Gerhard and Lodzia joined us. Mother fussed around, preparing coffee made from the roasted barley, which she had brought from home, and I sensed her discomfort when she had nothing more she could offer our guest. Oh, how I longed for some of her poppy-seed cake and doughnuts.
Even allowing for our natural interest, Natasha must have felt awkward being the centre of attention of every person in the room; like a curio in a shop window. We were keen to know all about her and about Vodopad.
Father raised his palm, ‘Now then – one at a time. Tell me, Natasha. Everyone’s been quick to tell us we’re the lucky ones. Seems an odd thing to say. How so?’
She regarded him in a moment of puzzlement. ‘Because you had shelter to move straight into – with fires burning. We kept them burning for you, so you didn’t have to endure the same fate as us.’
‘What was here?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. The river and the forest. We got off the train at Kholmogorki, as you did, and the NKVD led us here in mid-winter, on foot, carrying whatever they allowed us to take. There were no horses and sleighs to greet us – except for them to ride on.
‘Everyone ploughed through deep snow – then they abandoned us on the river bank – well over a thousand of us. Young, old, children, babies, and cripples. Most of the elderly and cripples perished before they got here.
‘Once we arrived and people realised what was happening, they rebelled and tried to follow the NKVD back through the forest to the railway line. But they shot them.’
‘Dear God,’ Mother remarked. ‘And this is the safe place?’
‘We were just as frail and malnourished as you are. All of us huddled together in the forest under the stars, with a ferocious gale raging across the river and no food.’
I didn’t know what to say. Our journey was grim enough, and I moaned all the way here; was still moaning.
Natasha raised her eyes to the bug-ridden roof to stem back the tears, blinked, but some escaped. She seemed annoyed she couldn’t control her emotions and brushed them away with her fingers. ‘We had to build massive fires. We kept them going night and day.’
‘Why did they bring you to this spot?’ Father asked.
‘We later learned this was a designated area for logging operations. There’s another gulag in Permilovo, thirty kilometres south of here. The sawmills are there. The river network around here is ideal to feed it with logs. The NKVD Commander from Permilovo originally oversaw our work, but we have our own Kommendant now. Ivanov is a decent man. Compassionate, but nobody’s fool. If you play fair with him, he will do what he can to help. If you don’t, then you take the consequences. He is by no means a walkover, and the others are very strict.’
Gerhard said, ‘Szefczuk told us you built this entire settlement?’
‘Every log and splinter is down to our toil. Those first nights were the worst, dark beyond darkness; grey mornings, frozen corpses laying all around us.’
This conversation was turning into something I wasn’t expecting. I thought it would be a meet and greet – getting to know you sort of an evening, but what Natasha was describing was scaring me.
‘These forests are teeming with dangerous animals,’ she said. ‘They must have known that. How did they expect us to protect ourselves? We had no weapons other than our own axes and saws.’ She raised her brows and stared at the floor. ‘It was brutal. I tell you, there is no reasoning with a hungry bear.’
‘Bears?’ My eyes widened.
‘Oh, yes, brown bears, wolves, wolverines. You wouldn’t believe what’s out there.’
Affecting a look of curiosity, Lodzia asked, ‘Well, how did you survive, if you had no food or shelter?’
Natasha perched on the edge of the slats, ramrod straight, gripping the wood. ‘Our priorities were to make massive fires and keep them going night and day. Fallen trees lay everywhere; the men dragged them out, and youths and young children kept the fires stoked, while the rest of us built crude shelters – like igloos – to get out of the wind and the snow. As soon as we had some protection, everyone set about either collecting uprooted trees or chopping down fresh ones as fast as we could; men, women, teenagers, even ten-year-olds like me. We needed to build something permanent, or we’d have frozen to death; many did.’
Her tears were falling as fast as she spoke. ‘You’ve no idea of the heartbreak. People were losing their loved ones, small children, babies, yet they swallowed their grief and carried on chopping the blessed trees.
‘Then some NKVD officials arrived from the sawmills at Permilovo and insisted we use the logs to build them an administration centre before anything else.
Muttering astonishment, Lodzia shook her head, ‘My God, and what did you eat?’
‘We, well we…’ agitated, Natasha cast about, her eyes coming to rest on her worn boots. She looked as if she was losing ground and couldn’t see how to fight her way out of it.
Our curiosity aroused, there was no going back. Karol gave an exasperated laugh, ‘Come on then; it can’t be that bad. You can tell us.’
Natasha looked stricken, and after a while, her eyes filled with tears again and her voice wobbled as if she was trying to hit the right note. ‘I suppose you might as well hear it from me because you’ll hear it from someone else; all the Ukrainians were guilty.’ Absorbed with sudden concentration, she raised her head and said, ‘We ate the corpses.’
There was a collective gasp, as if she had simultaneously winded us all.
My repulsion welled, I didn’t know what to say and glanced sideways at Karol, who was giving Natasha a long, considering look, as if he wanted to say something, but changed his mind. I wondered how he was feeling about her now, knowing she was a cannibal.
In the well of silence that followed, we all slowly averted our gaze from her to the stove and listened to the logs crackling.
Why did she have to tell us? Had it not been for Lodzia goading her, she needn’t have. Perhaps it was something she was desperate to get off her conscience. There was no point discussing it with other Ukrainians; they were all complicit, and frankly, I was wondering – who was the more dangerous, a hungry bear or this beautiful girl sitting in our midst.
Lodzia shuddered. ‘Ugh, human bodies?’
Natasha threw her a protesting glance, and her incomprehension showed in her face. ‘We had to. They left us here with no means of survival. These people had already frozen to death. What else could we do? It wasn’t as if we had purposely killed them. If we didn’t eat them, then the wolves and bears would have. I’m sorry; it’s not something I wish to discuss. I’m not proud of it.’
I was about to ask if they cooked them first, but my father must have read my mind and his forbidding glare stopped me before I opened my mouth. I wasn’t being flippant. I needed to know the practicalities in case Szefczuk ever ran permanently out of food. Life up here was clearly brutal and all about self-preservation. We could so easily find ourselves in her situation.
Letting this pass, he threw on another log and stood to watch the flames devour it. ‘It’s alright, child, you don’t have to apologise to us.’ His expression urged us all not to pursue it.
With an indulgent smile to show he understood, Gerhard broke the silence, ‘Where did you come from, Natasha?’
‘Krym, near the Black Sea. The Soviets brought us here in 1933. It was a ten-year sentence. In three years’ time, my parents will have served their time – except there’s only my mother and myself left.’ She gave a hollow laugh, ‘but where will we go? The Soviets have taken our homes, our lands, everything, so, we’re condemned to staying here unless I marry a Russian from outside of the camp, and we move away to wherever he lives.’