That night the guard asked me again the three routine questions—name, birthday, charge—then said, “Get ready!” I dressed hastily, trying to clear my mind and prepare myself as best I could for whatever was about to happen. I was badly disoriented, however, and more than a little confused. The guard led me out of the room and, as is customary, immediately made me face the wall with hands behind my back while she locked the door. Then we went along the corridor through door after door, very quickly. At every door, again, I was made to stand with my face to the wall. If someone came down the corridor, I was hastily shoved against the wall or into a corner with a warning not to look around until they had passed.
After a long series of corridors and up several flights of stairs, we arrived at the interrogation section. Even though it was night, there were two or three secretaries working in the reception room. From time to time, NKGB men would wander by and glance idly at me. The guard led me into a large room beyond the reception room, medium-sized, rather pleasant, with a carpet in the center of the highly polished floor. There were two windows in the room, shuttered, and in the middle of the rug a large polished desk behind which sat the interrogator. As I entered, he was looking over some papers. There were also a few stuffed chairs, a davenport along one wall, and over in the corner the usual three or four green filing cases.
The interrogator was a middle-aged man in the uniform of the NKGB, with a firm face, rather drawn at the moment and tired, and dark hair beginning to thin out around the temples. He greeted me non-committally, as though it was all in the day’s work, and asked me to sit down. I sat down, but I couldn’t relax. At the beginning of any interrogation of this sort, the psychological tension is great. Your body is tense and the palms of your hands begin to sweat a little, as you brace yourself for the unknown questions. By the look of his face and the look of the room, I knew this interrogator would be a professional, an expert at the job.
All through our session, he was soft-spoken and quite matter-of-fact, like a personnel manager interviewing someone for a job. He began at the beginning—name, birthday, and charge—then went detail by detail through my whole story to date. He warned me perfunctorily before he began the detailed questioning that he already had all the details of my earlier interrogations as well as the results of several independent investigations. He told me frankly he already knew all there was to know about me, that this was a preliminary questioning, and that everything would go much more smoothly if I simply told the truth.
I began by telling him I was “Lypinski, Wladimir Martinovich, born November 4, 1910, and charged under Section 58:10:2.” He looked up with a slight air of annoyance, like a man who had been distracted while thinking of something else. “Now look,” he said flatly and without animosity, “you are Father Walter Ciszek, a Jesuit priest from Albertin, born in America on November 4, 1904. Let’s just drop all the pretense and fill out your biography with as little fuss as possible, shall we?”
I began again to tell the story from the beginning. He interrupted so often, however, to ask questions about things I had never suspected they knew that our session finally resolved itself into a question and answer period. He would ask the details one by one and I would say “yes” or “no,” with as little explanation as possible.
The interrogator was not particularly insistent; he simply gave me the impression of a man who was doing his job and would appreciate a little co-operation. It was almost as if he had something else on his mind that night and was just going through an old routine. He wrote my story down, point by point, checking from time to time against some reports on his desk and asking about specific details. By the time we had completed the basic biography and his detailed questions, it was already morning; I could see the light filtering through the shutters on the window behind him. When he had finally finished, he told me to go back to my cell and think over what we had put down. He added that I would be called again soon and given an opportunity to fill in any forgotten details.
Back in my cell, after breakfast, I spent the morning puzzling over that session. The amount of background information they had on me was simply astounding. I couldn’t understand how they knew so much. It was only much later that I found out. One of my subsequent interrogators told me that a good bit of the information had been gotten from Fr. Makar, who was arrested while crossing the Hungarian border into occupied Poland at the time Nestrov and I were working at Chusovoy. (That accounted for the fact that Makar had never joined us, as he promised; it also accounted, no doubt, for the continual surveillance we must have been under prior to our arrest.) To convince me, this later interrogator showed me the photos taken of Makar on his arrest. I hardly recognized the happy-go-lucky Georgian: his face was thin and drawn, and he looked like he had lost a good deal of weight. But it was Makar; of that there could be no doubt.
All this, as I say, I learned much later on. But that morning, and in the days that followed, I was badly confused. I wondered whether perhaps Nestrov had talked, or whether we had been under surveillance ever since Albertin without suspecting it. I had no way of knowing. In the light of subsequent interrogations, things became a lot clearer to me, but that morning I was badly shaken.
I expected to be called out again that night, but nothing happened—nor the day after that, nor the day after that. The days began to stretch into weeks and nobody called me. So I began to organize my days as if I were in a Jesuit house back home, and I made up a daily order for myself. Just as soon as I got up in the morning, I would say the Morning Offering; then, after the morning washup, I would put in a solid hour of meditation. The 5:30 rising hour and seven o’clock breakfast were much like the daily order in most of the Jesuit houses I’d been in, and the days began to fall into a pattern.
After breakfast, I would say Mass by heart—that is, I would say all the prayers, for of course I couldn’t actually celebrate the Holy Sacrifice. I said the Angelus morning, noon, and night as the Kremlin clock chimed the hours. Before dinner, I would make my noon examen (examination of conscience); before going to bed at night I’d make the evening examen and points for the morning meditation, following St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises.
Every afternoon, I said three rosaries—one in Polish, one in Latin, and one in Russian—as a substitute for my breviary. After supper, I spent the evening reciting prayers and hymns from memory or even chanting them out loud: the Anima Christi, the Veni Creator, the Salve Regina, the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, especially the Dies Irae and the Miserere—all the things we had memorized in the novitiate as novices, the hymns we had sung during my years in the Society, the prayers I had learned as a boy back home.
Sometimes I’d spend hours trying to remember a line which had slipped my memory, sounding it over and over again until I had it right. During these times of prayer, I would also make up my own prayers, talking to God directly, asking for His help, but above all accepting His will for me, trusting completely to His providence to see me through whatever might lie ahead.
After prayers in the morning, and during the long afternoons, I would also recite what poetry I could remember: Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” or Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” or Burns’ little poem to a field mouse, which I found amusingly appropriate in my present condition and which had always been a favorite of mine. Occasionally I’d make up an extemporaneous sermon or speech on some subject, just rambling along, talking out loud in order to keep myself sane.
I also enjoyed trying my hand at long, comic anecdotes of the type common in Russia then: e.g., Stalin’s visit to a kolkhoz. I’d try to make up the silliest questions and answers imaginable, just to get myself laughing. I’d imagine the peasants asking for bread, or tractors, or milk, and telling Stalin how hungry they were. As “Uncle Joe,” I would answer gruffly that it wasn’t the first time they’d been hungry, or tell them to work harder and at the end of five years everything would be all right, and the like. It was silly, but it helped to break any possible periods of depression.
>
Practically every night, during these weeks, the sirens would sound at dusk with that long, eerie wail peculiar to air-raid sirens everywhere, and the guards would run around putting out the lights and turning on the red or blue emergency lights over the doors. Still, we were not allowed to go to bed until the signal was given. After a while, I’d hear the nearby pom-pom-pom of the anti-aircraft guns, some of which must even have been on the roof of our building, for the walls would vibrate with the percussion of the guns.
In between shell bursts, I could hear the drone of the German planes overhead, then the louder explosions of bombs falling in the city. From time to time I could hear the thin, high-pitched whistle of a falling bomb, and the building would shake afterward with the loud boom of the explosion, which seemed just outside the window but was, undoubtedly, a good distance away.
It was not until almost the end of September that I was called out again for interrogation. I had just sat down in the chair, tense as always, when the sirens sounded. The interrogator jumped up without talking to me and grabbed the phone. Before he had even made his connection, the anti-aircraft batteries began to pound from the roof right above us; the whole room vibrated. My ears were deafened by the noise, and suddenly the lights went out. At that point the guard came in, shoved me out of the room and led me quickly down along flights of stairs, through corridors crowded with shadowy figures in the ghostly red and blue lights, all the way down to what must have been, from the damp and musty smell of it, an underground shelter of sorts.
There I was put into one of those small dark “boxes,” as we called the temporary cells for prisoners. I waited in the darkness listening to the muffled thudding of the bombing. My next-door neighbor tapped on the wall and I came to attention. I strained my ears and heard a loud whisper, “Who’s there?” I answered almost by reflex, “Lypinski, Wladimir Martinovich,” and we struck up a whispered conversation there in the blackness. From time to time, the guard would come over to tell us to keep quiet; at other times, the muffled thudding of the bombs would drown out phrases and sentences. I learned nothing, except that there were many of us here in boxes in the basement and that I was, in fact, in Lubianka. But in that blackness, with the bombs dropping around us, we felt trapped, and it was comforting to have company.
Suddenly, after what seemed hours, the bombs stopped. Far off in the distance I could hear the air-raid sirens die away with a haunting wail. Then absolute silence, thick and black, so quiet it almost seemed to press in on my eardrums in that pitch-black box. Shortly thereafter we were led, one by one, back to our cells and told to go to bed.
Every night, during the first week of October, we were taken downstairs to shelter. The bombing grew in intensity, and we knew the Germans must be making an all-out drive for Moscow. The bombing was almost constant now; even during the day there would be occasional raids. One afternoon, I was sitting on my bed during a raid when I heard the high-pitched whistle of a bomb, very close and rapidly growing louder. Before I even had time to react, the bomb hit. The wall of my room shuddered so violently it bounced me around on the bed. I scrambled up and looked around anxiously, trying to see whether the wall had been cracked or the tin plate on the window blown off, but no such luck. Almost immediately, the door opened and the guard quickly took me downstairs.
Early in the morning of October 6th, they began to evacuate us from the prison. There was a great deal of confusion, and hustle and bustle in the corridors, with guards shouting at us not to look around or talk, but to keep moving in a single file—and for God’s sake to move quickly! We were all gathered together in what seemed to be a big basement room. Although we were strictly forbidden to talk, everyone was talking at once and the guards were too busy with other things to enforce the rule.
From one of the prisoners there in the half light of the basement, I found out that the Germans were reported to be only 110 kilometers (less than 70 miles) from Moscow. All during the morning the bombing continued, and we talked happily and somewhat hopefully of liberation by the Germans. It was almost as if there were a party going on in the basement; everyone shared with his neighbor what information he had, along with whatever scraps of food he had managed to squirrel away in his pockets.
Down there that morning I met a Russian who had worked in the American Embassy in Moscow. I bumped into him quite by accident, and discovered that he had been the one who sent me the telegram in Albertin. He told me how the Embassy had tried to keep tabs on my whereabouts and of the later telegrams they had sent to Albertin and Lvov, with no answer.
There were also a number of Russian Army officers in the basement, arrested for God knows what, who told us what they knew about the progress of the war. The German advance had been lightning-like; German spearheads now stood on a line running from Leningrad in the north, through Moscow, and down near Stalingrad in the south. The Ukraine had been taken, the Russian breadbasket; the Germans held Odessa and were driving into the Crimea; Rostov had fallen and the whole Caucasus was threatened. There was a driver there from the German Embassy who added what details he knew, and there were former heads of Russian factories who told us of the all-out Russian war effort. Those were the black days of the Russian campaign, and the people in that room, talking excitedly, were torn between their loyalty to the motherland and their hopes of liberation.
Finally, we were all lined up in groups of about twenty and led up a flight of stairs, out of the basement, and into the streets. I had expected that we would be loaded into vans, but instead we were led on foot, so quickly that we sometimes even had to break into a trot, through the streets of Moscow down to the railroad station. We were guarded all the way by soldiers and trained dogs, an added precaution because the streets were scenes of mass confusion. The bombing was still going on, and from time to time the street would be almost blocked by a high tide of rubble blown across it. A few people were scurrying about the streets, probably seeking shelter, with no time to stare at us.
The noise was deafening, the pace was exhausting, and I was bitterly cold. I was still wearing only my light coat, and Moscow that October was already in the depths of winter. We didn’t actually go into the station itself, but took a short cut, stumbling over the rubble, down into the railroad yards. There we were loaded into the regular stolipinski, or passenger cars—Russian versions of the European Pullman car, with small compartments about five by ten feet and a corridor down one side of the train.
Even in the midst of the bombing and the confusion (obviously the railroad yards were a prime target of the German planes) everything was done in order. We were loaded into compartments according to a list as our names were read out. About twenty or twenty-two people were packed into one of the five-by-ten-foot compartments; there was hardly room for us to stand, we were so crowded together, like a streetcar or subway during the rush hour. The first ones into the car took the seats, and some of the later arrivals scrambled up on to the upper bunks. In that way, we could at least breathe in the car without having our ribs crushed by our neighbors’ elbows.
Since these were ordinary passenger trains, there were windows on both sides of the car through which we could observe the chaos and bombing as long as it was light. At night, we could see the flashes of the anti-aircraft shells and the distant lights of explosions in the heart of the city like the sudden shimmering glow of sheet lightning in the summer.
In my section, there were more than a half dozen high army officers, charged with treason or subversion or even desertion, a member of the Soviet upper house of parliament, a Russian who had worked in the Chinese Embassy, several directors of factories, a couple of chemists and lawyers, an engineer, two students, and a professor. All in all, it was a rather intellectual gathering, and most of them, except for a few of the army officers, were political prisoners in the strict sense. We spent the first hours getting acquainted, interrupted from time to time by the crash of a nearby bomb which shook the cars—once we even thought we were going to tip over.
&nbs
p; Then one of the senior army officers, an old general, decided it was time to organize the group and establish a daily order. He worked out an efficient system for rotating the seats and the bunks, allotting the older men a little extra time to sit or curl up, a little less time to the younger men. He also decided that, in order to pass the time, each of us in the car should give a lecture in our specialty each day; he himself began these “stolipinski courses” with a lecture on strategy. He explained in great detail how Hitler had mounted his offensive and how the lines were now drawn in a great arc from Leningrad down to Stalingrad, with Moscow at the pivot.
“But Hitler will lose,” he said, “because he has spread himself too thin and his supply lines are overextended. During the winter he may hold the towns, but he is in constant danger of having his supply lines cut by partisan raids throughout the countryside. His real objective is not Moscow but the oil fields of the Caucasus down near Baku, and we know it. It’s an elementary rule that you must have fuel for mechanized divisions and, now that his Panzers are so deep into Russia, his only hope of supplying them is from the oil fields of Russia itself. Therefore, we shall drive from Stalingrad to Rostov and pinch off the Caucasus, exposing his flank to the north, isolating the oil fields, and with luck, capturing whole divisions behind the line of counterattack.”
It was a fascinating lecture to listen to, there in that ice-cold Pullman car in the midst of the railroad yards of Moscow, with the German planes unloading death overhead. From October 6th to October 9th, we stayed right where we were in the station. Perhaps the railway line was blocked, because from time to time our car would be shifted from one track to another, but we made no progress. We would move perhaps 150 yards, stop, back up, move over onto another track, go perhaps 500 yards, stop, wait, then go through the whole process again an hour later.
With God in Russia Page 8