A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II by Gustaw Herling

Author:Gustaw Herling [Herling, Gustaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1996-05-31T12:00:00+00:00

Only in the bath-house was it possible to examine the effects of hunger, for in the barracks the prisoners seldom undressed for the night. The small bath-hut was always, full of murky grey light which filtered in through the dirty window-panes, and of steam which rose from a huge vat of boiling water. Before going in, we handed over our clothes to be deloused, and received in return a piece of grey soap the size of a domino counter. When the clothes had been deloused they were brought in, hung on iron rings on a long pole, by an elderly priest who, sloping the pole, let the bundles fall on to the floor of the passage. It was pleasant to feel the hard plasters of heated clothing on a clean body. There was no other way of changing clothes; we went to the bath-house once every three weeks, and these visits were the only time that we really washed ourselves, for usually we just moistened with snow our encrusted eyes, our noses hard as shells, and our cracked lips. A thin, half naked teacher from Novosybirsk, who looked like a Hindu yogi as he watched us bathing, his eyes covered with a thin cataract, gave us each two pails of water, one boiling, and one cold. Thin shadowy forms, with drooping testicles and fallen stomachs and chests, their legs covered with open sores and joined like two matchsticks to thin hips, bent under the weight of the pails, puffing from exhaustion in the steamy atmosphere of the hut. The Novosybirsk teacher here played the part of a eunuch in a Turkish harem, for his functions were the same when women came to the bath-house. For a pinch of tobacco he would tell us whether their breasts and thighs were beautiful, whether the old ones were flattened like blocks hit with a steam-hammer so that their heads grew straight out of monstrously widened hips supported on legs like knotted branches, or whether the young ones still retained the vestiges of girlish modesty and the straight line of their shoulders.

One day someone stole my piece of soap from the bench and I swore angrily in Polish. A small, grey-haired old man, standing next to me over his bucket of hot water, raised his gentle eyes towards me and asked in Polish, enunciating each word with difficulty: “Did you by any chance know the poet Tuvim?”

“Not personally, no,” I replied, bewildered by this unusual question, “though, of course, I have read ...”

“Well then, you can wash my back for me.”

As I soaped his thin back he explained everything to me, coughing incessantly as he did so. His name was Boris Lazarovich N., a professor who, before the First World War, had studied at the Russian Secondary School in Lodz in Poland, and had gone to Russia after the Revolution of 1918. From his schooldays he remembered a younger fellow-student, Tuvim, and he had learnt from the press that he had become a well-known poet.

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