This choice was curious, even for Utah, where scriptural place-names grew like sage. Here was an appellation with an odd pronunciation (“MOAB”) that happened to be derived from one of the more cryptic sex-and-blood stories of the Old Testament.
Moab was the incest-born son of Lot, who had fled with his family from the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. After Lot’s wife had been turned into a pillar of salt because she dared to look at the burning cities, Lot’s eldest daughter fed him homemade wine and seduced him so the family line would not die out. The offspring of that drunken incest was Moab, who became the king of a high plain at the eastern edge of the Dead Sea that eventually took his name. The Moabites were considered wicked and fought occasional battles against Israel. Moab would also be the place where Ruth would flee to the “alien corn” in one of the most famous love stories of the Bible. But it was generally regarded as a cursed place. In Zephaniah 2:9, God declares, “Surely Moab will become like Sodom, the Ammonites like Gomorrah—a place of weeds and salt pits, a wasteland forever.”
Disgruntled locals in Utah made several petitions to the U.S. post-master general in Washington, D.C., for a change in station name over the next decades. These requests were all denied, and the town was stuck with Moab, which was at least fitting because the ochre topography in all four directions looked similar to the Judean desert where the dramas of the Bible had played themselves out. It also happened to look beautiful on celluloid. The director John Ford happened upon the place in 1948 when looking for a picturesque desert in which to film outdoor scenes for Wagon Master. He loved the red-rock vistas and returned the following year to direct Rio Grande, starring John Wayne, who told reporters that Moab was “where God put the West.” But the big game in town during the 1950s was uranium.
Moab ballooned with ex-GIs, promoters, speculators, suppliers, a few discreet prostitutes (this was pious Mormon country, after all), and assorted other fortune seekers. There was only one pay phone in town, and it was not uncommon for people to line up for the length of a block to use it. Drugstores and sporting goods stores sold Geiger counters. A store called Uranium Jewelry opened downtown. Corporations were formed over pitchers of beer at the 66 Club, one of the town’s only legal bars, where, the Western memoirist Edward Abbey noted, “the smoke-dense air crackled with radioactivity and the smell of honest miners’ sweat.” A notorious sign was hung in the window of a brand-new drinking establishment, the Uranium Club: NO TALK UNDER $1,000,000,000. The school-house was jammed: Classes had to meet on the lawn outside, and the school felt obliged to start offering free lunches because so many parents were off prospecting in the desert.
A man named Joe Blosser told a reporter he had abandoned a pleasant life of golf and cocktails in California to join the hunt in the desert. “I guess it’s freedom I want, and the sense of being useful,” he said. “This stuff uranium . . . We need it. It’s a new kind of power. There was coal to make steam, oil to run gas engines. Now there’s uranium.”
Another of the migrants was an owl-eyed Texan named Charlie Steen.
He had grown up in the backwater town of Caddo, the son of a riches-to-rags oil prospector. Steen worked his way through college, learned a little Spanish, and landed a job with Socony Vacuum Oil Company after graduation. Sent to Peru to look for new prospects, he came up empty. Far from discouraging him, the experience left him determined to start hunting wealth on his own. But he had a wife to take care of, so he took an exploration job with Standard Oil of Indiana. After an argument with two of his supervisors, he was fired for being “innately rebellious against authority.” Steen was working as a carpenter in Houston in 1949, plotting his next move, when he happened to read an article in the Engineering and Mining Journal about the desert that straddled the Colorado-Utah border. CAN URANIUM mining PAY? asked the headline. Steen decided he would try.
He drove into Moab with a jeep and a trailer, his wife and four children; a wispy-framed striver with dun trousers and a grin shaped like a wedge of orange. His receding hair and thick-framed glasses gave him the air of a NASA technician. And indeed, he was one of the few prospectors arriving on the Colorado Plateau who had graduate-level training in geology. Steen had a theory about these formations that others thought was foolish. He believed that the same method used to find oil deposits could be used to find uranium. He spent almost no time looking for the easy money in the canyon walls and he didn’t even own a Geiger counter.
The key for Steen was the anticline, a dome-shaped structure some distance behind a spot where a trace amount of uranium had already been found. He believed that the first trace could be the petrified whiff of a larger deposit hiding beneath the clay. This was one of the guiding principles of oil exploration, a field he understood and where he felt most comfortable. A bore of two hundred feet would find a patch in the anticline, if it was there. Others drilled horizontally into cliffs; Steen would bore straight down into the soil. This contradicted everything that was known at the time about uranium geology, but Steen was cocksure.
“Turn a spoon upside down on the table, like so,” he later explained. “That’s your anticline. Down the flank of that dome, down below the rimrock, that’s where the uranium is. That’s where the oil often is.”
Armed with a $300 grubstake, he began to focus his attention on the Lisbon Valley, about thirty miles south of Moab. The Atomic Energy Commission had found low-grade uranium in an outcropping on the west side of the valley, but the uranium was judged too high in lime content to make any exploration profitable. This seemed like the perfect place to test the anticline theory. Steen staked out a dozen claims on the valley floor and gave them wistful Spanish names to remind him of better days in Peru; Mi Corazón (“My Heart”), Linda Mujer (“Pretty Woman”), Te Quiero (“I Love You”), and Mi Vida (“My Life”). This last choice of name, according to Edward Abbey, demonstrated “revealing pathos.” At the time, Steen had that patch of desert nearly to himself. The AEC didn’t think much of these barren spots, located in a district called Big Indian, and one official called him a “crackpot.”
By this time, he and his wife and their four children had spent all their savings and had to sell their trailer. They were living on corn bread, venison, and beans inside a $15-a-month tar-paper shack in the forlorn railroad village of Cisco. Time and money were running out. In the field, Steen ate only potato chips and mushy bananas. He could no longer afford new boots, and his toes stuck out of the ends of the ones he had. His wife could satisfy her nicotine cravings only by picking up half-smoked cigarettes on the side of the highway and rerolling the tobacco.
The birthplace of uranium mining, St. Joachimsthal, meanwhile, was in for special misery.
The Red Army had been sent to capture the medieval mountain town shortly after Hitler’s suicide, and geologists went into the shafts to assess the quality of the pitchblende. What they found pleased them. “It was not the Soviet Union that decided that the atomic bomb was going to be the weapon of the future,” reasoned one colonel.
In November 1945, Joseph Stalin pressured the government in Prague into signing a confidential treaty: Moscow would get the entire run-of-mine, and Czechoslovakia would provide the labor force under a state corporation named grandly—and vaguely—National Enterprise Jachymov.8
The mines that had worried Albert Einstein were now secretly under the control of the Russians.
Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk was left uninformed of this deal when he promised the United Nations that St. Joachimsthal’s uranium would never be used for “mass destruction.” He had added: “We in Czechoslovakia want our uranium to be used entirely differently—to build, protect, and make our lives safer and more efficient.” He had concluded with a proposal that echoed the failed Baruch Plan: that an international organization should inspect all uranium mines to ensure that none of the ore would be used for weapons.
This speech helped sign Masaryk’s death warrant. Nobody had briefed him on the exact details of the secret uranium deal
with the Russians, but he was reprimanded. Two weeks after the Communists seized power in Prague in 1948, he was found dead, lying in his pajamas below a bathroom window in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry. The official verdict was suicide, but Masaryk was widely believed to have been murdered.
Stalin ordered the Czechoslovakian mines rushed back into production, but there was almost nobody around to do the work. The town was nearly deserted. The German-speaking residents of St. Joachimsthal who hadn’t been drafted into the army had been expelled from the region after the Nazi defeat. The entire motor pool consisted of a truck and two horse-drawn wagons. The Russians assigned some of their prisoners of war to start digging uranium, and when that proved too slow, they turned toward the ordinary citizens of Czechoslovakia.
The minister of justice, an ardent Communist, told his subordinates that “we must concentrate all our attention” on the labor problem and round up able-bodied men wherever they could be found. A directive called Plan of Action T-43 was issued; it contained this sentence: “We need 3,000 more people who do not already work for us.” Neighbors were encouraged to inform upon one another for petty crimes. The state security bureau, the SNB, was also given latitude to detain suspects on vague ideological grounds and bring them in front of special committees that, if there was no genuine crime, declared them guilty of such things as “believing in bourgeois ideas” or being a “product of a capitalist milieu.” These prisoners were described with an antique term: nevolna, or “serfs.” They were the first residents of what would become a giant uranium gulag.
The day of their arrival at St. Joachimsthal was a shocking and miserable experience. The hills had become dotted with more than a dozen new crossbeamed headframes, each one encircled by two layers of barbed-wire fences and watched over by four elevated guard towers, manned by Russian soldiers holding carbines. The space in between the fences was a moat of fine white sand, raked regularly so that any footprints would be immediately apparent. A large red star was mounted over the main gate to each camp. Loudspeakers mounted on the fences blared patriotic music and speeches.
The prisoners were marched inside the gates, handcuffed to one another in a line, and made to stand at attention for their first roll call, a thrice-daily ritual they would be made to repeat, in every kind of weather, for years to come. Anyone who stepped out of line was beaten over the head, usually with a giant ring of keys, and their bloodied foreheads served as a warning to others. “It was a nightmare. I cannot believe that this system was designed by Czech people,” one inmate recalled in a letter home. He added: “It looks like arbeit macht frei,” referring to the infamous sign above the Auschwitz camp that meant “Work makes you free.”
Among those rounded up was Frantisek Sedivy, an idealistic twenty-five-year-old vocational school student who took part in an underground movement opposed to the Soviet-backed regime. He and his friends had already risked imprisonment by helping two families smuggle themselves to West Germany. Sedivy’s group was approached by a man who wanted to arrange more defections. Sedivy was cautious, but agreed to help. He was promptly arrested and told that his new “friend” had actually been a police informant conducting a sting operation. Sedivy was sentenced to fourteen years in the uranium mines.
“It was not forced labor,” he would say later. “It was slave labor.”
The daily ration of food was four slices of bread and a few mushy vegetables. Three times a week came watery “soup,” which was lukewarm water added to dried vegetables. Within a few months, Sedivy lost nearly forty pounds. Snowstorms came to the mountains in October and lasted intermittently until April; the drifts blew through the open windows of the barracks and onto the cots. Beatings were common. When jingoistic speeches were not being trumpeted on the loudspeakers, the administrators played the same three Czech folk music records over and over.
A favored job was minding the kennels, where a prisoner might hope to steal a bit of dog food every now and then. But most prisoners were ordered into the mines. Sedivy’s first assignment was inside the Svornost (“Concord”) shaft, near the center of St. Joachimsthal, which had first been excavated by silver-hungry peasants in the sixteenth century. There was no training: Men were simply handed pneumatic drills and ordered to bore holes and lay track. The tunnels were barely wide enough to accommodate the ore carts; men had to flatten themselves against the walls when one came hurtling by. Carts also jumped the tracks. “We had a lot of broken legs,” recalled Sedivy. He was given a rubber coat, which kept him partially dry from the moisture oozing from the walls. The water could rise to the knees before pumps kicked in. On bad days, workers came out of the elevator cages so drenched in mud that friends could not recognize one another. Almost nobody was issued a helmet, and workers were routinely killed when the explosive charges sent chunks of rock whizzing through the tunnels.
Sedivy later worked in the crushing mill, a primitive facility where inmates broke up rock with sledgehammers. His job was to help separate chunks of pitchblende—called smolinec in Czech—according to purity. The lowest-quality ore was set aside for the waste piles. Medium- to good-quality ore was packed into crates, which weighed approximately 150 pounds each. These were loaded onto railcars for shipping to the Soviet Union. The mill produced nearly 270 tons on a good day, and its windows were frosted gray with dust. The four-story building became known as the “tower of death” by some miners—including Sedivy—who had heard there was something dangerous about breathing uranium particulate but were powerless to do anything about it. There was no doubt in the mill about what the pitchblende was going to be used for, although it was rarely discussed.
“We knew that the Soviets wanted the uranium for bombs,” said Sedivy. “There could have been no other purpose. It wasn’t for science.”
He dreamed of escape, but the penalty for being caught outside the fences was death on the spot. Bedsheets were issued only in summer months to prevent the inmates from using them as cloaks to blend in with the snow. Sedivy recalled being forced to march in a circle around a pile of corpses. They were men who had tried to sneak away and had all been shot in the face, their identities obliterated. Their families were notified with a curt letter. A typical two-sentence notice, addressed to a woman named Anna Cervenkova, said: “Your brother, Petru Frantisek, was shot in an escape attempt. You are not permitted to attend the funeral.” There was no signature.
Sedivy recalled a rare moment of levity shortly after Stalin died of a stroke in March 1953. A political officer in the camps was delivering a windy eulogy inside the barracks and, at one point, tried to refer to Stalin by his full Georgian birth name, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. The officer’s Czech pronunciation was poor: To the inmates, the mangled name came out sounding like “Joseph has fleas and syphilis.” There was nervous chuckling, and that was the last time that that officer was allowed to make a speech. At about the same time, rumors had spread of the election of General Dwight Eisenhower to the office of U.S. president. This inspired speculation that the same general who had fought the Nazis would also initiate a war against the USSR. This was cause for some hope.
A miner who managed to escape told the following story to a Western journalist. “Once in a while something happened that encouraged you to carry on,” he said. “The SNB guards had a beautiful, expertly trained police dog that was said to be worth forty thousand koruny. The miners were fascinated with the animal. Everybody agreed that he would make a fine roast. One night, three miners came upon the dog when no SNB man was around. Poor dog; his expert training didn’t help him. They lured him into an abandoned mine shaft and killed, skinned, and cooked him on the spot.”
Inmates did their best to cheer one another up amid the boredom and despair, sharing tobacco and new coats when they were available. “The people here are tough and brave,” wrote Viktor Opavsky in a letter home to his family. He mentioned in particular one Father Harman, a Catholic priest, who tried to keep his fellow inmates from falling into depression. The let
ter, which would have been read by censors, does not indicate if Father Harman continued to say Mass in secret. In any case, priests were the targets of special harassment in the camps. The only rations of meat in the week were often served just on Fridays to make them choose between their consciences or their stomachs. The Bible and other books were forbidden, but some prisoners managed to have them smuggled into the camp, where they were hidden underneath rocks and behind barrack walls. Discovery meant punishment, usually confinement in a freezing underground bunker for a month or more. Serious violators were beaten with rubber hoses or hung from metal grills for hours. One guard earned himself the nickname the “Human Beast” for ordering prisoners to stand outside during winter storms and shoveling more snow around their feet as it blew away.
Those who worked the hardest were given the best equipment and allowed to skip the dangerous tasks. They were permitted to watch movies on Sunday and could go into town by themselves for brief periods, almost as if free men. Early parole was also offered. These elite brigades were known as Stakhanovites, after a workaholic miner named Aleksei Stakhanov, who had mined more than one hundred tons of coal in six hours in 1935 and become a symbol for Socialist excellence. Those who joined often embraced the propaganda even more passionately than their teachers.
“If you entered one of their barracks, you would be under the impression that you had entered a Communist Party indoctrination classroom,” said one inmate. “You would see red banners all over the place and political slogans taken from the Communist daily press, which would convince you that the people living there did not participate in the Stakhanovite movement just because it is the only way out.”
Tom Zoellner Page 17
