May 1945 – September 1955
Time ceased to be linear. It became circular, a grinding wheel that rotated between two poles: the white cold and the grey hunger.
The journey began in a cattle car that smelled of unwashed bodies and old fear. There were eighty men in a space designed for eight cows. They stood pressed together, a singular organism of misery swaying with the rhythm of the tracks. The train moved east, always east, eating the miles, devouring the concept of Germany, then Poland, then the known world.
Peter Polemos did not speak. He had nothing to say to the living. He spent the weeks in the dark clutching his chest, his hand frozen into a claw over his heart. The letters were there. They were the only passport he had left.
When the doors finally rolled open, the light was blinding. The air was thin and sharp, biting into the lungs like powdered glass.
They were in the Urals. Or maybe Siberia. The geography didn't matter. It was the Archipelago of the lost.
"Camp 38," a voice barked.
They were stripped. They were shaved. Their uniforms—the wool tunics that had seen the sunflowers of Ukraine and the ruins of Bautzen—were taken away, thrown into a pile to be burned or boiled.
Peter stood naked in the snow, his skin blue and shivering. A guard, a thickset man with eyes like flint, walked down the line, tossing rags at them. Quilted jackets. Telogreikas. Trousers that were too short.
Peter held his tunic until the last second. As the guard grabbed it, Peter's hand darted into the breast pocket. It was a magician's trick, a sleight of hand practiced a thousand times in the dark of the train. He palmed the small, oilcloth-wrapped packet.
He hid it in his armpit. Then, as he pulled on the lice-ridden shirt he was given, he slipped the packet against his skin.
He had saved the soul. Now he just had to save the body.
1947
The forest was endless. It was a prison of pine and birch that stretched for a thousand kilometers in every direction. The trees were the bars of the cell.
Peter was a logger now. He was part of a Brigada, a work gang of twenty men. Their quota was six cubic meters of timber a day. If they met the quota, they got 600 grams of bread—a dense, wet brick of sawdust and rye. If they missed the quota, they got 300 grams.
300 grams was a death sentence. It was a slow suffocation of the cells.
"Heave!" Peter grunted, pushing against the rough bark of a fallen pine.
Beside him, a man named Richter slipped in the snow. Richter was a former pianist from Vienna. His hands, once insured for thousands of Reichsmarks, were now cracked, bleeding claws wrapped in rags.
"I can't," Richter wept. "Peter, I can't."
"Push, Richter," Peter hissed. "If we don't clear this trunk, we get the 300. You will die tonight."
"I want to die tonight," Richter whispered. He looked at Peter with eyes that had seen the bottom of the well. "It's warm when you die. They say it feels like a bath."
Peter grabbed Richter by the collar of his jacket. He shook him.
"No baths," Peter said. "Not yet. We push."
They pushed. They cleared the trunk. They got the bread.
That night, in the barracks—a wooden longhouse where two hundred men slept on wooden planks like stacked cordwood—Peter sat in the corner.
The air was thick with the smell of drying rags, dysentery, and hopeless sweat. A single stove burned in the center of the room, fueled by the scraps of the forest. The men nearest the stove burned; the men near the walls froze. Peter was near the wall.
He checked the packet.
The oilcloth was cracking. The damp of his body, the sweat of the labor, was penetrating the seal. He unwrapped it carefully, his hands trembling with fatigue.
The paper was thinning. The edges were fraying. The pencil script was beginning to fade, the graphite rubbing off against the folds.
I release you...
The words were disappearing.
Panic, cold and sharp, spiked in Peter's chest. If the words faded, the mission failed. If the paper dissolved, the apology vanished.
He needed a pencil. He needed to retrace the letters.
But a pencil in the Gulag was contraband. A pencil was a weapon. It meant you could communicate, organize, rebel.
Peter looked across the barracks.
There was a man there, a Russian criminal prisoner—an Urka. They were the wolves of the camp, the ruling caste who terrorized the politicals and the POWs. This one was named Pavel. He had tattoos of churches on his back—one cupola for every conviction.
Pavel was whittling a piece of wood with a shiv made from a sharpened spoon. Beside him, on a crate, sat a stub of a carpenter's pencil.
Peter stood up. He walked across the room. The other Germans watched him. You didn't approach the Urkas. It was suicide.
Peter stopped in front of Pavel.
The Russian looked up. His eyes were dead sharks. "What do you want, Fritz?"
"The pencil," Peter said in broken Russian.
Pavel laughed. It was a wet, ugly sound. "You want to write a letter to Hitler? He's dead, Fritz. Burned in a ditch."
"I need the pencil," Peter repeated. "For five minutes."
"And what do you have to trade?" Pavel sneered. "You have no tobacco. You have no bread. You are a skeleton."
"I have my ration for tomorrow," Peter said.
The barracks went silent. To trade tomorrow's bread was to gamble with existence.
Pavel raised an eyebrow. "Tomorrow's bread? You might be dead by tomorrow."
"I won't be," Peter said.
Pavel considered this. He picked up the pencil stub. It was barely an inch long. "All of it. 600 grams."
"Yes."
Pavel tossed the pencil. It landed in the dirt at Peter's feet.
"If you don't pay tomorrow," Pavel said softly, toying with his knife, "I will take your ears."
Peter picked up the pencil. He walked back to his corner.
He spent the night working. Under the dim light of the single bulb, he carefully, painstakingly retraced every letter. He pressed the graphite into the dying paper, darkening the loops of the 'D' in Dolce, sharpening the 'V' in Verona. He breathed life back into the text.
He didn't sleep.
The next day, he gave his bread to Pavel.
He worked the shift on an empty stomach. The hunger was a physical weight, a clamp on his intestines. He hallucinated. He saw sunflowers in the snow. He saw Hanke sitting on a stump, smoking a cigarette.
"You look terrible, Sergeant," the ghost of Hanke said.
"I am hungry," Peter mumbled to the air.
"But the letters are legible," Hanke smiled. "That is what matters."
Peter survived the day. He survived the night. He had bought another year for the paper.
1950
Richter died in the spring. He didn't wake up for roll call. He had simply stopped. His body was frozen to the planks.
Peter helped carry him to the "boneyard," a trench outside the wire. They stripped him of his clothes—the living needed them.
As Peter looked at Richter's naked, emaciated body, he felt a terrible envy. The pianist was done. The concert was over.
"Why?" Peter asked the sky. "Why not me?"
He touched his chest. The packet was there. It was harder now. He had found a piece of rubber from a discarded truck tire and wrapped the paper in it, sealing it with tree pitch. It was a hard lump against his ribs, a second heart that beat with a graphite pulse.
He couldn't die. He was the courier.
He had started to memorize the letters. He recited them in his head while he swung the axe.
My Dearest Dolce... The roof is falling now... I release you...
He said the words until they lost their meaning and became rhythm. Chop. My. Chop. Dearest. Chop. Dolce.
The words kept him warm. They were a fire that the wind couldn't blow out.
1953
The loudspeakers crackled. The music—the endless, martial music—stopped.
A voice announced it. Stalin is dead.
The camp held its breath. The guards looked nervous. The prisoners looked at each other with a terrifying hope.
Change was coming. But change in Russia was glacial.
The seasons turned. The work continued. But the discipline slackened. The 300-gram days became fewer. Letters from home were allowed, though Peter received none. His family was gone, or they thought he was dead. And he could not write to Verona. He could not send the letters by post. They had to be delivered by hand. That was the penance.
September 1955
The rumor started in the latrines. Adenauer is in Moscow.
The German Chancellor. The Old Man. He had come to bargain for the lost children of the Reich.
Peter didn't believe it. He had stopped believing in rescue ten years ago in a railyard in Bautzen.
But then the lists came.
Names were called at morning Appell. Men were pulled from the lines. They were sent to the bathhouse. They were given new clothes—civilian clothes.
Peter waited. He stood in the snow, listening to the alphabet of survival.
"Müller... Neumann... Oster..."
"Polemos, Peter."
The sound of his own name was alien. He hadn't heard it in a decade. He was just Number 482.
He stepped forward. His legs felt like water.
"To the gate," the guard said.
Peter walked. He didn't run. He was afraid that if he ran, the dream would shatter.
They were marched to the train station. A train was waiting. A real train. Passenger cars with glass windows. Smoke puffed from the engine, white and clean against the blue sky.
He climbed aboard. The seat was upholstered. Soft. He sank into it, and his bones, shaped by ten years of wood and stone, ached in protest.
The train whistled. It lurched forward.
The camp receded. The wire, the towers, the endless forest—it all slid away into the past.
Peter sat by the window. He watched the taiga roll by. He saw the seasons change through the glass as they traveled west. The gold of the birch trees. The green of the Polish fields.
He was thirty-five years old. He looked fifty. His hair was grey. His teeth were loose. His hands were scarred leather.
He was a ruin.
But as the train crossed the border into West Germany, as the signs changed from Cyrillic to Latin script, Peter Polemos reached into his shirt.
He pulled out the packet.
It was ugly. A lump of black rubber and pitch, stained with sweat and dirt.
He peeled back the layers.
Inside, protected like a pearl in an oyster, was the paper.
It was yellow, brittle, and fragile as a moth's wing. But the words were there. The dark, heavy pencil lines he had bought with his bread were still sharp.
I release you.
He wept.
He didn't weep for Hanke, or Schultz, or Klein, or Richter. He had cried for them in the silence of his soul for years.
He wept because the weight was still there.
He had thought that freedom would make the letters lighter. He thought that crossing the border would lift the burden.
But it didn't.
The survival was not the end of the mission. It was just the logistics.
He was alive. He was free.
And now, he had to go to Verona.
He folded the paper. He didn't put it back in his shirt. He held it in his hand.
The train slowed. A station sign appeared. Friedland. The camp for returning prisoners.
Crowds were waiting on the platform. Mothers holding photos of sons who would never come back. Wives searching for husbands they hadn't seen in a decade.
Peter stepped off the train. He looked at the sea of faces.
He had no one waiting for him. No photo. No sign.
He walked through the crowd, a ghost returning to a world that had learned to live without him.
He walked past the Red Cross nurses offering soup. He walked past the priests offering prayers.
He walked to the station master.
" excuse me," Peter said. His German was rusty, accented with the harsh cadence of the camps. "When is the next train to the south?"
"The south?" the man asked, looking at Peter's ragged clothes. "Where are you going, soldier?"
"Italy," Peter said. "I am going to Italy."
The man looked at him with pity. "You just got home, son. Go rest. Eat."
"I cannot rest," Peter said. He held up the packet. "I have mail to deliver."