyed me and one another in the same way. We were all looking for someone we knew. But the odd thing borne in on me was that recognition was impossible. We were all in complete and uniform disguise. We were all longhaired and heavily bearded — I had not had a haircut or shave for nearly a year, but it had never occurred to me that all the others would have been treated alike. Our clothes were the same. When we had all been herded into the yard there were about 150 men like me all holding on to their trousers. One hundred and fifty lost souls turning up in the same pitiful costume at some devil’s fancy dress ball, each with a neat brown paper parcel in one hand and a pair of trousers in the other. The corners of my mouth twitched and I could almost have laughed, but suddenly I felt a choking wave of pity for us all that they should make such fools of us.

  This was my first encounter with any other prisoner. In Kharkov and the Lubyanka I had heard noises. I had heard men being shot. I had heard the awful howling of a man who is going mad. I had listened to scrapings and tappings as though someone was trying to communicate with me through a cell wall. But I was never allowed to meet any of the other unfortunates. Isolation was part of the treatment and I got it in full measure.

  The business of assembling us, checking names against documents and counting heads took about two hours. During this period we were all made to squat in the snow — another security rule. Two groups of about a dozen armed soldiers kept watch on us. There was little daylight left when we were ordered to our feet and loaded standing into five canvas-topped Army lorries. One lorry-load of soldiers headed the convoy and another followed in the rear. Tossed about and flung from side to side, we were driven at breakneck speed for what seemed to be about ten miles before the brakes were slammed on and we pitched forward in mass. The convoy had stopped.

  In that short, jolting ride, I could feel a tense, bubbling excitement all round me. It was an odd and powerful experience to be with other men again, to feel the thump of another shoulder, the sharp prod of an elbow in the ribs, to be reminded again of the smell of men in a packed crowd, to hear exclamations in rich, colloquial Polish. But that great surge of talk one might have expected did not come. We were to find it took some little time to recover the habit of conversation. It came back slowly by way of shouted little questions and short, jerky answers.

  The place where the lorry convoy stopped was a small station on a branch line which I estimated to be about five miles outside Moscow. Someone later professed to know the place, gave it a name and said it was a suburb of scattered villas much favoured by the well-to-do Soviet official. As I jumped down from the lorry I saw in the distance the lights of houses, well spaced out, which might support the theory, but there were no civilians around and the prisoners and soldiers had the place to themselves. Drawn up on the railway was a train of cattle trucks of the type which normally accommodated eight horses or cows in stalls, four each side, tails against the front and rear ends and heads pointing inwards to a small central gangway between the two truck doors. There was an engine with steam up at each end of the train.

  The loading was carried out quickly. As the name of each man was called he stepped up to the door of the truck and two soldiers hoisted him in. Inside, two more soldiers packed the men around the truck walls, gradually filling the available space towards the centre until they were themselves inched back towards the door. When they had finished there were sixty men jammed immovably in my truck. All the cattle fittings had been removed except the steel rings to which their safety harness had been made fast, and the four barred ventilation openings had been covered from the outside by metal plates solidly bolted into position.

  Two soldiers with some special armbands on their uniform looked in at the door and called out, ‘We are first-aid men. If any of you feel ill during the journey, just call for us and we’ll put you right.’ The door was slammed shut and barred from the outside just when it seemed that those near the entrance were in danger of being forced out by the press like corks from a bottle. In the stuffy darkness someone raised a laugh about the first-aid men. ‘How shall we attract their attention — ring ’em up on the phone?’ And, in fact, in the weeks ahead no one in my truck ever saw the experts with the armbands exercising their first-aid skill. It was just one of the many ironies of Russian organization.

  I was rammed hard against one end of the truck, my parcel still under one arm. Both arms were pressed into my body. It was impossible to sit and when I wanted to lift a hand I had to have the co-operation of the man next to me, who would lean back against his neighbour on the other side to squeeze out the extra space I needed. It was this anonymous friend who advised me to open my parcel and eat some food in case it might later be stolen. I explored the contents by feel and smell — and it was a rich and rewarding experience. There was a loaf of special bread, oval in shape, about nine inches long and about five inches across at the middle. There were two excellent dried fish of a kind known in Russia as taran. And there was an ounce of korizhki, the coarse tobacco made from the veins of tobacco leaves, with a sheet of newspaper (I later found it was dated 1938) to use for rolling cigarettes. I ate half the loaf and one of the fish and stuffed the rest into my blouse, wrapped still in the brown paper.

  It was not until the train moved off that the talk began to flow. Voices began to speculate on
where we were going. Some expressed the fear that we might end up in Novaya Zemlya, that bleakest of islands in the Barents Sea, or in the Kamchatka salt mines of Eastern Siberia. Everyone agreed that our destination was Siberia.

  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.