Random Acts of Heroic Love

by Danny Scheinmann

  With the arrival of spring a new lease of life came to the camp. The men had resigned themselves to a lengthy stay. The news from the front spoke of stalemate. In the west, trenches had been dug and the French and British were fighting huge battles with the Germans over a few metres of territory. In the east, the Russians had been pushed out of Poland but the Germans did not have the resources to advance.

  We had so much time on our hands that a kind of university sprang up in Sretensk. Virtually everything was taught there, from history to engineering. I taught Russian to the Germans, the Germans taught German to the Hungarians, but nobody wanted to learn Hungarian. I learnt how to carve wood and make cabinets from a Viennese craftsman. I made that chair you’re sitting on, Fischel, and that cupboard over there; in fact everything I make in the workshop I learnt in Sretensk. Books flooded into the camps from the various Red Cross agencies and we were able to organize a little library. In the evenings we could listen to the camp choir or watch theatre shows, a thing I had never seen before. We had political debates and played every board and card game known to man.

  I was still weak and could not do any hard labour, but when the thaw came in May Király and many others were sent out to build roads or work on farms. These men kept the Siberian economy alive in the absence of the Russian workers who were still at the front. They also kept the womenfolk happy. Király would come back from his farm stays with lurid stories of peasant girls he had deflowered in haystacks . . . Oh, you find that funny, do you, Fischel? You too will understand such pleasures before long; although you will have to go a few kilometres from Berlin to find a haystack. Király said that someone had to do it while the Russian boys were at war. Apparently Siberian women were much less prudish than European women, a claim substantiated by many others, in particular a certain breed of Hungarian male who prided himself on his voracious womanizing. Király insisted that no man was a man unless he exercised his sexual function. I found his tales both amusing and educational, for I had never seduced a woman and Király took great pleasure in divulging detail.

  Király’s German greatly improved in Sretensk; it was unusual for Hungarian peasants to speak any German at all and even rarer for them to be fluent. I wondered where he had picked it up from in the first place. I discovered that his mother had been an Austrian, hence the name Frantz. His father was a cruel man who had beaten him senseless as a child, before leaving his mother for another woman when Frantz was twelve. His mother had become an alcoholic, they had been saddled with debt and their house had fallen into neglect. He had joined the army as soon as he could.

  I was biding my time, getting stronger every day. I worked in the kitchens making kasha which was our staple diet. It is a buckwheat soup laced with pig fat. Don’t look so shocked, Fischel, all the Jews ate it; a hungry man must eat. I even ate the scraps because all I wanted was to be strong. I did it for Lotte. I did everything for Lotte. It was not healthy but it kept me alive. I was still writing scores of letters, which were never posted. I was saving my money for the escape, besides, the Russian postal service had virtually collapsed and I did not have an address for her after her house burnt down. These letters were ever more nostalgic and passionate since I knew she would never read them.

  Dear Lotte,

  For a whole week I have thought only of the curve of your cheek and the lushness of your lips . . .

  Dear Lotte,

  Do you remember that time when the snow was so deep that the Kaminskys couldn’t open their front door and we spent hours playing roly-poly down the hill?

  Dearest Lotte,

  Please wait for me, oh God please wait for me. I am sick without you. Don’t go with another man, please, I’ll die if you do.

  Dear Lotte,

  Last night I buried my nose in the soft fur of your waistcoat where your body once lay, and breathed you in . . .

  I was teaching Király to play chess and we spent many hours playing and arguing. I always won the games but I often lost the arguments. I could never quite work out what made Király tick, so I would challenge him over chess.

  Once I asked him, ‘What do you think about at the quietest moment in the middle of the night? The last moment before you sleep?’

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’ He was pondering his next move.

  ‘You know, the one thought that holds up all the others, the one you can’t ever escape from. The one which is you,’ I probed.

  Király lifted his eyes for a moment from the board and reflected. ‘I think about death. I see death in the faces of the men, I see it in the snow and I see it in the blood-red battlefields of Europe. Even I am death. I live but I am dead, my life is useless, a waste. Knight takes pawn.’

  ‘So why live – what for?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, it’s just a bad habit I got into,’ he said. ‘Play, you’re losing.’ His position was far weaker than he thought and I put him in check. ‘Hmm,’ he mused, ‘I missed that.’ And then he turned on me, as I knew he would. ‘And as for you, you don’t even have to tell me, the whole camp knows, it’s your damn Lotte. Writing letters to the snow. Waste of time. And if you ever get home, what makes you think she won’t have married someone else? She’s probably fucking someone else right now, just like these little Russian girls.’

  Excuse my language, Fischel, it was as shocking to me then as it is to you now. I could not hide my fury. ‘My God, Frantz, you really are a pig,’ I shouted. ‘It’s true I live on hope. Why shouldn’t I? Every day I see her beauty while you rot in hell. You will tell me that I’m deluded but we are all deluded in some way. The question is which is the best delusion.’

  ‘Oh ho,’ Király mocked, ‘Moritz the dreamer. One day the wind will leave your sails and you will see the world the way it is.’

  ‘Maybe, but I will not be in here when it happens. I have to get to Lotte before my heart breaks.’

  I should never have said such a thing in front of Király, it was fuel to his fire. He burst out laughing.

  ‘And what are you going to do? Escape? From Siberia? You are mad. You will perish in the snow blizzard like all the other dreamers before you. Don’t you see? The guards won’t even chase you; you will just be one less to deal with. Moritz, you can’t do it because it’s impossible.’

  He looked down at the board and realized his position was lost but the argument had been won. He was right: it was impossible.

  There were two ways to escape, south into China or west through Russia. We had been warned by our own government not to attempt to go into China because we would be captured and treated much worse than under the Russians. Rumour had it that the Buryats of Mongolia were so ruthless they would murder you for a silver button. We could not know whether this was true or not, but for sure a white man in China was easy to find. Most attempted escapes thus far had been to the west and by the summer of 1916 no one had succeeded. Those who had left in winter had been found frozen to death a couple of days’ walk from the camp. Those who had escaped after the thaw had either been robbed by Cossacks and turned in, or captured by policemen tipped off by Russian villagers hostile to the Central Powers. I had only one advantage over all those who had failed and that was that I could speak Russian. I would bide my time and wait for the right moment.

  As winter drew in there was a feeling of unrest amongst the prison guards. Inflation was so high that their salaries were becoming worthless. The Siberian grain producers began hoarding their grain because it was no longer profitable to market it and consequently European Russia, which was dependent on it, began to starve. When things started getting bad in Moscow and Petrograd the tsar got blamed for it. Even the army were losing faith in him. The front-line soldiers were demoralized and under-equipped. Imagine, Fisch, some of them were fighting bare-footed.

  We were now receiving Bolshevik propaganda written in German and Hungarian and specifically targeting prisoners of war. They saw us as their natural allies in the struggle against the nobility of Europe. Our political debates during
the long winter months became particularly heated. Many of the prisoners and guards were sympathetic to the cause of Bolshevism. They began to organize themselves and talked of revolution. This was froth, it would never happen as far as I was concerned. The tedium of camp life often brought debate to extremes. I shared the Bolshevik belief that the working man had become the plaything of the landed aristocracy, but I felt the people of Europe were sick to death of war, and did not have the stomach to wage a civil one as well.

  How wrong I was. In March 1917 we were in our dormitories eating kasha when an Austrian activist prisoner burst in. He had just been in town and was breathless with excitement.

  ‘Comrades,’ he announced, ‘revolution is in the air. I just heard the tsar has abdicated.’ The room erupted in shouts of jubilation; more men came crashing in from other dormitories until ours was packed to the rafters. Everyone wanted to know if this meant the war was over. The Austrian brought the room to order with a wave of his hands. ‘No,’ he said. ‘A provisional government has been declared, but look who the new ministers are: Prince Lvov, Milyukov, Guchkov and Kerensky. All members of the tsar’s duma greedy for power. But who are they really, if not puppets of the ruling classes? This is no revolution but a bourgeois palace coup, there will be no land reform. Kerensky may call himself leader of the socialist revolutionary party, but really he is no better than the tsar because he too vows to continue this futile war, he too promises to use the workers as cannon fodder. The war still rages. Millions are dead. Our only hope is the Bolsheviks. It is now only a question of time before they take control. Every day the Bolsheviks are gaining support. They are calling for all Russian soldiers to stop fighting, and to join the workers in the great struggle. Landowners and officers are class enemies, their orders should not be obeyed. When the Bolsheviks take power they have promised to free all prisoners of war so that we too may join the revolution. Only the Bolsheviks will put an end to this futile war. The time has come to eliminate the ruling classes of Europe who have made our lives such a misery for so long.’

  A prisoner at the back of the room shouted, ‘Long live the Bolsheviks, long live the revolution!’ And a throng of voices repeated the call. By now the guards had been alerted and were standing unnoticed in the doorway.

  Frantz Király was on his feet. ‘Propaganda. Rubbish,’ he shouted. ‘The Bolsheviks will be lucky to take Moscow but it will be years before they reach Siberia. And we will be here for ever.’

  ‘Don’t listen to this idiot. Let’s go to Moscow. Who is with me?’ the Austrian retorted. There was uproar as the men argued with each other.

  A German took the floor. ‘Why should we join the Russian working man, when he is our enemy? No, what we must do now is take the camp by storm. The Russian regime is weakening, imagine if every camp in Siberia was overthrown: we would be doing a service to the fatherland. We could be an army a million strong. It would hasten the end of the war.’ There was a clamour of approval. The guards did not understand us but the atmosphere was becoming too heated for them, they barged their way in and one of them fired his rifle in the air. The room fell silent. The guard spoke in a quiet, assertive voice. No one understood him but the sense of threat was clear.

  The Austrian asked if anyone could translate and Király pushed me forward. ‘He says, try and escape if you want, and if you don’t get shot by us you’ll perish in the snow. No one has ever survived out there.’

  As the day wore on we witnessed arguments among the guards. Some had not been paid for weeks and simply went home. Rumour was rife and the old colonel who was a tsarist through and through called his men together and ordered them to remain loyal to the old regime. There was such confusion that none of the guards went about their normal duty. This was the chance I’d been waiting for. That night as the other prisoners slept I packed my haversack. I had procured civilian clothing from the Red Cross and stolen two large salamis and some kasha from the kitchen.

  Király saw me and whispered, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m leaving. I am going to walk straight out of the front gate. There’s no one there,’ I said excitedly.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Moritz, where the hell are you going to go? This is March. It is still freezing – we are miles from anywhere. Only a madman would dream of escape. You heard what the guard said. You’ll die out there. Here at least you have a roof over your head.’

  ‘I’d rather die out there trying to get home than fester in here waiting for the Bolsheviks to free us, because it might never happen. Now is the time to go, the place is in turmoil, no one knows what’s going on, or who to be loyal to. They are not going to worry about an escapee for the next few days,’ I reasoned.

  ‘Don’t let hope blind you,’ Király pleaded. But I would hear no more of it. I picked up my bag and walked out. Frantz came hurtling after me and grabbed me by the arm. ‘Wait, Moritz . . . you can’t leave without me,’ he begged.

  I was amazed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not asking you to come, Frantz. Besides, you think it’s a stupid idea.’

  ‘Please, Moritz, please let me come.’ He was tugging at my coat.

  It was extraordinary to see this big oafish man reduced to grovelling like a child. He had not done this since his father walked out on him when he was a boy. His eyes softened, the edge had left his voice. ‘I’ll go mad here without you,’ he said forlornly. ‘I have no friends, Moritz, you’re the only one. I am dead without you. I’ll bring the chessboard, I have to beat you at least once in my lifetime.’

  I thought of all the reasons why Király would be a terrible liability. He didn’t speak Russian, he was aggressive, and he whinged incessantly. But I was frightened and did not want to go alone so I relented. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘get your things.’

  He was so delighted he put his arms around me and hugged me. Just like a little boy. Then he scampered back into the dormitory, pilfered what he could from the sleeping men, stuffed his backpack and came back to me with a cheeky grin on his face. I had never seen him look so happy.

  We made our way to the unguarded entrance of the camp and slipped out into the white night of Siberia. From now on each step would bring me closer to Lotte. My heart was dancing.

  19

  NOW SON, FETCH THE MAP OF RUSSIA. GOOD BOY. SO find Lake Baikal, you can’t miss it . . . a little blue crescent above Mongolia. Now my plan was to get to the town of Irkutsk to the west and the quickest way was to cross Baikal while it was still frozen. Otherwise we would have had to walk an extra three hundred kilometres round the edge. Believe it or not it doesn’t thaw out until May so we still had a couple of months to get there. In March when we set off it can still drop to minus 20 degrees centigrade, though a Siberian would tell you that it was warming up because in January you get minus 40. The worst was past, but the cold was still a big threat. Looking back I would say the timing of our escape was fortuitous because within days of our escape the provisional government ordered a vicious crackdown on POW camp security and began a virulent anti-German campaign. Rumour had it that captured escapees would be killed or at least tortured. If we had been heard talking German it would have been the end of us.

  We had not been gone ten minutes when Király suggested we spend the night in Sretensk. He had some unfinished business with the young wife of a kulak whose wheat field he had harvested in the absence of her husband. I was regretting his presence already. We were barely out of earshot of the camp and we were at each other’s throats arguing.

  ‘Is that the real reason why you wanted to come? So that you could have your way with a Russian peasant? We’ll be back in there by morning if we go into town. The place is crawling with soldiers,’ I yelled.

  ‘Don’t you get it, you stupid Polish, Jewish, son of a lousy cobbler? She’ll give us food. How far are we going to get on two bloody sausages and a flask of kasha?’

  ‘It’s not the food you want, you lying sod, it’s he
r womanly charms, and you’re prepared to risk my life to get them, because you don’t care about anyone other than yourself. I should have known that when you watched me kill Jerzy Ingwer. What was I thinking letting you escape with me? You’d kill me for my waistcoat. You’re worse to me than the enemy,’ I cursed.

  ‘I admit it, Moritz, I want to give it to her. Just like you want to give it to Lotte. Of course I do. What’s wrong with that? The only difference is that you’re going to have to walk ten thousand kilometres to get your oats and I can get mine right here. And by God I’m going to stuff her good and proper and the memory of it will keep me going to Hungary,’ he scoffed.

  ‘Hungary? Don’t make me laugh, you’re not even going to cross the Amur. You’re nothing but a liability, and I wash my hands of you. Go to Sretensk if you must but go alone. We part ways here. Goodbye, Frantz.’ And I stormed off.

  Király came running after me.

  ‘Oh no, not so fast, Moritz. Think about it for a minute. We don’t have to cross town to get to her place; she has a good-sized plot right on the edge. She’s wealthy by local standards and she has a larder full of food. If we can take a sledge from her and stock up for a month we might make it to Irkutsk. How the hell else are we going to get there without stopping in every village? It’s worth taking the chance. Come on, Moritz.’

  I hesitated. Now he was talking sense. But he misunderstood my silence. ‘Oh, you’re jealous! All right we’ll share her, if that’s what you want. She won’t mind. Now tell me that isn’t a good offer. Food, sex and a roof over your head.’

  ‘You are an animal, Király, remember that. You are an animal and I am a human being. Don’t ever confuse the two. I don’t want your whore, but I agree that if we can get our hands on food we have a better chance of surviving. So let’s go.’

  Király had won again.

  The woman heard the stones at her window, saw Király and came to the door in her bedclothes all excited. She was a handsome woman with broad shoulders and long wispy blond hair. She welcomed us in and blathered on at Király in Russian. She had been thinking about him and wanted to thank him again for saving her harvest. He was better than ten Russians, he was so big and strong and more and more, none of which I bothered to translate. It was probably a good thing that they didn’t understand each other. All she knew was that he had worked hard for her and saved her from destitution. Each day she had seen the soil on his hands and smelt the sweat on his back and she knew that no man would work harder for her. Király was a genuine farm labourer and not some soft-bellied POW teacher or peddler who pootled about the field like a pregnant pig. Of course, if she had been an old spinster he would not have gone to half the trouble.