Gulag полностью

The guards did not take the escape of criminals very seriously and did not exert much effort in pursuing them: they would be caught when they came out to the railroad or reached a town. But for the pursuit of political prisoners, posses would be organized at once: sometimes all neighboring villages would be mobilized and the frontier guards called to assist. The political prisoner always tried to escape abroad—in his motherland he had no refuge.³⁸

Most runaways were men, but not all of them. Margarete Buber-Neumann was in a camp from which a Gypsy girl escaped, running away with the camp cook. An older Gypsy woman, hearing the story, nodded knowingly: “She’s got an idea there’s a tabor [a Gypsy encampment] somewhere in the neighborhood. If she can get to that, she’s safe.”³⁹ Usually, escapes were planned in advance, but they could be spontaneous too: Solzhenitsyn tells the story of a prisoner who jumped over a barbed-wire fence during a dust storm in Kazakhstan.⁴⁰ Escape attempts were often launched from the more loosely guarded camp work sites, but that was not always the case either. In the randomly selected month of September 1945, for example, 51 percent of recorded escape attempts took place in the working zone; 27 percent took place from the living zone; and 11 percent took place during transport.⁴¹ Edward Buca planned an escape from a prisoner transport train bound for Siberia, along with a group of young Ukrainians:

With my hacksaw blade, we would try to cut through four or five planks, working only at night and concealing the marks with a mixture of bread and horse dung from the floor of the car. When the opening was ready, we would wait until the train stopped in the forest and then push out the planks and leap from the wagon—as many of us as possible, scattering in all directions to confuse the guard. Some of us would be shot at, but most of us could get away.⁴²

They had to give up the plan when the escape attempt was suspected. Others did try to escape from the trains, however: in June 1940, two criminal prisoners actually got out through a hole in a wagon.⁴³ In that same year, Janusz Bardach slipped through some rotten boards in a wagon too. He neglected to fix them back in place, however, and was immediately caught, tracked down by dogs, and badly beaten—but allowed to live.⁴⁴

Some escapes had their origins, as Solzhenitsyn puts it, “not in despairing impulse but in technical calculations and the love of fine workmanship.” ⁴⁵ False walls were built into railway boxcars; prisoners hammered themselves into boxes and had themselves shipped out of the camp.⁴⁶ Once, twenty-six criminal prisoners dug their way under a wall. All made it out, although—according to the officer who led the search—they were also all captured again within the year.⁴⁷

Others, like Tchernavin, used their special positions within the camp to organize their escape. Archives record the story of a prisoner who deliberately caused an accident on a goods train and escaped amid the confusion. ⁴⁸ In another recorded case, prisoners who had been assigned to bury bodies in the camp cemetery shot their convoy guard and placed him in the mass grave, so that his corpse would not be immediately noticed.⁴⁹ Escape was also easier for “unguarded” prisoners who had passes allowing them to move about between camps.