Block 11

It snowed non-stop that winter. It drifted down in large, soft flakes that settled straight away, leaving the earth a carpet of pure white in the fields surrounding the camp.

Some days it is so cold that we can't feel our fingers and toes. The nights are worse. Huddled together in rooms barely big enough to house ten people, let alone the fifty that are crammed in, managing two hours sleep if we are lucky.

I have seen many come and go since the first day. Some have stayed, others moved quickly and without warning. The weak and the old find it very difficult, some going to sleep at night and not waking by the time the cold harsh light filters in through the small windows. These are moved and someone else takes their place on the dirty mattresses that lay like a big patchwork quilt from wall-to-wall.

My head was shaved almost as soon as my details had been passed on and my clothes removed and replaced with the grubby, striped ones that we all wear. A fellow 'worker' tasked with the job, using a well-used and blunt razor, less than delicately taking off my hair down to the skull.

Everyone is this way, even the women - who we sometimes see out in the fields or in the kitchens serving food. They are kept in different buildings to us, which are clustered together like rows of rotten, broken teeth. From a distance, the women look just the same as the men do, other than the size. In every other way, they may as well be just a walking number. I know I am.

Yesterday, a man two beds over from me was dragged away just before dawn, and his blankets thrown into the corner. A little while later, I heard a faint noise. It was like a firecracker going off in the next village. I think we all knew what it was.

This is what we live through, and live around, each day and night. The uncertainty is what keeps me awake (as well as the cold) but you must keep putting one foot in front of the other and ticking off the minutes. What other way is there?

So, the train passed through a large arched opening and through to a stop beside high barbed wire fence on both sides. From the small slitted sides of the train car, I could just make out the insulated bulbs dotted along at regular intervals which could only be for an electrical current to run through. Down both sides of the track, guard posts stood on stilts, with two guns pointing out from each, the ends a dark hole that promised nothing but misery.

I, along with just about everyone else on the train, had been rounded up in the city and removed from jobs and homes and herded like cattle into the waiting trains at the station. The march down had been terrifying. Guns pointed at the ground but ready to fly at any given moment. Women weeping, with infants clung tightly to chests, some of whom were also weeping.

The train slowed and the brakes screeched as it finally bumped against buffers and rocked backwards and forwards for a moment. There was a commotion and then the doors slid back letting in the blinding winter sun. The chill was bone deep.

The guards that greeted us were grim-faced and robotic. Ushering without care or compassion, not discriminating between men, women, or children - everyone was treated with the same distain. It was chaos. A sea of tired, hungry, freezing, confused bodies.

A young soldier of, perhaps, twenty looked me up and down quickly and grunted. He pointed to his left and told me in broken English to make my way down that line. There were around a hundred heading this way - most seemed to be adult males. A couple of women and one or two older children made up the remaining swell of humanity.

The line to the right was smaller and contained mainly women, children, and older people.

We were led through a gate, and over hard, ice-packed grassed fields towards where a cluster of buildings stood. These were to be our homes for the foreseeable future. Mine was block 11. I am still here.

Since that day, I have seen trains too numerous to count trundling through the gate and emptying out their passengers onto the road that bisects the camp down the middle. Some end up taking places in and around where I live - some even find their way into block 11, and even into my room. Never any women, never any children, never the elderly.

At the far end of the camp, the furthest point from where I am, is a small nondescript building. Grey concrete topped by a flat roof of grey tile. A tall chimney, at least twice as high as the building itself, stands like a proud soldier at a parade. Once each day, usually mid-afternoon, a thin spiral of smoke will drift lazily into the sky, dissipating as the breeze grabs hold of it and swirls it away to the clouds. I like to think that it's nothing more sinister than the boiler house, stoked high with burning coals to heat the blocks. I like to think that, but I know better.

People enter but don't come out. A lot of people. Innumerable over the roughly three years since my first day. I'd like to be able to give an accurate number, but it would be impossible to do.

Today is potato day. We have two fields to dig and harvest. There's a kind of contentment in knowing that we are collecting our own food. We will also clean and prepare it, so the cooks can then boil the goodness out of it ready for the plate. It's not often we get fresh potato.

Cabbage. There's a seemingly endless supply of the stuff. Cabbage stew with a few rotted carrots is the staple of our diets. The rooms at night are not the most inviting places to be.

The cold bites into my bones, deep and chilling. It's freezing. All along the edge of the camp, the fields stretch away as far as the eye can see, green with plants ready for harvest. The guards stand watch, looking bored more than anything, guns hanging limply at their sides, occasional glances across at the workers but nothing more.

It's been a couple of months since anyone tried to make a run for it. That was a man called Piotr. He was on a different detail to me, but I knew him to speak to. A quiet man, with long gangly legs and arms that looked out of size to the rest of his body. He seemed edgy and distracted - not that anyone but me noticed I don't think. People had a way of just melting into the surroundings to try and stay away from the glare of the guards. I noticed that day.

At first, he stood in line with the rest of his group, bending to pull cabbages, dropping them into the baskets that were placed along the sides (these were made by the women across the other side of the camp) and standing again to stretch and pop his back, before repeating the process.

Two guards were chatting and having a smoke to his left. To the right, a gap between the men and the fence of, perhaps, twenty yards. The fence itself was twenty feet high, with barbed wire strung along the top and electrified. On the other side of that fence was the camp. On these duties, we were escorted outside of the perimeter to dig for twelve hours.

I watched him as I dug and threw, dug and threw. All the while keeping my eyes on him. I felt something about to happen.

It was quick. Almost as an afterthought. He dropped a cabbage into the basket, half-bent to pick another and instead, turned and walked casually away. The trees at the far end of the field were a good hundred yards away or more but off he went. The guards were laughing about something, unaware of what he was doing. The rest of us held tense, our breath drawn in and waiting to be released as the guns crashed. They didn't though. They just didn't see him.

The last I saw of Piotr was the brief dash of dirty yellow and blue striped overalls through a gap in the trees. Then there was no more. He was gone.

We went back to work, bending, pulling, lifting dropping. The guards carried on talking and laughing; the one on the left ribbing and elbowing the one on the right about something only they could hear. As far as they were concerned, everything was ok, everything was just as it should be in the world. Prisoners doing as they were told, work being done.

Later, back inside the fences and lined up in the middle of the yard, being counted back into the blocks, a yell went up and the alarm warbled. Many running feet followed and a few of the men at the outside of the group were knocked to the ground.

Within five minutes we were all back inside and the doors locked. I tried to peer through the grubby window to see what was happening but all I could make out was a few blurred figures darting backwards and forwards.

Word started to spread as it inevitably does, and it wasn't long before we had about ten versions of how the events had unfolded; circulated like a wild forest fire on a hot, dry summers day.

He had made it to the border and crossed over to safety was one. Another had him gunned down within half a mile. A third, had him holed up in an abandoned farmhouse (how anyone could know this didn't detract from the telling). It was hard to believe anything.

We didn't work the following day. We stayed in our cramped rooms, climbing the walls with boredom as the sun made its way slowly across the sky, first turning it a bright blue, and then a dark red tinged with bruise-coloured clouds later.

Midway through the day, guards came into the block and marched out a whole room of men. They were in the same work detail as Piotr - the man who had fled.

None of them returned. Not that day, not the day after. I didn't see any of them again out in the fields working the crops. Some said they had been transferred to another camp, where their skills were needed. I knew better.

Before too much longer, their room was filled with more men, all looking bewildered and half-starved. Much as we had done on our first day.

So anyway, today we are marched out to the potato fields and given long trowels with splintered wooden handles. The ground is hard with a frost and will be difficult to turn over to get to the vegetable's underneath, but we will do it. It is in our best interests to do it; we will be fed something other than cabbage tonight, and it will save us from a beating if we don't.

I can feel the vertebrae in my spine crackle when I bend to lift the first lot of potatoes. There is a loud pop when I straighten and drop the half dozen, mud-caked veggies into the basket. Around me, men work and chat, and laugh, and slap each other on the back. You would think that this would be stopped but the guards don't mind if we get through our quota.

Most of them are good-natured and try to make things as comfortable as they can. As with everything, there are exceptions. One in particular - a guard called Stefan - is a real ball-breaker. A hard nut. Nothing gets by him, nothing is tolerated. It was on his watch that Piotr made his escape, and he hadn't taken it well.

I could see him over by the fence, barking out orders to his men and looking even more red-faced than usual. One guard saluted him and stalked off quickly and without looking back. The other faced him and took the verbal volley that was coming his way.

A few men laughed and joked that he must have not had any action from his wife the night before and there was a titter throughout the group.

We continued our work. Toiling in the cold, fingers already numb despite only being here in the field for less than half an hour.

From just behind me, a cry of pain. I look around and see a man I don't know sprawled on the ground; several potato plants crushed beneath him. The guard who had been sent away by Stefan, stood over him, a small wooden club hanging by his side.

The prone man was then dragged by the collar, over to a waiting truck and thrown into the back and driven away. It happened fast, as things around here tend to do, and with no warning. For a few moments there was a stunned silence, and then another guard shouted at us, and everyone began digging again in tandem.

Word is that he was plotting an escape and was in close friendship with Piotr. I knew nothing of this, not knowing the man personally but as with most things in here, it's just gossip.

Do I fear for my own safety? Yes, every minute of every day. I wouldn't be human if I didn't think that my life could be snuffed out at any given moment. No one has an accurate guess on what the date is, or even what the year is, come to think of it, but it seems that lately all the guards are on edge. Maybe the war is coming to an end, and we will be free - who knows for sure?

My best estimate is that it is sometime between late August and October. I can't do better than that. Some days it is quite warm when the sun is out, and it feels like a barmy summer's day. On the other hand, there have been morning's (like today) whereby the shovels and trowels won't penetrate the hard frosted soil.

Each day is marked by the setting of the sun, over the buildings with the tall chimney stacks that often billow smoke, and each new one by the light that drifts in slowly from the East. It's the only thing we have that enables us to work out the passage of time.

If I wake and able to work and eat, and laugh, and just exist with my fellow men, and women, then all is well.

My basket is pretty full, the potatoes almost to overflowing. We should eat like king's tonight and thank God that we are all alive to enjoy it. I can only hope that it's not me that will be next into the stone building at the end of the rail tracks. That it will be someone else. Or no one at all. I can only hope. We can all only hope.