Hour after monotonous hour we jostled from side to side, listening to the chuckuty-chuck of wheels passing over the tracks, to mothers trying to explain to cold and hungry children why they shouldn’t cry.
I sat down beside Mother on the floor, the draught from the toilet hole whipping up around my legs, and I pulled my eiderdown closer. My father slid down the wall beside us and we sat in silence in our tiny girdle of space.
‘Where are they taking us, Tatta?’
‘If only I knew, kohanie – I am so sorry; this is all my fault.’
‘Why? It’s not.’
‘It is, Marishu. I should have realised what was happening the moment the Soviets set foot on Polish soil.’
‘Yes, but how could you have known?’
Mother sighed – a recent habit she repeated often. ‘I suppose your father didn’t want to see the worst in people. You know what he’s like.’
‘Nothing wrong in that, Anna. But, I admit, the signs were there. Some Byelorussians began settling old scores, robbing Polish farmers of livestock….’
‘Yes, then we heard rumours they murdered quite a few,’ Mother added.
I spun around to face her. ‘I didn’t know that! Are they going to murder us?’
The next day we crossed the border into the USSR.
I noticed our transport never stopped at the larger stations, but rattled through as if Stalin’s henchmen were ashamed to allow their citizens a glimpse of their depraved and hideous secret. Approaching the larger towns, those on the top shelves thrust their hands through the iron bars and shouted for help. Some threw out their names on scraps of paper or banged on the walls with saucepans, shoes and fists, anything that made a noise, pleading for help. No one heard us; no one knew we were here; it was as if we were invisible.
If our train stopped at city stations, it was always in sidings well beyond the platforms, and when I put my eye to the knothole, what a shock I got. Transports rammed with human cargo occupied the many tracks alongside ours – tear-stained faces pressed against the bars of the boxcars – everyone shouting for help.
These were the days when guards delivered pails of soup and boiled water to each of the wagons. There was never enough to go around. Often there were days with no food or water at all. Those on the top shelves scraped snow from the wagon’s roof and sills, and we had to eke out what remained of the rations we had brought with us.
We continued northeast, the cold hammering into us from all sides.
I shrank back from the metal door and listened to the wind as it forced its way through the slats and added to the ice forming on the walls. The pounding of the wheels was endless. On and on our transport ploughed, through snowstorms and blizzards, the din booming in my head. The noise grew louder than before, and my wretchedness increased with each second that passed. I no longer measured my misery by the minute – each instant of having to endure these conditions was indescribable. Even though my parents tried to buoy my spirits, I sensed we would never return home. The Soviets would never take us this far to safety.
Two weeks into our journey and the train began decelerating – again. It was the same routine. ‘Where are we?’ people asked. Then the usual answer from the kids on the top shelves, either, ‘Nowhere – empty plains’ or ‘a station’. Everyone knew ‘empty plains’ meant we were in for another long wait. A ‘station’ buoyed everyone’s spirits; meaning bread, soup and boiled water and, if we were lucky, a few shovels of coal for our stove. However, it was a very long train and every wagon needed fuel, as did the engine. But what did it matter when only those nearest to it gained any benefit? The cold was now affecting everyone’s health and many were suffering, particularly the youngest and the elderly.
Smaller children cried incessantly the further north we travelled, but it was more than crying, rather it was a desolate sobbing that came from sensing their parents had lost all hope.
There was a concern for an old woman who sat propped against the pile of suitcases. Her family fussed around her, and other passengers tried to help. Everyone spoke in low, grave voices.
It occurred to me I never knew either of my grandparents; they remained in western Poland when my parents moved east. It hadn’t mattered before, but now it did. They visited once when I was five years old, but I didn’t remember them, and now they were dead. As for our relatives who remained in Upper Silesia, they were going about their daily lives unaware of the disaster that had befallen us. I resolved to correspond with them the instant we returned; they might even invite me to visit. I had never written a letter before, but the thought empowered me. It was a plan; something that took my mind off the dreadful thought we might never return.
Today the guards opened the doors and allowed us out to stretch our limbs for the first time since leaving Zhabinka.
It was so bright. I recoiled and squinted; the light was unbearable. My eyes watered as I tried to focus. Blinking, I gazed out over endless snow-covered plains; there was nothing out there. Land and sky moulded into one as if all colour had drained from the world, barren, sightless and Godless. There was no danger of escape; our captors could afford to be magnanimous.
Everyone looked crumpled as they slid out into virgin snow: men in their homburgs, farmers in caps and grandmothers in headscarves, even the elegant woman in the fur coat and Cossack hat. I realised neither class nor decorum mattered anymore because we were now all the same. Soon the snow around our transport turned deep orange with urine.
‘I won’t be long,’ I told Mother and shrugged off my eiderdown. With so little to eat, my digestion was all over the place, and I hadn’t had proper toileting since leaving home.
Dropping from the wagon, I crawled under its belly, slid down the bank and found a spot away from the others. Within moments an even more intense cold penetrated my clothes, chilling both blood and bone. Squatting here, I felt an overwhelming sense of emptiness. I could see the entire length of the train in both directions, resting on its tracks like a vengeful dragon curving far into the distance. In the silence, the wind skimmed the light surface from the snow, obliterating our transport from view as it moaned across the plains from one empty horizon to the other. Where are they taking us, I wondered; the thought never left me.
I heard it then, a muffled caterwauling mixed with anguish that knew no consolation, and it came from all directions. People were bringing out their dead. Corpses were being lowered from wagons and slid onto people’s shoulders to lie in their snowy graves.
Mesmerised, I couldn’t look away as they tried to bury them in the frozen ground beside the tracks. The best they could do was to cover them with snow.
Guards moved from wagon to wagon and cleared out any dead whose loved ones refused to let go. They threw them out like so much carrion, not stopping to watch them roll down the railway bank. Mothers clung to their lifeless children until dragged from them, too numb to protest.
Our transport moved off. Two days later, another station, another bowl of soup and a crust of bread. Who could survive on such slops?
Once the guards were sure there was no chance of their prisoners absconding, they allowed us off the train to buy or barter for what little food was available at the few tiny stations we approached.
Vast forest accompanied us on both sides of the track now and had done for the past six days. It was even colder. Was there no end to this nightmare?
Occasionally, we pulled into a siding and waited – just waited. Our food was all gone, and hunger gnawed at our insides. When the guards opened the doors, we were in the middle of nowhere. Where could we run to or hide? Sometimes we saw a cluster of weather-beaten farm buildings, a ramshackle hamlet or the faded blue dome of a desecrated church. Soviet Supply transports passed by us at speed on the main track, heading to wherever they were heading. Some speculated they were heading for Finland, others said for the White Sea, but no one knew for certain.