3rd December 1943

We thought that we were free. The Germans had released us back from our prison camps to our home country. There was a day of joy, of celebration. We received blankets and new boots; we took in food that had no threat of poisoning. But Stalin was wary of us, accusing the men and women of his country that we had cooperated with the Germans. We were quickly recaptured and moved to another prison camp in Siberia. They’ve been shifting us from one camp to another for as long as I can remember. Sometimes we get close to the Kolyma River; I can hear the water rushing nearby even in these months, in the dead of winter. My father told me that the river runs too fast for it to freeze over, but there are some parts further downstream where there is frost on the top, and cars take chances to cross. That was a long time ago though; I haven’t seen my father since the beginning of the war. I’ve given up looking for the rest of my family. My brother is right here next to me, stuck in the camps, sitting against my shoulder. He sleeps with a surety that is lost on the rest of us. He doesn’t have to work in the mines because he knows how to grow cabbage. It’s one of the few vegetables that grow reliably out here. Unfortunately, that means the rest of us have to eat it.

15th December 1943

We’ve settled down into a camp. They told us that we won’t be moving from this one for a little while. The mines are to be worked by all of the men in the barracks. As soon as the sun is up we are taken out and put to work. We have to mine gold by hand, which is a slow and dark process. I haven’t met a man yet though who is afraid of the darkness, or the gas. Men are afraid of the cold. We have to keep moving otherwise fingers freeze. Yesterday a man gave up and just crouched in the corner. He was dead, frozen within the half hour. I’ve been put in charge of the cart, it has been my job to wheel is into the mine and out again. My legs hurt, but I stay warm. When our shift is over, we are loaded back up into the trucks and carted to the barracks. Most of us start to doze as soon as we are allowed to sit down.

This morning a truck pulled in with another load of prisoners pulled into this Gulag camp. Political prisoners, people who spoke out and resisted the regime. They came from a 12 hour ride in the back of a cattle truck. Many of them couldn’t stand and just fell to the dirt. Some of them didn’t survive the journey. I had to assist in dragging the bodies out from the corners, carry them to the pits at the edge of camp. They leave the bodies there to rot. The new prisoners didn’t look like they would be much help in the mines. Scrawny, lean, all of them. They looked like bank tellers and politicians. One of them said that he was a Christian priest, and he and another hundred or so men and women had been rounded up because they had refused to renounce their faith. I would have thought a belief in God would have been a helpful thing here. Believing in something keeps men sane. But even that last liberty seems to be taken from us as well. There is nothing left for us in life but working the mines. The mines are the only thing that keeps us alive. As soon as we are no longer useful, we are no longer alive.

1st January 1944

The work in the mines is long and tiresome, and it seems like the ore deposits are slowly being depleted. There is only so far a man with a pick can go, even if there are still several hundred of us below earth. I saw the priest two days ago, blindly swinging his pick into the wall. He didn’t even have his eyes open, or care where he was going. He told me the winter holiday had already passed us by. I didn’t even notice. I’m just guessing at dates now. He was singing under his breath at the beginning of the day, but the work exhausted the cheer from him, and we were all left for echoing sound of metal on stone. It’s becoming an empty sound now. The wheels on my cart are getting warn, it makes it harder to push it up to the surface. I don’t dare tell anyone about it, I don’t want attention drawn towards myself. One of the other workers started to complain about his conditions, and he was dragged away. They told us that he was no longer useful, no longer doing his job. They took him to the pits where they throw the dead travellers and shot him in the back of the head. One of the guards scuffed sand over his body, like one drops dirt onto the coffin of a loved one. I think he felt bad about what they had just done, but he showed no more remorse beyond that.

3rd February 1944

We’re no longer working at the mines. They say that there is no more need for that many of us chipping away at the rock for the gold flecks they crave so much. Instead, they have decided to move us north, closer towards the Kolyma River. Stalin has instructed us to build a road. A road that runs south from Magadan to Yakutsk. We had not known before, but common prisoners and the prisoners of Stalin’s war have already been working on the road for many years now, working north to where we are to start. The two parties are to meet in the middle near the bridge crossing the Kolyma River.

The truck ride was tiresome. It reminded me of the trip we had to take to reach the first of the Gulag prison camps. Men were pushed in together, pressed together so we could not move. The women of the camp were left behind, left to some fate I won’t know about. My brother was left behind as well, left to tend his little fields of cabbages. I wish that I could stay with him, pretend that I also know what to do. Anything would be better than working in the mines, or being forced to build a highway for a dictator’s trucks. Some of the men hid when they were called out of the barracks, tucking themselves under their bunk beds. The guards only called them twice and then left them. Maybe they thought they were already dead. Or maybe they were marking their names down to send toward the grave pits later on. Part of me wishes that I had done the same, but another side told me that hiding was not the answer to this kind of situation.

The stones that we have been breaking up from the mines are being used to build the roads. Large slabs of stone to form the base along with solid lumber, the smaller rocks to fill the cracks. Several men have to sit over a large vat; they use the small rubble and tar to make the covering. It’s a horrid smell, the men sweat and slave, struggling to stir the black ooze so that it does not set when it is not being used. We work to clear the land, swinging picks and shovels. It takes at least six men to clear away the stumps of the trees that the saws leave behind. It’s long work. We clear the land and dig a shallow pit for the base of the road. Large wooden pillars line the base, gaps filled with gravel and tar. Slabs of rock, more gravel, more tar. My hands hurt so much that my fingers remain curled even when I set my shovel down. It makes it harder to write, but I feel it is a worthy sacrifice.

27th February 1944

Ever since I have arrived to the road building camps, I have been looking around for the grave pits that the guards build to store bodies. It seems to be the one common element in such places, along with the hard labour and poor rations. But this place, there seems to be none. The conditions are hard, be clear land and build roads. We crack rocks from dawn till dusk. Surely there are bound to be men who cannot handle the work. We get rare drinks of water during the day. If one does not freeze in the morning or the evening, it seems that they might overheat in the rare sun of midday. The men beside me have started to call this place ‘Death Road,’ citing old stories of men dropping dead and being carried away. But I have yet to see a body. After having lived with death for so long now, it seems so strange that this place could not be tainted with it. I don’t want to get my hope up; I don’t want to think that this is a place where God is watching over us like the priest said, and that we are all being saved for some higher purpose. Stalin wants us to look like we are here for a higher purpose. Building his damned road.

4th April 1944

I saw my first dead body today. Here, at the road side. After such a long time without death I was almost beginning to hope that there wouldn’t be any more people dying, that there wouldn’t be any more corpses to be carried to the dead pits.

Two days ago I was stationed next to the priest. The one who was brought in because he wouldn’t renounce his faith. The one from the mining camp. We were put next to each other in the road work line, using our shovels to shift the smaller rocks and gravel into the cracks between the bigger rocks. It’s thankfully less tiring than breaking the stones, or sawing trees. But the priest didn’t look well. His eyes were greying over, his cheeks sunken in. His lips were dried and cracked. I could hear him breathing hard even when he wasn’t moving. He definitely didn’t look well. And that was all the excuse that they needed. One of the guards came up behind him and told him to work, when he couldn’t rise to his feet, the guard pushed him forward onto the ground, on his hands and knees. He cocked his rifle, put it to the base of the priest’s skull and fired. He didn’t even have a chance to say a prayer for himself. The rest of us are too used to death to cry or feel ill. But I found out what they do with the bodies here.

We all just took up our shovels and pushed him into the shallow basin, lining him up with the logs in the base.

“That’s what they do here.” The man standing next to me advised as he scuffed gravel over the dead man. “That’s where bodies go. A body, a log. A body, a log.” He pointed the shaft of his shovel back along the expanse of the road that we had crafted and toiled over these last few months, pretending to point out where each body had been laid to rest. I felt ill knowing that the cement holding the stone and wood together was not only little rock shards and tar, but the tender squashed bodies of the men who worked to create this road. They had been integrated into their last creation. Does that mean a similar fate awaits the rest of us in the near future? I find no solace in the thought that when I die, I will be sandwiched between two logs and several heavy stones.

11th April 1944

Sometimes it seems like there are some days that are longer than other. Sometimes the hour disappear unnoticed and dusk in upon us, while other days you measure the minutes by how often the rock trolley rattles past. I’m always glad for the quick days, because it means that our work is quickly done and we can retire to our almost nonexistent mattresses. But then the day after, and the day after that we must return to our work, swinging our mallets and axes to break rocks until our hands are raw.

The closer you get to the head of construction, the more often you see what they do with the dead. The men were right; it’s not a rare occurrence. Every poor soul who drops is thrown into the roadway and covered over. I hadn’t been close enough last time to hear the way the body breaks under the weight of everything. How bones blister and crack like wooden stakes. How skin tears under the weight and pull of sliding stones. I never want to be present for that initiation into the dirt ever again.

3rd May 1944

‘The Road of Bones’, the new nickname that the men are starting to throw around. I’m inclined to agree with them, it suits better than ‘Death Road.’ Lots of men die building roads and bridges across the waters. But not every man who dies is buried into a roadway. Even the guard troop are acknowledging the men who have leant themselves to the construction of the road, abandoning the official ‘Kolyma highway’ name. I don’t think anyone is going to call it that. At least, not the people who knew what a sacrifice it was to create. I don’t know how many more months, if not years that we will have to go before the road is complete, before we join up with the other workers who have started the road side heading north. The men from the Sevvostlag labor camp have been building the road since before the war. Since 1932 they said. I wonder if they have the same way of dealing with all the death that we do, if the men in command decide to dispose of bodies into the stone and tarmac like they do here. Will the whole stretch of road bare the same name that we have dubbed our little section?

‘The Road of Bones,’ this great stretch of tarmac and rock that carves its way through this barren and frozen landscape. The road built with wood and stone and human bones. Built by political prisoners housed in some ten thousand other prisoner camps. I think it is a suitable name for such a place. A kind of memorial if you will. My only real wish is that if I do fall in this line of work that I can be transported home and not laid to rest like the other poor souls.

Here’s to hoping.

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