WHITE STEPPE: An Indictment Four years of imprisonment in Soviet Russia by Antonino Buffa

Author:Antonino Buffa [Buffa, Antonino]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: History
Publisher: Blue Zephyr
Published: 2016-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

URIUPINSK CAMP 123

In the USSR everything is mysterious, enigmatic, suspicious, surreptitiously done in the shadow. An order suddenly comes that nobody is to know before, just as no one must know when and why it is given. Thus we suddenly had the news of our transfer to another concentration camp. Early in February 1944 we doctors – in addition to me Mantelli, De Ponti, Gambera, Benigni and Ragazzoni – received the order to depart immediately. They forced us to eat a piece of black bread and some soy in a hurry and they pushed us into an open and grungy vehicle. So we were departing! Where for? There was no need to know this for the moment; we had no chance to greet all our friends; the truck immediately took us away. We said goodbye to the church, the quarters, the walls, and the mass of crows. We were going we knew not where, but we were moving, going somewhere, living, instead of growing sad amid walls and fences. The town of Susdal faded away. All six of us were in a good mood, our eyes full of joy. What did we care if as we rushed along the path in the snow we were tossed around and the cold got inside our overcoats?

The country was flat, uniform, with a covering of snow and some clumps of wood, going away toward the horizon. After a few hours we arrived at the station in Vladimir where we were then escorted by two Russian soldiers. We thought we would be put in some livestock wagon, but to our surprise we were taken instead to the waiting room, decorated and furnished in the nineteenth-century taste. Some soldiers looked at us curiously, and some invalids as if they wanted to assault us. In the meantime, a passenger train overloaded with people advanced with small and not very clean wagons. We were amazed when the escort soldiers pushed us inside. Were we traveling amid the Russians like common passengers? It hardly seemed true! We had lost our personalities, like animals in captivity, and we felt a little uneasy in contact with civilians. The two guards made us sit down. There were passengers everywhere, in the corridors, in the aisles, even between the bumpers.

The train moved slowly, not more than twenty or thirty kilometers an hour. Inside, everything was closed because of the cold, and the heat and the smells from human bodies were unbearable. Finally, we grew accustomed to it. Turning to look inside, I observed the civilians, with lined jackets, kufaikas, valenkis, felt boots. The compartments were bigger and higher than ours, with third-class wooden seats (there was only one class in Russia); in a compartment for six people were six sleeping places, including the two lower seats; in the daytime they were for sitting on, and then at night they were for two people; the other ones went up on the right and left in the other places, all on hard wood. In Russia single-class wagons are thus fitted out for long journeys that can last weeks.

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