Flights to Freedom

THE HUNTERS AND THE HUNTED (245 pp.)--Ivan Bahriany--St. Martin's Press ($3.50).

THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN (248 pp.)--Henriette Roosenburg--Viking ($3.50).

Each of these books is an intriguing mixture of political terror and pastoral. The authors spent years in those plague spots of the 20th century--concentration camps. One of them was condemned to death; the other contracted tuberculosis. Yet, their writing has far more sunlight than shadow, and their message is one of charity rather than hate.

Out of Siberia. The Hunters and the Hunted was written by a refugee from the Soviet Union who escaped to the West in World War II. His novel is set in the time of the mass purges during the 1930s and begins with an angry rhapsody to all those who suffered death, punishment and exile. The hero, a Ukrainian Cossack named Hryhory Mnohohrishny, has been sentenced as "an enemy of the State" to 25 years at the slave-labor camp at Kolyma on the frozen Sea of Okhotsk. Now he is one of thousands of prisoners jammed into a 60-car convict train rolling across Siberia to the camp. As a counterpoint to the doomed men in the cattle cars, Author Bahriany describes the comforts of another train, also bound east, which is carrying volunteer settlers to the frontier lands on the Pacific. Among them is the NKVD major responsible for Hryhory's arrest. These are the antagonists: the hunter and the hunted.

Hryhory makes his escape at the last Siberian station before the prisoners are transferred to boats for the voyage to Kolyma. He plunges south into the taiga, the vast, swampy forest that stretches along the Manchurian border. After six days of flight, during which he has only a handful of nuts for food, Hryhory is still powerful enough to stab a bear to death and rescue Natalka Sirko, the daughter of a family of hunters. The remainder of the book is largely a hymn to the free life of the Sirko family, whose elemental existence is wondrously untouched by the Soviet police power.

Idyl's End. There are quiet nights as the hunters sit silently with their rifles awaiting the antlered deer at a salt lick; they go spear fishing in the forest rivers, wake to brilliant mornings when billions of dewdrops shimmer like miniature suns, and huddle in the winter snugness of their clay-walled home with its roaring Russian stove. The climax of the year is the tiger hunt, when dogs and men go out to track down young cats and wrestle them into submission. And through this rhythmic cycle of the seasons, love springs up between Hryhory and Natalka.

When the idyl is broken by the arrival of the NKVD major, Hryhory shoots the man dead and escapes to Manchuria and freedom with Natalka. The mythic and dreamlike quality of the book suggests that Author Bahriany may be more interested in symbolism than adventure. But his fine telling of man's struggle against nature seems more compelling than his deeply felt account of a freedom fighter's war with totalitarianism.

Out of Germany. The Walls Came Tumbling Down relates the real saga of a Dutch girl, condemned to death by the Nazis for her work in the underground and awaiting execution at the Waldheim prison in southeastern Germany. Her story begins with the carnival of freedom that occurs when Waldheim is captured in 1945 by the advancing Russians. In those first hysterical days, the freed prisoners are as vindictive as a wolf pack. Captured guards are hurled to their death down a stairwell; a brutal prison doctor is beaten insensible and shot. Henriette comes face to face with a woman guard she has sworn to kill: "I stared fixedly at the woman, at those coarse features, and cruel mouth I had hated from the bottom of my soul . . . Yet now I found that, even if I had known how to go about it in a sunny courtyard full of people, I was incapable of killing in cold blood."

With that decision, Henriette and her friends change from uncaged animals to human beings with purpose and pride. With two girls who were her fellow prisoners and a young Dutch seaman, she starts out on the long journey to her home in The Netherlands. The book becomes a picaresque adventure as the quartet travel by foot, horse cart, boat and truck. Along the way are Germans, sullen or penitent or self-pitying; Russians, busy "liberating'' wristwatches, bicycles and women; and a boisterous medley of all the races of Europe who had been penned into camps by the Nazis and are now moving deliriously toward their homes. The biggest problem of course is posed by the Russians: "We never learned to predict what a Russian soldier would do. Was he going to shoot? Be friendly? Look the other way? Help us out? Run us into a displaced persons camp? . . . We could never tell beforehand."

Life's Encore. In the final stage of their journey they encountered the overwhelming if absent-minded munificence of the U.S. Army. A Negro truck driver whisked them 50 miles in 60 minutes to Halle airfield, where a U.S. dispatcher airily put them aboard a C-47 bound for Brussels and, by easy stages, home.

Author Roosenburg. now a LIFE reporter, writes with such warmth and euphoria that often the great migration of prisoners seems as jolly as a Sunday in the park. The heady excitement of survival made it easy to put the dreadful past out of mind and heart. Nearing home. Henriette says: "I feel like one of those violinists at a concert who gets called back for an encore. I was so convinced that I was going to die and that the concert was over, but apparently life wants an encore. I just realized that tonight."

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