Vorkuta

Two Americans stepped through the Iron Curtain last week, free men. Private William Marchuk, 38, of Norristown, Pa., who disappeared from his Army unit in Berlin in 1949, asked for a cigarette and grunted, as he dragged on it: "First American cigarette in six years." His companion, John H. Noble, 31, of Detroit, had been arrested by the Russians in Dresden in 1945. Said he: "I have much to tell."

What Noble had to tell about was Vorkuta, a name that is likely to live in infamy with Dachau and Belsen. Marchuk and Noble had been held for years in Vorkuta slave camp, and they brought out word that a handful of other Americans are still there.

In the past three years, Germans, Russians, Spaniards and Greeks have also been released from Vorkuta; some have told their stories to interrogators, others have filled twelve issues of a refugee magazine with firsthand descriptions of the Soviet slave camp system. Together their stories present a well-documented picture.

Forty Pitheads. Vorkuta is a complex of prison camps, situated in the bleak tundra territory of European Russia on the river Vorkuta above the Arctic Circle, about 1,400 miles northeast of Leningrad. A century ago Czar Nicholas I's advisers suggested to him that he make a colony for political prisoners at Vorkuta, but when he learned the conditions, Nicholas decided that it was "too much to demand of any man that he should live there." The Soviets let the native Komi remain there, virtually ignored until 1942, until the invading Nazis captured the Donbas coal mines. Then, gathering a vast horde of war prisoners, refugees from the Baltic states and the Ukraine, the Russians built a railroad to Vorkuta and began mining coal in its permanently frozen ground.

Today, in a vast area, there are 40 pitheads, serviced by the camps of the Vorkuta complex. There are an estimated 235,000 people in the Vorkuta complex, some 12,000 of them guards, technicians and officials, about 105,000 of them prisoners, and another 120,000 of them prisoners freed from the camps but forbidden to leave the area. Vorkuta supplies about 6% of the Soviet Union's coal production.

White Winter. Ten months of the year Vorkuta is blanketed by snow. El Campesino, the peasant general who fought for the Republicans in the Spanish civil war (one of the few people ever to have escaped from a Soviet prison camp), has described the storms which sweep over the Vorkuta during the winter: "The watch dogs of our guards sensed the approach of a snowstorm before we did; they began to howl and whine, and this would be the signal to start cutting holes into the frozen ground where there was no other shelter. One day a shift of 150 prisoners on its way back to camp was caught in a sudden storm only a few hundred yards from the mine. The guards abandoned them and made their way back to shelter with the help of their dogs. The prisoners dug themselves in. Two days later, when the storm abated, the next shift going to the mine passed small white mounds. Nobody troubled to dig the bodies out. But one of the officers in the camp command said: 'It is a pity we've lost their clothing.' " A typical Vorkuta camp, built around a mine pit, consists of some 30 long, low, Quonset-like barracks made of vertical boards and roofed with hand-reeved board shingles. The cracks are chinked with mud and cinders, and two coal-fed brick stoves supply heat. Rows of double-deck bunks run the length of the building, but frequently prisoners have to sleep on the floor. Buckets provide sanitation.

Prisoners wear quilted uniforms, men in blue, women in black. The uniforms of political prisoners are stenciled, top and bottom, with combinations of numerals and letters which tell prison officials at a glance the prisoner's history. No histories could be more varied. The camps contain Old Bolsheviks who claim acquaintance with Lenin and Trotsky, Socialists, at least 30 Wehrmacht generals and several thousands of German prisoners of war, thousands of Poles, Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians, executioners who worked for the SS in the Ukraine, SS men, thousands of Russian and Ukrainian Jews (some of them victims of the "little pogrom" just before Stalin's death), Armenians. Greeks, Roman Catholic priests, Frenchmen, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetans.

A special group in the camps are the Veruyushchie (believers), prisoners who refuse to work for the state on the grounds of conscience. Among them are the monashki, devoted religious women who normally might have been nuns. Dr. Joseph Scholmer, a German M.D. who spent 3 1/2 years in the camp, attended a religious service in one of the mine pits worked by Lithuanians: "We walked down passages that were full of people and eventually came to a disused gallery which ended in a little crypt. About 20 men had collected there. All were standing in silence: they were sunk in prayer. They felt quite safe here. No soldier who values his life would ever venture down into the pit."

The Vagrants. Strangest of all the groups in the camps are the blatnye, the criminals, who take the best bunks, get the best food. "They belonged," wrote Dr. Scholmer, "to a tightly knit organization with rigid laws of its own which is to be found in every camp in Vorkuta. The organization is made up to a large extent of former besprizornye, the vagrant children who have been characteristic of the Soviet Union. I never once saw one so much as lay hands on a shovel. His companions would murder him if he did. The camp authorities put them officially into brigades, but it is more than any brigadier's life is worth to try and get any work out of them. Fights are nearly always settled with knife and hatchet. Every year a large batch of more than a thousand blatnye is shipped off to the camps on the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean. From these camps there is no return."

At Vorkuta, each camp is surrounded by a twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fence. Inside the fence is a prohibited zone within which the guards in the towers shoot at sight. There are powerful arc lamps every 10 or 15 yards along the wire and during the long hours of winter darkness the prohibited zone is as bright as day. Beyond the camp is the tundra, where guards sit in camouflaged dugouts scanning the undulating landscape with field glasses, and slow-flying biplanes circle looking for suspicious movement. The Komi receive a reward for every escaped prisoner they hand over to the police. Yet prisoners still try to escape. When caught they are beaten to within an inch of their lives, sometimes stripped of their clothes and sent to solitary confinement in the bor, a prison within the prison, but with a difference: it is unheated.

There are compensations--of a kind. In the vast Soviet prison system, Vorkuta is classified as a "polar camp," which means that prisoners get better food. The daily ration includes 800 grams of bread and two warm dishes, usually oatmeal, thick soup or beans with fat. There is meat twice weekly, fish four times. Movies, usually Russian, are shown three times a month. Pravda is pasted on the wall.

After Stalin. On the camp loudspeakers, Vorkuta learned of Stalin's historic stroke. The religious knelt to pray. Others sang joyously. "A 'political expectation' spread through Vorkuta," says Konrad Michailowski, onetime major in the German 16th tank division, who arrived in the camp in 1950. "Everyone thought that Malenkov, whom they called 'Uncle Zhorka,' would change things. Things didn't change and Vorkuta became ripe for trouble."

On the wall-Pravda, the prisoners read of the insurrection in East Germany. Resistance was so open that on July 22, 1953 Vorkuta Commander General Derevyanko made a speech in one troublesome barracks. A Lithuanian interrupted: "I am sick of just working, working until I drop dead in the pit or the tundra sucks me up." Said Derevyanko: "You do not need freedom in order to live. As a citizen you are only on file [an expression frequently used in Soviet bureaucracy], but as a worker you live." The prisoners made a slogan of the general's words, shouted: "A man who is filed away can no longer work." When the order was given to go to work, 3,000 prisoners in the camp laughed.

The strike spread. Despite threats and promises, and the pleas of frantic Vorkuta officials, the revolt lasted ten days. In almost every camp the strikers maintained perfect discipline, and there was amazing unity among the prisoners, regardless of nationality. When prisoners chased officials from one camp, an officer gave the order to shoot. Two prisoners were killed, but there was no general riot.

Despite frantic appeals for instructions, Moscow was mysteriously silent for several days before word arrived that Deputy Minister of the Interior Maslennikov was on his way to Vorkuta by plane. The news sent a chill of fear through both the prisoners and guards. Strikers drafted eleven demands to present to him. At the first camp he visited, Maslennikov made a "fatherly" speech and promised a few concessions: unlocked barracks, more letters and a few rubles' pay. One by one the camps returned to work until finally there were only a few holdouts. At 10 a.m. on July 31 a detachment of Russian guards was deployed about Vorkuta. Quickly, they clamped an iron ring around the camp and the prisoners were told that everyone not out by 11 a.m. would be shot. As the frightened prisoners marched out of the gate, they were split up into groups of 100, and the strike leaders were arrested. Camp 20 refused to leave their barracks and the guards opened fire, killing about 150. Vorkuta quieted again.

In recent months, for whatever capricious reasons, the Communists have allowed a few men and women to leave this hell on earth, apparently supremely indifferent to whatever effect their small voices might have in the rest of the world.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.