11

‘UP, BOY! Up, boy!’

One of the soldiers was digging his rifle butt into Wladek’s ribs. He sat up with a start, glanced at the freshly dug graves of his sister and the Baron, before he turned to face the soldier.

‘I will live to kill you,’ he said in Polish. ‘This is my home, and you have trespassed on my land.’

The soldier spat on Wladek and pushed him towards the front of the castle, where the surviving servants were waiting in line. Wladek was shocked by the sight of them, painfully unaware of what was about to happen to him. He was made to kneel on the ground and bow his head. He felt a blunt razor scrape across his head as his thick black hair fell to the grass. With ten bloody strokes, like the shearing of a sheep, the job was completed. Head shaven, he was ordered to put on his new uniform, a grey rubashka shirt and trousers. Wladek managed to keep the silver band hidden in his clenched fist as he was roughly pushed back into the ranks of the prisoners.

As they stood there – numbers, now, not names – waiting apprehensively for what would happen next, Wladek became conscious of a strange noise in the distance. The great iron gates opened, and through them came a machine like nothing Wladek had ever seen before. It was a large vehicle, but it was not drawn by horses or oxen. All the prisoners stared in disbelief at the moving object. It came to a halt, and the soldiers dragged the reluctant prisoners to it and made them climb aboard. Then the horseless wagon turned a circle, moved back down the path and out through the iron gates. Nobody dared to speak. Wladek sat at the rear of the truck and stared back at the castle, until he could no longer see his inheritance.

The horseless wagon somehow drove itself through the village of Slonim. Wladek would have thought more about how the vehicle worked if he had not been even more worried about where it was taking them. He recognized the road from his school days, but his memory had been dulled by the years in the dungeons, and he could no longer recall where it led. After a few miles the truck came to a halt and they were all pushed out at the local railway station. Wladek had seen it only once before in his life, when he and Leon had gone there to welcome the Baron home from his trip to Warsaw. The guard had saluted them when they walked into the ticket office. This time no one was saluting.

The prisoners were ordered to sit on the platform, and were given goat’s milk, cabbage soup and black bread. Of the original twenty-five servants who had been imprisoned in the dungeons, twelve survived: ten men and two women. Wladek took charge, dividing the portions carefully among them. He assumed that they must be waiting for a train, but night fell and they slept below the stars. Paradise compared to the dungeons. Wladek thanked God that the weather was mild.

They spent the next day waiting for a train that never came, followed by another sleepless night, colder than the previous one. Morning came, and still they waited. Finally an engine puffed into the station. Soldiers disembarked, speaking their hateful tongue, but it departed without Wladek’s pitiful army. They spent yet another night on the platform.

Wladek lay awake considering how he might escape, but during the night one of his twelve charges made a run for it across the track and was shot down by a guard even before he had reached the far platform. It was the Baron’s steward, Ludwik – one of the witnesses to the Baron’s will, and Wladek’s heritage. His body was left on the track as a warning to anyone else who might try something similar.

On the evening of the third day another train chugged into the station, a great steam locomotive hauling passenger cars and open freight carriages with the word Cattle painted on the sides, their floors covered with straw. Several of the carriages were already full of prisoners, but from where, Wladek didn’t know. He and his small group were thrown into one of them to begin their journey – but to where? After a wait of several more hours the train started to move out of the station, in a direction that Wladek judged from the setting sun to be eastward.

Armed guards were sitting cross-legged on the roofs of the passenger cars. Throughout the interminable journey an occasional flurry of shots from above resulted in another body being thrown onto the track, making clear the futility of any thought of escape.

When the train stopped at Minsk, they were given their first proper meal – black bread, water, nuts and millet – but then the journey continued. Sometimes they went for three days without seeing another station. Many of the reluctant travellers died of thirst or starvation and were hurled overboard from the moving train, allowing a little more space for those who remained. When the train did come to a halt, they would often wait for a couple of days to allow another train going west the use of the track. These trains that delayed their progress were invariably full of soldiers and Wladek quickly worked out that troop trains had priority over all other transport.

Escape was always uppermost in Wladek’s mind, but two things prevented him from taking the risk. First, there was nothing but miles of wilderness on either side of the track; and second, those who had survived the dungeons depended on him. He may have been the youngest, but it was he who organized their food and drink, and tried to sustain their will to live. He was the only one who still believed in the future.

As each day passed and they were taken further east, the temperature grew colder, often falling to 30 degrees below zero. They would lie up against one another in a line on the carriage floor, each body keeping the next one warm. Wladek would recite The Aeneid to himself while he tried to snatch some sleep. It was impossible even to turn over unless everyone agreed, so periodically Wladek would slap the side of the carriage, and they would all roll over and face the other way. One night one of the women did not move. Wladek informed the guard, and four of them picked up the body and threw it out of the moving train. The guards then pumped bullets into her to make sure she was not feigning death in an attempt to escape.

Two hundred miles beyond Minsk, they arrived in the town of Smolensk, where they were given warm cabbage soup and black bread. A bunch of new prisoners, who appeared to speak the same tongue as the guards, were thrown into their carriage. Their leader was considerably older than Wladek. Wladek and his eleven remaining companions, ten men and one woman, were immediately suspicious of the new arrivals, so they divided the carriage in half, with the two groups keeping to themselves.

One night, while Wladek lay awake staring at the stars, trying to keep warm, he saw the leader of the Smolenskis crawling towards the last man in his own line. The Smolenski had a short length of rope in his hand, which he slipped round the neck of Alfons, the Baron’s first footman, who was sleeping. Wladek knew that if he moved too quickly, the young lad would hear him and escape back to the protection of his comrades. He inched along on his belly down the line of Polish bodies. Eyes stared at him as he passed, but nobody spoke. When he reached the end of the line, he leapt on the aggressor, waking everyone in the carriage. Each faction shrank back, with the exception of Alfons, who lay motionless in front of them.

The Smolenski leader was taller and more agile than Wladek, but that made little difference while the two were scrapping on the floor. The struggle lasted for several minutes, which attracted the attention of the guards, who laughed and made bets on the outcome. One guard, bored by the lack of blood, threw a bayonet into the middle of the carriage. Both boys scrambled for the shining blade, with the Smolenski grabbing it first. His band cheered as he thrust it into the side of Wladek’s leg, pulled the blood-covered blade back out and lunged again. This time the bayonet lodged firmly in the wooden floor of the jolting carriage, next to Wladek’s ear. As the Smolenski boy tried to wrench it free, Wladek kicked him in the crotch with every ounce of energy he could muster, and his adversary fell back, letting go of the bayonet. Wladek grabbed it, jumped on top of the Smolenski, and thrust the blade into his mouth. The boy gave out a shriek of agony that awoke the entire train. Wladek pulled the blade out, twisting it as he did so, and thrust again and again, long after the Smolenski had ceased to move. Finally Wladek knelt over him, breathing heavily, picked up the body and threw it out of the carriage. He heard the thud as it hit the bank, followed by the shots the guards pointlessly pumped into it.

Wladek limped towards Alfons and fell onto his knees, suddenly aware of a cold, aching pain in his leg. He shook the lifeless body: his second witness was dead. Who would now believe that he was the chosen heir to the Baron’s estate? Was there any reason left to live? He picked up the bayonet with both hands and pressed the blade against his stomach. Immediately a guard jumped down into the carriage and wrested the weapon from him.

‘Oh, no you don’t,’ he grunted. ‘We need the lively ones like you for the camps. You can’t expect us to do all the work.’

Wladek buried his head in his hands. He had lost his inheritance, in exchange for a dozen penniless Smolenskis.

The whole carriage was Wladek’s domain, and he now had twenty prisoners to care for. He split them up so that a Pole would always sleep next to a Smolenski, which he hoped would reduce the likelihood of any further warfare between the rival gangs.

He spent a considerable part of each day learning the Smolenskis’ strange tongue. He did not realize for several days that it was Russian, so greatly did it differ from the classical language taught to him by the Baron. But then the real significance of this discovery dawned on him when he worked out where the train was heading.

During the day, Wladek took on two Smolenskis at a time to tutor him, and as soon as they grew tired, he would select another two, and so on until they were all exhausted. It was not long before he was able to converse fluently with his new dependants. Some of them he discovered were Russian soldiers, taken prisoner after repatriation for the crime of having been captured by the Germans. The rest consisted of White Russians – farmers, miners, labourers – all bitterly hostile to the Revolution.

The train jolted on past terrain more barren than Wladek had ever seen before, and through towns of which he had never heard – Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk: the names rang ominously in his ears. Finally, after two months and more than three thousand miles, they reached Irkutsk, where the track came to an end.

All the prisoners were hustled off the train, fed and issued with grey uniforms with numbers on the back, felt boots, jackets and heavy coats. Although fights broke out for the warmest garments, even the most sought-after provided little protection from the wind and snow.

Horseless wagons like the one that had borne Wladek away from his castle appeared and long chains were thrown out by the guards. The prisoners were then cuffed by one hand, fifty to each chain. They marched behind the trucks, while the guards rode on the back. After twelve hours they were allowed a two-hour rest so the dead and dying could be unchained before the living set off again.

After three days, Wladek thought he would die of cold and exhaustion, but once they were clear of populated areas they travelled only during the day and rested by night. A mobile field kitchen run by prisoners from the camp supplied turnip soup that became colder, and bread that became staler, as each day passed. Wladek learned from these prisoners that conditions at the camp were even worse, hence their volunteering for the field kitchen.

For the first week they were never unshackled from their chains, but later, when there could be no thought of escape, they were released at night to sleep, digging holes in the snow to keep warm. Sometimes on good days they found a forest in which to bed down: luxury began to take strange forms. On and on they marched, past vast lakes and across frozen rivers, ever northward, in the face of viciously cold winds and ever deeper drifts of snow. Wladek’s wounded leg gave him a constant dull pain, soon surpassed by the agony of his frostbitten toes, fingers and ears. The old and the sick were dying. The lucky ones, quietly as they slept. The unlucky ones, unable to keep up the pace, were uncuffed from the chains and cast off to die alone. Wladek lost all sense of time, and was conscious only of the tug of the chain, not knowing when he dug his hole in the snow at night whether he would wake the next morning. Those who didn’t had dug their own graves.

After a trek of nine hundred miles, the survivors were met by Ostyaks, nomads of the steppes, in reindeer-drawn sleds. The prisoners were chained to the sleds and marched on. When a blizzard forced them to halt for the best part of two days, Wladek seized the opportunity to try to communicate with the young Ostyak to whose sled he was chained. He discovered that the Ostyaks hated the Russians of the south and west, who treated them almost as badly as they treated their captives. The Ostyaks were not unsympathetic to the sad prisoners with no future, the ‘unfortunate ones’, as they called them.