Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag by Orlando FIGES Read Free Book Online Page B

‘enemies of the people’); or death without the body’s being found. So many soldiers had been killed that Sveta must have feared the worst for Lev.

    It was so painful and distressing that I decided I would never celebrate my birthday again unless you were with me. You know, the existence of a dwarf-star is desperately painful, for it has lost the whole of its electron shell and preserved only its nucleus; in my breast it was just as empty and just as painful, as though my heart had withdrawn into itself. It was impossible to breathe. For months on end I couldn’t talk to anyone, couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t read. As soon as I returned home I would turn my face to the wall. And however much I cried in the evening, during the night or in the mornings the pain never eased.

    Struggling to cope with her longing and anxiety for Lev, Sveta poured her feelings into poetry. Two of her poems have survived. The first is dated ‘Winter 1943’, not long after ‘that terrible day’ in September when she heard that Lev had disappeared. ‘It was what I needed to say to someone,’ she would later write of the poem, which expressed her sadness about losing him:

    For a long time I stood on the threshold,
But then I made my mind up and set off.
In the road, amidst the crushed stone,
I found a symbol of peace and happiness –
A horse-shoe to hang over your door.
I brought it to share my joy with you,
But the war threw us on to separate paths
Along which we have to wander on our own.
Through what forests have you forced your way?
Which stones bear the traces of your blood?
Here instead it is the spectre of a lonely old age
That hangs over me ever more menacingly.
What keepsake will you leave me with?
The bitter impression of a long-vanished dream?
Or will you let another woman touch your heart
With passionate words in September?
Can I not trust you? Who else if not you –
A youth who is a stranger to me now?
My circle of friends grows ever smaller,
Which of you will reach the end with me?

    The second poem was shorter. It too was written that winter. Even more than in the first, there is a note of hopelessness in Sveta’s prayers for Lev’s return:

    It’s not for me to judge you, who are under fire,
With whom death has already spoken more than once,
But to pray night and day,
That the Mother of God keep you safe for me.
     
    I would pray for this. But the ABC of prayers
Was not taught to me by my mother and father
And I couldn’t find a path to God
In joy, sorrow, or in grief.

    But Lev was not dead. He was a prisoner in one of Hitler’s harshest labour camps, a Stalag in Leipzig where Soviet POWs were marched under heavy guard to work every day at the Pittler ammunition factory. Lev had been sent there from the Mühlberg prison camp, where he had been held after being caught on the Polish
border in July 1943. The regime in the Pittler factory was punitive. Armed guards stood by all the doors in the workshops, and the German foreman carried a revolver, ready for use at any time. During the winter of 1943–4 the work regime became increasingly severe as the German army’s need for ammunition grew with every new defeat on the Eastern Front. Productivity declined as the POWs became more exhausted and undisciplined, prompting the Gestapo to investigate and root out potential leaders of a slave rebellion.
    Lev was interrogated several times. One day in May 1944 he was arrested in a group of twenty-six prisoners and sent to the main prison in Leipzig, where they were all kept in a single cell with a toilet pan and basin by the door. They were held there for a month without being let out of the cell. On 4 July, they were transferred to Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp near Weimar, where they were held in a quarantine barracks consisting of long, unbroken rows of sleeping shelves four tiers high. There were prisoners of every nationality – French, Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs –each one designated by a