Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual

Aleksandr Wat, My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. 1977

Trans. Richard Lourie

What was a prominent Polish writer who was arrested by the NKVD in 1940. While a prisoner at Lubyanka, he and his fellow inmates were evacuated to Saratov in the fall of 1941.

For years afterwards I thought that Lubyanka had been entirely evacuated - I mean, I knew that it filled up again later, but I had thought at that time, during the week of evacuation, the entire prison had been evacuated. But I've read of someone who had stayed on there. And so everyone wasn't evacuated

The evacuation of Lubyanka. The secretaries were walking downstairs between us, beautiful girls, all young, very well dressed. There was no panic on the NKVD people's faces, but each one of them was carrying as many dossiers as he could hold, dossiers whose covers had been marked that they were never to be destroyed. The courtyard was packed with trucks, one beside the other. The dossiers were tossed into the trucks at random, personal data on millions of people, the dossiers that in fact upheld Stalin's state

From the courtyard where the dossiers were being tossed into trucks, we were taken to other courtyards, an enormous number of courtyards, each with its gate, one after the other, like Chinese boxes, and so I don't know how many there were. We were led through those courtyards to where a great variety of vehicles were waiting for us. Clearly there was no plan now; the plan had vanished, been washed away. Simply because I was alongside Broniewski, they packed the two of us into the same vehicle - us, people involved in the same case. But no one took any notice.

They packed us into the same vehicle and drove us to Butyrki Prison. Of course we did not know whether we were being taken to our deaths or to another prison. But we did know that this was an evacuation, and so chances were that we were going to another city, and most likely we were heading for a train station. But we were going to Butyrki

We were taken to the railroad tracks; there was no station in sight. Truck after truck, Black Maria after Black Maria, they packed us into cattle cars. As soon as the wooden car doors were slid open on their casters, the whole group of us surged forward like wild men to grab the good places. We already knew what those transports were like . The cars have plank beds and of course the most coveted are the ones by the little window. There's one little window high up, just one. Naturally, Boniewski and I kept together. But somehow Peiper vanished in that enormous crowd of people.

The trip to Saratov had begun. It must have taken four days. Again, no way to measure time. Thanks to using our elbows, Broniewski and I had relatively decent places, not right by the window but not far from it either, and on the same side. The daily routine has been described a hundred times - head counts, officers, NKVD. The lavatory was right in the car, a hole in the floor. We were given bread, rather large portions - I think they must have weighed six hundred grams. The world's worst bread. They also gave us herring. And that too was part of their routine. Someone very cruel must have thought that one up because those herring were covered with a thick crust - not a layer, a crust - of salt. And they gave us very little water. Prudent people didn't eat the herring

We pulled into Saratov, on a side track again. There were no trucks waiting to pick us up; a marching column was formed I don't know how many kilometers they herded us, but it was a good distance.

Source: Aleksander Wat. My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. Trans. Richard Lourie. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 265-272.