Foro de Hislibris

[momper]

El norteamericano John H. Noble era hijo de exitosos emigrantes alemanes que, a finales de los años treinta, abrieron una fábrica de cámaras en Dresde (donde el padre debía tratarse durante dos o tres años cierta enfermedad). La guerra los atrapó allí, con la prohibición de salir de la ciudad, y aunque sobrevivieron a los bombardeos, su deseo de partir inmediatamente a Detroit al acabar la contienda no pudo hacerse realidad. Poco después, cuando volvían de un viaje a Kassel relacionado con su negocio, el guardia fronterizo británico se sorprendió de que regresaran a zona soviética (he asked us half seriously if we wanted to commit suicide). No tardaron en entender por qué... John y su padre (aunque éste fue liberado mucho antes) quedaron atrapados esta vez en esa trituradora de hombres que era el sistema penal soviético.

El giro más siniestro de su pesadilla llegó para John en 1950, cuando fue transportado a las minas de Vorkuta, en el Ártico, para hacer trabajo esclavo con una pena de quince años que añadir a los que ya llevaba preso. Allí vivió la huelga que siguió a la muerte de Stalin, un levantamiento que intentó aprovechar el desconcierto del régimen y que acabó bañado en sangre.

Les copio unos fragmentos:

When the guards came to a cell where a sentenced prisoner was, they ordered him to remove his clothes... While the undressing went on, guards and officer would joke and laugh.

In that joking was summed up a startling difference between these guards and the Nazi death squads about which those prisoners who had known both sometimes spoke. The Nazis, they said, killed viciously, because they were convinced that the people being killed were actually their enemies. The Russians killed because, almost literally, a number had been drawn from a hat, because some meaningless document in some meaningless proceedings had said to snuff out the candle. No ferocity attended the executions. The reasons for the killings were as remote and irrelevant to the Russian guards as was the concept of death itself. Their joking, then, was not forced. When they patted a prisoner's shoulder, the action came easily. Life had to end for certain integers in the state table of statistics. That's all, comrade. Nothing personal.

***

The interior of a Stalopinski prison car is very efficiently laid out. It represents one of the few real Soviet contributions to design, inasmuch as Russia's main industrial patterns are copied from those of other nations. The Stalopinski is a Soviet achievement, all Soviet.

There are wire cages on the side of the corridor, extending to the far side wall, eight cages to a car. In each cage there are three horizontal wooden shelves about six or seven feet wide apiece, like large tables extending from the wall of the car to the wire of the cage.

On each shelf five prisoners are laid out like sausages on a tray. That makes fifteen prisoners per cage, 120 per car. In the "mail" car, with prisoners standing, only seventy to eighty prisoners could be packed. Getting some fifty extra prisoners per car is a genuine, undisputed accomplishment of communism.

The prisoners were placed on the shelves with feet toward the wall of the car, heads against the wire of the cages. Some lay on their backs, some on their stomachs, depending on how they squirmed when ordered onto the shelf.

There was no way to change positions, to arch one's back, to do anything. Twice a day we were taken out to go to the bathroom. At other times, during the day and night, prisoners who could not hold themselves would whimperingly foul their pants and often also the prisoners next to them.

We stayed on those shelves for six weeks as the Stalopinskis rolled on, northeastward.

***

During the trip, whenever we stopped on a siding to let another train pass on the single-line track, several guards walked outside the car banging on each board with mallets to assure that none was loose. The hammering was maddening.

[...] if the train still hadn't started — and stops of several hours were most common — the silence would start. The wind would sigh through the car. No prisoner would have anything else to say. The blatnois [delincuentes comunes] would be hunched by themselves. It was then, I suppose, that most of us realized how utterly lost we were. We had only rumor to tell us our destination. We had only our fears to tell us our future in any direction.

There, in the silence of those stops, we realized the most desolate thing that a human can know — that no one cared about us and that no one could do anything about our plight. It was as though the Soviet had made time stand still and paralyzed history itself.

***

During the strike, for no logical reason, I somehow expected a wildly careening chain of events that would end up with me as a free man back in Detroit. But that dream was over, and there were eleven years left to my sentence. In all my time in Vorkuta, I had never been interrogated, and it disturbed me. There were times when I hoped for some official sign that they knew of my existence. God knows — I might become one of the "forgotten" men I had heard about, living out my life in slave camps, lost in the morass of Soviet bureaucracy.
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¿Quién es Müller?