Free Journeys with My Mother by Halina Rubin

ordered to bend down in submission. He refused, and from then on so did the others.
    Władek, like everyone else, would have chosen even the hardest of tasks rather than endure a day-long exercise drill. Police guards and the criminals who assisted them, armed with long wooden sticks, would supervise these drills by hitting at the first sign of an inmate slowing down the pace of a squatted walk, hands stretched up; or a regimen of crawling, running and jumping for hours. Władek was thirty and fit but it did not take long before his exhausted body refused to obey.
    It was torture by another name.
    Władek thought of conventional prison almost with fondness. In jail, he could talk or read; his sentence set, he could look forward to his day of release. In Bereza, however, no one knew if their time would be measured in months or years, no court would sit in judgement, deciding how much longer they would have to remain in such a hell.
    Reading the testimonies of Bereza’s inmates, I realise that I had known many of them. They were family friends, frequent visitors to our home in Warsaw. Quite a few fathers or relatives of my school friends had shared the same fate as Władek. As far as I know, they did not speak much of Bereza. Maybe events of greater magnitude obscured their earlier experiences. The war eventually scattered them all over Europe, landing them in resistance groups, battlefields, ghettos, German concentration camps and Soviet gulags. Each place was its own kind of hell. Those who’d participated in the Spanish Civil War or joined the French resistance fighters could not have predicted that one day their own Communist Party would accuse them of espionage and punish them accordingly.
    Some never made it to peace time. Salek Jolles, the uncle of my school friend, an amiable man with red hair, loved by everyone in Bereza because of his good nature and humour, was killed in the battle for Warsaw in 1944.
    They tried to forge their own destiny. Yet history jostled them every which way.
    Only now, long after their deaths, am I astonished by their lives.
    If there was one thing that made Bereza tolerable, it was their unity. The communists formed a tight group, protecting each other, especially the weakest. The risk of punishment was great. Talking was prohibited at any time. They had to speak softly, their mouths scarcely opened, quickly, when the guards were turned away. Their defiance could only be expressed in small, almost invisible, ways: giving a piece of bread to someone badly beaten, propping up someone who could not walk. A surreptitious smile, a wink, a barely heard murmur: ‘Just hang on a little bit longer’ – these communications, of little consequence in other situations, here transmitted strength from one to another.
    News from outside also broke the isolation. Every scrap of information was precious, and shared in hurried whispers at night. The issue foremost on their minds was the Spanish Civil War. Their moods fluctuated with the outcome of battles and the movement of the front lines. Their happiness and hope hinged on the outcome of that war.
    The most dreaded punishment – as if staying in Bereza were not penalty enough – was to be sent to solitary confinement: karcer . In his thirteen months in Bereza, Władek spent more than one hundred days in there – almost one third of his stay.
    Four small dungeons made of bluestone, once used for storing gun powder, now served as a place of extreme isolation. The concrete floor was permanently wet, there was nothing inside other than the parasza , a pail for excrement. To keep warm – coats were taken away during the day – the inmates walked around the tiny space and exercised, all in darkness. Eventually, despite the cold, out of sheer exhaustion and against their will, the need for sleep took over. They would lie down in the watery mud and doze off. Of all the privations – lack of food, warmth, basic