It has always seemed like my grandpa’s life began in 1973, when he was granted an exit visa and allowed to make Aliyah to Israel. I do not recall him ever talking about life in his native Russia. From my dad I learned a few scant details. But even he didn’t know much. My grandpa simply didn’t talk about it. Not to anyone.
Last week, I visited him at his nursing home. He is over 100, and, sadly, does not have much time left. At the conclusion of our visit, he handed me a stack of yellow legal paper. “I once had a dream of becoming a physician,” he said. “That dream was stolen from me. I made no meaningful contributions to the sciences. This is all I have. Try to see that it is published.”
His account is reproduced below:
I have tried to write about my experiences in the Gulags hundreds of times. About the old man in the bunk next to mine, a former stage actor from Moscow. On a January night, two big Latvians approached him with a piece of rusty copper wire. He was an informer, you see. It took him 47 seconds to stop struggling. I counted.
I have tried to write about the unimaginable cold of Siberia, where the temperature often dropped below -40°. Of prisoners whose boots were old and ragged and full of holes. They wrapped their feet in rags, but it was not enough. Blood-filled blisters on their frostbitten feet, toes blackened and dead.
I have tried to write about the constant feeling of hunger, only alleviated by a few ounces of hard bread and a cup of thin stew, which, if you were lucky, was augmented with a moldy potato or a putrid fish head. I thought I would get used to it. I never did.
I’ve filled dozens of notebooks with drafts, but, no matter how hard I try, I can’t get the words out right. I have tried in Russian, French, Hebrew, and English. It seems, that no matter the language, I can’t find the words to describe the horror.
But there is one experience that I think I can describe. Not as a man of letters, not as a poet, but as a man of science I once dreamed of being.
Before I describe my encounter, I must provide some background. So you can understand why I ended up in a Gulag.
I was born into a well-off family in Saint Petersburg, then known as Petrograd. My father was both a practicing physician and an assistant professor of medicine. He was able to provide my two siblings and me with a comfortable upbringing, but, even from a young age, I was made aware that we were different than most of the families in the neighborhood. For we were Jewish. We were not observant in the least—I never even had a Bar Mitzvah—but that did not matter. For many Russians, if you were of Jewish origin, even if you spoke Russian instead of Yiddish, even if you never attended shul, even if you went as far as converting to the Orthodox Church, you were not considered to be a Russian, but an outsider, an interloper.
Despite the ever-prevalent anti-Semitism, my family managed to persevere. At least for a while. It was the second year of my university studies when war broke out. I was conscripted, and served the entire duration of the conflict, fighting from Stalingrad to Manchuria. I didn’t make it home until the summer of 1946, to a city in the midst of rebuilding.
I remember walking to the apartment of my youth, dreaming that I would be reunited with my family, that I would walk in to find my mother playing a Tchaikovsky concerto on her grand piano, my father reading Balzac by the fireplace, my grandma knitting in her chair. But I knew deep inside that would not be the case. It was an old man who answered the door. At first I thought it the wrong address. But no. Inside were twenty or so squatters, dressed in rags. None of them knew my family or what happened to them. Nothing remained. Not even the wallpaper, for during the 900-day siege the walls were stripped and the paste boiled to soup for the starving populace.
The only remnant of my past was a small painting of Norman peasants hunting pigeons at night, attributed to Millet but most likely a student copy, which my father brought back from one of his trips to his beloved Paris. It was covered with so much soot that at a distance it appeared to be solid black. The gold-gilded frame was gone but the canvas remained, hammered above where my bed use to lay with a single nail.
It was three days later when I finally found a relative, an older brother of my father. He told me what I had long known deep inside. My entire family was gone, My parents, grandparents, and dozens of other relatives had perished during the siege. My only brother had died fighting in Berlin in April 1945, so close to surviving the war. My sister, who had married and was living in Odessa on the Black Sea when fighting broke out, had not been heard from and was presumed dead.
I searched the city high and low for my sister, holding out against hope that she was still alive, that she had somehow made her way back to the city of her birth. The government knew nothing, and neither did any of the various private aid organizations. Countless days I spent at the railroad station, where a stream of displaced persons was still trickling in. I scanned the crowd daily for my sister, asking the survivors if they knew her. None did.
Finally, one of the many letters that I sent to Odessa was answered. My brother-in-law, along with thousands of other Jewish men and women, was murdered by Romanian soldiers in October of 1941. No records existed of my sister’s fate, but it was believed that she was taken to the concentration camp known as Bogdanovka, where she was almost certainly murdered. Everyone I loved, everyone who had loved me, was dead.
Although alone and penniless, my family’s wealth having vanished, I did the best to start my life anew. I went to the university where my father had taught, where I had studied briefly before the war. Luckily, I found a professor who was a friend of my father. He helped me reenroll, and provided me with a garret apartment which I shared with several other destitute students. Sadly, I never completed my medical studies. Early one morning there was a knock at my door. There were four policeman outside. I did not know what I had done, but I knew where I was going. Siberia.
A fellow student had accused me of criticizing Stalin, of attempting to foment discontent. Nonsense of course, but there was no due process, especially for someone of Jewish origin. 25 years was the sentence. To be served at a camp in the Chelyabinsk Oblast, close to the Kazakhstan border.
At first, I was lucky. Due to my medical background, I was assigned to be an assistant to the camp doctor. While most of the prisoners were laboring outside in the Siberian frost, I was inside, where coal for the hungry furnace was always plentiful. I was well fed, for a prisoner would part with some of his bread, or a helping of his stew, or, if he was a lucky man, with a rich family to send him parcels, with some of his sausage or snuff. In exchange, I would inflate the reading of the thermometer, turning a 99° temperature to a 102° fever, exempting him from work.
I knew it would not last. While it made me many friends, it also made me enemies, jealous of my status, angry when I informed them that no more exemptions could be granted that day. After less than a year I was discovered.
Following a spell in the concrete isolation cells that I thought would surely kill me, I was sent off to a camp a hundred or so miles north, in a forest of cedars. They never told us the exact location, and I never learned. They said the nearest village was over 40 miles away.
The camp was unfinished. The fence and guard towers had been built, but the barracks were still under construction. At night we slept in a hastily-constructed temporary shelter, 30 men, sleeping side by side on thin boards, while during the day we labored ceaselessly, attempting to complete the rest of the buildings before the ground would be too frozen to continue
One night, a few weeks after my arrival, I awoke in horrible pain. Not the constant malaise from hunger and the backbreaking work, but severe abdominal pain, centered around my navel. I thought appendicitis. There would be nothing anyone could do. But it would mean the end of suffering. I pulled on my felt boots and went outside, out of the putrid, stale barrack air.
I walked to the gate, trudging through the snow. It was late October or early November, probably about 15°F. I smiled as I saw the enormous gut of the guard on duty, Ivan Nikolayevich**.** Ivan was usually kind, if you tolerated his jokes.
“Are you off to a house call, doctor?” he asked.
“I feel sick, can I go to the stream and get some fresh water?”
Ivan considered this for a few seconds. He knew that I knew that there was no chance of surviving an escape attempt this late in the year. But still, if a prisoner walked out on his watch, he’d soon be a prisoner himself.
“Give me your jacket,” he said. “And a third of your bread tomorrow morning.”
“My jacket?”
“Do not worry, I will hang it up so it does not get wrinkled. It is just a little insurance policy, so you will not try to escape.”
I tried to think back to my studies, trying to remember how long I could survive in this cold. I thought at least an hour. The stream was only a quarter of a mile away. More than enough time.
I handed him my jacket and he unlocked the gate.
At the edge of the forest, I doubled over and vomited the meager contents of my stomach. Almost instantly, I felt relief. I walked further into the condemned cedars until the walls of my prison had vanished and laid down on the soft snow, not caring that my clothes would get wet, not caring that it would speed up the process of getting hypothermia. It was a magical scene, the full moon giving the evergreen cedars a ghostly appearance. Above me, high up in the branches, sat a solitary gray owl, a silent sentinel over the ancient forest.
I felt more at peace than I had since my arrest. I thought of laying there forever. But something inside of me compelled me to go on. I got up, brushed off the snow, and made my way to the stream.
The water tasted crisper than any I had ever drunk. When I was bending down for my second sip, I noticed a dark mass making its way to the other side of the stream. At first I thought it was a bear, but as it got closer I could tell that it was walking upright with the aid of a walking stick, its gait humanlike. I thought that maybe the guards had lied to us to discourage escape, that there was a nearby settlement. But as it continued to approach, I knew that it wasn’t a villager.
About a foot from the edge of the stream, it stopped and stared at me, seemingly noticing me for the first time. I stared back, frozen in fear, not believing what I was seeing. Human, but not human.
A male, about 5-feet tall. Hair covered almost its entire body, either dark brown or black. Stocky, probably about two hundred pounds, built like a wrestler or a circus strongman. Wide hips, broad shoulders, thick arms, legs, and torso. Large hairy hands. Feet the size of an average man’s, but much wider. His odor was repulsive, reminiscent of decaying fish in the summer sun.
The creature’s legs were much shorter than those of a human of its stature. I had once seen a patient who broke both femurs as a teenager. The fractures never healed properly, and as an adult he had a normal-sized upper body but a disproportionately small lower body. I wondered if a similar accident had befallen this creature.
Except for a thin beard, his face was hairless and deeply wrinkled, like that of a haggard old peasant, and his skin appeared brownish in the moonlight. He had a sloping forehead with a prominent brow ridge. Large dark eyes, rounder than those of a human, were set close together, deep in their sockets, A wide, bulbous nose. A protruding, prominent upper jaw and a receding chin. Ears that joined the side of his head at an extreme angle, sticking out a few centimeters from the side of its face, like those of humans who have an undeveloped antihelical fold.
As I watched it, only a meter or so apart, it made low, guttural grunts. Suddenly, with a single leap, it cleared the stream and swung its walking stick at me. I ducked, the wood narrowly missing my skull, and turned to run. I heard heavy footsteps behind me. After a minute of dashing through the cedars, I looked back. The monster was far behind, but still coming after me. I sprinted back to the camp.
Ivan looked at me, noticing my expression of horror. “What is it, a bear?”
I looked back. There was nothing. “Yes, a bear,” I said, gasping for air.
He laughed. “A city boy like you, doctor, will have to learn to live with bears. They are harmless…most of the time. At my previous camp, we only lost three prisoners to bear attacks.” He laughed again but I did not.
Three days later, under guard, we were sent to gather water from the stream. I looked for footprints, but they had disappeared, covered by wind and snow.
I never saw the creature again in all my years of imprisonment, during the thousands of hours that I spent logging the ancient cedars. But it never left my mind.
Once I was released during the Khrushchev Thaw, I spent days in the library, confirming my hypothesis that what I saw was an archaic human, more specifically a Neanderthal or some other, undescribed relative. I thought that putting a name to the creature would help me forget it, but it didn’t.
It followed me like a clinging dybbuk, from Russia to Israel and finally to my new home of Florida, appearing almost nightly in my dreams. Why? I do not know. I witnessed horror after horror during my days as a soldier and a prisoner, came close to death on several occasions, but somehow, for some reason, I remember the brief encounter most vividly.
I truly wish that the wild man’s stick had connected with my head. I’ve had joy, yes, but every day I’ve had misery, indescribable misery. It’s been over 75 years since I discovered my entire family was dead. They said the pain will lessen. It never did. But soon it will end. I know I will not see them again; I was never a believer. But I do not despair. For to die is to sleep. An eternal, dreamless sleep.