One sunny morning the children from our Block, and from the twin one, and the Lowlander-children from the wooden houses by the foot of the Gorka upland collected at the House of Officers where two buses and two trucks with canvas tops were waiting for us. Parents gave their respective children suitcases with clothes, and bags full of sweets and other tasty things, and waved after the departing convoy.

We went over the bridge at the Pumping Station and passed the white gate of Checkpoint, leaving the Object behind the barbed wire that surrounded all of it together with the forest, hills, marshes and a stretch of the Rechka.

After Checkpoint, we turned to the right, climbing a protracted slant of the highway which we followed for about half an hour before another turn to the right to follow a dirt road in the forest of great Pine trees. There, the convoy had to slow down and, after a twenty-minute ride, we drove up to another gate in another fence of barbed wire. However, that fence wasn’t doubled, and there were no sentries at the gate because it was a pioneer camp.

Not far from the gate, there stood a one-story building with the canteen and the rooms for caretakers, and paramedic, and Camp Director, and other employees at the camp. Behind that building, there stretched a wide field marked by a tall iron mast of “giant leaps” crowned with the iron wheel from which there hung half-dozen canvas loops on thoroughly rusted chains because no one ever used the attraction. Beneath the row of tall Birch trees along the left edge of the field, there ran a neat cinder path to the pit for broad jumps. Across the field, the forest began again, parted from the camp by the couple lines of barbed wire nailed randomly to thicker trunks among the trees.

To the left of the canteen building, a growth of green bushes screened 4 square canvas tents with 4 beds each on the lining-board floor for the ninth-graders from the first platoon.

Then followed a level clearing with another iron mast, this time more slender and without chains but with one thin cable looped trough two small pulleys—atop the mast and near the ground—for the Red Flag of the camp. Each morning and each evening the platoons were lined-up along three sides of a large rectangular, facing inside. The iron mast, Camp Director, Senior Pioneer Leader, and the camp accordionist concluded the rectangular as the fourth—fairly rarefied—side of the perimeter. The commanders of the platoons, starting with the youngest, approached, in turn, Senior Pioneer Leader to report that their platoon was lined-up. During their report, both the commanders and Senior Pioneer Leader held their right elbows up, hands straightened and kept diagonally across their respective faces.

With the reports received from the commanders of all lined-up platoons, Senior Pioneer Leader made several steps ahead towards the center of the formation, yet without reaching it turned around and approached Camp Director to report that the camp was lined-up, and Camp Director responded with the order to hoist or to pull in the Red Flag of the camp, depending on the time of day.

The accordionist stretched the bellows of his instrument and played the hymn of the Soviet Union. Two rank-and-file pioneers called out by Senior Pioneer Leader for their recent achievements and overall merits in the camp life approached the mast. Standing on both sides from it, they pulled the cable running thru 2 pulleys, their hands taking turns at grabbing the cable, and the Red Flag of the camp crept in starts and jerks along the mast, up in the morning and down in the evening, while the lined-up formation stood with their right elbows up, hands straightened and kept diagonally across their respective faces, even Camp Director, caretakers and kids from the youngest platoon though none of them was age eligible for this pioneer salutation…