War Girls Complete Collection Chapter 353

Chapter 20

T

he prison in Voronezh was only a way station. Several days after his trial ended, Johann was crammed into one of the so-called

Stolobinskiwaggons

and sent to a detention camp.

After a few days he was ordered, along with several hundred other prisoners, to a gulag, a hard labor punishment camp, in Vorkuta.

Please, God. Let this place be anywhere but Siberia.

It turned out that Vorkuta was right at the border with Siberia, west of the Ural Mountains. But that didn’t mean it was a better place, because it was located several miles north of the Arctic Circle. When one of the Russian prisoners told him those details, Johann’s bones turned to jelly. He wished he’d die right there and then.

A rifle butt against the back of his head made him change his mind and he trotted forward, boarding yet another train of horrors.

The Arctic Circle

. He closed his eyes in desolation

. Why are you doing this to me? Why? How have I deserved this?

In other circumstances, he might have cried. But after his violent breakdown in the prison cell, he simply didn’t have any emotions left. It felt as if his soul had left his body altogether, leaving behind a barely functioning empty shell. A human body devoid of sentiments. An automaton, really.

The journey to the far north into the icy Arctic wastelands took an entire week. With each passing day, his apathy and desolation increased. He was a dead man walking. Destined to languish in a gulag until the Soviets had squeezed every last ounce of manpower from his emaciated body. He’d never see home again.

In contrast to his first transport as prisoner years ago, this time they were given food and water every day. They were even allowed to step outside to pee when the train halted. It seemed the Soviets were actually interested in seeing that the passengers reached their destination alive.

Johann wasn’t sure whether this was a good sign. At times he longed for a quick release from his suffering and the next moment his will to survive stirred and he promised himself to hold on. Mostly, though, he slept through the journey. It might be the last time in years to receive sufficient sleep.

When they finally arrived at the camp in Vorkuta, he doubted his perception of reality. Certainly, he must be hallucinating it – a paradise created from his delirious mind. The vast lands were blooming in the brightest yellow and purple colors. The dark-blue sky overhead greeted him with a blinding sun burning down with surprising strength.

Had the train accidentally gone elsewhere?

But no, the entrance sign clearly said Vorkuta.

All the newcomers were put into barracks and were told they had one week to adapt to the climate and the conditions in the camp.

“Well, that’s an unexpected treat,” Igor, a Russian anti-communist from Johann’s transport, said in almost fluent German.

Johann nodded. It was nice. The first week fooled him into believing being there wouldn’t be such a horrible fate. The sun shone relentlessly, the rations were more generous than in his last camp and he had to do only light work. Unloading food, sweeping the barracks, peeling potatoes. Compared to Voronezh, this resembled paradise.

The honeymoon ended much too soon. By the beginning of week two, the newcomers were distributed to regular work details, mostly in the vast mines around Vorkuta. Johann was assigned to the coal mining detail.

“Name?” the leader of the work campaign asked him.

“Hauser,” Johann said.

“Sentence?”

“Twenty-five years.”

The other man laughed, baring a row of rotten teeth. “Don’t worry. Nobody has to live here for twenty-five years.”

“They don’t?” A rush of relief swamped Johann’s bones.

“No. You’ll die long before that.”

The sarcasm crushed him, making it hard to breathe. The work was excruciating and after he toiled ten hours loading hundredweights of coal onto train wagons with nothing but his bare hands, he only made it back to the camp with his new friend Alfred’s help.

Over the course of the last week Johann had made friends with two men who couldn’t be more different: the quiet and sly Igor, who was usually well informed, and a German called Alfred. Alfred was a unique specimen: a former boxer, whose body still looked the part. Despite starvation and overexploitation he hadn’t lost his natural determination to seek trouble.

Any brawl in the camp, and one could be sure Alfred was in the thick of it. It was almost as if he enjoyed getting punished. Johann’s initial response was to steer clear of the troublemaker, but he soon realized that even the criminal gang members in the camp respected Alfred’s brute force.

Johann flopped onto his bunk like a flour sack and only opened his eyes when Igor said, “If you don’t get up, someone else will eat your dinner.”

Dinner

? He’d all but forgotten that anything but work existed in this world. With aching bones he got up from his bunk and followed the others to the kitchen barracks for a bowl of disgusting soup and a slice of bread.

Thus passed the days in a cruel monotony of eating, sleeping, and working. Mostly working.

One day Igor said, “Did you know there’s a culture barracks behind the administration building?”

“A what?” Johann stared into his bowl, a fish soup. He’d been lucky that day and had found a morsel of fish in it. It was part of a fish head, but who cared?

“It’s some kind of library. We should go.”

“Pshaw… reading books? I have better things to do,” Alfred said.

Johann, though, was intrigued. “Do you think they have anything in German?”

“I doubt it,” Igor grinned. “But your Russian is quite good.”

It was, because he’d diligently practiced that skill the moment he’d found out that speaking Russian gave an invaluable advantage. It allowed him to communicate with the guards and other prisoners. Keeping exclusively to the German

plenni

was what most of his comrades did. But that proved to be a mistake, because the Germans were constantly harassed by the other nationalities.

“Maybe my speaking, but I can’t read the letters.”

“I’ll teach you.”

In the culture barracks they found several classics of Russian literature alongside Marx and Lenin. But the sight of a newspaper caused giddiness to take hold of Johann.

A real newspaper! A copy of the party paper

Pravda

meant news from the outside world. Like every prisoner he craved to know what was going on in the rest of the world. For the past years the

plenni

had been deprived of information. Hungry for news he grabbed the paper and with Igor’s help deciphered the headline.

“It’s too difficult. Can you read the rest to me?” he begged his friend.

Igor laughed good-naturedly. “Only if you promise to read two lines tomorrow.”

“Promise.”

Pravda

was full of communist propaganda. But with Igor’s tactful

translation

into the real meaning behind the words, Johann formed an image of the happenings in the outside world.

After several weeks he was able to read an entire article on his own. Having a link to the real world, even though only through propaganda news, gave him hope.

As the weeks passed, so did the summer. Up there, north of the Arctic Circle, the summer lasted six weeks and the winter ten months. Johann soon learned that an Arctic winter wasn’t something to look forward to.

One day, the prisoners were handed padded jackets and a

dokar

, a sheepskin worn with the woolen side against the body. They also received felt boots called

valenki

and fur caps.

This was much warmer clothing than Johann had ever possessed during his time in Voronezh during the harsh winters. It was ironic, but it seemed he’d freeze less up here in the Arctic. At least that was what he thought.

Throughout the next months, though, he was disabused of that idea. The thermometer fell steadily and reached temperatures Johann didn’t believe existed.

The work in the freezing cold became harder and ever more tedious. More than one of his comrades froze his fingers, toes, or nose. It started out with burning, itching, then nothing. The exposed skin became ghostly white and turned black when the affected man didn’t instantly counter the freezing by rubbing the skin with snow – a trick Johann had learned in his last camp.

In the evenings he often heard the harrowing screams of men who had their toes or fingers amputated by the imprisoned doctors without any means of anesthesia. The kindest thing a doctor could do was to knock out the patient with a punch to his head before operating.

Johann trudged on. On very cold days, he wore a

baschlyk

, a hood that was fastened at the neck and only left three small holes for eyes and mouth. While the

baschlyk

certainly helped to keep the worst cold away, it made working an agony.

Beneath the cloth, the sweat turned to ice, forming icicles around mouth and nose. Johann found it difficult to breathe the humid air, but on the other hand, breathing without the hood burned his lungs. There really was no good way to work under the extreme temperatures.

The native people did the only reasonable thing to counter the harsh conditions and rarely left their houses during winter. Like bears they hibernated, their lives reduced to the bare essentials. A luxury the

plenni

couldn’t afford. They were forced to work even through the worst of the cold.

Therefore Johann was quite surprised when one day a guard announced with an important expression, “No outside work today.”

“Why’s that?” Alfred said. “Surely not out of the goodness of their hearts.”

Despite his misery, Johann had to suppress a grin. “Surely not.”

“Because it’s too cold,” Igor said. “Below minus thirty it’s simply impossible to work outside.”

“Quiet!” the guard bellowed. “Your labor detail is assigned to repair all broken bunks in the barracks.”

Repair how

? Johann didn’t voice his concern. For now he was content with not having to go outside. Not that anyone would consider their barracks

warm

, and the

plenni

wore their padded jackets and sheepskins day and night. But at least it stayed above the freezing point inside.

The next day the guards asked for volunteers to bring wood logs to the commandant’s house. Johann wasn’t keen on extra work, especially not if it involved a two-mile walk through the white hell surrounding them.

Igor took him and Alfred by the elbows and stepped forward. “We will volunteer.”

“Are you crazy, you idiot?” Alfred hissed, readying his fist for a good brawl.

Johann jumped between the two men. It was too late to protest anyway. The guard had already jotted down their names on a list. Together with five other volunteers they loaded wooden logs onto a

panje

sled. Usually, a horse or a pack of huskies drew this kind of sled, but in the gulag, men replaced the animals.

Johann swore beneath his breath, promising Igor eternal wrath for signing them up for this goddamn mission. When they reached the commandant’s mansion, his eyes widened with awe.

It was a real house, made of concrete, no doubt by unfortunate prisoners. The guards fled inside and left the prisoners to do the work unsupervised.

When Johann first entered the storage room to unload and stack the wood, he couldn’t believe how warm it was. Combined with the hard work, the cold soon left his bones and he shed first the padded jacket and then the sheepskin. Even Alfred stopped grumbling and showed a grin on his bearded face.

After finishing their work, they settled against the stacked wood, waiting for a guard to come and tell them what to do next – though nobody was in a hurry to get going again. Simply sitting in the warmth was a joy they’d long missed. Meanwhile, the unforgiving wind had roared into a veritable snowstorm, rattling and jarring at the doors and windows.

One of the guards came to check on their progress and gave them wonderful news. “The storm’s too strong. We have to stay here for the night. You are allowed to sleep in the storage room.”

Igor rose to speak. “

Tovarish

, will we receive some food, please?”

It seemed the guard hadn’t thought about such mundane things as food for the prisoners, because he furrowed his brow and then shrugged. “I guess you should, right?” Then he turned to leave.

Nothing happened for a long time and the only sound Johann heard was the howling wind. But then the door opened, and an old Russian woman came inside. When Johann noticed the tray she was holding in her hands he wanted to fall to his knees and kiss her feet.

“The commandant ordered me to bring you food,” she said in Russian and put down the tray filled with delicacies Johann hadn’t tasted in years. Looking at the men she shook her head. “You’re much too skinny. I’d better get some more.”

The moment she vanished, eight men attacked the food like a pack of wolves. Johann’s mouth watered at the aromatic smell of a hearty stew. He sunk his spoon deep into the pot and dug out a piece of potato. Joy filled his heart as the heavenly taste and creamy substance of the stew filled his mouth, the hot liquid running down his throat and warming his stomach from within.

The stew was filled not only with potatoes, but also with chunks of meat, carrots, cabbage, and onions. It bore no similarity to the dishwatery soup they received at the camp. Within a minute the men emptied the entire pot and dug their teeth into thick slices of bread spread generously with butter – real butter.

The old woman looked quite surprised when she saw the pot emptied to a shine and not a morsel of bread left on the tray. She smiled at them and put down more food.

Kasha

, apples and sweet cakes.

“Bless you, good woman,” Johann said. This time the men savored the food, basking in the feeling of being full. Sated.

“Have you heard? A bunch of German POWs have been released,” Kurt said.

“We’re not POWs anymore, we’re convicted criminals,” Johann answered. “The Russians made sure of that with their phony trials.”

“But there were cases of sudden release even of those convicted to twenty-five years.”

“You dream on,” Alfred said. “As soon as it’s summer, I’ll escape.”

“What?” The four Germans plus Igor jerked their heads and stared at him.

“You heard me.” Alfred nodded, indicating this was his last word about the topic.

While Johann didn’t believe such an undertaking had any chances of success, he admired Alfred for being so daring. Himself, he’d come to terms with the imprisonment and accepted it as an unchangeable fate. If he had to spend his life in prison he might as well make the most of it.

Naturally, he hoped that one day he’d leave the place the Russian prisoners called

Devil’s Home,

but he was determined not to waste away and to enjoy his life within very limited boundaries.

Staying healthy was essential for his plan. Each day he made hot tea with Icelandic moss that he picked on his way to work. He learned to speak, read and write Russian, read the newspaper and classic literature, did gymnastics to stretch what remained of his muscles and minimize injuries, and found joy in the little things. Like sitting idly in a warm room with a full stomach.