Free The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz Page A

and his workmates nevertheless were expected to get them in running order to be sent back to the farms. Grechinen spent
nearly a week on one of them and then watched it go with misgivings. One day he was called to the superintendent’s office and gravely informed that this particular machine had broken down
soon after it returned to its farm. Grechinen, a stolid lad and slow to temper, said his piece forcefully and pointedly about the impossibility of turning scrap-iron into farm tractors.
    Mechanic Grechinen was arrested and charged with sabotage. A few other charges were thrown in as well. His previous unexceptionable career as stationmaster supported the accusation that he had
been a willing worker for the Polish police state and therefore an enemy of the people. Grechinen tried to explain, but no one took any notice, so he shut his mouth after the first interrogation
and resolutely refused to say another word. ‘What can you say,’ he asked me, ‘to a crowd of bloody fools who ask questions and get mad at you because you won’t give them the
answers they want?’ They manhandled him, pushed him round, yelled at him. Grechinen kept his mouth shut. They thought he was a bit simple in the head, and eventually stopped the treatment and
put him on trial. He got off lightly with ten years hard labour.
    When the sentence was announced, Grechinen was so surprised that he forgot his vow of silence. ‘Ten years!’ he exclaimed. ‘What for?’ The prosecutor jumped to his feet.
‘Oh,’ he said menacingly. ‘So now you start to talk.’ Grechinen shut his mouth again. He had kept silent, he said, until he met me. Talking in the wrong places, he warned
me, could get a man into a lot of unexpected trouble. This, I realized, was advice from a friend. I thanked him. There was a strong bond between us for the rest of the trip. I liked honest
Grechinen.
    Somehow someone learned during the second week of the march that it was 24 December. Maybe a prisoner had guessed we must be near that date and had had the day confirmed by a guard. The news
went up and down the long, struggling line like the leaping flames of a forest fire. It’s Christmas Eve, went the whisper from man to man. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, Grechinen,’ I
said. Grechinen half-smiled through his cracked lips. ‘Christmas Eve,’ he repeated. Away back behind us there was suddenly a thin, wavering sound. It was odd and startling. It grew in
volume and swept towards us. It was the sound of men singing, men singing with increasing power in the wastes of the Siberian wilderness.
    I thought the soldiers would have been ordered to shout us down, but the mounting song reached us unchecked and engulfed us. I was singing and Grechinen was singing. Everybody who had a voice
left was joining in. A marching choir of nearly five thousand male voices drowning their despair in a song of praise for the Child who would be born on the morrow. The song was ‘Holy
Night’, and those who did not sing it in Polish sang it in the language in which they had learnt it as children. Then a few voices started the Polish Christmas carol, ‘Jesu’s
Lullaby’, and I choked on it and fell silent. And half-way through it, others broke down and wept quietly. The Lullaby died abruptly and there was no more singing. Our hearts were full to
bursting with the bitter-sweet memories of other Christmases.
    Christmas Day came and went like any other of the dreary succession of marching days. We walked into our second blizzard and walked out of it. Grechinen and I between us supported the man
directly ahead of him for hours during this second storm, calling on the guards to do something to help him. ‘He’ll manage all right,’ said one of them. He died barely
half-an-hour before we reached the night’s stopping-place.
    The soldiers were not always so indifferent to the appeals of exhausted prisoners, but it became clear that they were under orders to discriminate. The gasping,