Forty Days at Kamas (7 page)

The speaker climbed down from his bunk and stood next to me. He was tall and rangy with a narrow face and tranquil blue eyes. He looked about ten years younger than I and seemed in good physical shape for someone who had been in the camps for very long. I placed his accent as being from Wisconsin or Minnesota. He spoke with a confidence that I associated with higher education and I guessed that he might be a high school or college instructor.

"I just arrived here yesterday, but I'm with you about the stoolies," I told him. "At Susquehanna there were more stoolies than lice and you couldn't say a word without hearing it played back to you during interrogation."

"Welcome to Kamas. Here at least we have the stoolies on the run," the man said, holding out his hand.

I shook hands and gave him my name. His was Ralph Knopfler.

"Do you have a work assignment yet?" he asked me.

"No. Any advice?"

"If you have a choice, go for the civilian recycling plant. They have plenty of work for new men and you don't run much of a risk of being reassigned to something worse later. Military recycling's not bad, either. But don’t go near the silver mines in Park City. They’re killers."

Before I could ask another question, the bell rang a second time and we followed the crowd of prisoners onto the parade ground. The roll was called, announcements were made, and then a work scheduler read out assignments for the new arrivals. I listened intently as the scheduler called out our names and assignments, which had been made based on the rows and columns where we sat on the parade ground. Road construction, snow clearing, waste disposal, and the ore crushing plant were all read out before they reached recycling sites A and B. I was assigned to Recycling Site A, which recovered civilian building materials on a large scale. I congratulated myself on my good fortune and gave a high five to Will Roesemann, who was assigned to the same place.

Breakfast was served in the Division 3 mess hall, a two–story factory–like building of cinder block construction. Each of us received a plastic bowl of watery oatmeal with a few elusive globules of margarine floating on top and a ration bar we were supposed to save and eat at midday. I estimated the food’s caloric value and wondered how I would survive until dinner.

Tucking the ration bar inside my coveralls, I picked up an enamel mug. Self–service urns contained a choice of cold water, weak tea, or a thin coffee substitute unlike any I had ever tasted. I opted for the tea and stepped into the dining area, which consisted of row upon row of metal picnic tables bolted to the floor.

Selecting a seat in a prison or labor camp dining hall, as I had learned from painful experience, demanded caution. Mealtime fistfights were commonplace. At Kamas the warders, easily identifiable by their sleekness and heft, sat at special tables near the windows. Foremen, work schedulers, and other high–ranking prisoners also sat together, as did prisoners under the age of twenty–one.

Here and there were tables of silent, slow–moving, painfully gaunt figures who could be diagnosed at a glance as goners or last–leggers. These were the prisoners who lacked the physical strength to carry on much longer and already had lost the will to survive. I had known goners at Susquehanna and in the transit camps and had seen how quickly their final decline could take hold. Every self–respecting prisoner feared this fate for himself and his friends.

Being over forty, I chose a seat for myself at a table of older prisoners with whom I imagined I might have something in common. One of them was the fellow at the barracks who had expressed fear of reprisals for the killing of stool pigeons. He was a small man whose furtive manner and yellowing front teeth made him resemble a rodent. My intuition told me that he might have been an alcoholic or drug abuser before entering the camps. He recognized me and held his hand out across the table.

"Just in from Susquehanna, eh? I was there once."

His name was D’Amato and he worked in the warehouse.

"You're lucky to be in recycling," D’Amato said. "Sometimes you can find stuff that you can sneak back to the camp and sell to the guards. I found a gold chain once that way. Traded it for a sack of ration bars."

"What's the warehouse like?" I asked.

"It's the best, believe me. I used to be in snow removal and I nearly froze more times than I can count. Lost the toes to prove it."

"How did you go about getting a change in duty? Was it hard?"

D'Amato's neighbor, a towering fifty–something whose aristocratic features showed several days of gray stubble, inclined his head to hear D'Amato's response. D'Amato gave him a sheepish smile and went on.

"Pure luck. One day you're at death's door, the next day you're in from the cold. There's no way I can explain it. Take Judge O'Rourke, here."

He nodded respectfully toward the man on his right, a small, ruddy–faced man of about sixty who wore silver wire–rimmed bifocals.

"The judge and his partner, Judge Richardson, used to be in waste disposal. Nasty, nasty work. Judge O'Rourke came down with cholera and nearly didn't make it. Now they're both appeals clerks and report directly to the deputy warden. Whenever anybody requests a case review, it goes through them."

"Every prisoner has the right to due process," Judge O'Rourke added gratuitously. "Oh, you'll hear petty grumbling about the appeals process from time to time, but in nearly twenty years as a judge, I have found that it is the criminal's nature to claim unfair treatment."

I looked at the man in amazement. To claim that due process existed at all for politicals charged under Title 18 rose to the level of a psychotic break with reality.

"And what might your offense be?" I inquired. "If you don't mind my asking."

The judge pulled himself upright and cast a disapproving look my way.

"Title 18, Section 2384."

"Seditious conspiracy," I noted. We all knew the sections of Title 18 by heart. "Odd, but you hardly look like somebody who'd be involved in that sort of thing. Could it be that someone made a mistake?"

"There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for what happened in my case," the judge replied stiffly. "I'm sure it will all be straightened out in due course."

The man was either a Unionist stooge or certifiably insane. I shoveled down my oatmeal and chugged the rest of my tea to get away from them.

After breakfast more than a thousand of us assembled at the eastern gate of Division 3 for our march to Recycling Site A. New snow had fallen overnight and knee–high drifts covered sections of the road leading north. Iron gray clouds hung low in the sky as they advanced steadily to the east.

I felt a mixture of anticipation and fear as I set out for my first full day of work at Kamas. I had already calculated the precise number of days remaining in my sentence but had reassured myself that this was only the first of many work assignments I would have in my camp career. This one might last days or months, but in either case the tedium would be broken by meeting people and gaining knowledge unlike any I had known before.

After leaving the gate, we marched a distance of nearly five miles in about an hour and a half. As we came within a mile of the recycling site its outlines became clearer. The place seemed indistinguishable from an ordinary junkyard except for its enormous size. As we came closer, certain sections of the site took on the form of auto salvage yards; others of lumberyards, brickyards, and plumbing supply yards, each specializing in the recovery of a different class of materials. To the rear, a huge structure the size of an airplane hangar opened to receive a flatbed tractor–trailer.

As the head of our column reached the site's outer perimeter fence, a metal gate slid open on tracks to admit us. Group by group, work teams peeled off to their regular worksites, leaving the newcomers behind. We halted and counted off by fives to form fresh squads. Roesemann and I ended up on different teams. Still, I found some familiar faces in my twenty–man work team, including the Texan, Jerry Lee. Our leader was the same Ralph Knopfler whom I had met in the barracks before roll call.

In a speech as brief as it was blunt, Knopfler announced that, so long as we remained on his work team, we were to regard him as the final authority in all things at the site. It was he who kept attendance, made work assignments, set quotas, measured output, and determined who went on sick call and who was punished for shirking. He urged us to get to know each other and to work closely as a team because our collective output would from now on be the single biggest factor in our individual survival at Kamas.

Knopfler then led us to a nearby section of the yard where dump trucks had delivered a towering heap of bricks, cinder blocks, paving stones, and stone building blocks. For the rest of the day our group's task would be to carry the bricks and blocks to an assembly area where we were to sort them by shape, size, and color and stack them onto wooden pallets. He and two of his foremen would work with us and instruct us in the proper way to carry out our tasks.

For the next nine hours, we picked bricks and blocks from the heap and carried them across the yard on our shoulders or in hods, then stacked them onto pallets. Other than a ten–minute lunch break to eat our ration bars, we labored without interruption from morning till after dusk, and then assembled by the gate for the return march to camp. I watched my teammates closely, matching my pace to that of the men who worked neither fastest nor slowest. It was punishing work and every muscle and sinew in my middle–aged body cried out for relief, but somehow I survived until the end of the shift. When the whistle blew, we dropped bricks and hods where we stood and assembled for the march back to camp.

As our brickyard work team was one of the first to reach the site’s main gate, we lined up near the head of the column and waited for the gate to open. We sat cross–legged on the ground, close enough to link arms if ordered to do so. I allowed my mind to idle, studying the landscape and surveying the compound's guard towers and perimeter fence for blind spots and other weaknesses.

The convoy guards seemed unusually quiet and tense. I reasoned that they might still be in a state of heightened alert following yesterday's shooting in Division 3 and the brief work stoppage after Lillian's murder.

But this still did not fully explain the behavior of the warders, who milled about nervously at a greater distance than usual from our column. From past experience, I would have expected them to pace up and down the road, giving a whack to anyone who stepped out of line.

I took advantage of the warders' distance to turn around and face the rear of the column to gain a better view of the approaching work teams. As each team took its place in line, its members conversed while awaiting the order to sit.

One group waited in a spot where the road passed particularly close to the perimeter fence and an adjacent watchtower. One of the guards in the tower bantered with the prisoners below as if they were wagering on something. Then suddenly a prisoner seated two rows in front of me pointed excitedly toward the tower, where one of the guards had tossed what appeared to be a tobacco pouch into the yard.

A murmur rose from the group nearest the tower, then silence as one of the prisoners broke away from the column and strode toward the pouch. From where I sat, I recognized the prisoner as a stout little Chinese POW who worked in a different part of the brickyard from ours. He spoke little English but was a natural comedian, resorting to gestures and mimicry when words failed him. The Chinaman looked back at his teammates with a broad grin and made a rude gesture with his corncob pipe to show how manly he was to accept the dare.

He approached the tobacco pouch gingerly, then stooped to snatch it off the ground. As he strutted back toward the column, the POW waved it over his head in triumph then tucked it into his coveralls. Suddenly he did a little jig and an instant later we heard a single gunshot. The Chinaman spun around and fell with a bullet wound in his hip. He looked up at the tower plaintively and dragged himself back toward the column lest the guards shoot him again.

Without warning, a prisoner broke out of the column and ran toward the Chinaman to help. It was Will Roesemann. He knelt at the wounded man’s side, pulled his arm around his shoulder and lifted him the same way he and I had lifted Glenn Reineke two days before. It was a noble gesture, but it didn’t get him or the Chinaman far. The pair hadn’t taken more than three paces before a burst of machine gun fire slammed into Will’s back and blew a gaping hole through his chest. A round from the same burst hit the Chinaman in the neck and nearly tore off his head. Those of us who saw it gasped but did not dare break ranks, knowing that to do so would invite massive retaliation from the machine gunners above.

As always, Will had done the right thing by his fellow man. Only this time it had cost him his life. And now I was more alone than ever.

As if on cue, the convoy guards raced down the length of the column and took up positions spaced precisely ten yards apart. They barked orders for us to stay seated on the ground and link arms or be shot. Warders arrived moments later, swinging their clubs wildly at any prisoner who sat even slightly out of alignment with the column. I felt a glancing blow strike my shoulder and needed all my self–control not to attack the warder who hit me. Other prisoners looked daggers at their attackers but none dared raise a hand against them.

While the guards and warders were busy enforcing order, Jack Whiting climbed down from the watchtower with a sniper rifle slung over his shoulder. His face held a look of animal satisfaction that sent a shudder up my spine.

The march back to camp was highly charged, since we all knew that at any moment a sudden movement might incite the guards to fire upon us. We closed ranks as if we could hide from their bullets behind our fellow marchers. When we came within a mile of camp, we saw armored vans stationed at intervals along the side of the road, their swivel–mounted machine guns trained upon us. Inside the camp, more machine gunners drew beads on us from watchtowers and roofs. Instead of being released to the mess hall for dinner, the warders led us to our barracks in small groups and padlocked the doors behind us.