But I wanted to make sure of it.
All the way to Poznan, where they put us in a proper camp, I never got the right kind of chance.
But in the Poznan camp it looked as if I'd got what I wanted. At the end of May they sent us out to a little wood near the camp to dig graves for the prisoners that had died- a lot of our chaps died at that time from dysentery. And while I was digging away at that Poznan clay I had a look round and I noticed that two of our guards had sat down to have a bite; the third was dozing in the sun.
So I put down my shovel and went off quietly behind a bush. Then I ran for it, keeping straight towards the sunrise.
"They couldn't have noticed me very quick, those guards.
Where I found the strength, skinny as I was, to cover nearly forty kilometres in one day, I don't know myself.
But nothing came of my effort. On the fourth day, when I was a long way from that damned camp, they caught me.
There were bloodhounds on my track, and they caught up with me in a field of unreaped oats.
"At dawn I found myself in the open and it was at least three kilometres to the woods. I was afraid to go on in the daylight, so I lay low in the oats for the day.
I crushed up some grain in my hand and was filling my pockets with a supply, when I heard the sound of dogs barking and the roar of a motor-bike. My heart missed a beat because the dogs kept coming nearer.
I lay flat and covered my head with my arms, so they wouldn't bite my face.
Well, they came up and it only took them a minute to tear all my rags off me.
I was left in nothing but what I was born in.
They dragged me about in the oats, just did what they liked with me, and in the end a big dog got his forepaws on my chest and started making passes at my throat, but he didn't bite straightaway.
"Two Germans came up on motor-bikes.
First they beat me up good and proper, then they set the dogs on me. The flesh just came off me in chunks.
They took me back to camp, naked and bloody as I was.
I got a month in solitary for trying to escape, but I was still alive. Yes, I managed to keep alive somehow.
"It's pretty grim, mate, to remember the things I went through as a prisoner, let alone tell you about them.
When I remember all we had to suffer out there, in Germany, when I remember all my mates who were tortured to death in those camps, my heart comes up in my throat and it's hard to breathe.
"The way they herded us about in those two years I was a prisoner!
I reckon I covered half of Germany. I was in Saxony, at a silicate plant, in the Ruhr, hauling coal in a mine. I sweated away with a shovel in Bavaria, I had a spell in Thiiringen, and the devil knows what German soil I didn't have to tread.
There's plenty of different scenery out there, but the way they shot and bashed our lads was the same all over.
And those damned bastards lammed into us like no man here ever beat an animal.
Punching us, kicking us, beating us with rubber truncheons, with any lump of iron they happened to have handy, not to mention their rifle butts and sticks.
"They beat you up just because you were a Russian, because you were still alive in the world, just because you worked for them.
And they'd beat you for giving them a wrong look, taking a wrong step, for not turning round the way they wanted.
They beat you just so that one day they'd knock the life out of you, so you'd choke with your own blood ·and die of beating.
There weren't enough ovens in the whole of Germany, I reckon, for all of us to be shoved into.
"And everywhere we. went they fed us the same- a hundred and fifty grams of ersatz bread made half of sawdust, and a thin swill of swedes.
Some places they gave us hot water to drink, some places they didn't.
But what's the use of talking, judge for yourself. Before the war started I weighed eighty-six kilograms, and by the autumn I couldn't turn more than fifty.
Just skin and bones, and hardly enough strength to carry the bones either.
But you had to work, and not say a word, and the work we did would have been a lot too much for a cart-horse, I reckon.
"At the beginning of September they sent a hundred and forty-two of us Soviet prisoners-of-war from a camp near Kiistrin to Camp B-14, not far from Dresden.
At that time there were about two thousand in that camp.
We were all working in a stone quarry, cutting and crushing their German stone by hand.
The stint was four cubic metres a day per man, and for a man, mind you, who could hardly keep body and soul together anyway.
And then it really started. After two months, out of the hundred and forty-two men in our group there were only fifty-seven left.
How about that, mate?
Tough going, eh?
We hardly had time to bury our own mates, and then there was a rumour 'in the camp that the Ge1·mans had taken Stalingrad and were pressing on into Siberia.
It was one thing on top of another. They held us down so we couldn't lift our eyes from the ground, as if we were just asking to be put there, into that German earth.
And every day the camp guards were drinking and bawling out their songs, rejoicing for all they were worth.
"One evening we came back to our hut from work.
It had been raining all day and our rags were soaking; we were all shivering from the cold wind and couldn't stop our teeth chattering.
There wasn't anywhere to get dry or warm, and we were as hungry as death itself, or even worse.
But we were never given any food in the evenings.
"Well, I took off my wet rags, threw them on to my bunk and said:
'They want you to do four cubic metres a day, but one cubic metre would be plenty to bury one of us.'