Authors: Mary Nichols
What could he do but agree? Without her and the clothes and money she had provided he would have died on the march, because the straggling line of prisoners would almost certainly have been taken by the advancing Russians. Someone had told him they had been destined to be put on board a ship which would have put to sea and been deliberately sunk. Either way, he would not have
survived. He was not as sure as Else was that it would be the Americans who reached them first and his only hope of staying out of a Russian prison was to remain Erich Weissmann.
They lived like rats in the cellars of bombed houses, coming out now and again to try and find food, begging and scavenging. Money had no value, so they traded whatever they could find in the bombed buildings for food. By the time the Russians overran the city, they were living skeletons dressed in rags. But the anonymity was a blessing.
The conquerors were in jubilant mood, drunk much of the time, raping the women, which they said was no more than the Germans did to the Russian women. Else was afraid all the time and clung to Alex, who managed to keep the soldiers at bay with his ready command of Russian. They heard daily reports of the Battle for Berlin which was raging street by street and getting closer and closer to Hitler’s headquarters in the Reichstadt. The day it was overrun was a black day for the inhabitants but one of jubilation for the Russians, who celebrated with noisy parties and drunken orgies. No one believed Germany could win the war and none was surprised when it ended with the news of the Führer’s suicide, and very shortly afterwards, Germany’s unconditional surrender.
‘Now we can live in peace,’ Else said, as she emerged from the cellar in which they had been living to see their conquerors celebrating. ‘Now, perhaps they will go home and we can get on with our lives.’
Alex did not believe for a minute the Russians would go; it was their avowed intention to spread communism throughout the world and they set out to sovietise all the land they had overrun. Germany became a country divided
between the Allies; Potsdam was in the Russian zone.
The civilian men were rounded up and put to work clearing the rubble so that life could return to some kind of normality, for which they received a small wage and minimal rations. Alex, known as Erich Weissmann, became one of the workers. England, Upstone Hall and Lydia seemed a far-off dream and it was best not to think about it. But sometimes, when life seemed more than usually drear, he could not help thinking of the life he had left behind and wondering if Lydia were safe and happy. He prayed that it was so, or all he had endured would have been in vain.
He sometimes looked longingly towards the west, wondering if he could escape, but Else was the stumbling block. He could not abandon her and she would not go with him. As far as she was concerned, she was home where she belonged and she had a man to take care of her and life was not so bad, especially when they found an apartment in a block of flats which had been repaired and made habitable. The
Hausfrau
in her came to the fore and she delighted in making a home for him. It was all she asked. She did not see his restlessness and would not have understood it if she had.
Unfortunately there were those in the city who had known the real Erich, and one day in autumn 1946 four armed policemen knocked at the door in the early hours of the morning and arrested him, taking no notice of Else who clung to him, weeping and protesting that he was Erich Weissmann to whom she had been married since 1941. He was taken to the town gaol, his only hope that they did not know his real name; only Else knew that.
Several nights and days of interrogation followed in which he maintained his name was Erich Weissmann. It
became apparent during their interrogation of him that they had questioned Else who, to save herself, had told them his Russian name and that he was a deserter who had forced her to shelter him. She had not told them he was English, perhaps because they never thought to ask and she had only answered questions put to her, or because she did not believe it herself. He was handed over to the Russian authorities.
It was unexpected but fortuitous that they were so inefficient that there appeared to be no record of Alexei Simenov becoming the Englishman Alex Peters. He wondered whether to disclose it himself in the hope they would release him, but decided not to. For one thing, he knew he would be considered a spy and the British authorities would almost certainly deny any knowledge of him. It would cause a diplomatic incident and would not save him. Better to remain Alexei Simenov. He was despatched to Moscow for trial on a charge of desertion and consorting with the enemy, fully expecting to be sentenced to death. He would have been if his bravery at Minsk had not been reported and his sentence was commuted to ten years in Norilsk, one of the many labour camps in Siberia. ‘You have been given an opportunity to become rehabilitated,’ he was told. ‘Do not waste it.’
The journey was even worse than he imagined it might be. The prisoners, many of them sentenced under
trumped-up
charges, were crowded into trucks like animals; the rations were minimal and toilet facilities disgusting. He lost track of time as day followed day; the weather became colder and only the fact that they were crammed so closely together kept them warm. It came to an end at last when they arrived in the town of Krasnoyarsk, where they
boarded a steamboat to continue by river. After another two thousand kilometres, becoming colder and colder, they arrived in the port of Dudinka well inside the Arctic Circle. From here a train took them to the camp. It was snowing hard and they were ill-equipped for the cold. Some had already died on the journey, many more were sick.
Norilsk was a desolate place, built by earlier prisoners using nothing but pickaxes and wheelbarrows in order to exploit the rich mineral deposits in the area. Its nickel was needed for the production of high-grade steel and it had grown into a huge complex. There was no perimeter fence; it wasn’t needed. No one could escape from that wilderness, thousands of kilometres from civilisation. They were taken to the administration building for documentation, after which their clothes were taken from them for delousing and they were given a bucket of water and herded to the washrooms to try, as far as they were able, to clean themselves. Their clothes, such as they were, were returned to them and they were taken to the huts which were to become their homes. Alex ducked his head under the lintel of one to follow the man in front of him, in a mood of black despair. The thing he had spent so much time and effort to avoid had come to pass; he was a prisoner of the Soviet system and cut off from all communication with the outside world.
He looked about him. The floor of the hut was simply hardened earth. There was a broken stove in the middle whose chimney leant drunkenly before disappearing out through the roof. Beside it were a few sticks and a pile of coal. Bunks had been constructed around the walls and each man put his meagre belongings onto one of them while one of their number set about lighting the fire. The room was
soon filled with black smoke, making them cough and their eyes water, but the fire took the edge off the bitter cold.
It was the cold and the barren landscape which was their greatest enemy. Trying to keep warm, fed and well enough to do the work required of them was the be-all and end-all of their days and nights. The camp was huge; there were copper and nickel mines, coal mines, smelting works, factories for making bricks and another for processing fish, garages for the repair of vehicles, as well as offices, a post office, a theatre and a sports stadium, though Alex suspected the last three were intended for the guards and the growing number of free workers, specialist engineers and technicians, who were needed to run the mines and factories and who, unlike the convicts, were paid.
Alex was put to work in the repair shop, which was supposed to keep the machinery in working order. This was almost impossible, due not only to his lack of experience in that kind of work, but to a chronic shortage of spare parts and the intense cold. When his expertise in languages became known, he found himself in the administrative office, translating the petitions of the non-Russian prisoners and drafting the replies, most of which comprised a firm
nyet
. It meant a slightly enhanced standard of living, if you could call constant hunger and never feeling warm living.
The efforts to separate the male and female prisoners were not always successful and there were many ragged unshod children running about the camp. They reminded him how he had failed to find Yuri and that reminded him of Lydia. It was seven years since he had said goodbye to her in Moscow and he wondered what she was doing. What was England like in the post-war years? Was it returning to normality? Had she remarried? He could hardly blame her
if she had. He had not asked her to wait for him; it was too much to ask, given the situation at the time when the prospect of him ever returning to England was so remote as to be discounted. But oh, how he longed for the pleasant green fields, the winding tarmac roads, the old churches and Upstone Hall.
The pleasant green fields of England had disappeared under layers of snow. Drifts up to fourteen feet deep obscured the roads and buried cars over their roofs. Trains could not run. Remote villages and even some towns were cut off. The sea froze at its edge and there were icebergs floating in the sea off the Norfolk coast. To add to everyone’s misery, there was a shortage of coal, not only for domestic use but for industry. The mines had recently been nationalised and the stocks, already low, were frozen solid and could not be moved to the power stations. Factories were closed and schools were shut. Peace had certainly not brought an end to the country’s problems. Rationing was as severe as it had ever been, money was short and so was housing, even though there was a huge programme to replace buildings which had been bombed. Discontent was rife and there were frequent strikes.
Robert, on leave, struggled up the drive of Upstone Hall dragging a huge branch which had fallen from one of the trees in the park. Bobby, not yet four, was with him, well clad against the cold with woolly hat and gloves. Bobby was a real daddy’s boy and, whenever Robert was at home, would follow him about, trying to imitate his ways. Seeing them from the window, Lydia handed Tatiana over to Claudia, donned wellington boots, scarf and gloves, and ran to help.
‘It’ll keep the stove going a little longer,’ Robert said,
stopping to catch his breath. Keeping the stove going was their main occupation. They had turned off all but the essential radiators and had been living in the kitchen where the stove which heated the boiler was situated. It had also been used for cooking until Edward had had an electric cooker installed just before the war. The cooker was next to useless now because there were daily power cuts between nine a.m. and noon and for two hours again in the afternoon. The old boiler was their lifeline.
They dragged the branch round to the stable yard and Robert set about chopping it up. Lydia took Bobby indoors to keep him away from flying splinters. Edward had come to the kitchen to keep warm and was sitting in the housekeeper’s old rocking chair, toasting his toes on the fender and nursing Tatiana. He was wearing a dressing gown and scarf on top of all his clothes. He had never been the same man after Margaret’s death, but the arrival of Tatiana, which had coincided with the end of hostilities in Europe in May 1945, had given him a renewed vigour. He adored her. She was dark-haired and blue-eyed, a placid child, unlike Bobby, who had learnt to walk when he was little over a year old, and was like a whirlwind and into every mischief he could think of. Seeing his grandfather, he endeavoured to clamber on to his lap beside his sister.
‘You cannot both sit on Grandpa’s lap,’ Lydia said, removing him and divesting him of his outdoor clothes. ‘Come and look at your picture book with Claudia while I cook lunch.’
‘I hope it’s not that dreadful whale meat,’ Edward said. ‘It’s enough to make a body turn vegetarian.’ Whale meat had been heralded as a good alternative to beef, but it had not proved popular with the public.
‘No, it’s chicken. They’ve stopped laying, so we may as well eat them.’ To augment their rations, they had turned over a portion of their large garden to vegetables, half a dozen chickens and a cockerel who scratched in the dirt and ruined the flowerbeds, and a nanny goat which they kept for her milk. Claudia had even managed to make goat’s cheese.
‘Then what do we do for eggs?’
‘Rely on the ration and dried egg,’ Lydia said.
‘We were better off during the war,’ he said, echoing a favourite cry of much of the population. ‘What we need is Winnie back at the helm.’
Winston Churchill’s Conservatives had lost the 1945 election and Labour under Clement Attlee had come to power. One of their first enactments was to nationalise the coal mines and bring them under the control of a Minister of Fuel and Power in the shape of Emanuel Shinwell. The weather and his apparent lack of forethought over coal stocks, together with strikes and absenteeism, meant he was decidedly unpopular.
It wasn’t only the weather that had made everyone gloomy, but the austerity of the aftermath of the war, the strikes and shortages. Factories closed for lack of power. Meat, eggs, cheese, bacon, sugar and sweets were still rationed and so were bread and potatoes, something that had never happened during hostilities. The newspapers were cut back to their wartime size of four pages and holidays abroad were banned. There were those who said Britain had won the war but lost the peace.
The troubles at home were reflected abroad with the need to rebuild Europe. This was not helped by the attitude of the Soviet Union and those eastern countries it
controlled. Winston Churchill, in a speech in America the year before, had said: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’ Neither Lydia nor Edward were surprised by this. It seemed to symbolise the way she had been cut off from Yuri. She would never cease to feel guilty about what had happened, telling herself she should have realised what Kolya and Olga were planning and taken steps to prevent it. But she had been so overcome by misery over her husband’s betrayal, she had not been thinking properly. Papa had told her not to blame herself, but she still did. Perhaps one day, when life returned to normal, she might try and find him. But what was normal? Was it never being afraid? Never being hungry? Was it never being short of anything? Was it having time to enjoy life? Being free to travel?