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Pechora River Gulag Transport Ship - Soviet Union, January 1941
My hands... I saw these most vividly. I looked down at them in wonder as it happened.
Because they weren’t really my hands. They were not the hands I’d brought from Vilnius, and certainly not those I’d had in Warsaw. The dirt on these hands had colonized the depths of the ragged fingernails, had swarmed into the vein-ringed chasms of the chapped skin. These hands were calloused, sickly, rough.
My hands were familiar with the cool obsidian of a fountain pen, with the warmth of coffee shop porcelain. They knew the silkiness of Danuta’s inner thigh much better than splinter-infested shovel handles, dented tin cups, and sweat-slick cervical tissue.
For these hands, I discovered with horror, were locked tight around a human neck.
I never knew the man’s name. I never cared. I’d woken with a start from a deep slumber, a sleep fueled by gulag exhaustion and starvation, and by the gut-wrenching seasickness from which I’d suffered since we came aboard the prison ship. But I hadn’t slept so deeply as to shut out the man who tugged at the rag-wrapped bundle on which my greasy head rested. That bundle contained my solitary remaining collared shirt, my spare socks, and the crusted oilskin that embraced my letters.
My letters!
I was on him in a moment, with an energy that rose from somewhere unnamed, somewhere I—even then—hoped never to revisit. I, who scarcely ever hit a man, found myself pinning this one to the floor with suddenly elephantine weight, born not of the NKVD-supplied ration of moldy bread, river water, and thin soup, but rather of sheer fury.
My thumbs pressed deep into his windpipe, and at some point, he stopped struggling. The arms that flailed futilely at my grimy hands stilled. The contorted back straightened, the knees bucking my coccyx reposed, and his eyes, betraying unmistakable clarity and unimpeachable relief, begged me to continue.
Kill me, they said. Show me this one decency, will you not?
The man had allowed himself to be murdered, and those hands—not my hands—obliged.
The foulness of the man’s final breath still stung my nostrils, and the cramped muscles of my hands—those hands—started to ache. I turned my adrenalin-engorged eyes to the hundreds of dirty faces peering down from three levels of roughly welded bunks. I clutched my bundle to my chest, and turned to the rust-sweating wall.
“My letters... my letters!” I hissed viciously in the momentarily silent hold. Then, as the men turned back to their gambling, masturbation, petty arguments, and lice gathering, my softening voice intoned as if in whispered prayer to the implacable iron wall, “My Danuta.”
