The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (26 page)

Between interrogation and sentencing, Victor Herman was transferred without warning into a very different cell, which held just nineteen prisoners in far less crowded conditions. As he entered the doorway, he saw a perfectly clean white towel laid out in front of him. As soon as he stepped around this towel, two heavily tattooed prisoners jumped down from their bunks to attack him. What they did not expect was that Victor Herman was a trained boxer who, even in his weakened condition, could fight off two untrained men. When a third prisoner came toward him with a prison-made knife, Victor worked him like a heavy bag in the gym, holding the man’s body up over his shoulder and continuing his frenzied attack until the man slumped to the floor. At this point, the atmosphere in the prison cell changed dramatically.
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Thrown in with a group of Russian criminals, or
urkas,
Victor Herman discovered his savage fighting skills had won their immediate respect. A heavy man with a scarred face and dark eyes beckoned him over. “I am the Atoman, the chief here, and you, fighter, what are you? A wolfblood, yes? One of us, yes?” Far from being angry, the
atoman
appeared pleased: “Hey fighter! . . . Next time you wipe your feet on the towel, yes?” And thus began Victor Herman’s first lesson on how to pass among the criminals, a casual introduction into the subculture of murderers and thieves used by the Soviet authorities to terrorize the “enemies of the people.” From the
atoman,
Victor learned why he had been transferred into that particular cell: “They put one in here, and we do the rest, you know?” And when the NKVD guards returned to find the wrong body lying on the floor, the
atoman
explained that there had been an accident. “It was a bad fall,” he shrugged.
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Perhaps because they were both young and physically fit, Victor Herman and Thomas Sgovio survived their months in prison. In time each was convicted of “crimes” against the Soviet state, and each was handed a piece of paper with his name and a number written on the back and circled in red.
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Victor Herman received a “ten,” whereas Thomas Sgovio’s paper showed only a “five,” but their sentences carried a purely arbitrary quality since their prosecutors did not expect them to survive. And for their part, all the prisoners sent out into the “zone” of the “corrective labor camps” would look back upon their time spent in jail with the curious nostalgia reserved for the easiest part of their sentences. Within the Gulag, both Victor Herman and Thomas Sgovio would suffer ordeals far worse than that which they had already known. For suffering comes not only from the pain one receives, but also from the pain one inflicts on others in trying to survive.

 
 
ON THE NIGHT of June 24, 1938, Thomas Sgovio left Moscow sealed into the carriage of a prison train with roughly seventy other prisoners. They formed one unit of a transportation of prisoners, packed tight onto the train for their long journey east. These NKVD prison trains had been specially modified with steel spikes under the carriages to prevent escape, and machine-gun emplacements on the roofs. The number of cars on each train ranged from 60 to 120, allowing several thousand prisoners to be moved at a time to destinations across the Soviet Union’s vast Gulag system. The prison trains moved slowly, in part because of the number of cars on the line but also because the drivers rightly feared the consequence of an accidental derailment. And the slow progress was regularly interrupted by guards, who hammered with wooden mallets on the walls, ceilings, and floors of the train to check that the prisoners were not attempting an escape.
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None of the prisoners knew their final destination, although there was an expectation that the farther they traveled the worse it would be—and to a certain extent this was true. But the measure was only relative, not absolute. While Victor Herman’s journey ended in the forest wilderness of central Russia, Thomas Sgovio was transported across the entire length of the USSR to the very end of the line. His ten-thousand-kilometer journey locked in the carriage lasted twenty-eight days, and every stop along the way was marked by the burial of prisoners who had died on board the train. This, too, was completely normal.
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A month after his train’s departure, Thomas arrived starved and traumatized at a vast transit camp near Vladivostok, on Russia’s Pacific coast. His transportation was still not over. Here the prisoners waited within a barbed-wire enclosure, inside a vast city of eighty thousand souls, ready for the next stage of their descent.
²⁴
It was the place from which the poet Osip Mandelstam managed to send his last letter, in December 1938, the month of his death:
“My health is very poor. I am emaciated in the extreme, I’ve become very thin, almost unrecognisable, but send clothes, food and money—though I don’t know if there’s any point. Try nevertheless, I get terribly cold without any [warm] things . . . This is a transit camp. They didn’t take me to Kolyma. I may have to winter here.”
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All prisoners would experience the same shock of the vertiginous fall into the abyss, and at every moment, when they believed they had reached the final depths, they would fall again, lower and lower, until they scarcely recognized themselves as human beings at all. Only then—when they had lost all self-awareness and respect, when they existed only in the most savage primal sense as men stripped bare of all humanity—only then would they have arrived at the very heart of the Gulag. And in this state of starving desperation, they would scarcely recognize their loss. They would be dismissive of even the notion of freedom—like Kant’s dove, which feels the weight of the air on its wings and thinks that it can fly better in the void.

 
 
THE VLADIVOSTOK HOLDING camp was a vast field where, according to one survivor, “as far as the eye could see there were columns of male and female prisoners marching in one direction or another, like armies on a battlefield. A huge detachment of security officers, soldiers and signal corpsmen with field telephones and motorcycles, kept in touch with headquarters, arranging the smooth flow of these human rivers.”
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At intervals the guards would shout warnings—
“Those who are bored with life should take one step out of the column”
—while unlocking the bolts of their rifles. Their prisoners had little idea what awaited them, nor were there any explanations. In the holding camp, they died by the score in epidemics of typhus and dysentery, or they were murdered by the criminals in their midst. Attempting to survive, the English-speaking prisoners of Thomas Sgovio’s transport grouped together. With Michael Aisenstein, Thomas came across an American boot-legger who had escaped jail in California only to be arrested in the Soviet Union. The American had sold off all his clothes and was left in a pitiful, ragged condition, swearing, “I’d kiss a skunk’s ass to be in a prison in California again, even if it was for life.”
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After weeks of waiting, the prisoners were eventually marched down toward a fleet of ships waiting at anchor in the Vladivostok dockyard. The NKVD ships were old tramp steamers that once had names such as
Commercial Quaker, Ripon,
and
Dallas,
and had been bought up in America and Europe for rock-bottom prices after the Crash. The smoke-stacks of the Gulag fleet were painted in the blue of the NKVD, but the ships themselves were always at the very margins of seaworthiness. Already old and decrepit when they were bought, the fleet had since been corroded by the fierce weather, the sea salt, and the ice floes.
²⁸
Now Thomas Sgovio found himself being pushed down a steep and slippery wooden stairway into the filthy depths of the ship. It took a while for the prisoners’ eyes to adjust to the dim light of the lower decks, but looming out of the darkness was a scene that one survivor compared to a nightmarish vision by Francisco Goya.
²⁹
In the cavernous depths of each ship were crammed five or more levels of wooden bunks containing thousands of battered men and women from all over the Soviet Union who had been arrested. Thomas Sgovio was pressed into the human cargo of the steamer
Indigirka,
which ferried between three and five thousand other prisoners north across the Sea of Okhotsk into another world. He remembered the date of his transportation exactly. It was August 2, 1938, three years to the day since he had left New York Harbor on the deck of a passenger liner, waving goodbye to the Statue of Liberty bound for Soviet Russia.
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THE
INDIGIRKA
STEAMED north out of Vladivostok toward the Arctic Circle, passing through the narrow Straits of La Pérouse and across the Sea of Okhotsk. The voyage of the prisoners could last up to two weeks depending on the sea conditions, and during that time no guard ever ventured down into the hold. They feared the savagery of the criminals who reigned in the darkness below, robbing the political prisoners of food and clothing. Their attacks were impossible to withstand; if any political prisoner dared resist, a pack of criminals simply murdered him. One fallen Red Army general, Aleksandr Gorbatov, who had survived five sessions of torture by the NKVD in Lefortovo Prison, described having his boots stolen by a gang of thieves in the hold of the
Dzhurma
. His decision not to fight back very likely saved his life.
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Terrible events regularly occurred on these sea transports. The criminals would often break through the thin partition walls of the hold to attack the female prisoners who traveled with them. These mass rapes were reported in many survivor accounts and appeared to have become a ritualized part of the Sea of Okhotsk crossing. One female witness remembered watching the horror of the violence inflicted upon her fellow prisoners in close proximity. Over the screams of their victims, the criminals most violently abused the women who resisted. In one instance, not untypical, two female prisoners were left dead in the bottom of the hold.
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Although the escorting guards were heavily armed, their usual response to such events was to do nothing. Only if the riots belowdecks became too unruly would any action be taken. Then the hold would be drenched with freezing ocean water from the fire pumps. One ship, the
Kim,
set out from Vladivostok carrying three thousand prisoners. When the prisoners mutinied, starting a fire below deck, the guards simply flooded the hold and the prisoners arrived in Magadan frozen from hypothermia.
³³
Similarly, if one of the Gulag ships was caught in a storm or ran aground, its human cargo would be left to their fate as the guards attempted to save their own lives, firing shots at the prisoners to prevent their escape.

Fifteen months after Thomas’ transportation, on December 13, 1939, the
Indigirka
ran aground on a reef in shallow waters just a mile off the coast of Japan. At the time the ship’s hold contained twelve hundred highly skilled engineers and scientists specially selected from the Gulag population to return to the “mainland” as part of the Soviet preparations for war. Three days after the wreck, the Japanese authorities learned from the
Indigirka
’s captain that he had abandoned ship with the prisoners still alive inside, trapped under the upturned steel hull in only a few feet of water. A Japanese rescue team was dispatched to the wreck with cutting torches, but they found only corpses trapped in the cold dark space. The prisoners had clambered on top of each other in their desperation to survive. Just twenty-eight prisoners were discovered alive at the top of this pyramid.

It was the end of the ship built in 1920, in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and originally named the
Ripon
in honor of the town where a group of American Republicans first announced there could be no political compromise with slavery.
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THOMAS SGOVIO SPENT six days and nights trapped inside the darkness of the
Indigirka
. As the atmosphere grew overpowering, the Americans compared their fate to that of African slaves transported to the United States. Then one of their group reminded them that while a slave might have been sold for several hundred dollars, their lives were no longer worth “two kopecks.”
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From a Russian prisoner they learned that the ship was bound for Kolyma, in the far northeastern corner of the USSR. It was an area so remote it could be reached only by sea and so cold it was called “another planet” by its prisoners:

 
In Kolyma, the coldest temperatures on earth had been recorded at below minus sixty degrees centigrade.
³⁶
Officially a rule existed in the camps that the prisoners’ work was canceled if the temperature fell to minus fifty degrees. But the rule was never enforced, and the prisoners never saw a thermometer. Instead, they judged the temperature by other means: at minus forty, the human body made a clinking sound as it exhaled; at minus fifty-five degrees, the man in front disappeared as the air froze into an impenetrable fog; below minus sixty degrees, spit froze in midair.
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In Kolyma, nature was said to be “in league with the executioner,” the extreme cold accelerating the destruction of its victims. Alexander Solzhenitysn would later describe the region as the “pole of cold and cruelty” of the Gulag Archipelago. And, like the train timetables of Auschwitz, the logbooks of Andrei Sakharov’s “death ships of the Okhotsk Sea” would reveal the scale of the tragedy that took place in this one unknown corner of the Soviet Union.
³⁸
In complete secrecy, the NKVD fleet had been silently ferrying its human cargo since 1932, and the ships would continue their operations for the next two decades. During this period, millions of prisoners would disembark onto Kolyma’s rocky shore, the majority never to return.

On his arrival at the port of Nagaevo, Thomas Sgovio was ordered down the gangplank to join the column of prisoners for roll call. The prisoners were routinely referred to as “slaves” by their guards. Even the word used for their death was one not normally applicable to human beings: the Russian word
paddochnicht
was used, meaning to “croak.”
³⁹
From the shore of Nagaevo Bay, the prisoners were force-marched up the cliffs to the city of Magadan, the wind howling all around them, drowning out the commands of the guards and the barking of the Alsatians which, when let loose, could knock a starved prisoner down with ease.
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Thomas Sgovio was marched up these cliffs at night, the guards holding lanterns amid the barking of the dogs. To distract himself from his fear, and the sudden coldness of the air, he started humming the “St. Louis Blues.”
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