The march continued on the second day until late afternoon. It might, I feel, have ended earlier if we could have reached a sheltered position before this, but, as was to be the practice from then on, there appeared to be an order requiring the Commandant to find some unexposed place, usually in the lee of woods, for the night’s halt. The consideration was almost certainly one of expediency rather than a humanitarian one. Since so much time, effort and money was being spent in getting this considerable free labour force from one end of Russia to the other, there must have been some pressure on the Commandant to bring through as many men as possible still capable of work. Now, outside the settled area of urban Irkutsk, we were unshackled for the night and allowed to light fires. As in the potato field, we dug into the snow to get some warmth and clung close together, dozing in the light of fires for which, with cramped and frozen hands, we had eagerly foraged the wood from the trees about us. There we had our second mug of coffee of the day, and those who had been careful enough to save some bread from the morning issue ate as they drank.
I have grateful memories of the general efficiency of the lumbering field kitchen. It baked the bread issued to us each morning and which was our only sustenance throughout and it produced two hot drinks a day. Only once did it fail, and that was after we had been buffeted and bogged down for hours by a blizzard. On this day we received an emergency issue which proved to be a most welcome and palatable change of fare — rye bread which had been soaked in honey and partially dried to form an easily stored and transported form of iron ration. How well I remember any change of diet on the long road from Pinsk to Northern Siberia. I struggle sometimes to remember in sharp detail some of my experiences but small incidents concerning food come back to me clearly and unbidden. There was never enough of it and the thought of it nagged at us always. Men would have given a handful of diamonds for an extra slice of bread in these circumstances and counted themselves the most fortunate of beings, because only food had value. It was beyond price.
We were hit by three tearing blizzards in the course of our march. The first one, which struck towards the end of the first week was the worst because it was our first experience of the full fury of one of these freezing, high-velocity winds hurling with it a concentrated, driving weight of snow. The sky had been heavy, the clouds low and lead-grey, when we got under way soon after dawn, and the blizzard shrieked down on us about two hours later. It slowed the convoy almost immediately until we were creeping along, heads well down, at only a slow shuffle. It was almost impossible to open the eyes to it. The snow packed on our matted hair and beards, coated the lorries and the taut chains, mantled the soldiers exposed to it ahead and above us, crouched forward near their whitened machine-gun. The blizzard met us almost head on and its impact was such that I wondered how for the next few hours the leading lorry still succeeded in keeping the convoy crawling on. We found some kind of comparative shelter about two o’clock. This was the first time I saw the Russians wearing their bashliks, a larger super-type balaclava in a kind of camel-hair material, the use of which required a special order from the commanding officer.
The storm blew for the rest of the day and well into the night. We could light no fires while it continued. When it abated before dawn into thin flurries of snow we all, and this must include the soldiers too, felt at our lowest ebb. At dawn, looking like a collection of snowmen, we turned with desperate hope towards the field kitchen. The mute appeal was answered. The hot coffee came round. There was a bread issue.
Little opportunity existed for striking up any kind of friendship with one’s fellow sufferers. Everyone seemed preoccupied with his own troubles, grappling in his own fashion with the overriding necessity of keeping going. One man, however, I did get to know, because he was my partner on the chain, handcuffed at the same point and abreast of me. He was a young man, thick-legged, strong and with big, muscled shoulders. It was days before we spoke, although we had been taking stock of each other from the beginning. For my part, I liked what I saw and I think the feeling was reciprocated on his side. We talked first during an enforced stop to unshackle a dead man from a place on the chain just ahead of us. ‘They won’t kill me like that,’ he said quietly. ‘Me neither,’ I answered. ‘We’ll get there… wherever we’re going.’
His name, he told me, was Grechinen, and he came from Lublin. He was — although the description is a little too grandiose for the actual job — the stationmaster at a small station outside Lublin. In fact, he did what work was required almost on his own, including the portering. A boy of modest ambitions, content with his own small sphere of importance, happier working with his hands than carrying out the modest amount of clerical work that went with the title of stationmaster. The Russians came, and for no logical reason relieved him of his appointment and sent him to one of the motor transport stations they were setting up to deal with the repair of tractors. Grechinen, born a Ukrainian, was one of those who became Polish in the great Central European rearrangement of boundaries after the First World War. He was philosophical about his changed occupation. In fact he quite liked ‘messing about with tractors’.
Some of those tractors, Grechinen told me, were beyond repair, but he and his workmates nevertheless were expected to get them in running order to be sent back to the farms. Grechinen spent nearly a week on one of them and then watched it go with misgivings. One day he was called to the superintendent’s office and gravely informed that this particular machine had broken down soon after it returned to its farm. Grechinen, a stolid lad and slow to temper, said his piece forcefully and pointedly about the impossibility of turning scrap-iron into farm tractors.
Mechanic Grechinen was arrested and charged with sabotage. A few other charges were thrown in as well. His previous unexceptionable career as stationmaster supported the accusation that he had been a willing worker for the Polish police state and therefore an enemy of the people. Grechinen tried to explain, but no one took any notice, so he shut his mouth after the first interrogation and resolutely refused to say another word. ‘What can you say,’ he asked me, ‘to a crowd of bloody fools who ask questions and get mad at you because you won’t give them the answers they want?’ They manhandled him, pushed him round, yelled at him. Grechinen kept his mouth shut. They thought he was a bit simple in the head, and eventually stopped the treatment and put him on trial. He got off lightly with ten years hard labour.
When the sentence was announced, Grechinen was so surprised that he forgot his vow of silence. ‘Ten years!’ he exclaimed. ‘What for?’ The prosecutor jumped to his feet. ‘Oh,’ he said menacingly. ‘So now you start to talk.’ Grechinen shut his mouth again. He had kept silent, he said, until he met me. Talking in the wrong places, he warned me, could get a man into a lot of unexpected trouble. This, I realized, was advice from a friend. I thanked him. There was a strong bond between us for the rest of the trip. I liked honest Grechinen.
Somehow someone learned during the second week of the march that it was 24 December. Maybe a prisoner had guessed we must be near that date and had had the day confirmed by a guard. The news went up and down the long, struggling line like the leaping flames of a forest fire. It’s Christmas Eve, went the whisper from man to man. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, Grechinen,’ I said. Grechinen half-smiled through his cracked lips. ‘Christmas Eve,’ he repeated. Away back behind us there was suddenly a thin, wavering sound. It was odd and startling. It grew in volume and swept towards us. It was the sound of men singing, men singing with increasing power in the wastes of the Siberian wilderness.