My Grandfather the Gulag Escapee: A Life Reconstructed

I remember being six years old, visiting my grandparents in Glendale, Calif., for the first and final time in my memory. I’ve held onto the memory of that trip for the longest time. I remember my grandmother telling me in her Austrian accent, “Go play chess vith your papik.” She and my father left the room, and I was alone with this towering old man, who seemed larger than life. Gazing at me above a chess set was my grandfather, Suren Oganessian the First. And I was afraid of him. I can’t explain why, really. He just seemed like a giant. It felt like his stare could burn a hole right through me. After a long, awkward silence, I backed away, and slipped out of the room.

Two years later, he died. By then I was old enough to feel guilty that I‘d been afraid of him, and I wished I had gotten to know him better. My grandfather Suren has become a mythical figure in my family since his passing. Being his first-born grandson to bear the Oganessian name, he chose me to be the next Suren, to continue the story. For years I hid behind my middle name, Michael, to avoid being bullied. But during my teens, the years when one typically begins searching for an identity, I began to realize the gravity of having been chosen to carry his name. My curiosity grew about who this man was, this man who died when I was eight years old, who existed only in old photographs, and in a thin little memoir at the bottom of a box in my parents’ closet.

My father, my aunts, and uncles all have stories about him—anecdotes of what it was like growing up, and theories on his life before he met his wife Olga in Germany and emigrated to America. He has been dead for close to 20 years now, so he can’t verify any of these stories. Some tales contradict what’s actually written in my grandfather’s memoir, Under Stalin’s Sun, a book that mainly deals with his time as a Soviet political prisoner and his escape from Siberia. So I have to put the pieces together. To complicate matters, the copy I have is a condensed English translation, much shorter than the door-stopper he wrote in Armenian, written in a very educated and eloquent Soviet Armenian dialect—making it difficult for my father and relatives, who learned Western Armenian in America, to understand. The English translation is a bit shoddy, muddying the waters more.

For instance, the English version of Under Stalin’s Sun doesn’t say anything about his being tortured in the Gulag camps, but from the stories I’m told, it’s obvious he was, and the missing fingertips on his left hand and the scars on his body attested to that. No one knows the names of his immediate family members because he never talked or wrote about them. The patriarchal branch of my family tree ended with him, essentially. There are mysteries I’ve yet to unravel, and it seems every time I speak to one of my aunts and uncles I learn something new, whether or not it can actually be verified. Piecing their testimonies with his memoir, this is the most accurate story I can put together about who this man was, and the life he lived.

 ***

My grandfather, Suren Oganessian the First, was born in Meghri, Armenia, in 1905—a hard time to grow up for almost any Armenian, to be sure. Though spared the massacres and deportations of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, history conspired to make my grandfather’s life a difficult one nonetheless. In 1918, Russia withdrew from the Caucasus region and left the last sliver of Armenian territory not yet conquered by the Ottoman Turks to fend for itself. Ethnic cleansing was the order of the day in Turkey, and with the dream of creating a racially pure Pan-Turkish state stretching from Anatolia to Central Asia, they capitalized on the opportunity to finish eliminating Armenia. Knowing that a Turkish conquest would be the end of Armenia, the Armenians raised an army; citizens from all walks of life were mobilized, even women and children. They took up old Russian military positions, and in May of 1918 the Turks invaded. Among the recruits were my grandfather’s family: his two older brothers and father. The tactics of asymmetrical warfare prevailed for the Armenians from May 21-29, and they were able to defeat the Turks at the Battle of Sardarabad, thereby ensuring the continued existence of the Armenian nation. For an ever-so-brief time Armenia was independent and much bigger than it is today.

My grandfather disliked talking about his childhood, but what I do know is that he was orphaned by the war at the age of 12, and was the only surviving member of his family. He spent the rest of his childhood in an orphanage. What a bitter disappointment it must have been then, when a few short years later, the nation that his family gave their lives to protect was conquered and partitioned between Turkey and the Soviet Union.

After leaving the orphanage in the 1920’s, my grandfather got a job as a school teacher in mathematics, but during this time, he also secretly joined the Dashnak Party, also called the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF). They were a nationalist organization that wanted to see Armenia become independent again. The party, which had ruled Armenia during its brief independence, was outlawed by the Soviets and most of its members were exiled. However, an underground branch still operated in the Armenian SSR during the 1920’s and 30’s. It was only natural for Suren, whose family had given their lives for Armenia’s independence, to strive to free Armenia from tyranny.

In 1930, Suren’s Dashnak comrades brought a stencil printing machine into his house so that they could print anti-government booklets. They chose his house because it was isolated. Their plan was to print 500 of these booklets, and distribute them in Leninakan (modern-day Gyumri, north of Yerevan). Suren was given four names to contact in Leninakan when he arrived. One of these individuals, however, turned out to be a spy that had infiltrated the Dashnaks. On Nov. 3, 1930, Cheka police broke into Suren’s hotel room and arrested him along with the rest of his group. He was taken to Medekh prison in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia.

Medekh was a prison that many detainees from the Caucasus region were first brought to before being transferred elsewhere in the Gulag prison system. Here, Suren was stuffed into an overcrowded prison, infested with lice. “The cells were so crowded with these miserables that even the drops of water from the ceiling could not find their way to the floor,” he wrote in his memoir. Moisture inside the cells caused clothes to grow moldy, so that “when one entered a cell from the outside, such a terrible stench would greet them that one’s head would begin to spin.” While he was a political prisoner, the majority of his cellmates were simple villagers, incarcerated for petty things like stealing a loaf of bread or owning more cows or goats than the government allowed, he noted. Most of the other political prisoners had been tricked into “joining” the Dashnaks or other outlawed political parties by undercover Soviet police.

In July 1931, Suren was transported from Medekh to a prison in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. After two days, he was summoned by the warden, who offered to give him a pardon and to send him back to Armenia if he agreed to work undercover for the Soviet police, uncovering subversive revolutionaries. My grandfather refused, and was then beaten severely and thrown in a cell with 65 other prisoners crammed together, the majority of whom were Armenians, Ukrainians, and Jews. The prisoners were rationed 200 grams of bread and a cup of water daily. No one had more than an arm’s length of space to themselves, save for one man who Suren described as a “human anthill,” teeming with lice. But, Suren survived here.

In the spring of 1932, he was transferred to yet another prison, the Lubianka in Moscow, where he spent most of the time in solitary confinement before being loaded on a crowded train with other prisoners to a concentration camp in Siberia known as Jirlakhd, in October 1933. Jirlakhd was perhaps the worst of all. Here, prisoners were forced to labor in the stinging Siberian cold. Detainees as young as 12 had been sentenced here for reasons as trivial as stealing corn from a field. Only a fraction was made up of genuine criminals like gangsters and murderers. Rations were so small that prisoners would sometimes drop dead of exhaustion or starvation, if they didn’t die of hypothermia or rampant disease first. Their meager rations of bread could be stolen in the blink of an eye: Bread was more valuable than gold. Faced with grueling labor—from laying bricks for new buildings, to clearing forests of trees and sending the lumber to nearby mines, all in sub-zero temperatures—Suren survived here too, until 1935.

It was on April 17, 1935 that my grandfather finally saw his chance. Two days earlier, the general supervisor of the camps had come to visit the prisoner barracks. Everyone stood to attention and saluted, save for Suren. When asked why he remained in bed, he answered that he had no reason to stand because he was a political prisoner and was under no obligation to humble himself in that man’s presence. Furious with his cockiness, the supervisor confiscated Suren’s papers. The next morning it was announced that five prisoners were being transferred to a disciplinary camp, my grandfather among them. “People sent there were in fact condemned to die—that is, to experience a slow death of many horrible kinds,” he wrote in his memoir.

April 17 was a rest day at the camp; many of the guards traveled to nearby villages to shop and mingle with Russian women. The weather was so severe that work was impossible. The guards in the towers were even forced to retreat indoors, shielding themselves from the rain. “If you’re really planning on escaping, this is the time. You’ll never have a better chance than this,” Suren remembered telling himself. And so, filling a bag with essentials, he slipped out into the stormy night, crawled under the barbed wire fences, and escaped into the dark. As he put it, “I took advantage of the blessed rage of God, got out of the camp, and put myself into the hands of fortune. I was able to escape that Hell.” Suren crossed a freezing river, careful to keep his scent from being tracked by bloodhounds that would surely follow once his escape was discovered. Trekking through the woods, frantically trying to get as far as he could before dawn broke, he then came upon a frozen lake. Using a tree branch, he tested the strength of the ice in front of him before stepping on it, making his way across. Searching for shelter, he came upon a natural cave, which looked as if it had perhaps until recently been the winter residence of a bear. He camped out in the cave for a few days, starting a fire with matches he’d taken with him and ate morsels of his meager ration of bread.

Knowing he had to keep moving, Suren pressed on when food ran low, traveling by night through the Siberian wilderness. He followed another turbulent river for five days, unable to find a way to cross it and continue east until, by luck, he found a fallen tree that bridged the shores. Soon, he came across a village. Having not eaten for days, he walked into the first house he saw. An old woman and her daughter were inside. They were frightened at first until they learned that he was an escaped convict. While aiding an escaped convict could get one thrown into a Gulag, the women opted to risk their own freedom and take Suren in, feed him, and give him villager’s clothes so he could disguise himself. The following night they sent him on his way. He continued east until he came upon another villager from the next town over with a horse and wagon. The villager, figuring out he was an escapee, allowed Suren to ride in his wagon, hidden under hay until they reached the next village. During his long journey back to Armenia, the villagers he met all resented the government for keeping them in poverty and demanding high taxes they couldn’t afford to pay, and despite threats that harboring fugitives would earn them the same sentence as the fugitive, they were willing to help.

Finally, his journey took him to the city of Abakan, in central Siberia. Here he was able to sneak aboard a train with the cargo. But as the train neared Georgia just north of Armenia, he was discovered by a conductor and a ticket collector. Unable to produce a ticket or any identification papers, the conductor deduced that he was a fugitive, and he was brought to two unarmed Red Army soldiers. He had no idea how he was going to save himself, and was sure he’d be sent back to the Gulag to be killed. The two soldiers studied him, reading the look on his face and knowing how far he’d come. One turned to the other, as the train neared the station, and said, “What a fool this man is. If I were an escapee and had come this far, I’d take this chance to jump off the train as it slowed down.” The other man agreed, keeping their eyes off Suren. Suren, seeing that he was being given a chance, immediately leaped off the train. From there it wasn’t far to return to Armenia, where he changed his last name from Hovhanessian to Oganessian (a Russian spelling) and kept a low profile for the next few years.

Here his autobiography becomes scant, but what I do know is how he came to live in America. The outbreak of World War II marked the end of living beneath the government‘s radar. He was drafted into the Soviet army and sent to the war front. Eventually, his entire platoon was captured by the Germans. He was a prisoner of war, and spent the rest of the war forced to build bombs for Nazi Germany’s war effort. Stories from my relatives vary on this part of his life; he either made a daring escape using a Nazi soldier’s uniform, or he waited out the war. His memoir is silent on the subject. Though Nazi Germany was defeated, Suren was unable to return to the Soviet Union or his beloved Armenia after the war.

Stalin viewed any former prisoners of war as traitors and spies. Thus, Suren lived in Germany in a Displaced Person’s Camp, one where my grandmother, Olga Golob, worked as a nurse. The two met and fell in love, starting a family and eventually moving from war-torn Europe to America in search of a better life. Suren evidently kept the Russian spelling of his name through all of this. In the back of his mind, he was always afraid that the Soviets would find out he was a fugitive.

The family immigrated through Ellis Island, the old-fashioned way, and after living in New York for a short time they moved to Chicago. Though an intellectual, Suren had to get by doing odd jobs. A favorite anecdote passed down in the family tells of his time as a hot dog vendor: One day someone robbed his hot dog stand, and he chased the thieves two or three blocks with a butcher’s knife, screaming that he was going to kill them. A police officer had to stop him, and explain to him that such things just weren’t done in the United States.

When my father was young, my grandfather offered this advice, having learned from his five terrible years as a Gulag prisoner: “Son, never get involved in politics,” he said, holding up the hand where two of his fingertips had been severed during his torturous interrogations. “Look what it did for me.”

Uncovering my grandfather’s life is an ongoing process for me. One day I want to have his memoir fully translated. No doubt there is much about his life that I don’t even know about yet. But sadly, our lives only overlapped for a brief time. If only I’d known how to play chess at that age.

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Suren Oganessian

Suren Oganessian was born in Concord, Calif., in 1986. He discovered his talent and love for writing and storytelling in high school, and recently graduated with an MFA in creative writing from Fresno State, where he also regularly contributed to the Hye Sharzhoom Armenian student newspaper. He is an aspiring novelist and, when not writing historical fiction, he likes to delve into creative nonfiction, poetry, and historical fantasy genres. Oganessian currently resides in Martinez, Calif.

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• My Grandfather the Gulag Escapee: A Life Reconstructed - September 1, 2014