Forty Days at Kamas (23 page)

Meanwhile, spring arrived late to the Kamas Valley, as had been its pattern for the last dozen years. Snow and freezing rain continued almost daily for most of the month, with the last big snowstorm taking us by surprise on April 24. Gradually temperatures rose, the snows thawed, and the mud deepened. In late April our heavy winter coveralls and insulated winter boots were exchanged for thinner summer coveralls and standard–issue army boots. For the first week after the switch, the frosty mountain nights made it more disagreeable than ever to crawl out of bed in the morning. But as always, we adjusted.

Although food rations had not changed, the milder temperatures meant that we needed less energy to stay warm. Yet none of us gained weight because the reduced numbers of men on each work team since the transfer meant that each of us had to work harder to meet our weekly quotas. The failure to improve living conditions and the fear of reprisals and the lack of hope led to another outbreak of suicides during the last week in April.

It was a time of intense vigilance among both Jack Whiting's stoolies and Gary Toth's stoolie hunters. Every day Whiting and his staff summoned selected prisoners from the barracks, the dispensary, worksites, mess halls, and bathhouses for discreet meetings. There they offered cash, food, tobacco, and easier work assignments to entice new informants to report on their fellow prisoners. Those who refused were threatened with the isolator, beatings, transfers north, and even reprisals against family members outside the camps.

At the same time, Toth's counter–intelligence squads followed these same prisoners wherever they went, interrogated them after each suspected contact, and warned them of dire consequences if they informed on their neighbors. Every week brought the discovery of another suspect whom the vigilantes had stabbed, smothered, or garroted. Among these was the genial medical student from Atlanta, Dennis Martino, who had left the isolator too weak to withstand the Wart’s relentless pressure.

An important consequence of the strikes had been the further polarization of the camp population along partisan lines. Those who pledged their loyalty to the Unionist Party went out of their way to distance themselves from the rebels in camp. Those who opposed the Party lost no opportunity to remind fence sitters of our sufferings at the Unionists' hands.

Many rookie prisoners joined the ranks of the hard–liners during April, having shed in March any remaining illusions about the nature of the labor camp system. D.J. Schultz was among the new converts to vigilantism. For this he sacrificed his close friendship with Jerry Lee. But even moderates like Pete Murphy and Chuck Quayle, who had belonged to the delegation that settled the first strike, hardened their stance after the second strike was crushed. Only devoutly religious prisoners from persecuted sects like the Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orthodox Jews, and Seventh Day Adventists, together with a few New Agers and secular humanists like Al Gallucci, managed to steer a clear course between the opposing political camps.

One of the few post–strike events on which both sides shared a common interest was the announcement that the Department of Justice had appointed a three–judge special hearing panel to review the cases of Kamas political prisoners. Each evening after the mid–April announcement, a queue formed in the mess hall to pick up petition forms and instructions at a table manned by the legal appeals clerks, judges Richardson and O'Rourke. From dinner until lights–out, prisoners of all ages and backgrounds could be seen toiling to prepare their petitions. It seemed that hope lingered in every man's breast that Washington would at last discover its errors and order his immediate release.

As for myself, I had no desire to line up for the privilege of consulting the hack judges. Nor did I believe that there was a chance in a thousand that I would gain legal relief through such a petition. I saw the case reviews as nothing more than a cynical trick to distract the credulous by occupying their leisure time.

I spent most of my spare hours during April trying to restore my health. On several follow–up visits to Georg Schuster at the dispensary, I came away with enough supplemental ration tickets to stabilize my weight and actually gain a few pounds. Schuster's nurse, Gwen, also resupplied me with tonic herbs and slipped me a bottle of expired multivitamins to speed my recovery. On Sundays, I napped, ate, read, visited with friends, and went to bed thinking of my wife and daughters.

Early in the month I received my first message from Sigler's widow. It was an ordinary sheet of cheap copy paper twisted into a scroll to fit into a hollowed stick. I felt a special thrill on seeing a woman's handwriting in a note addressed only to me and an even greater thrill when I read that she agreed to correspond.

In Helen Sigler's second letter, using the code I had proposed, she explained that she and Alec had used their letter exchange primarily to convey messages between women in Division 1 and men in divisions 2 and 3. Helen visited the women's division regularly under the pretext of trading food, herbs, soaps, and skin lotions for prison handicrafts that she resold in town. As security measures in the women's camp were relatively flexible, and as she paid a portion of her revenues in bribes to the gate guards, Helen was able to meet scores of women prisoners, some of whom had brothers or husbands only a few hundred yards away on the other side of the Service Yard.

Nearly all the messages we exchanged during April were devoted to requests from female prisoners to locate their male relatives and to the men’s responses. I soon found that the task of searching for these men was the easy part of the job. Since nearly all the women already knew that their loved one had been arrested, finding him alive and in the same camp came as joyous news. Even to learn of a relative's ill health or death was preferable to knowing nothing. Most often any bad news had been discounted long in advance.

Delivering the women's messages to the men, however, was not as simple. In most cases, the male relative had been the first family member arrested and, being denied the right to correspond, was unaware that any other family member was in custody. It was also natural for any prisoner who had agreed to cooperate with State Security to expect that such cooperation would spare his relatives. So the news that a man's wife or sister or daughter had landed in a labor camp almost always came as a crushing blow. It took me most of April to devise a method for preventing or cushioning these reactions.

The end of April stands out in my memory for another reason. Rumors of an incoming prisoner transport began before roll call on the last day of the month. According to several warders and guards, a convoy had arrived just before dawn and consisted of five or six hundred prisoners. But the new men were not politicals like us. They were common criminals convicted of crimes like murder, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, rape, and armed robbery. Most of us had encountered this breed of prisoner in transit camps before our arrival at Kamas. But apart from the transit camps, which served political prisoners and common criminals alike, politicals and thieves had always been held in separate correctional facilities.

News of the incoming transfer sent a shockwave through the camp. Nearly every prisoner who had been thrown in with the thieves in the past dreaded facing them again. We remembered how the thieves had intimidated us, beaten us, cut us, stolen our food and belongings, raped the young and weak and murdered those who stood up to them, all without risk of punishment from the authorities. We remembered how our fellow politicals generally lacked the stomach to match the criminals blow for blow and how the thieves, who operated in gangs, easily dominated the independent and disorganized politicals.

As we marched off to our worksites on that last day in April, we fretted about how our world would change when we returned from work. Mercifully, the thieves would be held in quarantine for their first full day. That would give us time to conceal treasured possessions and perhaps lay hands on a weapon. But what would happen when the thieves moved into our barracks? Who would be singled out first for harassment or worse?

At the worksites we talked of nothing else. How would we meet our production quotas when the thieves shirked their work and refused to contribute to the team effort? What if the thieves were appointed as warders, foremen, or work group leaders? And how could we keep the thieves from informing on us to the camp bosses as they invariably did?

Our work team returned to camp that evening more agitated and depressed than we had been in weeks. As we entered the mess hall, we watched the thieves as closely as they watched us. In the lead were simpering rat–faced punks, cocky gangsters, and sullen, slow–witted giants who served as their bodyguards and enforcers. Behind them were the capos and their lieutenants, resembling professional wrestlers in their exaggerated villainy and exuding an unmistakable brutality and animal cunning. Tomorrow these would be our new barracks–mates.

The fact that the thieves were permitted in the mess hall at all was the first indication that the warders and guards were unwilling to enforce the rules against them. According to quarantine regulations, transferees were to remain separate from the regular camp population for twenty–four hours after their arrival.

We waited until the last of the thieves left the mess hall, and then filed in for dinner. Conversation was lackluster.

After we returned to our barracks, Ralph Knopfler called me outside to watch the spectacle of the thieves smashing their barracks windows and lighting bonfires on the parade ground. It was not until after lights–out that guards arrived with fire extinguishers to put out the fires. These stern disciplinarians now were seen chuckling at the audacious spirit of the young criminals. Unlike politicals, the thieves represented the underprivileged, whose foibles were tolerated in the new Unionist society.

If the thieves' arrival heralded a new tactic in the bosses' campaign to crush the political prisoners' will, it seemed off to a promising start. The threat of an alliance between the thieves and the camp bosses had caught us completely off guard. On the eve of the May Day holiday, none of us slept soundly.

C
HAPTER
21

"Don’t believe, don’t fear, don’t ask."
—Soviet camp saying

TUESDAY, APRIL 30

The late afternoon sun filled the Chambers living room through half–opened blinds. Claire sat at Martha's desk hunched over her math worksheet and concentrated hard on finishing her last few fractions problems before Marie stirred in the upstairs nursery. Once she heard the baby's cries, there would be no more time for homework until much later.

The doorbell rang. It was Helen Sigler.

"Hello, stranger."

Claire buried her face in Helen's brown wool jacket and squeezed her around the waist. A pair of covered straw baskets lay on the doorstep.

"I brought some herbs for Martha. Is she in?"

Claire welcomed Helen inside.

"She’s in the kitchen. I'll go get her."

Marie let out a wail upstairs. Claire came back with Martha Chambers and set off up the stairs.

"Helen, what a lovely surprise!" Martha said with genuine warmth. "How about a cup of tea? I have some Earl Gray that Doug just brought back from Denver."

"No thanks, I can only stay for a few minutes," Helen answered, removing her coat and accepting a seat on the sofa. "Your gate guard comes on duty at six. I'd prefer to be gone before he arrives."

"Six is when Doug comes back, too. He's bringing the Warden with him again," Martha said with a frown.

"All the more reason to be brief," Helen added. "But before I forget, please take these herbs. I brought them in case they questioned me at the gate."

Upstairs, Marie let out a piercing wail.

"Do you need to get that?" Helen asked.

"No, Claire knows what to do," Martha replied. "Tell me, Helen, do you have children of your own?"

"A daughter. She graduates from college next month."

"You must be very proud," Martha said. "Will she be coming back to Utah?"

Helen lowered her eyes.

"Lucy has never been to Utah. She lives with my sister in Virginia. They agreed to adopt her after Alec's arrest so that Lucy could stay enrolled in school."

"I'm sorry. I didn't realize–"

Helen continued as though she hadn't heard the apology.

"It was the only way I knew to give her a fair chance in life."

"What was Alec charged with?" Martha asked.

"The charge was merely a formality. The point was that Alec ran for the state legislature on a ticket that opposed the Unionists. When he lost, Alec presented evidence that the other side had stuffed the ballot boxes. A week later he was arrested. That was eight years ago this fall."

"Eight years in the camps for that?"

"They called it advocating overthrow of the government," Helen replied. "But at least Alec had the satisfaction of standing up and publicly opposing them. And of never giving in. This June he would have completed his sentence."

"Would have?" Martha repeated.

"Alec died last month."

"I'm so very sorry," Martha said, reaching out to touch Helen's hand.

"You had no way of knowing. Even I didn't find out until weeks later."

"What will you do now?" Martha asked.

"I don't know. I plan to stay in the cabin a while longer until I sort things out."

"Forgive me for being so naïve," Martha began gently. "There's so much I still don’t understand."

Helen looked up at Martha with a sympathetic smile.

"You see, when we came back from Paris after the Events," Martha continued, "everything around me had completely changed. But nobody wanted to talk about it. Whenever I asked Doug what it was like during those years, he said he just wanted to forget."

"Then why on earth would he choose to join State Security?" Helen asked.