Whenever the number of deaths increased to the point where the labor force was declining, they would bring in whole trainloads of new prisoners of war. The men would be dressed in rags, emaciated, and a good quarter of them would die within the first few weeks, unable to withstand the harsh conditions in the mine. The dead would be thrown into abandoned mine shafts. There was no way to dig graves for them all. The earth was frozen solid there year round. Shovels couldn't dent it. So the abandoned mine shafts were perfect for disposing of the dead. They were deep and dark, and because of the cold, there was no smell. Now and then, we would put a layer of coal over the bodies. When a shaft filled up, they would cap it with dirt and rocks, then move on to the next shaft.
The dead were not the only ones thrown into the shafts. Sometimes living men would be thrown in to teach the rest of us a lesson. Any Japanese soldier who showed signs of resistance would be taken out by Soviet guards and beaten to a pulp, his arms and legs broken before they dropped him to the bottom of the pit. To this day, I can still hear their pitiful screams. It was a literal living hell.
The mine was run as a major strategic facility by politburo members dispatched from Party Central and policed by the army with maximum security. The top man was said to be from Stalins own hometown, a cold, hard party functionary still young and full of ambition. His only concern was to raise production figures. The consumption of laborers was a matter of indifference to him. As long as the production figures went up, Party Central would recognize his mine as exemplary and reward him with an expanded labor force. No matter how many workers died, they would always be replaced. To keep the figures rising, he would authorize the digging of veins that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been considered too dangerous to work. Naturally, the number of accidents continued to rise as well, but he didn't care about that.
The director was not the only coldhearted individual running the mine. Most of the guards inside the mine were former convicts, uneducated men of shocking cruelty and vindictiveness. They displayed no sign of sympathy or affection, as if, living out here on the edge of the earth, they had been transformed over the years by the frigid Siberian air into some kind of subhuman creatures. They had committed crimes and been sent to Siberian prisons, but now that they had served out their long sentences, they no longer had homes or families to go back to. They had taken local wives, made children with them, and settled into the Siberian soil.
Japanese prisoners of war were not the only ones sent to work in the mine. There were many Russian criminals as well, political prisoners and former military officers who had encountered Stalins purges. Not a few of these men were well-educated, highly refined individuals. Among the Russians were a very few women and children, probably the scattered remains of political prisoners families. They would be put to work collecting garbage, washing clothes, and other such tasks. Young women were often used as prostitutes. Besides the Russians, the trains would bring Poles, Hungarians, and other foreigners, some with dusky skins (Armenians and Kurds, I should imagine). The camp was partitioned into three living areas: the largest one, where Japanese prisoners of war were kept together; the area for other criminals and prisoners of war; and the area of noncriminals. In this last there lived regular miners and mining professionals, officers and guards of the military guard detachment, some with families, and ordinary Russian citizens. There was also a large army post near the station. Prisoners of war and other prisoners were forbidden to leave their assigned areas. The areas were divided from each other by massive barbed-wire fences and patrolled by soldiers carrying machine guns.
As a translator with liaison duties, 1 had to visit headquarters each day and was basically free to move from area to area as long as I showed my pass. Near headquarters was the train station, and a kind of one-street town with a few shabby stores, a bar, and an inn for officials and high-ranking officers on inspection tours. The square was lined with horse troughs, and a big red flag of the USSR flew from a flagpole in the center. Beneath the flag was parked an armored vehicle, with a machine gun, against which there was always leaning a bored- looking young soldier in full military gear. The newly built military hospital was situated at the far end of the square, with a large statue of Joseph Stalin at its entrance.
There is a man I must tell you about now. I encountered him in the spring of 1947, probably around the beginning of May, when the snow had finally melted. A year and a half had already passed since I was sent to the mine. When I first saw him, the man was wearing the kind of uniform they gave to all the Russian prisoners. He was involved in repair work at the station with a group of some ten of his compatriots. They were breaking up rocks with sledgehammers and spreading the crushed rock over the roadway. The clanging of the hammers against the hard rocks reverberated throughout the area. I was on my way back from delivering a report to the mine headquarters when I passed the station. The noncommissioned officer directing the work stopped me and ordered me to show my pass. I took it from my pocket and handed it to him. The sergeant, a large man, focused a deeply suspicious gaze on the pass for some time, but he was obviously illiterate. He called over one of the prisoners at work on the road and told the man to read it aloud. This particular prisoner was different from the others in his group: he had the look of a well-educated man. And it was him. When I saw him, I could feel the blood drain from my face. I could hardly breathe- literally. I felt as if I were underwater, drowning. My breath would not come.
This educated prisoner was none other than the Russian officer who had ordered the Mongolian soldiers to skin Yamamoto alive on the bank of the Khalkha River. He was emaciated now, largely bald, and missing a tooth in front. Instead of his spotless officers uniform, he wore filthy prison garb, and instead of shiny boots, he wore cloth shoes that were full of holes. The lenses of his eyeglasses were dirty and scratched, the frame was twisted. But it was the same man, without a doubt. There was no way I could have failed to recognize him. And he, in turn, was staring hard at me, his curiosity first aroused, no doubt, by my own stunned expression. Like him, I had also aged and wasted away in the nine intervening years. I even had a few white hairs now. But he seemed to recognize me nonetheless. A look of astonishment crossed his face. He must have assumed that I had rotted away in the bottom of a Mongolian well. And I, of course, never dreamed that I would run across him in a Siberian mining camp, wearing prisoners garb.
A moment was all it took him to regain his composure and begin reading my pass in calm tones to the illiterate sergeant, who had a machine gun slung from his neck. He read my name, my job as translator, my qualification to move among camp areas, and so on. The sergeant returned my pass and signaled me with a jerk of the chin to go. I walked on a short way and turned around. The man was looking at me. He seemed to be wearing a faint smile, though it might have been my imagination. The way my legs were shaking, I couldn't walk straight for a while. All the terror I had experienced nine years before had come back to me in an instant.