34. Liberation and the Last Tragedy

January 25, 2014 · Adam Bondaruk, Baptists, Victor Belykh, AUCECB, Persecution, Interview, KGB, Books, Unregistered Pentecostals, Nikolay Kotyakov, On Emigration, United Church of Evangelical Christians, Vestibule, Petr Saenko, Pentecostals, Religious Mafia, Slavik Radchuk, Contemporary Persecution, Security Services

By the time of my release, I already had many friends in the camp. On August 18, 1982, the day of my release, from early morning a crowd gathered in our barracks. Everyone came up to me, shook my hand. Some thanked me for support, like Nikolay, others simply wished me happiness, and those I had met in the camp library joked:

Too bad your term is up.
The camp radio announced: “Citizen Perchatkin, report to the guardroom!” I went, leaving behind my new friends, leaving the barracks. I didn’t look back, but I felt hundreds of eyes on me.
Now I’m crossing the camp yard. A tractor is driving out of the work zone. It’s heavily pulling a trailer loaded with camp products. I pass by some prisoner, an old man of about seventy. “What is he being kept here for?” I thought. At that moment the tractor drew level with me and the old man. The old man is gazing indifferently at the sky and suddenly, with a sharp movement unexpected for his age, he fell under the wheels of the heavy trailer. I shouted something from shock and despair. My cry was drowned in the old man’s terrible death scream. The tractor stopped at once. Guards came running. The tractor driver was indignant:
The shtriban (that’s what they called old men in the camp) threw himself under the cart, timed it so I wouldn’t see.
Perchatkin, don’t linger! Your mother’s waiting for you outside the gate,” yelled a guard from the checkpoint. The last tragedy I witnessed in the camp, the last shouted order.
With a heavy feeling I enter the guardroom. A guard hands me the clothes my mother had brought. I change, receive my documents. Major Malinkovich approaches me:
I’ve been instructed to have a talk with you before you leave, so I invite you to my office.
He is, as always, vulgar and cynical. Yes, he is not the kind of Jew I know. There are scoundrels in every nation. Among Jews I saw them here, in Camp Number 10. And so I’m in Malinkovich’s office. His office at the guardroom is ordinary, not rich, not like the one in the camp headquarters. Here he receives prisoners’ relatives and various public commissions.
Well then, Perchatkin, I’ve been told to warn you. Everything you’ve seen here, heard, experienced – forget it. If you speak or write about it, you won’t be able to prove anything, it will all be slander. For slander you’ll end up back with us. You’ve already got experience, you know how they punish slander against the motherland.
After Malinkovich’s office I walk on alone, already considered a free man. I walk and see through the second-floor windows how two prison vans drive up. People start jumping out of them. A new transport has been brought. I stopped by the guardroom window, watching the arriving prisoners. The prisoners moved through a maze of barbed wire. A little time will pass, and some of them will adapt, become overseers or brigadiers, others will try to find justice and end up in the punishment block, and yet others will wander around the camp garbage dumps and eat potato peelings. There will be those for whom the guardroom doors will never open. They will be taken out through the gates on a cart pulled by harnessed men. The guards at the checkpoint will first pierce their heels with steel rods – maybe he’s pretending – and to be sure they’ll smash their skulls with a pointed hammer. For such people, that’s the pass to freedom. And at the camp cemetery they’ll place a stake with a little board above them. No name, no dates, just a number. Then go, mother, find your son, or wife, find your husband, or children, their father.
I see the transport off with my gaze. The backs of the last ones disappear into the insatiable maw of the camp.

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