TOWARDS the end of November 1941, four months after the general amnesty for Polish prisoners in Russian camps had been announced, when I knew that I should not survive until spring and when I had given up all hope of being released, I decided to go on a hunger-strike in protest.

 

Only six Poles remained in Yercevo of the two hundred who hadbeen there. Everyday dozens of them passed through on their way out from all the main sections of the Kargopol camp: Mostovitza, Ostrovnoye, Krouglitza, Nyandoma and the two Alexeyevkas. Yercevo seemed suddenly to have become empty for us, and it looked as if unless we died soon, we would share the fate of the “old Poles" from Ukraine, who had been cut off from Poland by the outbreak of the 1917 Revolution, and who, until the announcement of the amnesty, had considered themselves to be Russians. We now understood their bitterness when they learnt that the Polish-Russian pact also considered them to be Russians.

 

My hunger-strike was not so much an act of courage as a desperate step which had every appearance of common sense. I was in the final stages of scurvy, physically exhausted, and according to experienced prisoners I had only six months to live. A hunger-strike was something almost completely unknown in Soviet prison camps, and even in peace-time it was treated as industrial sabotage, punished with a heavy additional sentence or even with death; what is more, I could hardly expect my physical condition to be improved by a period of several days without any food or drink. I recognised all the arguments as well as did the friends who advised me against the step. But what finally decided me was the thought that when I came to die in a few months' time, it would be with the bitter knowledge that I had given in without a struggle. As long as parties of Poles still went out into liberty through Yercevo there was always a slight chance that I would remind the authorities of my existence by a gesture of self-destruction. I risked cutting my life short by a few months, but although even that decision demands a great deal of determination, yet the stake was too high for me to hesitate. A man who is buried alive and suddenly wakes in darkness does not think reasonably, but jerks his body and beats with bleeding fingers on the lid of the coffin with all the strength of his despair.

 

But it was not so easy to convince the other Poles of the necessity for action, and yet without their participation the hunger-strike would lose the moral force of a solid common effort. During several evenings in succession we met together in the corner of one of the barracks: M., an engineer; B., a teacher from Stanislawow; T., a policeman from Silesia; Miss Z., a bank clerk from Lwow; L., the owner of a saw-mill near Wilno, and myself. Their objections to my proposal wavered between exaggerated fear and undue hope.

 

"Not everything is lost yet, and a hunger-strike, as an offence committed after the announcement of the amnesty, will only serve to make our situation worse, and perhaps exclude us from the amnesty altogether. Besides, for all we know, they may still treat us as Soviet citizens despite the signing of the agreement in London, and you know that hunger-strikes and refusal to work are punished by death. But everything isn't lost yet, our lives are in God's hands. They surely can't keep genuine Poles like ourselves in the camp, and release people who until recently were denying their Polish nationality."

 

But they could, however, only too easily. The difficulty of our dispute lay in the fact that both sides had, of necessity, to use entirely irrational arguments. My friends believed in the justice of Divine decrees and in the force of international obligations; I believed in the possibility of escaping our fate by deliberately provoking it. On the evening of November 30th, when I had almost made up my mind to strike by myself if they would not, I went for the last time to our corner of B.'s barrack. The engineer M. sat, as usual, in the darkest corner of the lower bunk, resting his thin, ascetic face on his hands, and looking at me with tentative friendliness. The teacher B., formerly an officer of the reserve, who after the outbreak of the Russo-German war had been locked up in the camp prison and had only recently returned to Yercevo from the Second Alexeyevka, seemed to be looking for a way out of the situation in which he was placed, and was obviously avoiding my eyes. T. and L. played draughts with assumed indifference, and Miss Z., her hands folded across her stomach, was whispering a prayer. In the murky light of the barrack, they looked like a group of tourists lost in some rocky mountain cleft while darkness falls, who are ready to risk a dangerous attempt to escape if only their guide will take upon himself all responsibility for its success or failure. I stood before them, seized also with a sudden fear, not knowing what I should do.

 

"You must remember how I was denounced by Makhapetian," I said at last. "Which of you can be certain that he doesn't owe his prolonged imprisonment to equally absurd accusations which have been made against him by an informer? After the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939, German communists went on hunger-strike in a Moscow prison. And what happened? Of the six hundred who participated, five hundred-odd were released and repatriated, and the fact that I myself, towards the end of January, saw three of those who had been detained in Russia, surelyproves that not one was taken before a firing-squad."

 

These two arguments made an unexpected impression, and for a moment I was almost sorry that they had agreed so easily and so readily. But it was now too late to draw back, and we decided that M. should not strike with us as he had a serious heart disease, and he was also the only Pole in the camp besides us, the only man who could hope to be released and whom we could trust to take news of us out to liberty, in case our mutiny should end before an emergency war tribunal. The very same evening we handed in our bread ration and soup tickets at Samsonov's office, though we took the precaution of going there separately, at half-hourly intervals, and afterwards we were careful not to meet or talk in the zone. From the stories of Russian prisoners, we had learnt enough about the Soviet penal code to know that the slightest infringement of regulations is treated as the most serious offence if it has any appearance of an organised conspiracy. We had committed ourselves.

 

The days immediately preceding my decision to strike had taught me some curious things about myself. After the amnesty, when my release seemed to be only a matter of time, I had felt guilty and ashamed before my Russian fellow-prisoners because I was leaving the camp by the simple accident of being a Pole, and not as an ordinary prisoner, leaving it, too, to defend the regime which was responsible for their imprisonment and their suffering. But as the weeks passed without release, and the gates of the camp still barred my way out to freedom, I lost all my generosity and humanity.

 

Gradually, without admitting it even to myself, I began to hate the Russian prisoners with all my heart, from the very depths of my hopelessness, as if with invisible hands they were holding me back by my ragged jerkin, pulling me down into the quicksand of their own despair, to shut me out for ever from the light of day because their own eyes had for years vainly tried to pierce the obscure night of their existence. I became suspicious, peevish and boorish, avoided even my best friends, and received the expressions of their sympathy with unhealthy mistrust. This psychological condition drove me to my decision as much as any reasoning or sheer despair. I wanted to assert, with my own life if necessary, the existence of the right to an ultimate free choice, a right which they, the eternal slaves, would never have dared to claim for themselves. My behaviour was repulsive and humiliating to me, but I could not defend myself against it as a man cannot defend himself against his own nature. It was the greatest self-degradation of my life, this longing to be revenged on the other prisoners only because I was threatened with having to share for ever their accursed fate.

 

Among the six Poles who had joined together in a hunger-strike relations were developing badly. Despite the appearance of friendship and solidarity which a common struggle had created, we did not trust each other and waited only to see which of us would be the first to break down or betray the rest. In our fear of the trial before us, we suspected above all that the hunger-strike might for every one of us become the opportunity to gain freedom at the price of the others' lives. We were like a shipwrecked company, drifting in one lifeboat to some unknown destination; they are necessary to each other, for every pair of hands mans an oar, but not one of them can for a moment forget that every man in the boat must eat until the meagre food supply is exhausted. Although if I had struck alone, I would have forcibly isolated myself from the rest of the Poles in the camp, yet to strike together was to assume the dangerous character of an organised action. And, we wondered, what if one of us should break down? Would he save himself by incriminating the others, or would his failure help them to a quicker triumph? We were bound together as human destinies are on earth every move in the direction of freedom involved someone else's suffering. We saw so clearly what lies hidden in a human heart: the rare gift of nobility in moments of comparative safety, and the seed of failure to live up to it in the face of death.

 

It was our pettiness and our cowardice, not our courage, that held us together. We decided on common action only when that silent distrust could separate us irrevocably or weld us together. And in that atmosphere of tension, it was no accident that, when we shook hands in agreement on that gloomy November evening, we decided to exclude M. from the hunger-strike as a pledge of our honesty and good faith in this final test. A snowstorm was raging outside, and on the table by B.'s bunk the yellow flame of a candle-stump wavered uncertainly. M. accepted with a nod of the head, though a bitter little smile passed over his pale face.

 

When I returned from Samsonov's office to my barrack, I was greeted by silence. All the conversations round the table broke off suddenly, my nearest neighbours on the bunk edged away as if I were contagious, my friends avoided my eyes and answered my questions unwillingly. The news of our hunger-strike had already spread throughout the camp, arousing excitement and fear everywhere. The feelings of my Russian friends towards me must have

been as embarrassing as mine were towards them. When theamnesty was first announced, they had treated me with reserve,almost with dislike, for the prospect of my miraculous release was for them a break of prison solidarity. But the long months of waiting which followed, while I gradually lost all hope of freedom, had again brought them closer to me, though for the same reason 1 kept myself apart from them. I suspected that their sympathy for me was really the comfort which condemned men draw from the despair of others.

 

Their reactions to the news of the hunger-strike were equally complex. They were excited and fascinated by the very fact that we had dared to lift a hand against the unalterable laws of slavery, which had never been disturbed by one gesture of rebellion. On the other hand, there was the instinctive fear, which they had retained from their former lives, that they might be involved in something dangerous, perhaps a case threatened with a war tribunal. Who was to know whether the hearings would not reveal the "rebel's" conversations in the barrack immediately after committing the offence? Better keep away from him, at least until the Third Section takes up some definite attitude towards his unprecedented case. There were also other, more hidden, reasons for their attitude. Our hunger-strike was a revolt of foreigners. Its failure would prove once and for all that even the people "from over there" cannot force a hole in the prison wall which separates all Russia from the rest of the world.

 

But if the rebellion were successful, it would show only too clearly that even behind the barbed wire of the camps different laws exist for foreigners and for Russians. Our success would increase their despair, for in a situation without any solution it is better to be certain that there are no exceptions to the common fate. Nothing comforts a suffering heart so much as the sight of another's suffering; and nothing deprives one of hope so much as the thought that only a chosen few have a right to hope.

 

I was alone, then. Lying on my bunk, I looked round the barrack with a feeling of loneliness and fear. The prisoners were preparing for the night, whispering quietly among themselves and drying their foot-rags over the fire. Several were boiling, in small tin cans, potato peelings and rotten parsnips which they had collected from the rubbish-heap by the kitchen. The period of acute hunger and food shortage in the camp seemed to be never-ending, but it had reached the phase when we were almost indifferent to it. There comes a moment when the hungry man begins to suffer from the hunger of the imagination far more than from pangs in the stomach. His thoughts become filled with feverish visions of food, and his dominant feeling is panic, fear that his body will slowly wither away.

 

Then the possibility of cheating hunger is more important than a full stomach. Even snow seems to take on a solid consistency- it is eaten like porridge. Thus, though the most starving prisoners detested the actual taste of rotten vegetables boiled into a fluid mess, they looked upon the acquisition and eating of these scraps as exceptional luck, for it gave them the confidence that they were warding off, even momentarily, the inevitable end. Those evening meals were celebrated with quiet solemnity, and prisoners invited to share the contents of someone's bowl were honoured guests partaking of a magnificent feast.

 

In the sphere of human emotions there exists a strange phenomenon which is something more than mere habit, the almost suicidal condition of psychological indolence. I mean by this that at the very depth of human degradation there occur moments when every possibility of change, even change for the better, appears risky and dangerous. I have heard of beggars who look upon their benefactors with increasing suspicion if they receive more from them than the usual alms, a roof over their heads or work instead of a few pennies. Below a certain standard of life man develops a fatalistic attachment to his misery and treats with distrust any prospect of improvement; bitter experience has taught him that change can only be for the worse. "Leave me alone," he seems to say. "All I want is just enough to live on."

 

It is possible to draw from this the conservative conclusion that no one should be made happy against his own will, and this is accurate in one respect: happiness is never the same to him who receives it and to him who gives it. In the camp I almost believed that a man condemned to a certain fate should not rebel against it. I was astonished that night, as I lay on my bunk and looked at my fellow-prisoners with hatred, to find myself suddenly regretting my attempt to escape their life. It was easy to tell from their faces that few of them would live longer than a year, and yet I felt so much safer and less lonely as one of them, even in the face of death, than without them in this last struggle for life. There was some unperturbed resignation about these barefooted men with bristly faces flushed from the warmth of the flames, who sat over their pots, aimlessly poking the fire with pieces of wood, or else lay down on their bunks to wait for sleep, staring with exhausted eyes at the dim light of the bulbs. It was already quiet in the barrack; occasionally a prisoner crawled with difficulty from his sleeping place and, stumbling as if drunk, knocking aside the bare legs which protruded into the passage from all sides, walked over to the bucket of hvoya for a drink. The corner bunk where Dimka used to sit in silence was now empty our orderly had been sent to the mortuary. The night was approaching, I felt alone, dreadfully alone.

 

That night I did not close my eyes. I lay on my back on the hard bunk, with my hands folded under my head, and once more attempted to settle in my mind all that had happened. After

midnight the whole barrack was asleep, the bulbs became dimmer, and from all sides came the first nocturnal shrieks, babblings and sobbings. It was stifling, and like my neighbours I threw aside my jerkin and greedily inhaled the heated air. Closing my eyes, my imagination brought up the sound of carp plashing in the reeds of an abandoned pond; when I looked round I could see half-open mouths and rotting teeth, which gave out the sweetish odour of decay, discernible even at that distance, and the whites of eyes gleaming in dark sockets. Beyond the windows spread the white night, leaving the frosty imprint of leaves and ferns on the glass. The beams of light from the four corner searchlights, patrolling the night as usual, pierced the barrack at regular intervals, picking out sleeping faces from the half-darkness of lower bunks, and disappeared rapidly like swords cutting the soft curtain of the night.

 

Far more audacious than the hunger-strike, and far more dangerous, was our refusal to work. In Soviet camps it is known as "otkaz", and is one of the most serious offences against internal camp discipline. For example, the Kolyma camp, which is cut off from the rest of the world by ice and snow during most of the year, is ruled by a cruel regime of internal regulations which are not subject to central control, and there refusal to work is punished by immediate shooting; in other camps the offender is stripped naked and left standing in the snow and frost until he either submits or dies; in others yet, the first punishment is solitary confinement on water and two hundred grammes of bread a day, and if the offence is repeated, the prisoner goes through a second trial and is given a second sentence five years for criminal prisoners, ten years or death for politicals. In Yercevo "otkazchyks" with a second sentence were after a few months taken away to the central prison beyond the zone, and we never knew what became of them. But from time to time, we heard the echoes of machine-gun and rifle fire from beyond the zone, and we had good reason to believe that they came not, as we were told, from the camp garrison's shooting range, but from the walled-in courtyard of the central prison. After the outbreak of the Russo-German war the camp authorities did not attempt to conceal from us the fact that new regulations had come into existence which gave the extraordinary powers of war tribunals in practice power of life and death over the prisoners to the "people's courts" in villages near labour camps. The example of the drunken sceptic in the technical barrack proved this sufficiently.

 

Among the gravest offences which could be committed in the camp after June 22nd, 1941, were the spreading of defeatism and refusal to work, which, under the new defence regulations, was included in the category of "sabotage of the war effort". There remained only the vital question of how far the Sikorski-Maiski pact exempted the Poles from the mechanism of Soviet martial law. On this thin thread hung the whole success or failure of our hunger-strike, and I knew that the first hours of the day which was dawning beyond the opaque glass of the windows would give us the full answer to the question. In the pros and cons of our enterprise it was the only unknown quantity, and it would decide whether the sign of equation would point toward us like rifles aimed at our hearts or stand like the open double gates of the camp.

 

Towards morning I fell asleep so heavily that I slept right through reveille and was only woken by a sharp tug at my ankle. Zyskind was standing by my bunk and with a gesture of the head ordered me to come with him. I climbed down from the bunk, put my cap on, tied my jerkin into a bundle with a piece of string, and followed him out of the deserted barrack into the zone. Outside, orderlies were shovelling the snow away from barrack doors, broad sweeps of smoke issued from the kitchen chimneys and the bathhouse and, spreading over the roofs, bounced off the eaves like rolled-up pieces of paper tossed into the air. The water-sledge rode slowly from the kitchen towards the gates, carrying an empty barrel with Kola, the watercarrier, sitting astride it and prodding his frost-rimed bay with a juniper twig. When he saw me walking with Zyskind he turned round as if to shout something, but after a moment bent over the reins again, tugged them towards him, and hit the horse with the twig. Several sick prisoners were already waiting by the dispensary. The morning was frosty, dry, and sharp. It was the first of December.

 

Instead of going directly to the internal camp prison, I had to accompany Zyskind while he went round the barracks where the other hunger-strikers lived, and then the six of us walked together to Samsonov's office. He saw us individually, but the interviews were identical. He sat at his desk, behind him on the wall a large map of the Soviet Union, large portraits of Stalin and much smaller ones of Beria, graphs of the production scheme and a plan of the camp; he looked at me calmly from under his fur cap, his reproachful, almost fatherly expression betrayed by occasional flashes of hatred.

 

"Who told you to strike?"

 

"No one. It was my own decision."

 

"Why are you striking?"

 

"I ask to be released from the camp in accordance with the terms of the general amnesty for Polish citizens imprisoned in Russia, or else to be allowed to communicate with the Polish plenipotentiary to the Soviet Government."

 

"Have you heard of the special tribunals which in wartime can

shoot prisoners for refusing to work? Do you know that a hunger strike is rebellion against Soviet authority and Soviet law?"

 

"Yes, I know."

 

"Sign this declaration to say that you do know."

 

"I won't sign anything. From the moment that the Soviet-Polish agreement was signed in London; I have been the citizen of an allied country, and I owe no allegiance to Soviet law."

 

"Silence! Zyskind, lock this Polish bastard up!"

 

Zyskind ran energetically into the room, crying "Yes, Citizen Chief," and led us outside in front of the barrack. The first hearing was over. We looked at each other in silence, but with relief on our faces, and only Miss Z. went pale, her teeth chattering, while B. wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.

 

By nine o'clock we were all in the camp prison, each in a separate cell. The internal prison of Yercevo squatted like a hen-roost by the observation-post in the corner of the zone. It was a small house, with barred windows the size of a human head, and surrounded by a barbed-wire fence so that no doubt might exist that this was the prison within a prison. Prisoners usually avoided it, walking round it at a distance, not even looking in the direction of those grey stone walls, pierced by openings which seemed to breathe out a cold dark emptiness. But sometimes shouting and singing could be heard from the prison, and then prisoners would step on the path, with their backs to its walls and facing the barracks so as not to awaken suspicion and listen in case those inside were asking for something. The internal prison housed those punished for minor offences committed in the zone, and those who were to be transferred, with a heavier sentence, to the central prison beyond the zone, which was also used for the free citizens of Yercevo.

 

One of every prisoner's most cherished dreams was of escape from the torture of daily work in a labour camp to the blessed idleness of a normal prison, but conditions in the two Yercevo prisons were such that it was indeed a heavy punishment. A prisoner in one of them received only water and 200 grammes of bread a day; the windows in the small cells had neither glass nor even a board over them, so that the temperature was never higher than outside; finally, the prisoner could take with him into the prison only the things in which he went out to work if he was fortunate enough to possess a palliasse or a few horse-blankets, he had to leave them in the barrack. In some cases, too, the punishment of solitary confinement was limited only to the nights the prisoner went to work in the daytime as usual, but in the evening, he came from the guardhouse straight to the prison and received for this only the "penal" cauldron, 300 grammes of bread and two platefuls of the thinnest soup. The prison therefore was a dreaded punishment, and sometimes prisoners there wept like children, promising good behaviour only to get out.

 

The window of my cell looked out on the zone, and pressing my face to the cold bars I could see some of the barracks, the kitchen and the bathhouse. In the neighbouring cell, on my right as I faced the window, was the Silesian policeman T., a simple and honest man who for reasons unknown to us concealed his real name and profession in the camp, where he passed for a miner, and who was one of the best foresters in the whole of Yercevo. T.'s cell adjoined that of Miss Z., and the other two hunger-strikers were beyond her.

 

On my left was Gorbatov, an electro-technician from Rostov, who was in solitary confinement for insulting a free official in the Yercevo electricity plant. T.'s window, beyond the corner of the prison building, commanded a view of the road leading from the camp to the town, and he could see a few of the houses in Yercevo and the fork of the road which led to the central prison.

 

My cell was so low that I could touch the ceiling with my hand, and so narrow that with one step I could walk from the wall of T.'s cell to that of Gorbatov's. Half the space was taken up by a two- tiered bunk, made of rough, unplanned wood nailed together, and turned with the head towards the window. It was impossible to sit on the upper bunk without bending one's back against the ceiling, and the lower one could only be entered with the movement of a diver, head first, and left by pushing one's body away from the wood, like a swimmer in a sandbank. The distance between the edge of the bunk and the bucket by the door was less than half a normal step.

 

After some deliberation, I chose the upper bunk, even though a bitter wind blew in continually through the open window, piling up a thin layer of snow on the ledge. I thought that if I walked

backwards and forwards, as one does in a prison cell, on a scrap of bare earth measuring a step by half a step, I should soon go mad. I could communicate with both my neighbours through the red-brick walls, and not only by the usual prison method of a knocking alphabet, but even in a loud whisper through chinks in the wall where fragments of dried cement had fallen out. Before going off to lunch, Zyskind once more tested the lock on the door. The key turned in the lock, the judas was raised for a moment, and then the quiet tread of felt boots receded, leaving us in dead silence.

 

The first day I spent looking round my cell and out at the zone through the tiny window above the bunk. It was strange to look at those other prisoners, hurrying to their barracks, stopping on the paths, greeting each other from a distance: I could almost believe that they were free men. But I did not envy them. After so many months of life in a large herd, solitude was again, as before in the hospital, a fresh and reviving feeling. I was terribly cold, but I did not feel any hunger. Somewhere at the bottom of my consciousness was a small spark of pride, as if I had already gained my freedom with difficulty. Thousands of men all over the world fight for various causes, without knowing that even the possibility of defeat, if it can only assume the character of martyrdom, becomes conquest and glory. Men defeated in a lonely struggle for something in which they believe, willingly take upon themselves the burden of martyrdom as the bitter reward of their solitude. But unfortunately, there are very few whose physical endurance can live up to the strength of their determination. On the very first evening of my imprisonment, when the bulb was lit in my cell and I heard the usual sounds of mess-cans and pots tinkling in the zone, I was suddenly seized by hunger and fear, and from that moment, even though I refused all drink, I passed water several times every day and night until the end of my hunger-strike.

 

That night I slept badly, waking frequently, and my dreams were so puzzling, disconnected and intangible that with the greatest effort I could not recall them even a moment after waking. Shivering with cold, I squeezed myself into a corner of the bunk, as far as possible from the window, with my legs drawn up to my stomach, my head almost entirely covered by my jerkin, and my hands in its sleeves. In this position I could lie on one side only for an hour at a time, but because it seemed the most sensible, and because it protected me best from the wind, I did not change it during the whole time that I stayed in prison.

 

The next morning the hunger had receded, but the feeling of loneliness grew. I climbed down from the bunk and for a few minutes walked about on the small space of floor to warm myself, beating my hands against my sides. When at last I felt my blood running faster through my numbed limbs, I knocked on the wall of T.'s cell.

 

"How do you feel?" I asked.

 

Behind the wall I heard a loud noise like the falling of a body, then a gentle scratching at the cement, and finally T’s calm voice ; "Bloody cold, but I'm managing. And you?"

 

"I'm all right. What about the others?"

 

"They don't answer."

 

I stepped across to the other wall and knocked.

 

"How long have you been here, Gorbatov?"

 

"Five days. And as many more to come."

 

"How is it going?"

 

"I'm starving. The scrap of bread they give you here. You're mad to try this hunger-strike, you won't last out."

 

"That's none of your business, Gorbatov."

 

I sat down again on the edge of the lower bunk, looking aimlessly at the bucket. Gorbatov turned out to be more sociable than T. He knocked on the wall:

 

"Do you know who I've got next to me?" he asked.

 

"Well?"

 

"Three nuns, being punished for their faith."

 

"Impossible!"

 

"It's true, I can hear them singing and praying. I tried to talk to them, but they won't answer. Virgins, you see." He laughed, and at once choked with a fit of coughing.

 

Vaguely, as through a mist, I remembered the story of the three nuns of Hungarian origin, which had been whispered about in the camp though none of us had ever seen them. It was said that they had been sent to Yercevo prison with a transport from Nyandoma, where they had been imprisoned since 1938. They had worked well until the autumn of 1941, when one day they suddenly refused to leave the zone in the morning, saying that they would not "work

for Satan". The prisoners in Yercevo discussed their case frequently, but in October the whole affair seemed to die down, and I was certain that the three nuns had either been dead for a long time, or else were in the central prison. The severity of martial law gave to their mysterious madness the character of certain suicide. T. knocked again.

 

"What's that dripping in your cell? Roof leaking?" he asked.

 

"No, I was making water."

 

"Why, are you drinking?"

 

"No."

 

"Well, then, what's the matter? Frightened already?"

 

"No, I must have a sick bladder."

 

T. laughed and said something else, but I had taken my ear away from the crack. For a long hour I stood in silence leaning against the bunk, feeling my former assurance vanishing and giving place to anxiety, and seeking escape in the contemplation of my daring and ambition. There are moments in the life of every man, particularly after periods when his self- confidence has been inflated by the audacity of his plans and actions, when his legs seem to melt under him and his only desire is to escape, to fly without looking back.

 

"Do you know who's in here with us?" I asked T.

 

"Who?"

 

"Those three nuns who won't work for Satan."

 

"Still here? What do they want?"

 

"It's their martyrdom for the faith," I replied without thinking, not even realising then that I had borrowed the phrase from Dostoevsky.

 

"Just like ours," he answered calmly.

 

"You're exaggerating, we only want our freedom," I retorted, and immediately knocked on the other wall again.

 

"Hey, Gorbatov, give our love to the three little nuns from the starving Poles."

 

"Have you gone mad? I want to get out of here some time! Quiet, it's Zyskind."

 

I heard steps on the path in front of the prison and the opening of the main door. Zyskind walked along the corridor for a while; finally, the key turned in the lock of my door. He came inside, and without a word placed a whole ration of bread on the upper bunk. He must have done the same thing in the other cells, for I heard the turning of the key and the regular slamming of doors receding down the corridor. I looked at the fresh bread for a long time, but I felt no hunger; and although Zyskind brought me a fresh ration every day at the same time, I greeted his visits with increasing apathy, and the pile of bread grew on the bunk, untouched.

 

In the evening the door of my cell was again opened. Someone was kicked inside through the door, rolled across the floor like an enormous rag ball, and disappeared in the lower bunk. After about a quarter of an hour the door opened slightly, and Zyskind pushed through first a plateful of steaming soup, then a slice of bread, on the floor. The unknown prisoner jumped up, hit his head on the bottom of the upper bunk, swore, and threw himself on the floor.

 

He ate loudly and greedily smacking his lips, gulping down the hot fluid and rapidly crushing the bread in his jaws. This went on for more than a minute, and then I heard the familiar sound of a tongue licking round the plate, the clang of the empty tin dish thrown on the floor, and an animal grunt of satisfaction.

 

I suddenly felt the sickly taste of a lump of phlegm in my throat, beads of sweat on my forehead, and a weakness in my whole body like a total loss of consciousness. When I came to, the other was already asleep, snoring and breathing out with a penetrating whistle, and muttering in his sleep. In the morning, he was taken away to work, and in the evening brought back again to my cell. And though we spent five nights together we never exchanged a word, and I did not even once see his face. When he ate, I lay on my bunk, seeing only a foot of earth by the door and the bucket, and when he went out in the morning, I was either asleep or pretending to be. In the dark light of the evening, I saw only for a fraction of a second the cowering crumpled shape of his body, pushed inside with a violent blow which sent him sprawling straight into his bunk. I knew that his function in my cell was that of a tempter, but I became attached to him, for in the stream of time which dragged mercilessly slowly he was the only stable point on which I could fix my starved imagination.

 

On the fourth day of hunger, I was so weak that I could only with difficulty climb down to use the bucket, and the rest of the day I spent without movement on my bunk, dozing restlessly even in the daytime. This feverish, broken sleep brought me a certain relief, a full taste of my loneliness, but it also put me in a strange state of fear and gradually robbed me of all feeling of reality. I was neither hungry nor cold, but I would wake up suddenly to find myself shouting, not knowing at first where I was and what I was doing there. In my rare moments of consciousness, I tried in vain to recall my life until that moment, perhaps to draw consolation from a last glimpse of the face which had once borne my name, the man that I had been. I realised vividly as never before the sadness and bitterness of dying, and experienced the process of detachment from one's own personality which is surely the most terrible aspect of death and the one which most disposes to religious conversion. What is left to a man if he does not even believe that somewhere, when his time on earth is up, will occur the miraculous fusion of a body which has been abandoned on the hard planks of suffering

with the purpose of life which leaves it as the blood flows from the veins? At those moments I regretted the fact that the camp had hardened me so that I could no longer pray; I was like a barren, parched desert rock which will not stream with living water until it is touched by a miraculous wand.

 

About midday the door opened and a high-ranking officer of the N.K.V.D. whom I had not seen before walked in, in a uniform crossed by a belt, an unbuttoned leather coat and a red-and-blue cap with a gilded Soviet emblem. Samsonov was looking into the cell over his shoulder, in a fur cap and with his fur greatcoat buttoned up to the neck.

 

The unknown officer opened his overcoat and I could see his hand resting on his revolver holster. "Name?" he asked sharply.

 

With difficulty I raised myself on the bunk and slowly pronounced my name, but suddenly I imagined that I saw the officer unbuttoning the holster and taking the black, gleaming handle of his revolver into manicured fingers. My heart beat faster, and all my blood seemed to rush into my unbearably overfilled bladder. I closed my eyes, and heard the next question like the explosion of a bullet:

 

"Will you stop this strike?"

 

"No," I answered, shouting hastily and desperately, "no, no!" and fell back on the bunk, drenched with sweat, while my bladder collapsed like a pricked balloon.

 

"War tribunal for you!" I heard as if in my sleep. The cell door slammed shut again.

 

I have no idea how long I slept then but it was already dusk when violent knocking on T.'s wall woke me up.

 

"Miss Z. fainted," he said quickly, "they've taken her to the hospital."

 

"And the others?"

 

"I don't know. The communication has broken down because her cell is empty, but I heard many steps in the corridor. I thought that you'd been taken off too, I've been knocking for an hour. Did they threaten you?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Are you holding out?"

 

I thought for a while and then answered: "Yes."

 

Towards evening Zyskind brought me the daily portion of bread, and instead of leaving without a word as usual, he pressed a scrap of paper into my hands. I crawled over the bunk nearer to the bulb to read the message. It was from B.: "We are all three in hospital. Stop the strike. It won't get you anywhere."

 

I read it out to T., but he only swore when he heard it. With a feeling of relief I curled up to sleep again, while the other prisoner burst noisily into the cell and greedily threw himself on his soup.

 

The next morning, I awoke with a strange feeling that I was choking. I caught the air into my lungs with difficulty, my hands and legs seemed to be bursting out of my clothes and hanging out in rolls of flesh, and my whole body felt as if it was firmly tied down to the bunk. Without changing my position, I raised one hand before my eyes and found it so swollen that the wrist joint had disappeared under a layer of flesh, and two soft, fat cushions had formed on either side of the hand. I sat up slowly and looked at my feet, which were bursting out of my rubber shoes above the ankle.

 

So, it was true: one did swell from hunger. I unlaced my shoes, freeing my feet from the straps, and with difficulty I began to unpick the seams of my thickly wadded trousers. Every movement was a piercing streak of pain, for I had to tear the cloth away with the crust of dried blood and pus, but I did not stop until I saw my two legs naked, red blocks covered with open sores from which a yellow-pinkish fluid trickled slowly. I felt the legs as if they were not mine the finger plunged into the soft dough of flesh and bounced off as from an inflated rubber tyre. But to pull off my jerkin I had to get down from the bunk, and when the whole operation was accomplished, I sat down on the floor exhausted, with my back against the wall. Now I could swell freely, I had enough living space. I was not even cold, I felt only sick and giddy. And without noticing it I fell asleep with my head on the cushions of my knees, soft and wet with blood.

 

It cannot have been later than four in the afternoon, for the light still streamed in thinly through the window, when I heard not so much a knocking, as a violent noise, from Gorbatov's cell. Without changing my position, I knocked back and listened.

 

"They've just taken the nuns away; I'm going out this evening. All the best."

 

I crawled across the floor to the other wall.

 

"Look through your window. They've just taken the nuns."

 

"Right," answered T. 'I’ll knock later and tell you."

 

I waited, full of incomprehensible excitement and apprehension. My head weighed on me like a ripe pumpkin, the sores on my legs had dried while I was asleep but were itching so mercilessly that I began aimlessly to pick at them, playing with the thin scabs. I was stifling and I felt my bladder burning again, but I had not the strength to get up. I felt a hot wave flowing through my trousers and saw a small puddle forming on the floor.

 

T. was knocking. "I saw it."

 

"Tell me what happened."

 

"They took them out beyond the zone, towards the central prison. I couldn't see very far, it's dusk already."

 

"What did they look like?"

 

"Quite ordinary. Three women with inhumanly tangled hair. Still young, I should think."

 

"Large escort?"

 

"Two guards with bayonets."

 

"Tell me some more. How did they walk?"

 

"Quite normally. I didn't see anything else, it's almost dark beyond the zone. Good night."

 

I climbed up into the bunk, cutting my legs on the rough edges of the planks and squeezed into my corner. I lay motionless while Zyskind brought the bread, while the ragged body tumbled into the cell and ate its beastly meal on the floor. Time passed quickly now, for I had fallen into a state of sleep-sodden, oblivious numbness. It must have been near midnight when I heard three salvos from the direction of the shooting-range. Like the flash of the shot itself, my brain registered the fact before I was plunged in darkness again.

 

The next day Dr. Loevenstein, who came to see me in the prison during Zyskind's absence, did not attempt to conceal the truth from me:

 

"My friend, your heart is quite healthy, but the healthiest heart cannot go on for long pumping blood to legs as rotten and diseased as yours. I advise you to give up your illegal hunger-strike" here he smiled gently "and to return to the lawfully prescribed hunger. You will live three months in the peace and warmth of the mortuary, and during that time things may, after all, take a turn for the better."

 

I shook my head in answer. I was feeling better now, I even climbed down to see the old doctor to the door. But that night the seventh of the hunger-strike, my sixth in the prison I felt a sharp pain in my heart and I was suddenly frightened. There is nothing worse than fear without an object, fear of something unknown; a mysterious presence seemed to be lurking everywhere by my side, at my feet, in my heart itself. The other man stirred in his sleep underneath me and sighed deeply, and this gave me back some of my self-assurance; but as soon as he was quiet again, I suddenly fancied, I don't even know why, that he was dead. I slipped quickly down to the ground. I knocked hard and dreadfully long a whole eternity on T.'s wall, convinced all the time that at the distance of an outstretched arm a dead body was lying on the bunk, afraid to turn my back on it for even the shortest moment, until I felt something sticky trickling between the fingers of my clenched fist and stopped knocking. There was no answer. Could he be dead too? I was gathering my breath for a last desperate shriek, as if I wanted to shout out all the agony of my fear of death, when by my side I heard first a knocking and then the question :

 

"What's the matter?"

 

"You're alive! Thank God!"

 

"I don't feel well, I'm weak . . ."

 

"Let's give up the strike, we lost anyway when the others gave in. The nuns have been shot."

 

"No. I won't," he answered with unexpected force.

 

I did not stir from my place. But when the body on the lower bunk sighed again and shouted something, I fell asleep heavily, and for the first time in many weeks I slept with a feeling of calmness and peace.

 

On the evening of the eighth day the unknown prisoner did not appear as usual, but Zyskind opened the door and told me to get ready to come out.

 

"Where to?" I asked.

 

"The guardhouse."

 

In the corridor I waited while Zyskind called out T. When he came out, I looked at his swollen face, and I saw in his stare the effort and the difficulty with which he was recognising my familiar face.

 

"I suppose this is the end?" he asked quietly.

 

I shrugged my shoulders. "I don't know. There aren't any guards."

 

At the guardhouse, in the presence of an officer from the Third Section, we signed the text of a telegram to Professor Kot, the Polish Ambassador then officiating in Kuibyshev, and then, still escorted by Zyskind, we set off for the small hospital which had recently been opened at the other end of the zone. We walked supporting each other, yet lightly, as if we could take off from the earth at any moment. Thick snow was falling, covering the barracks up to their lighted windows. It was quiet, empty and peaceful.

 

In the hospital our lives were saved by the silent "old Pole'' from the Ukraine, Dr. Zabyelski, who, contrary to explicit instructions, gave us each two milk injections instead of the usual bread and soup. Thanks to them, we avoided instantaneous and fatal cramps of the intestines, and on the next evening, having eaten my first solid food for nine days a plate of thin boiled barley I went out to the latrine. In the small, hastily erected closet, with only a few planks in place of a door, I suffered the worst physical torments of my life, as the stone-hard turd, which my thirsting organism had sucked dry of all its juices during eight days of hunger, forced its way through my guts, wounding and tearing them until the blood flowed. I must have been a sorry sight, crouching over a frozen plank, my jerkin blowing in the wind, looking out at the snowstorm which blew over the plain, with eyes full of tears of pain and pride.

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Copyright: Herling family

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