Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [241]
They had to give up the plan when the escape attempt was suspected. Others did try to escape from the trains, however: in June 1940, two criminal prisoners actually got out through a hole in a wagon.43 In that same year, Janusz Bardach slipped through some rotten boards in a wagon too. He neglected to fix them back in place, however, and was immediately caught, tracked down by dogs, and badly beaten—but allowed to live.44
Some escapes had their origins, as Solzhenitsyn puts it, “not in despairing impulse but in technical calculations and the love of fine workmanship.” 45 False walls were built into railway boxcars; prisoners hammered themselves into boxes and had themselves shipped out of the camp.46 Once, twenty-six criminal prisoners dug their way under a wall. All made it out, although—according to the officer who led the search—they were also all captured again within the year.47
Others, like Tchernavin, used their special positions within the camp to organize their escape. Archives record the story of a prisoner who deliberately caused an accident on a goods train and escaped amid the confusion. 48 In another recorded case, prisoners who had been assigned to bury bodies in the camp cemetery shot their convoy guard and placed him in the mass grave, so that his corpse would not be immediately noticed.49 Escape was also easier for “unguarded” prisoners who had passes allowing them to move about between camps.
Disguise was used as well. Varlam Shalamov tells the story of a prisoner who escaped and managed to spend two years in freedom, wandering through Siberia, pretending to be a geologist. At one point, regional authorities, proud to have such an expert in their midst, asked him very respectfully to give a lecture. “Krivoshei smiled, quoted Shakespeare in English, sketched something on the blackboard, and ran through dozens of foreign names.” He was caught, in the end, because he sent money to his wife.50 His story might possibly be apocryphal—but the archives do record similar tales. In one such episode, a Kolyma prisoner stole some documents, smuggled himself onto a plane, and flew to Yakutsk. There he was found, comfortably installed in a hotel, with 200 grams of gold in his pocket.51
Not all escapes involved clever flights of fancy. Many—probably the majority—criminal escapes involved violence. Runaways attacked, shot, and suffocated armed guards, as well as free workers and local residents. 52 They did not spare their fellow inmates either. One of the standard methods of criminal escape involved cannibalism. Pairs of criminals would agree in advance to escape along with a third man (the “meat”), who was destined to become the sustenance for the other two on their journey. Buca also describes the trial of a professional thief and murderer, who, along with a colleague, escaped with the camp cook, their “walking supply”:
They weren’t the first to get this idea. When you have a huge community of people who dream of nothing but escape, it is inevitable that every possible means of doing so will be discussed. A “walking supply” is, in fact, a fat prisoner. If you have to, you can kill him and eat him. And until you need him, he is carrying the “food” himself.
The two men did as planned—they killed and ate the cook—but they had not bargained on the length of the journey. They began to get hungry again:
Both knew in their hearts that the first to fall asleep would be killed by the other. So both pretended they weren’t tired and spent the night telling stories, each watching the other closely. Their old friendship made it impossible for either to make an open attack on the other, or to confess their mutual suspicions.
Finally, one fell asleep. The other slit his throat. He was caught, Buca claims, two days