The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (35 page)

Approximately half the American Lend-Lease cargo was shipped to the Soviet Far East ports where the conditions in the camps were, if anything, worse than at Molotovsk. In Magadan, much of the cargo intended for use in the war against Germany was channeled by General Nikishov into the service of Dalstroi. Brand-new American icebreakers were used by the Soviets to keep sea-lanes open around Magadan, further extending the transportation season for the Dalstroi fleet. Having delivered their cargoes, the American “Liberty” ships were then converted to transport prisoners into Kolyma, while the aging Dalstroi fleet was sailed across the Pacific to shipyards on the West Coast for expensive overhaul and repair. In the United States, the NKVD steamers were reconditioned at the expense of the American taxpayer, before their quick return to service as “the death ships of the Sea of Okhotsk.”

On January 31, 1942, for example, the
Dzhurma
arrived at a Seattle ship-yard for an overhaul costing over half a million dollars. Before the war the
Dzhurma
had caught fire in a riot belowdecks and had limped into Magadan with the prisoners still locked in the hold. Three years later, when the American fitters opened up the ship, they were met by the same appalling stench of death.
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Nothing was said or done, as one Dalstroi ship after another arrived in America for refitting and, having been made seaworthy again, returned to Vladivostok to pick up more prisoners, often on the very next voyage. Without the NKVD fleet, the operations within Kolyma would have become impossible to sustain. The ships were an essential link in the mechanism, required to replace the prisoners who had died, and to expand still further the network of concentration camps. It was as if the Reich-ministry had arranged to have its railway engines repaired in Philadelphia and then shipped back across the Atlantic to recommence their journeys to Auschwitz.

 
 
AT THE TIME, it was the surviving American prisoners such as Thomas Sgovio or Victor Herman who felt the keenest sense of outrage at the most famous brand names of American industry being used in the service of the death camps. In Kolyma, Thomas Sgovio witnessed the arrival of enormous black, fifty-ton American Diamond trucks with trailers and iron sides, and five-ton Studebakers that could easily manage the unforgiving terrain. These American trucks were used to transport prisoners across the vast distances of Russian wilderness into the camps.

Within the Kolyma camps and mines, suddenly everything was American: the machinery, the tools, the shovels; even the detonators and blasting equipment were all “Made in the U.S.A.” In one camp, the prisoner Varlam Shalamov, a former law student from Leningrad, described watching the NKVD guards eating “magical jars of American sausage.”
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Meanwhile, Thomas Sgovio was fed a new kind of soup, one that tasted very different from any other he had been given and, astonishingly, contained meat and bones. For two weeks the prisoners ate what they were given, reassuring themselves that the meat must be reindeer from the Yakut breeding farms. Eventually they heard that the cooks in the camp kitchens had stolen the American canned pork and replaced it with the bodies of the dead. The prisoners hardly flinched when they heard this news. They were all too starved to care.
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In her women’s camp, the Dutch nurse Elinor Lipper blessed the Americans for delivering their flour in such splendid white bags. The bags could be turned into extra clothing to protect the prisoners from the extreme cold, a practice that spread rapidly through the camps of Kolyma. And thus the starving Gulag legions became clad in American flour bags, whose brand names ran across their emaciated bodies in irregular patterns, like a Cubist rendering of suffering.
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The prisoners’ desperation for food was revealed when the American bulldozers were first delivered, each with its own barrel of machine grease. Varlam Shalamov watched one barrel attacked by a crowd of starving prisoners, who convinced themselves that the grease was “Lend-Lease butter.” By the time a guard arrived to protect the “food for machines,” only half the barrel was left.
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Nor did the arrival of the bulldozers ease the burden of the prisoners’ labor. Shalamov witnessed how the first American bulldozer was driven out of the camp away from the mines, to the place where a series of stone pits had begun to slide down the mountain. The pits contained the bodies of the male and female prisoners who had been shot, beaten, or starved to death at that particular camp. Newly exposed to the elements after months or years underground, their bare skeletal bodies had been perfectly preserved by the extreme cold. Standing on the side of the mountain watching the bulldozer rebury the bodies, Varlam Shalamov described how even the expressions on the faces of the dead could still be recognized: “They were just bare skeletons over which stretched dirty, scratched skin bitten all over by lice . . . eyes burning with a hungry gleam.” He also realized that what he had witnessed was only a pitifully small part of a vast world of hundreds of camps, and that so many more “could be hidden in the folds of a mountain.”
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At the end of the war, Allied investigators found it difficult to comprehend how one million people could have been killed in the few acres of the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka. Only after the downfall of the regime, and the arrival of the victorious Allied armies, could the enormity of the crime be revealed—and later, at Nuremberg, a measure of justice brought to bear. In the Soviet Union there was never a victorious army to expose the consequences of Stalin’s rule; nor would there ever be a Nuremberg. Instead, the victims of Kolyma, and every other terminal point of the Gulag, remained concealed even as the killings continued unabated. In Kolyma, the rhetorical question Joseph Goebbels had asked in his diary actually came true:
“For when we win who will question us on our methods?”
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VAST TERRITORIAL LOSSES in western Russia only accelerated the destructiveness of the NKVD. Foreigners from within the Gulag population, in particular, were targeted for execution. In Kolyma they were placed into convoys of trucks driving toward the extermination center at Serpantinnaya. Thomas Sgovio was selected for the Serpantinnaya list three times. On each occasion his life was saved by the intervention of an NKVD officer who had taken a personal interest in the young American prisoner. To circumvent the order, Lieutenant Terentyev would telegraph headquarters stating that he required Sgovio’s sign-painting skills. Spared by the miracle of a compassionate NKVD officer, Thomas continued his “function” as a sign painter in the war—A GRAM OF GOLD IS A CANNON SHOT IN THE HEART OF THE ENEMY! THE FATHERLAND DEMANDS MORE GOLD! But his good fortune could not last forever.
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All prisoners were regularly transferred within the system of camps to prevent overfamiliarization, and soon Thomas Sgovio was returned to gold mining. His situation worsened further with his transfer into the so-called Valley of Death, located some six hundred kilometers north of Magadan.
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In his new camp, Thomas watched twenty-strong brigades of prisoners, who had themselves no more than a month or two to live, making two trips daily up a slope just over two kilometers from the compound. On their shoulders these men carried the frozen corpses of prisoners to a burial site. When three or four hundred bodies were stacked like logs on the slope, a burial brigade bored holes into the frozen earth and blasted out pits with explosives. The pits were then filled with the dead.
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There was no electricity at Camp No. Seven, since it was too far north. At night the darkness concealed a level of violence so high that the guards did not attempt to step inside.
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Driven to fury by hunger, all human qualities of the prisoners became submerged beneath the animal desire to survive the work, and the killings within the zone. Even as the prisoners died, a steady stream of new arrivals filled their ranks, delivered in the holds of the Gulag fleet. Reduced by overwork to a ninety-pound skeleton, Thomas Sgovio gradually realized that he, too, had become a
dokhodyaga.
Anticipating his death, Thomas tattooed his name on his hip so that if, years later, his body was ever discovered frozen in the ground, someone might at least know of his existence.
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Instead, another intervention occurred. His brigadier, a Russian engineer named Dmitry Prokhorov, took pity on him and sent him for a medical examination. When Thomas undressed for the first time that winter in the local camp hospital, every bone was projecting from his body. The doctor who examined him told him, “You are as emaciated as any living skeleton I have seen, but it’s amazing you have the heart of a horse. I can’t put you in the hospital at all.” Thomas was then returned to work in Camp No. Seven. Days from death, a second respite occurred:
“It was always like this, every time I was about to die, something happened. God saved me, I think.”
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His brigadier, Prokhorov, had spoken to the camp bread cutter, who commissioned Thomas to draw a series of nudes in a notebook in exchange for a consignment of bread. While Thomas was completing the artwork, he would be excused from work and gain time to restore his strength. Prokhorov persuaded the other prisoners in the brigade to agree to the deal: “Look, he’s American, he’s young, aided by some miracle—he’ll go back to America and tell the world about Kolyma.” Perhaps the rest of the brigade realized that Thomas was scarcely fit for any work at all, but it was also true that the prisoners dearly craved a witness for their suffering. Realizing that their own deaths were likely and impending, above all else they wanted the outside world to learn of their fate.

After their bargain was struck, Thomas attempted to straighten his gnarled hands and make his blackened fingers supple enough to draw. At first he could barely hold the pencil he was given, but eventually his work improved.
“I said what does he want, does he prefer blondes or brunettes? He said anything I don’t care, as long as they have big breasts.”
In Camp No. Seven of the Valley of Death, Thomas’ teenage ambition to become an artist in the Soviet Union was finally fulfilled, drawing pictures of naked women to save his life.
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HUNGER HAD ALWAYS been a necessity of the Gulag, a calculated policy since it was understood that a starved man became more pliable, more passive, and more easily stunned into submission. Starvation turned the prisoners into automata, quite incapable of acts of conspiracy or resistance. Across the Gulag, food became so scarce that the each prisoner ate his thin ration of soup while running from the others. Out of calculated desperation, increasing numbers of prisoners chose self-mutilation in an attempt to be moved to lighter duties. At first they hacked off their fingers and toes; then they paid others to remove a whole leg or an arm, using either an axe or a detonator charge. The self-mutilators reasoned, and not without a certain terrible logic, that it was better to lose a limb than one’s life. Within the camps of Burelopom, Victor Herman heard how prisoners had disappeared in the woods, falling down only to be attacked by the criminals, for whom the fallen man was “nothing but food.” What remained was buried beneath the snow.
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Victor Herman was also singled out for extermination. Shortly after his arrival in Burelopom, he was marched with eighteen other foreigners from Subcamp Five. A guard then ordered that “the filth from the capitalist nations” must each load a sixty-ton railroad car with lumber before he would be allowed to eat. With the tree line more than a mile away, it was a deliberately impossible task. But Victor had noticed a cache of logs that formed a ramp next to the railway track onto which timber was rolled up into the train. Using this wood, over the course of the next three days, without food, he loaded his railway car, spacing out the stacks to cover the spaces so that the wagon appeared to be full. By this subterfuge he survived the task, while the other seventeen foreigners died of exhaustion and exposure. When his cheating was eventually discovered, he was put into a punishment cell, beaten regularly, and kept on a starvation diet of thin soup.
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After a year in solitary confinement, Victor was returned to the general population of the camp. At this point, he was too close to death to be able to work at all. He had started to go blind, and when his emaciated body was dumped facedown in the frozen mud of the camp, he found he was too weak even to lift himself up. There he might have died, his fate ignored by the other prisoners—since within the camps a dead body attracted no attention—but the next morning he was recognized by his friend Albert Lonn, who picked him up and carried him back to his barracks:
“Son of a bitch, look what they did to old Vic. Hey, old Vic, look what they did to you, lad. Why I bet you don’t weigh twenty-three pounds . . .”
For days afterward, Albert Lonn shared his precious ration of bread and nursed Victor Herman back to life.
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In the midst of the war, Albert Lonn’s gift of food carried a far greater significance than the small number of calories it contained. Fragments of the best qualities of human nature endured even in the darkest hours of a concentration camp in Burelopom. Albert’s compassionate action provided hope for the spirit, and with hope came a renewed willingness to find a means of survival. While he lay hidden under Albert’s berth, Victor had the idea of trapping the rats he had seen in the camp outhouse where the prisoners’ corpses were stored. Using a trap built for him by Albert, he caught and ate those rats until he was strong enough to return to work.
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It was while cutting lumber in the snow that Victor first saw the NKVD guards opening cans of Campbell’s Pork and Beans, Franco-American Spaghetti, and Dinty Moore Beef Stew. When he recognized the labels on the cans from his childhood in Detroit, Victor became so enraged that the guards waved a machine gun at him and threatened to kill him. Then he sat back down in the snow and wept.
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