The Rabbi Who Tricked Stalin Page 18
It had been a common sight in Russia, that prisoners would be transferred to Siberia in a train cattle’s cabins. All victims’ legs were chained. A freezing wind of automn was blowing through the cracks in the wooden walls of the cabin. Natalya was not feeling warm, despite two dirty blankets had been supplied to her by the generous guards. She was also permitted to take her fur’s coat with her, but that was also unhelpful.
Natalya and all the other political or criminal prisoners did not recognize each other, nor did they want to know, nor did they have strength enough to chat about any matter. They did not know also what was their final destinmation: Omsk or Tomsk, Tundra or Taiga.
The way was passing along sometime grassy old villages near forests of oaks or styrax trees, and the outrageous wind was bringing occasional showers. But most of the travellers did not try to pay attention to the weather. They were just slumbering or trying to, scratching unwillingly or just crouching and trembling from dread and cold and weakness. Only the locomotive had shown signs of some warmness, as some vapor was surfing beside its wheels, together with the smoke emerging over it from the chimney. The railway was leading the train day and night, in a boring and gloomy land. The traveller Natalya, who had only a kerchief on her head, instead of a hat with wollen ear covers, that some ‘criminal condemned’ persons were permitted to have – was suffering all the way. She was declaiming to herself like a mantra: ‘I must, I must, I must, sur-vive’ – with the monotonous tempo of the rolling wheels.
There were some moments, in which she would reflect about something that would be removed and be forgotten at the moment it
had passed away from the mind, like extinguished ember. From the folds inside the mind – some flashes are bulbing, of what is now reflected to be the good life that you had experienced and nothing like it would be forthcoming again. But every creature would aspire it to become again vivid and blossom, even cats and dogs and bees and butterflys, which are shorter living creatures than the human beings. Oh, sweet childhood, that has the amazing adaptability of mind and body not to know that nothing is perpetual and everything is moving toward its annulment, to its annihilation, to its death. Not only that. In most of the cases, lif it is a route of suffer – untill you get yourself as a corpse. Death is a silhouette and blindness, and an endless chaos and a free fall of unlimited silent screams that cannot be answered. And you can’t get back there to your grandmom, who would stand behind you and smooth your hair and kiss your cheek and calm you by saying that it’s all only a theater, a play that the characters in it are really imaginary and take a tragedy as a comedy of mocking at his Higness Mister Devil Sheol. . .And the little girl Natalya is waiting to her mother, curious to see her beyond the curtain, in the Minsk Theatre cellar, that in winter is warm, and Grandma would arrange something to enable them both to sit down there with the artists, actors or actresses or whisperers or music players, looking at their dressing and undressing while changing their clothes just to appear in the next scene as “somebody else in the Somebody Else’s most remarkable Profession”- so Mom would call the art of acting. . .
The train was trembling suddenly, then shaking-moving to right and left and then it was like some unseen force has lifted it together with its passengers and rolled them over, and everything was upside down. A a terrible pain struck all Natalya’s limbs. She was shrinking and crouching and tried to shout as others had done, but all was lost in the darkness of the night. The accident happened inside a wood, in which the train was passing. Nobody in the neighborhood heard the screams of men and women.
All the people were thrown on each other and on the cabins’ walls and roofs, and every wooden part of the train had been torn down. The cold wind penetrated the shouters’ bodies, and some lucky men who had succeeded to rescue themselves went away, nobody knew whereto. ‘Hopefully, we shall find some shelter in this hole’, said a bald man hoarsely, as he got out and had left Natalya behind.
In the morning came four peasants to the turned aside train. They helped ro rescue the lightly wounded, and Natalya was among them. Next day and night she was lying in an old woman’s hut. She feeded her with sour cabbage and talked to her in a heavy Russian dialect.
At last there came three men who were the prisoners’ escorts in the train. Two of them were limping, and their legs were wrapped. They read loudly from a list – the name of each person they had identified and known to be alive. They gathered a group, who waited for a new train. I soon came from the west of Russia, again having cattle cabins, like the previous one.
Natalya heard from other rescued passengers, that their train had been attacked by some white Band, that survived in those far districts. They just wanted to revenge the Bolsheviks for their ruthless killings. So they put some rocks with rods on and between the rails, causing that accident.
The new train was driving east for three additional days and nights. It came near Tomsk and stopped. Officers of a Gepau prisoners’ camp ordered the locomotive driver to take a curvy path toward a camp named:“Golden Star Educational and Ideological Refreshment Area”. It was a concentration camp par excellance, filled with ten long wooden grey buildings, having tin roofs and wooden beds.
Its kitchen had never seen cattle or chicken’s meat. The dwellers would receive only about a hundred grams of ham per person every second day. It was filled into a cabbage soup, which was not boiled properly. In addition to that, the prisoners would get four hundred grams bread, and some symbolic tomato, potatoe and/or onion per prisoner.
CHAPTER 19