Pavel Tunák

“When they brought us to Arkhangelsk -Murmansk, there was nothing but forest. As if they took us to a primeval forest. Everybody had to get off the train. We had to stand by the train cars. The snow reached up to my waist and at first we had to construct cabins for the Russians, for the Soviet soldiers who guarded us. Only after they were somewhat built were we able to build cabins for ourselves. Just imagine – we had to cut a thirty-metre long tree trunk with a hand saw. Thirty or forty people carried the tree fastened by ropes on their shoulders. We had to drag it there and raise it, using supports. There was no heating. We had no place to get warm. We lived liked that for dozens of days before we could at least get little warm. We also had to construct a canteen and guard posts for the Soviet soldiers in those temporary camps.”

“Injury. We were loading tree trunks onto cargo train cars, which were covered with frost. We used hooks that were three or four metres long. We thrust the hook into the trunk from the side and we pushed it over frozen planks onto the car. The Korean man who worked with me slipped. As he was falling down, the tree trunk fell on his head and he was dead on the spot. I spent about three weeks in a field hospital. The food there was a bit better than usual.”

“The way the men from Mossad got to gulag was that they brought frozen fish there using two or three sleighs. Those who delivered the fish and frozen fish to the storeroom were not prisoners, but agents from Mossad. They spent a short time in the camp and they tried to get our names from several prisoners and find out where we came from. We told them. There was a Polish man, a Hungarian, a German, an Austrian. We thus quickly grabbed a piece of paper and gave them our addresses and informed them that we were from Germany, Austria and from other countries. The men from Mossad then went to the gatehouse as a quickly as possible. They gave some whiskey and several packets of cigarettes to the gatekeeper. We kept it in secret and during two or three months, a note from Moscow arrived. It contained the names of persons who were to be released and repatriated.”

“I came to the hearing at the time he told me. He explained to me that since I had said about the Soviet Union that it was a lawless country and so on and so on, it was considered defamation of the Soviet State and I might be sentenced up to eight years for it. But that since I had little children, I would be sentenced only to fourteen months. This Alois Klar then became ill. As I learnt, he didn’t have only me, but he was a lawyer for other people who were sentenced to fifteen or twenty years because they had said something about the Soviet Union or about our lawless life.”

“The Soviets did not have any qualms. They had wooden sticks about one metre long, and they were beating us over our heads as they were counting us when we were getting on and off the train. The beating was terrible. They crammed ninety people into one train car, which was beyond human dignity. We prayed to Virgin Mary and we were thus saved from this hell, from the evil and from the worst. They unleashed their dogs to attack us. The dogs were jumping at us and biting us.”