Armageddon - Max Hastings [299]
Mamontov was too weak to walk when he left 21st Punishment Camp after serving his eight-week sentence. He was sent briefly to a transit camp near Leipzig, and thence to Buchenwald. They did little work in Buchenwald. They merely lingered on the cusp between life and death. After a few months, he was transferred to Dora, an outstation of Buchenwald, from which the inmates marched every morning into a mountain factory where V2 rockets were assembled. “We believed that no one would be allowed to leave the place alive, because it was top secret.”
They were an extraordinary miscellany. There were some French and a few British prisoners. Two of Mamontov’s Russian friends, Pavel Ostrovsky and Sergei Fomichev, had been sent there for attempted escapes. Both died. Yosef Ardginski, an Uzbek, was suspected of helping partisans. He survived. They all exchanged addresses soon after they arrived, so that if any man lived he might inform families of the fate of others. There were a few German political prisoners, who had a radio. This kept them informed about the war. After the Warsaw Rising, there was an influx of Poles. Alleged indiscipline was rewarded with twenty-five lashes. German behaviour became much uglier when evidence emerged that some prisoners were sabotaging rocket parts. Rations were cut. Anyone suspected of sabotage was summarily executed, sometimes by hanging in the workshops in front of the other slaves.
In 1945, “conditions became appalling,” said Mamontov. Some days, there was no bread, merely a few boiled potatoes. The camp possessed a small crematorium, but now there were too many corpses to burn overnight. Each morning as the prisoners marched to work, they saw the dead heaped outside. Mamontov attributed his own survival to some inner strength: “I never panicked. Those who panicked and thought they would die did die.” But in those first months of 1945 despair seemed very close. One night in March, the alarm sounded, and they were suddenly marched to a train waiting near by. “We had no idea where we were being taken. At stations, we would push a jug between the slats of the boxcar, and sometimes a railworker would fill it with water.” It took them a week of hell to travel fifty-five miles. When the train stopped, they were marched three miles to their destined camp. Stragglers who collapsed were shot beside the road. Their new home was Belsen. When they arrived on 4 April the administration of the camp was collapsing. Prisoners received no food at all. Bodies littered the compounds. They slept among corpses in the barracks. “The stench was indescribable . . . I cannot imagine how I survived.”
Georgi Semenyak was a young gunner from Leningrad, captured in July 1941 after walking for three weeks eastwards, trying to stay ahead of the German invaders. His subsequent experience was an odyssey through the hierarchy of misery within the Nazi prison industry. He spent his first two years of captivity in PoW camps in Poland. In November 1943, an informer denounced a large group of prisoners for organizing an anniversary celebration of the Revolution. Eighty-four men were sent to a slave-labour camp at Stutthof near Danzig, where 12,000 Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian and French prisoners were being literally worked into their graves. “The Germans obviously did not care whether we lived or died. We believed that we were doomed.” They were summoned to Appel each morning by a bugle call from one of the watchtowers. They lived chiefly off beet soup. The work itself was futile—relentless earth-moving designed solely to occupy the prisoners. He noted one grotesque irony—in PoW camp, they had been forbidden to sing. At Stutthof, it was a privilege of the damned to sing. “Every nationality was treated terribly, but Russians were treated worse than anyone except Jews and