Love and Freedom

by Rosemary Kavan

  ‘A young officer came in and told me to write my curriculum vitae. I pointed out that I had recently written one for the security police. He snapped that orders were to be obeyed. I started writing. It took me three days. I wrote carefully — my motives for my war work, my reasons for joining the Party. Every detail of my work at the Ministry, the Embassy, for the Party.

  ‘A slightly older officer appeared, Doubek1, one of Ruzyně’s key men. He disclosed that a treacherous faction, in league with the CIA, was threatening the very existence of the Party. The police knew the identity of many of the conspirators, but they needed further evidence before they could bring a water-tight case. They were counting on me to help. He questioned me: Didn’t I think Clementis put Slovak interests above the Party? Had I discussed Zionism with Goldstücker? Whom had Margolius contacted in London? Why had I cultivated Klinger’s friendship, knowing he was a Trotskyist? And so on.

  ‘Believing I was serving a higher purpose, I tried to give reasoned answers. I pointed out flaws in the police assumptions, which caused Doubek to remark that my eagerness to shield enemies of the state cast doubts on the veracity of my statements and the innocence of my activities. I began to experience a growing feeling of unreality. Anxiety and strain were beginning to tell on me. I was increasingly disoriented. I began to wonder whether the comrades, on whose integrity I would have staked my life, had become involved, knowingly or not, in a scheme to overthrow our socialist state. The prison clothes, the regulations — standing to attention when an officer or warder entered the cell — produced a psychosis of guilt. Somewhere I, too, had failed the Party, but where? This psychosis undermined my ability to think rationally. When the questions narrowed to my part in the “conspiracy”, I realized with a jolt that I was no longer regarded as an innocuous witness but as a guilty accomplice.’

  His voice shook with agitation. I took his hands to still their trembling. He went on to describe how sentences in his curriculum vitae were extracted from their context and twisted. His father had been a partner in a small wholesale clothing firm; this proved that Pavel had been brought up in a bourgeois capitalist family, although his father had died, bankrupt, when Pavel was twelve. Pavel’s attendance at a German secondary school (because it was the nearest and his mother couldn’t afford fares) made him anti-Czech. On the other hand, leaving his country in 1939 for patriotic reasons made him into a nationalist. As a student he had belonged to the Czech Socialist Party (albeit the left wing): this proved he was an anti-communist. His parents had changed their name from Köhn to Kavan to disguise their real sympathies which lay with Zionism.

  ‘In short,’ Pavel said, ‘I was given a new identity.’

  They brought him papers to sign — statements in which questions that had been put to him were presented as his spontaneous testimony. He discovered that any fresh information he had given the police in his attempts to throw light on the situation had been turned against himself and others. I recalled Cardinal Richelieu’s words: ‘If you give me six lines written by an honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.’

  ‘I refused to put my name to documents that were not of my wording,’ Pavel went on. ‘It became more and more apparent that they were trying to trick me into an admission of guilt. Their methods of cross-examination were not very subtle. “Did Zilliacus ask you to send a letter to Slánský?” “Yes.” “You abused your position at the Embassy to pass on espionage material?” “No, that’s not true.” Doubek shouted: “We are not interested in the truth! Here, there is only one truth, our truth!” That was the terrible moment of revelation. They didn’t want the truth; they wanted only a confession — to a bundle of lies.’

  Pavel clenched and unclenched his fists; his voice shook. ‘Doubek told me that Goldstücker and Margolius had already confessed. They had provided enough evidence to hang me, but if I signed a confession I would get a lighter sentence. That was a mistake. I realized that those two, and all the others, were in the same position as I was: it was a frame-up. I was relieved to be able to believe in my friends again. There was no conspiracy to overthrow the Party, only a plot to liquidate certain comrades.

  ‘At least I knew where I stood with the interrogators. There was no longer any question of cooperation.’ Pavel’s voice was firm again. ‘As I hardened, so they hardened. They set about to deprive me of my humanity. There are several ways of reducing a man to an animal. One is hunger. My food was cut down almost to starvation level. It was mostly soup made from mouldy potato peelings. Besides debilitating the body, it weakened the mind. Humiliation is another effective weapon. The door would open a crack, a hand would put the food can on the ground. I had to kneel and consume it like a dog.’

  I felt physically sick with horror.

  Pavel went on, like a man forced to exorcise the past by describing it. ‘Our underwear was changed infrequently. The same pants were issued to men and women. I often got ones with menstrual stains. We were given anti-hormone drugs to deaden our sexual desires. I was blindfolded and led like an animal to the interrogations. At the beginning I found it difficult to use the Turkish lavatory. Squatting is an undignified position in a man’s own eyes: in front of another person, often a woman, it was degrading. The combination of solitary confinement without a moment’s privacy was nerve shattering.

  ‘Worst of all was the mental torment. I had demanded permission to write to the Central Committee and Gottwald, and had been told that the Party leadership were convinced of my guilt and that of all the other members of the conspiracy. What was the answer to that riddle? Either we were in the grip of an anti-Gottwald faction who were lying to the Central Committee or we were being framed with Gottwald’s connivance. In either case, I was in prison at the instigation of communists, and my communist friends outside would be branding me as a traitor. All the warders and interrogators wore Party badges. That was the hardest thing of all: to be treated as an enemy by people who purported to be in the same Party, to be fighting for the aims to which one had devoted one’s life.’

  He struggled for control, then went on: ‘The last factor was physical exhaustion. The table and chair had long since been taken away; my bed was a steel slab that was pulled out of the wall at night. I was forced to walk up and down the cell for sixteen hours a day. In wooden clogs with no socks my feet were soon bleeding and the pain was agony. My legs began to swell; they were like columns.’ Pavel broke off. ‘But I do not want to distress you with these details.’ He gently wiped a tear from my cheek.

  ‘No, please go on. I want to hear everything. I must know what you had to suffer in order to understand —’

  ‘Why I confessed to crimes I had not committed?’ Pavel interrupted bitterly.

  ‘No, no, to understand what you had to endure so that I may better appreciate the miracle that your spirit survived; so that I may be proud to have married such a man. I want to know.’

  ‘The interrogations were very frequent; the interrogators alternated and always repeated the same senseless questions. They tormented us with our powerlessness; the Party had deserted us, our families had abandoned us. One told me you had left the country with the boys. Another threatened to imprison you and send the boys to an orphanage, so I knew the first had lied. During the interrogations I had to stand under a strong light for forty-eight hours; then they would shut me up in a small room in absolute darkness; then back to the light or my cell.

  ‘I’d drop onto the bed; but there was no rest. The cell light was burning. Every few minutes a warder would wake me with the excuse that my hands had not been outside the blanket.’

  This had gone on for weeks. He was weak from hunger and cold and the pain of his swollen legs. His pulse was throbbing and his heart pounding. The prison doctor taunted him: ‘You’re a sick man. You’re shortening your life. Your heart cannot stand the strain. Give in and you will receive treatment.’ Doubek urged: ‘Why prolong the agony? No one escapes us. Some last days, some weeks, some months, even a year, but in the end the
y crack up.’

  ‘While I could still think, I resisted; but weeks of no sleep reduce the mind to a brute level of consciousness. Concentration becomes fluid, memory jumbled; one has no sense of date or time. There’s no reality except light and darkness. A prod in the back, a dash of cold water in my face cleared the haze for a moment, then it closed in again. Voices were shouting at me — I knew that from their resonance, but the words were wrapped in wool. I wanted to cry: ‘No, it isn’t true. I deny everything!’ But my nervous system was beyond my control. Before I could frame a reply, the thought had fled. The only all-absorbing reality was the craving for sleep.

  ‘Involuntarily, I put my hands to my head. Constantly interrupted sleep drove me to despair. To withstand total deprivation seemed to me humanly impossible.’

  Pavel’s voice rose: ‘I suffered hallucinations. I saw my mother and father pleading with me to save my life. I had visions of you being tortured in the next cell. I heard your voice cry out. My greatest fear then was of insanity. One could recover from physical maltreatment, but once the mind snapped, there would be no recall.’

  Looking at Pavel’s strong face and smouldering eyes, I could not visualize him in these degrading circumstances, terrified of losing his reason.

  After a pause Pavel concluded flatly: ‘I didn’t believe they would leave any of us alive. At this stage, death was preferable to life as a mindless idiot. I gave in.’ His voice faded away.

  I finally knew how the confessions had been extorted. No medieval tortures, just twentieth-century techniques of a horribly effective kind.

  Pavel mused: ‘I don’t know everything they did to us. We were refused proper medicines yet given frequent so-called calcium injections. I don’t know what they really were. They may have been drugs to induce disintegration of the personality or permanent chemical changes. My interrogator used to boast: “We can reduce you to any state from impotence to idiocy. If you escape the rope, you’ll be as we want you.”’

  I shuddered: even now he was not free. He was haunted by the possibility of terrible after-effects.

  Pavel did not remember actually signing the confession that the interrogators had written out long before. He knew only that he was allowed to sleep, was given better food, and permitted to write to me. Doubek was friendly again. Pavel was given a script — questions and answers that would be used in the trial — to learn by heart. A young officer was appointed to rehearse him.

  ‘As soon as I recovered my powers of reasoning, I became more cheerful,’ he said. ‘Once in the courtroom, I intended to revoke my confession and tell the court that the trial was a frame-up. This was naive, of course. My jailers realized my intention. They threatened that if I altered one word, the proceedings would be halted and I would be sent back to Ruzyně where the procedure would begin again. I was still optimistic. I figured that if all the charges were as transparent as my own, members of the Party would recognize that the trial was phoney and would demand an investigation. To draw attention to the fact that the trial had been written beforehand, I answered one question before it was posed.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I heard you on the radio. But the Brown Book published the script with the complete question.’

  My senses were aching for sleep, but one thing I had to know! Who was behind it? Who instigated the trial?

  ‘Who? Why Stalin, of course,’ Pavel replied.

  ‘Stalin?’ I repeated in disbelief.

  ‘Stalin and his chief of police, Beria.’

  After Lenin’s death Stalin had gradually built up a position of absolute power. The Soviet Union was surrounded by enemies. Stalin had used the threat from outside to cement the Soviet people behind him and to impose sacrifices. He had explained all mistakes as the work of external forces. When this became untenable, he had developed the theory of the sharpening class struggle after the revolution: the greater the strides towards socialism, the more desperate the enemy became; infiltration of the Communist Party would be the penultimate weapon. Having created the theory, Stalin had to substantiate it, first in the Soviet Union, then in the so-called People’s Democracies. If no real enemies were found inside the parties, they had to be invented. Russian advisers at Ruzyně had instructed the Czech security police in methods of extracting confessions. Stalin believed war with the West was inevitable. By getting rid of people who had been in the West he was eliminating a potential Fifth Column. He also liquidated everyone who might advocate a non-Soviet model of socialism, especially thinkers capable of action in defence of their ideals, like the Spanish war veterans, resistance heroes and people who had supported Gottwald’s pre-1948 Czech road to socialism.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for Stalin’s paranoia, these crimes would never have been committed,’ Pavel said. ‘Stalin rose out of a historical situation. There can never be another Stalin, because the same situation will never be repeated.’

  This was an over-simplification. Subsequent events were to show that as long as the Soviet leadership insisted on hegemony in the socialist bloc, every attempt to embark upon an individual model of socialism would be relentlessly suppressed. The Czech trials had been more drastic than those in the other socialist countries because the Czechoslovak Communist Party — the strongest and most deeply rooted of the East European communist parties — was the greatest potential rival to the Soviet Party. This was to be demonstrated in 1968.

  Pavel held the alarm clock towards the window, into which a full moon was gazing with a cool, wise and friendly smile. ‘It’s two o’clock. We ought to get some rest.’

  Sleeping together was going to be embarrassing after such a long separation. However, by the time I had finished in the bathroom, the warmth and softness of an ordinary bed had overwhelmed Pavel and he was fast asleep. I slipped in beside him. Tired as I was, I could not drop off. Pavel had turned on his back and was snoring softly. I bore it for an age, then I nudged him gently.

  ‘Prisoner 2645 reporting,’ he mumbled and started to get up. I put my arm around him.

  ‘No, no, Pavel, you’re home. Everything’s all right. Go to sleep.’

  He sank back with a grateful sigh. I would not risk waking him again, even if he were to snore all night. Towards morning I fell into a fitful sleep.

  *

  The next day, the first of the Christmas holidays, Pavel played with the boys and talked to them about their lessons and interests. They did not stir from his side for a single moment. When they were in bed Pavel continued his prison saga.

  ‘I was kept in solitary after the main trial with no books or writing materials.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Eleven months altogether.’

  ‘How did you keep sane with nothing to do?’

  ‘I worked out a strict programme for myself. I washed all over with cold water as soon as I got up, and spent about fifteen minutes in physical exercises. Then I did Russian for an hour.’

  ‘You mean in your head?’

  ‘Yes. I revised my vocabulary, then I translated passages from Czech literature into Russian. Next item was a walk. My feet had healed and I was now wearing shoes, but without laces. I walked from one particular place to another. I pictured the landmarks on the way. If there were castles in the vicinity, I related their history. This was followed by mathematics. Maths was never my strong point so this required an enormous effort. I think only in prison, cut off from all distractions, can one achieve such a degree of concentration.

  ‘Then I had to keep up with my English. I composed stories or articles in Czech and translated them into English. For relaxation I went through Czech books, films and plays slowly and in great detail. I made miniature chessmen out of soap and used to play with the chap in the next cell by means of the Morse code. The main thing was to spread these activities over the day, leaving no blank periods.’

  Pavel was speaking with his customary vigour. Now it was easier to picture him as a prisoner; resourceful, fighting back. My old admiration for him surged over me. I took his h
and.

  ‘Tell me about your own trial.’

  ‘It lasted two days. It was similar to the main one. We learned our lines. At the trial we discovered that we four — me, Eda, Dufek and Richard Slánský — had formed a conspiratorial group at the Ministry. I had spent one week in the death cell. That was the worst time of all. I really believed they meant to hang us all.’

  After the trial Pavel was detained at the Pankrác prison for some inadequate medical treatment. Several months later he was declared fit and sent to Leopoldov. He was excited at what he thought would be a step toward normal life. But Leopoldov was hell, especially for communists. They were harshly treated by the warders, because they were traitors, and by the other prisoners because they were communists. The warders delighted in putting communists and fascists together and never interfered when the fascists beat up the communists.

  ‘The food was lousy: watery soup, potatoes, a few times a week a tiny piece of gristle. We stole meat intended for the police dogs and ate it raw. The work norms were so hard we rarely had anything over to buy extras,’ he said.

  ‘Yet when you did earn something you sent it to us. I told you to keep the money and buy food.’

  ‘I know, but I felt it might come at a crucial moment when you had nothing. My first job was plucking feathers. After a few weeks my fingers were calloused and bent. If I kept hard at it, I earned 25 hellers2 a day. Then I went on to making ropes and sacks. About this time I managed to smuggle out a letter to Zápotocký, describing the methods used to extract confessions and demanding a re-trial. I never received a reply.’

  Karel had ascertained that a letter from Pavel had reached Zápotocký’s office, as had my letter appealing for clemency.

  ‘Then they must have been concealed from him.’ Pavel was loath to believe that the popular Zápotocký, who had succeeded Gottwald as President, could have known and ignored the truth.