CHAPTER TWENTY

“People speak sometimes about the ‘bestial’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts; no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Oymyakon, Yakutia, Siberia, June 1954

The four trucks made it as far as the towns of Oymyakon and Susuman by the end of the first two weeks of their journey across the Yakutia region—ten times the size of Germany. They traveled on what the Soviet Union called the Kolyma Highway—but known to the prisoners and former inhabitants of the region as the “Road of Bones,” because so many died during construction of the track through the mountains which did not merit the designation as a highway. The track followed the circuitous Kolyma River through the mountain range of the same name. That region of Yakutia was so remote that much of it was not even explored until as late as 1926. It is the coldest area in the northern hemisphere. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union’s Council of Ministers did not deem the area to be of sufficient economic value to provide any services.

The trucks were still all intact as they passed the ghost town of Kadykchan, known as the “City of Broken Dreams” to the seven thousand people who used to live there. Two abandoned coal mines stood in decay just outside the city. Without time to prepare for deportation from their home city, all the inhabitants received 80 to 120 thousand rubles to purchase another apartment somewhere else—and were left to their own devices as to how to get to that other place. The power supply to Kadykchan was cut; the heating plant was dismantled; and the private homes were burned; so that the owners could never return. The only people they saw were reindeer breeders who lived in prehistoric conditions in a settlement called Ust-Nera, about 600 miles from their start on the Kolyma Highway.

The region through which the truck passed is located in the far northeastern area of Russia. It is commonly and mistakenly called Siberia, but is technically part of the Russian Far East. It is bounded by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. Part of the area is within the Arctic Circle and has a subarctic climate with extremely cold winters which some years last up to six months of the year. Permafrost and tundra cover a large part of the region, making it bleak and uninviting even to the eye. Even in June as the trucks made their way slowly west, it was very cold. That particular portion of Yakutia remained cold year-round. This was a portion of Siberia where the great permafrost belt remained in perpetuity. Permafrost extended three feet deep into the ground. At frequent intervals, the struggling trucks could not make it across a stream, up a grade, or over a particularly rough and rock-strewn stretch of road. The men were ordered out of the back of the trucks and half of them were harnessed to the front of the truck like draft horses and obliged to pull their conveyances while the other half pushed from behind. It was very slow going, and every night they slept on the frozen rocks. Rations were skimpy.

The steep, winding route ran through narrow ravines and alongside jagged cliff faces. When the way opened up, there were endless snowy expanses, frozen lakes, and rivers. The first death occurred on the fourteenth day—more precisely during the fifteenth night. One of the enfeebled former SS officers/former gulag survivors gave up the ghost and froze to death while shackled between two other men in fairly similar condition. The guards had to heat a kettle of boiling water to get the dead man’s corpse loose from where it was stuck to the frozen ground. Two other Kriegsverurteiltes were ordered to dispose of the body. They dragged it fifty yards from the strewn rocks that passed for a road. There were no trees to fell or rocks that could be pried up to cover the body; so, they simply hollowed out a trench in the snow and covered the man over with snow and packed it down. It would have been easier to bend the dead man over double and to have made a smaller depression in the snow; but rigor mortis was in full rigidity; and they had to place him in the hole like a bundle of sticks. The two gravediggers expropriated the man’s ragged clothes and added them to their own layers. The column pressed on.

Every other night, another man died in his sleep and was similarly left as a frozen reminder of what the former POWs endured on the “Road of Bones.” None of the makeshift graves had any kind of a marker, and no record was kept. They simply became additional statistics in the horrors of World War II. When the four trucks arrived for the second to the last night’s stay before getting to the rail head, one of the trucks threw a rod, thus ending its service. Failure of a connecting rod in those days in the western world was not particularly frequent. However, in the Soviet Union, throwing a rod was one of the most common causes of catastrophic engine failure in trucks. In the case of this small convoy, almost every known cause of failure of a connecting rod was operative. There was failure and improper excessive tightening of the rod bolts, overrevving of the engine beyond its ordinary capacity going up the frequent steep inclines, lubrication failure due to faulty maintenance, and freezing. A further problem of maintenance came from the common Soviet practice of cannibalizing parts to keep at least a fraction of a fleet going. Unschooled mechanics had assumed that the big end caps were interchangeable between connecting rods when rebuilding an engine. No care was taken to ensure that the caps of the different connecting rods were not mixed up. The result was that the truck’s engine suddenly froze up and stopped, pitching the occupants hard against the metal seats and dashboard. The engine glowed red and burst into flames.

Unfortunately, the truck had to be declared kaput and abandoned. Fortunately, no one suffered severe injury—just broken noses, two broken legs, and one broken arm. Also fortunately—in a perverse way—the number of dead men had reduced the overcrowding on the four trucks. That made it possible for the three remaining trucks to be able to handle the remainder. They had completed about 250 miles of the overland journey and had only about twenty-five to thirty miles left before they arrived at Tommot, the capital of the Sakha Republic and the eastern railroad terminus of the Amur-Yakutia Mainline.

The next morning, they slogged onward for about fourteen miles until they became bogged down in the jelly slick mud of early spring breakup. The three remaining trucks could only advance about two miles that day, and overnight the wheels froze in the six-inch ruts they had created. No heavy machinery was available; so, those trucks also were abandoned after a heroic struggle by the occupants, including the guards. The leading officer ordered a forced march to Tommot. Being a pragmatist, he knew the emaciated and exhausted men would not make it all the way. He divided up the remaining food, and the guards and their prisoners ate one last meal—the best of the entire journey for the Kriegsverurteiltes.

The first hill of the forced march proved to be too much for former Waffen SS-Sturmbannführer [Major] Jean Luc Latendresse. He was walking alongside Antoine when he suddenly clasped his chest and screamed in pain. Before Antoine could catch him, Jean Luc collapsed dead at his feet.

“Heart attack,” Serge Rounsavall observed matter-of-factly.

His Kriegsverurteilte comrades in the makeshift Gebirgsjäger unit buried him in a hastily dug snow pit and moved on. Someone in the Soviet Union estimated that at least thirteen million mammoths were encased in Siberia’s permafrost belt along with the human unfortunates who pass that way. Major Jean Luc Latendresse joined the great beasts for eternity. Now, there were five remaining members of the 33^rd Waffen-Grenadier Division of the Nazi SS—the renowned Charlemagne Division.

Soviet Emergency Rations

-Biscuits (tinned or sealed cardboard/paper wrapper) 17.5 oz

-Concentrated food—Course I (2.6 oz of instant soup or enriched biscuits)

-Concentrated food—Course II (7.0 oz of more of the same)

Where available after late 1942:

-Lend-Lease Tins or even some prepackaged ration items, such as British biscuits or dripping spread)—not available in Siberia during the 1950s.

-Smoked sausages 3.5 oz (by 1954, substituted by lard, fish conserves, ± bacon)

-Sugar 1.2 oz, tea 0.07 oz, salt 0.35 oz

Twice during the long journey from Yakutsk to Tommot, the guards and POWS received surprise meals obtained from locals—mostly leftover from troop encampments, including:

-raw vegetables, small red potatoes, some fresh and delicious, even raw; some rotten, chunks of red or green cabbage, and a smear of lard in a mess tin.

-“portable meat”—chunks of almost rock-hard blood sausage wrapped in oiled brown paper or thin smoked bacon.

-stale Russian black rye bread, unsliced, bags of hard-boiled eggs, some smelling faintly of H2S

-A small paper bag of macaroni or uncooked grits, and once, a small bag of apples, hard pears, prunes, and sunflower seeds (wrapped in a handkerchief).

-Tinned or dried varieties of fish—sprats, mackerel, or herring fish.

-very coarse loose-leaf tea. Some loose-leaf tobacco: the only way the men could tell the smoking tobacco from the tea is by boiling it. Cigarettes were unheard of.

-Salt: a small amount of salt and an ounce of plain sugar of a piece or hard lump candy twisted into some brown paper

-dry ingredients for nettle soup.

-a few sheets of latrine paper—Russian newsprint and leaflets.

POW Camp Recipes

Stinging Nettle Soup—Serves Four

Ingredients

-1 lb stinging nettles, 2 tbsps salt, 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, 1 diced white onion

-¼ cp basmati rice, 4 cps chicken broth, salt and pepper to taste

Preparation

-Bring a large pot of water to a boil with 2 tsps salt. Drop in the stinging nettles and cook 1–2 min. until soft to remove most of the sting. Drain in a colander, rinse with cold water. Trim off tough stems, then chop coarsely.

-Heat olive oil in a saucepan over medium-low heat and stir in the onion. Cook until the onion has softened and turned translucent~5 mins. Stir in rice, chicken broth, and chopped nettles. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer until the rice is tender~15 mins. Puree the soup, and season to taste with salt and pepper.