A Candle Burned

The ordeal of long ago remains a painful memory for Yelena. She wasn’t far into her story when her blue Russian eyes turned red and watery, and a tear slid down and caught in the rim of her eyeglasses resting on her cheek. The passing of 68 years hasn’t healed the pain, all too close to the surface.

She was recounting when she and her mother escaped from a Soviet labor camp, and they walked 5,000 kilometers (3,300 miles) across Siberia – for one year – to reach a train station. It took them through the worst of each season, especially the deep, aching cold.

For a while, Yelena, only 14 years old, wore big galoshes, but as starvation set in, her feet, knees and ankles became swollen badly with rheumatism, and the footwear became useless. Her face, once fair and clear, was also swollen, and her teeth were shaking. It is Yelena’s way of saying they were loose from a lack of vitamin C. Her gums were oozing blood.

Much of her mother’s hair, which she had always worn pulled back into a tight bun, had fallen out. To this day, Yelena honors the memory of her mother by wearing her hair, a combination of blond and gray, in a bun. She never changes it. The bitter hardships caused her mother’s face to resemble a baked apple. Her left arm became infected and had to be made useless. Mother and daughter were filthy and covered with thousands of lice.

Their clothes were in tatters. No! Yelena shouts, correcting me. They weren’t clothes at all; they were rags – rags wrapped around her torso and arms and legs, as you would wrap rags around water pipes next to the house to keep them from freezing. It was the winter of 1930.

How did they survive? I wanted to know.

Yelena raises her 81-year-old voice to give a ringingly clear answer in her still-present Russian accent: “GOD HELP US!”

In the 1920s, her older sister and brother already were schoolteachers in Moscow. Yelena beams with pride when she recalls her sister’s beauty, and then a dark look flashes across her face and the invective pours out. “An official of the Communist Party, a very ignorant man, had a stupid son,” Yelena says. “He wanted to be with my sister. He approached her in the forest. He was drunk, and he touched her breasts. She slapped him, and he said, ‘Your parents will be left in ashes.’ “

His father ordered Yelena’s family to be sent to prison. First, her father heard the rap on the door at exactly midnight. Police came to arrest Citizen Petrov. Before the officers could notice, he slipped off his wedding ring and gave it to his wife for safekeeping. Ten days later, the police returned for the rest of the family. This time, they took from Yelena’s mother her husband’s wedding ring. Hers would not come off so easily, so they ripped it off her ring finger, stripping the skin and exposing the white gristle of a knuckle.

Fortunately, when the police came for them, Yelena’s sister was at school. The police could not find her anywhere. She kept on the move, leaving a trail of rumors she had turned insane. With this news, the “stupid” man gave up looking, satisfied she had been punished mentally. She and her brother were able to slip away and cross the western border into Byelorussia. They continued their teaching careers under assumed identities.

Meanwhile, Yelena, her mother and father were put into railway cars and hauled east, over the Ural Mountains. Yelena’s only consolation was that the man who ordered their arrest was later interrogated and executed.

The train slowly made its way east. People were jammed into boxcars with no toilet facilities. Disease set in, and people began to die. Bodies were simply chucked out of the cars, down the railroad embankments.

The train passed through Smolensk and then Omsk where people were allowed to bathe – without soap – and then dress again in stinking clothes that were thrown into a common pile. What they put back on was not even theirs.