| Len's cousin
Meeting an exiled woman
M: In the summer, I worked as a logger. I used drive timber into the river. No boat, nothing, you know, but we were loggers. In the winter, I worked in the brigade where we had horses and sleighs, and we used to do all kinds of errands. Some of them went as lumberjacks, in the woods, to cut timber, and I worked as a sleigh rider. I used to drive with horses. And all the horses were dying, starving the same as the people. They never had hay, they never had any grain to eat, and it was cold, 40-50 below. So they were starving.
And we had 11 boys with 11 sleighs with 11 horses. I had a horse that wasn't starving. And the reason for it was that horse was born as a colt from a horse that the fellow who took care of the horses, it belonged to his father, the horse, you know. And he always still felt that the horse was his. You see, they collectivized it. It belonged to the collective farm. But in his mind, that horse was still his. So, he used to let other horses starve, but my horse he used to feed. So, my horse was good. So, I always used to ride the last one. Because, in case somebody gets stuck, I could give him a hand. Because it happened many times. The horse used to lay down in the middle of the road, and it wouldn't go anymore. For the simple reason it was hungry. So, he didn't have the power to pull anything.
And one day, we were hauling bricks from a big factory. And the boys were all in front of me, and I was behind. It was already about 2 o'clock. And there in the winter, it gets early dark, and we were always told to come to the base, you know, to the camp, before it gets dark, because there were a lot of animals. We had no firearms, nothing, you know. And there were a lot of bears, wolves. They said there were even tigers there, but we never saw any -- Siberian tigers. But we never encountered one, so I don't know. But wolves and bears was an awful lot in there.
And we were riding home. And a woman was going, walking, and it started to get stormy. There it starts to snow, and it starts to get windy. Siberian storms are terrible. An there she was going, a Russian woman, with a kerchief on her head, an elderly woman, and she was begging the boys in front of me, --we are going to the same ward [sic]-- to give her a lift. Hey, we are young, only 19 years old. And they never paid any attention, they wanted to go home as fast as they could. We he had to go about 10 miles, 10 kilometers. I was the last one, and I thought to myself, my horse will always catch up with the other ones, and I got plenty of time, no rush.
So, I took her on the sleigh. I gave her a lift. No sooner had she sat down on the sleigh, the fellow in front of me noticed that I picked her up. He turns, he said to me, he says to me in Jewish, "Nane [?]" he says, "see whether she needs something." You see, we had certain things we used to get in the camps, that the outside didn't get. We had tobacco, the outside didn't get. We used to get [one word unclear] rations. We used to have bread, actually. We used to have clothes, certain clothes that they didn't get outside. And we always had something on the sleigh, in case we have to do something. We have to do business somewhere, you know. So, he turned around [several words unclear] "See whether she wants something. Maybe she'll buy something from you." And without a word, the woman says, "I don't need anything." He spoke to me in Jewish. It never dawned on me that this woman could be Jewish, you know, but I thought maybe she's German. There were some Germans there that the Russians exiled in Siberia.
And I asked her, "Are you German?"
She says, "No"
And I said, "How in the world did you know what he said?"
"Because I'm Jewish," she said. And she started to speak to me in Jewish. And then she told me the story that in 1930 Stalin sent them out on exile for 5 years, and the 5 years ended. So, they called her in to the KGB. Then it was NKVD. They changed it to KGB later. They called her in and they asked her if she wants to take out a passport and sign that she won't leave this area, that she'll stay here. Then she'll be a free person. Because when you are an exile, you have to report every week. You are sort of under probation.
So, she said "No," so they gave her 5 years more. And then in 1940, they called her in again, and she said, "What's the use?" So, she took out a passport. See, she can't get out anyway. So, then she asked me, "How do you like our northern country?"
"Oh," I said, "I love it very much, but we are waiting for the day when we will be able to go back home." You see, we never left [sic] hope. They kept on telling us from the first day, "Better get used to it, because either you get used to it or you die. Out, there is no way. That's it." But we tried to buck the system, and we never gave up hope that we will some day get out.
But when this woman... I told her, you know, that we hoped to go home, and when she started to laugh with sort of a hysterical laughter, like a sickening laughter, I almost started to cry. And then she told me the story about the 5 years added on every 5 years.
And when I came to the camp, when I told them the story, for a couple of days we couldn't come to our senses. It was sort of like the whole house of ours is falling apart. Our only hope is because we hope we will survive it. All of a sudden, here comes a woman and tells us, "Forget about it. There is no out of here." And the fact is, if not the Russian-German war that broke out in 1941, we would never have gotten out of there. That was it. The only thing that we managed to get out was on account of the Russian-German war and Russians had an agreement with the exiled Polish government in London under General Sikorsky. And they had an agreement to release all Polish citizens. Otherwise, we would have never gotten out.
Len: I always wondered why you got out.
M: That was it, you know. You see, we had Polish documents all of a sudden, and they freed all the inmates from all the camps. And they also started to form a Legion, a Polish Legion. That was the agreement, actually, that all the able-bodies men should form a Polish Legion, but not to fight alongside the Russians, to move us to Iran, and from Iran to go and fight with the English. Because, the Russians and the Poles don't trust each other. And actually, we volunteered, but the Polish Army, even in Russia, was so anti-Semitic and so rotten to the core, they wouldn't accept us. So, we didn't go. But I volunteered, actually. |
