Authors: Slavomir Rawicz
Anchor-man Kolemenos again posed us a problem. Straddling the top of the fence, our legs held firm, Makowski and I leaned head downwards and arms outstretched to haul at him, one arm each. Three
times we got his fingers to within inches of the top and three times we had to lower him down again. We paused, trembling with exertion and near-despair, and tried again. His fingers scrabbled for
a hold on the top, gripped. To our straining he began to add his own tremendous strength. He came up, up and over.
To beat the coiled wire at the foot of the fence we threw ourselves outwards, landing in a heap in the deep snow. One or two failed to leap quite clear and were scratched as they pulled
themselves away. We were in the patrol alley now between the two fences and time was running out. If I had heard the sound of the sledge dogs announcing the start of a patrol now, I think I might
have been physically sick.
We ran the few yards to the outer fence and this time shoved Kolemenos up first. We were probably making little noise, but it seemed to me the commotion was deafening. This time I was last up
and it was Kolemenos who swung me up and over. In a final mad scramble we leapt and tumbled over the last lot of barbed wire at the foot of the outer fence, picked ourselves up, breathlessly
inquired if everyone was all right, and, with one accord, started to run. Round my waist was tied the old sheepskin jacket. I tugged it free, dropped it and heard it slithering along behind me
attached to the thong looped on my wrist.
We gasped and choked and wheezed, but we ran and kept running, into the great forest among the looming, white-clothed trees. We ran south, with the camp at our backs. One and then another
stumbled, fell and were helped to their feet. The first headlong rush slowed to a steady, racking lope. We jogged along for hours, into the dawn and beyond it to another snow-filled day, our packs
bumping and pounding our backs as we went. When we stopped to draw air into labouring lungs, I made them start again. And I made them struggle on until about 11 a.m. when hardly one of us could
have moved another pace. I picked up the old sheepskin and held it under my arm. We looked round at one another. Paluchowicz was bent over double with his hands on his knees, his shoulders heaving,
fighting to get his breath back. Two of the others were squatting on their haunches in the snow. All of us were open-mouthed with wagging tongues like spent animals.
This place was a shallow, bowl-like depression where the trees grew more widely spaced. We had stumbled down into it and could not, without a rest, have attempted the slight climb out of it. We
stood there for about ten minutes, too breathless to speak and in a lather of sweat in spite of the subzero temperature. The snow still came down, thinning a little now, and there was a moaning
wind through the trees that made the gaunt branches shake and creak miserably. Like hunted animals we were all straining our ears for sounds of the chase. In all our minds was the thought of the
dogs. But there was only the wind, the falling snow and the stirring trees.
Up the slope to our left the trees grew more closely together. ‘We will get up there,’ I said, finally. ‘There is more shelter and we shall be better hidden.’ There were
groans of protest. Smith joined in, ‘Rawicz is right.’ So we laboured our way out of the hollow and picked on the broad base of a great tree as the location of our shelter. We scooped
the snow away down to the tree roots and cleared a space a couple of yards square. We built up the snow around into a solid low wall. Kolemenos cut branches with his axe and we laid them on top in
a close mesh, piling on more snow to complete the roof. It was a lesson we had learned the hard way in Siberia: Get out of the wind, because the wind is the killer. The old Ostyak had told me,
‘Snow? Who worries about snow? Just wrap it around you and you’ll sleep warm as though you were in a feather bed.’
Here it was that we had our first real look at the contents of our packs. Each man had a flat baked loaf, a little flour, about five pounds of pearl barley, some salt, four or five ounces of
korizhki
tobacco and some old newspaper. All this in addition to the dried ration bread I had managed to save. On the top of each pack were the spare moccasins we had made and the left-over
pieces of skin. We crawled into the little snow-house, all jammed closely together, and talked in low voices. There was a discussion as to whether we should smoke. We decided the additional risk
was slight and the benefit to jangling nerves great. So we smoked and lay close together in the warm blue fug of burning tobacco.
There was, this relatively short distance from the camp, no question of lighting a fire, so we wolfed some of our bread. And in so doing we made a discovery about Sergeant-of-Cavalry
Paluchowicz. He had not a tooth in his head. Eating this hard bread was agony to him. The only way he could cope with it was by soaking it – in this case, where there was no water, by
painstakingly kneading it with snow.
‘I had a nice set of dentures when they took me prisoner near Belystok,’ he explained. ‘Then those bastard N.K.V.D. fellows knocked them out of my mouth and they smashed on the
floor. They laughed at that trick but it was no bloody joke to me, trying to get my gums round that prison bread, I can tell you. First thing I do when we get to where we are going will be to treat
myself to another set of teeth.’
‘And have them gold-plated. You’ll deserve them.’ This from Zaro. We laughed, and Paluchowicz joined in, too.
We slept through the remaining few hours of daylight, only one man remaining awake at a time to keep a listening guard near the small opening. Kolemenos went off like a tired child and snored
gently and musically. No one had the heart to stir him for guard duty. The Lithuanian Marchinkovas roused us as the light outside began to fade. We ate some more bread, smoked one cigarette each
and crawled out. The snowfall had diminished to light flurries and the wind was getting up. It was very cold and we were stiff and sore.
All seven of us knew it was imperative that we should get clear out of the camp area as soon as possible. All through that second night we alternately ran and walked. The stiffness began to
leave me after about an hour but I acquired new aches as the bumping pack chafed my back. I swung it round at intervals and held it against my chest. Kolemenos found the axe in his waistband was
rubbing him raw, took it out and jogged on with it under his arm. It never seemed to be completely dark but the going was nevertheless difficult through two and three feet of crisp snow, the
undulations of the ground masked by close-growing trees. Near morning we crossed a frozen stream, steeply banked on the other side, and when we scrambled up and got away from it into the continuing
forest, we made our camp.
For the first four or five days we stuck to this night movement and daylight holing up. There was no sign of pursuit. Hopefully we decided that, our tracks having been well covered by the first
night’s snow, the hunt had probably been organized eastward as being the shortest and most feasible escape route. Cautiously we congratulated ourselves on the choice of the flight to the
south. We started to travel by day, advancing roughly abreast in a spread-out formation and making up to thirty miles a day. Watching the occasional watery sun, reading the sign of the moss growing
on the sheltered side of the trees, we held to an approximate course south. Several more ice-bound streams were negotiated and I judged they were all flowing southwards to drain into the great Lena
River. It was a time of hardship, of a constant battle against cold and fatigue, but our spirits were high. Most of all at this time we wanted to be able to light a fire and we spurred ourselves on
with the promise that we should have one as soon as we sighted the Lena.
After about a week of travel we began to sort ourselves out. The two regular soldiers, Makowski and Paluchowicz, kept close together. Marchinkovas, reserved and serious, but with an occasional
unexpected dry wit, was befriended by Kolemenos. Smith, now completely accepted as a kind of elder counsellor of the party, was my own particular companion. The buoyant, funloving Zaro, was
impartially friendly with everyone and moved happily from group to group. A rare fellow, this Zaro. I saw him, at the end of a gruelling day when we had to flog our aching muscles for the energy to
build the night’s hide-out, mocking at his own and our weariness by squatting down in the snow, hands on hips, and giving us a lively version of a Russian dance until Kolemenos was bellowing
with laughter, tears running down into his beard. Nothing could ever daunt Zaro. Of all the gallant jokers I had met, Zaro was undoubtedly the greatest. He taught us all that the grimmest twists of
life were not entirely humourless.
On this race to the Lena we had our first and minor hunting success. We caught and killed a sable which was floundering in the snow. About the size and general appearance of a weasel, it made
great efforts to get away as we ringed it, each of us armed with a birch club. It may have been injured. I don’t know. But one thud of Makowski’s club and it was dead. We skinned it but
had not yet reached the stage of hunger when we could bring ourselves to eat it.
On the eighth or ninth day the going was unmistakably easier. The ground was falling away in a long, gradual slope southwards. The bare earth between the trees began to show tufts of the typical
tough, rustling Siberian grass, there was more moss on the tree trunks. In the early afternoon the forest suddenly thinned out and we saw the Lena, ice-sheathed and well over half-a-mile wide, at
this point already a mighty waterway with still some 1,500 miles to run to its many-mouthed outlet into the Arctic Ocean. We stood, partially under cover, in an extended line, listening and
watching. The day was clear and sounds would have carried well, but all was silent, nothing moved. We were then about a mile from the nearest bank of the river on low-lying land which looked as if
it might be marshy when the ice broke up.
The American walked quietly over to me. ‘We’d better stay this side tonight,’ he suggested, ‘and cross over at first light tomorrow.’ I agreed. ‘We’ll
turn back and get well under cover.’ I signalled the others, jerking my arm back in the direction from which we had come. We all turned and started back, retracing our steps for about twenty
minutes of brisk walking. We built a shelter and, as darkness came on, we lit our first fire, setting it off with
gubka
moss and small dry twigs which we had carried for days inside our
jackets against our fur waistcoats.
The distance already travelled was not, in relation to what lay ahead, very great, but it represented to us a considerable early success, with the Lena as our first objective. Quietly, as the
wood smoke curled up into the upper branches of the trees and disappeared into the night, we celebrated with a hot dinner – a steaming
kasha,
or gruel, of water, pearl barley and
flour, flavoured with salt. Our only cooking pot was an aluminium mug of about one-pint capacity. We had a couple of crudely-made wooden spoons and the mug was passed around the circle, each taking
a couple of spoonsful at a time. When the first lot disappeared – and it went very quickly – we melted some more snow and made a fresh mugful. The Sergeant was allowed to soak his bread
in the gruel and we all congratulated ourselves on a magnificent meal. All night long we kept the fire going, the man on watch acting as stoker.
And so, in the half-light of the day’s beginning we silently crossed the Lena, mightiest river in this country of many great rivers, and came to the steep bank on the far side. There for
some minutes we stood, looking back across the ice. Some of the tension of the past weeks was already falling away from us. In all our minds had been the idea we might never reach the Lena, but
here we were, safe and unmolested. We could face the next stage with fresh confidence.
Inconsequentially someone started to talk about fish. It set me on a train of thought and memory. I told the others that in winter in Poland it was possible to catch fish by hammering a hole
through the ice.
‘And having made the hole,’ interjected Zaro, ‘what do we do next – whistle them up?’ No, I explained, the fish, stunned by the hammering, will be forced out
through the change of air pressure when the ice is broken through. The others laughed and bantered, congratulating me on my ability as a teller of tall tales. ‘All right then,’ I said,
‘let’s try it.’ Kolemenos went off and returned with a solid baulk of timber and we walked out about twenty yards on to the river ice. Kolemenos wrapped his arms around the
timber, Zaro and I took hold near the bottom to direct the business end and we started thumping away with pile-driver blows. Eventually we broke through. The water gushed up like a geyser, swirling
icily round our feet. And yes! There were fish – four of them, about the size of herrings. We swooped on them and picked them up. We were as excited as schoolboys. The others crowded round
me, slapping my back, and Zaro made a little speech of apology for having doubted my word. Then Smith, looking anxiously around, said we had better not play our luck too hard and should get moving
under cover again. We had a drink of the cold, clean Lena water and moved off.
We turned south again, climbed the river bank to the higher ground beyond and headed on the next leg of the journey with Lake Baikal as the immediate objective. The nature of the country ahead
was familiar, much like that through which we had marched to the westward to the logging camp. Here there were no great forests such as the one in which we had worked to the north, although trees
grew hardily at intervals and crowned the succession of rearing mounds and hill ridges. Stunted bushes and scrub defied the assault of winter and in most places the characteristic brown-green
sighing grass flourished almost luxuriously, dancing to the moaning whistle of the Siberian wind.
That first night across the river we spent the night in a copse of trees on a low hillock and lightly grilled our fish spitted through the gills on a skewer-pointed twig, ate sumptuously of this
our first fresh food, and finished up with more gruel.