One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What had really happened was this. In February 1942 the whole northwestern army was surrounded. No grub was being dropped by planes, and there were no planes, anyway. It got so bad that they were filing the hooves of dead horses, sousing the horny shavings in water, and eating them. They had no ammunition either. So the Germans rounded them up a few at a time in the forest. Shukhov was a prisoner in one such group for a couple of days, then he and four others escaped. They crawled about in the woods and marshes till they found themselves by some miracle among friends. True, a friendly tommy-gunner stretched two of them, and a third died from his wounds, so only two of them made it. If they’d had any sense they’d have said they’d got lost in the forest, and nothing would have happened to them. But they came out in the open: yes, we were taken prisoner, we’ve escaped from the Germans. Escaped prisoners, eh? Like hell you are! Nazi spies, more like! Behind bars is where you belong. Maybe if there’d still been five of them their statements would have been compared and believed. Just the two of them hadn’t a chance: these two bastards have obviously worked out this escape story of theirs together.