I thought the soldiers would have been ordered to shout us down, but the mounting song reached us unchecked and engulfed us. I was singing and Grechinen was singing. Everybody who had a voice left was joining in. A marching choir of nearly five thousand male voices drowning their despair in a song of praise for the Child who would be born on the morrow. The song was ‘Holy Night’, and those who did not sing it in Polish sang it in the language in which they had learnt it as children. Then a few voices started the Polish Christmas carol, ‘Jesu’s Lullaby’, and I choked on it and fell silent. And half-way through it, others broke down and wept quietly. The Lullaby died abruptly and there was no more singing. Our hearts were full to bursting with the bitter-sweet memories of other Christmases.
Christmas Day came and went like any other of the dreary succession of marching days. We walked into our second blizzard and walked out of it. Grechinen and I between us supported the man directly ahead of him for hours during this second storm, calling on the guards to do something to help him. ‘He’ll manage all right,’ said one of them. He died barely half-an-hour before we reached the night’s stopping-place.
The soldiers were not always so indifferent to the appeals of exhausted prisoners, but it became clear that they were under orders to discriminate. The gasping, flagging, floundering older men from the original train party were never helped, in spite of the advice given out by the guards frequently before the start of a day’s march to ‘call out if you are taken ill’. We were reminded, too, that there were still with us specially-trained first-aid men, but I never saw them about their business.
Back at the assembly point near Irkutsk the train prisoners had been joined by a small crowd of Russians. They seemed to be nearly all youngish men and I suspect they were not, like us, political offenders but ordinary Soviet criminal types, consigned to Siberia to work out the expiation of their crimes. There were three or four of them on our chain and these were the only ones who were helped along on their journey. The procedure when a man began to stumble and fall about and mumble in his misery was for his nearest colleagues on the chain to call one of the walking guards. The name of the unfortunate was shouted ahead to the soldiers in the lorry. A list would be consulted. More often than not the sick man was out of luck. He was told to keep going and his friends heaved and strained to keep him on his feet until the next halt. I saw men collapse into the snow and cry to be unchained and to be allowed to lie down and sleep. It would have been release by death and they begged for it. But the soldiers pulled and kicked them to their feet and the awful struggle went on.
We were surprised indeed at what happened the first time one of the newcomers keeled over, his hand dragging at the chain. There were the usual shouts between the walking guards and the soldiers ahead. The list of names was brought out. The guards roughly hauled the man erect. There was a bit of heavy banter from one of the soldiers as the prisoner was unshackled. ‘You are a fine, strapping young fellow,’ he said. ‘We’ll give you a little rest and then you’ll be able to do some work for us later.’ The man was taken off to the lorry and helped up to join the soldiers. He rode with them for two hours or more and was then brought back to resume his place in the marching column. I suppose we should have been happy that one of our number had had his burden lightened, but, remembering the men who died unaided, we hated him and bitterly distrusted him. We never had anything more to say to a prisoner who had received the favour of a lift in the lorry. Our suspicions even went so far as to conjecture whether such men were planted among us as informers, although, in all reason, it would be difficult to imagine what reward could be offered for their services which would compensate for a winter trip through Siberia. The only discrimination by the military escort might possibly have been on the grounds of age — a quite practical expedient to bring through alive as many young men as possible — but I saw no Pole get a lift and we were not existing in conditions congenial to logical thinking anyway.
The days dragged on in much the same pattern through January. More and more we looked forward to the nightly halt, the fires, the bread and the hot coffee. Some of the old hands among the soldiers said we were lucky that this was not one of the worst Siberian winters, but it was as cruel and bleak as any weather I ever want to experience. The snowdrifts piling high along the track slowed us down increasingly each day. The occasions when we had to help get the lorries out of difficulties became more frequent until we began to wonder how long any progress at all could be maintained. The cold steel of the handcuff burned into my wrist. I was always cold, wet and wolfishly hungry. Stolid Grechinen plodded along beside me day after day. We said little but we derived strength from each other, from our mutual determination to see it through alive. Grechinen would go for days in silence but occasionally he would smile through his beard at me and I would give my own face-frozen smile back to him.
6. End of the Journey
IT MUST have been in the last week in January 1941, when we had spent over forty days on the march, that the third and most violent blizzard hurled itself out of the north and at last bogged down the lorries. The convoy had covered well over eight hundred miles from Irkutsk. We had crossed two great rivers, the Vitim first and, but a few days ago, the mighty Lena, both of them solid frozen and looking like broad smooth roads winding away on their long courses through the vastness of Siberia. After all this, it seemed incredible that the lorries would ever stop their slow thrusting northwards. With the dry, powdery snow thrown stingingly into their faces by the howling wind, soldiers and prisoners together worked to keep digging the leading vehicle out of drifts, but there came a time when no expenditure of human effort could prevail. The long line of trucks and men piled forward on itself and raggedly came to a standstill.
It had been the practice throughout the journey for the heavy duties of leading lorry to be taken in rotation. When the order was given for a change of leadership, the first driver would pull his truck out of line with his chained men behind and allow the rest to move past him, taking up position behind the last truck. The duration of duty at the head of the convoy depended on the type of road and the weather. Now we were on some kind of main road alongside which ran telephone poles, their wires sagging under the weight of the snow, but the advantage of being on a fair road was outweighed by its position on high ground completely exposed to the weather. Apart from the pile-up of snow it must have been almost impossible for the drivers to see ahead into the white wall of swirling snow.
The position of my group at this stage was fourth or fifth in line and it was here, almost alongside me, that the Commandant and his junior officers, after inspecting conditions ahead, got together for an anxious conference. Whether a complete forced stop had ever been envisaged I do not know, but these Russian officers were obviously a very worried lot. They talked, their backs to the wind, for a few minutes and then a signalman climbed precariously up one of the telephone poles and plugged in with a portable hand-set. He came down and reported. There were nods of rather taut approval and the officer group broke up to their various emergency duties. We stood around while a small patrol of troops struck off along the road ahead to reconnoitre for a sheltered place.
About half-an-hour after the breakdown the chains were unhooked from the lorries and the prisoners marched off ahead, crunching into the fresh snow, beating out a track and laboriously treading down the snow. The lorries crept after us. We struggled on for a mile until we came to the blessed haven of a belt of woods. Somehow we got the fires going, hundreds of them, and all through the raging night tended them for our lives. We felt the storm was trying to blot us out en masse. Prisoners dourly struggled and inched their way in towards the inner ring around the blazing timber. Some fools, ignoring advice that had been given since the start of the march, warmed their numbed hands close to the flames and then shrieked with the agony of returning circulation, beating their arms about and contorting themselves with the fierce pangs of it. Within range of the heat we kept turning ourselves about because the blizzard froze one’s back even while the fire was giving out some little warmth to hands, face and the front of the body. No one was allowed to sleep. Those in the inner ring who began to doze off were shaken roughly awake by their friends. To sleep, as we all knew, might mean no awakening.