A POW Camp in the Mountain

The last weeks has been wet , cold and windy and this monday it was no different. Or a little different , winter is imminent , so I had to make a trip out. As I was in the car the clouds dispearsed and the sun peeked out and I couldn`t be happier the weather gods was on my side.  The nice weather lasted until I had parked the car and put on my backpack. Then the first drops of rain came.  
 I was heading up a mountain side to a very remote POW camp area. The walk takes about an hour and is quite hard , but the views along the route is stunning. I had a box of Tic-Tacs I kept rattling to scare away any digger-hungry bears as I struggled up the old road the Soviet prisoners had built.
The weather kept changing all the time from light rain to strong winds and sometimes it really poured down. At one point I had to get off the path as it turned into a little stream , and further along I had to cross 3 rivers as the bridges was long gone.

I was a little tired when I suddenly was standing in front of a dense forest , as I walked through it I started to see rust between the trees. A few barrels , some enamelled dishes and buckets , and then I was on the other side of the forest and saw the camp ruin. A river runs through the middle of the area so I spent an hour or so investigating the northern side first. Traces of cellars and buildings was all along the small camp road and many of these was filled with different kind of rust. Roof plates , bridge sections , metal cans of all kinds , wagons and field kitchens. Everywhere I turned my eyes there was something rusty. I tried to find the camp gravesite but I looked in the wrong spots and I decided to cross the river and check out the other side.

I managed to get across the river with no accidents and could see right away that there was even more stuff on this side. First I found the camp kitchen, A large stone oven with building ruins around it. Many stone built cellars , the foundations of many barracks and heaps of planks from the buildings was strewn around the forest. As I moved around I felt the eerie vibe of the past. This was really one of the craziest sites I have found on my trips this far. Its really hard to describe the feeling it was walking around up there. A group of stoves from the barracks is standing between the trees and not far from them another field kitchen lay tipped over on its side. It had started to rain pretty hard and as I noticed it I stepped into a well or parts of the camp irrigation system. I stood with icecold water to up on my thigh. Man it was fresh. I was quickly on my feet and found a place to empty the boots and twist up the wool socks and realized I had to start the trip back down.

This camp was operational from 1942-45. It held around 900 Red Army POWs who had to build the railroad as slaves of Hitler. In total 96 of them lost their life here. 83 men died from hunger and 13 was shot.
R.I.P