There was little doubt the Germans were getting close. Almost daily, Saratov was bombed. During the attacks, we even began to root for the Germans vocally, hoping they’d drop one of those bombs right in the middle of our courtyard. Again, as on the train to Saratov, we spent a lot of time planning our escape if the Germans were kind enough to blow down the walls.
The nearness of the war had another more immediate effect. The food, which had been fairly good, was growing worse; some days there was none at all. There was little food in the town itself, there were too many prisoners now, and the prison kitchen was just not equipped to handle such a crisis. One evening, as our group was being led to the toilet, I noticed a big hambone in a corner of the corridor. When the guard wasn’t looking, I snatched it up and hid it inside my coat. In the toilet I washed it off as best I could under the faucet and put it in my pocket. The rest of the day I sat in the cell, biting off pieces of it, grinding it to powder between my teeth and swallowing it. I broke it up and offered pieces to the others, but their teeth weren’t strong enough to chew it.
One night in late January 1942, I was called out again for interrogation. Again, it was my boyish young blond interrogator, but he seemed strangely silent and dejected. He paced nervously up and down while he delivered a preliminary oration. This was my last chance to tell the truth, he said, so I had better think it over and tell it straight this time. He sat down, greatly preoccupied. He began to question me, but he kept shuffling things about on his desk nervously, and finally the conversation lapsed altogether.
We just sat there, until suddenly the phone rang. He scooped it up and listened a moment. His face changed immediately. He banged the receiver down, jumped up with a shout and ran out of the room. I heard the other officials out in the anteroom, milling around and whooping it up. Suddenly the door opened and three other officials came in with my interrogator, chatting excitedly and slapping each other on the back. One of them finally noticed me. He called the guard and told him to take me back to the cell. I could hardly wait to get there and spread the news: from snatches of conversation, I gathered that the Russians had retaken Mozhaisk, the gateway to Moscow. The Germans were retreating. Moscow was out of danger.
The news caused a sensation in the cell. Everybody began discussing it simultaneously; the Morse code telegraph was soon rapping it out on the walls. We could hear murmurs up and down the corridor, and even the guards that night joined a bit in the general hubbub, confirming the news. Reactions to the Red Army victory among the prisoners were mixed. Most of them were Russians, many of them army veterans; their pride and patriotism keyed them up over this Russian success. But then they would reflect, or be reminded by someone, that with the German defeat our hopes for any immediate release from prison had also vanished, and they would be momentarily sobered. In the end, patriotism won out. All in all, it was another sleepless night.
On the morning of January 23rd, I was called out again for what I supposed must be that “last chance” interview with my tall blond amateur. Instead, I was led downstairs and put into a box. After a while, the guard brought my personal belongings from the cell, and gave me a loaf of bread and three teaspoons of sugar in a paper cone. I knew I was going traveling again. At last, two guards took me out to the courtyard and a waiting prison van. They climbed in with me, and we bounced off to the station at Saratov. The crowds in the station were completely changed; there was happiness on every face. The whole atmosphere was optimistic, the people elated. Even the soldiers thronging the station seemed to have a new lift to their shoulders and a new spring in their step.
My guards and I boarded a train heading north and sat down in one of the passenger compartments. This time it took us only fifty hours to reach Moscow again. I husbanded my bread and sugar carefully, though, because I had no way of knowing beforehand how long the trip would take or where I was eventually headed. All along the right-of-way I could see bomb craters and ruined houses in the wake of the high-water mark of the German invasion. But there was no bombing this time, the tracks seemed to be in fairly decent repair, and we ran through to Moscow without incident.
SEDOV GETS A “CONVICTION”
SOMEWHERE IN THE copious files of the MVD there must be a whole gallery of portraits of me—thin, thinner, and thinnest—because I again went through the whole weary process of admission to Lubianka. Photographed again, fingerprinted, barbered, the routine medical exam, then the bath and the wait while my clothes were disinfected. At the end, I was led to a little room in the basement which already contained five or six people, but I stayed there only a few days before I was moved upstairs again to a private cell. I was disappointed to be alone again. I was also beginning to wonder why I was so continually shifted around from place to place and why Moscow should be interested in me of all people. I didn’t have long to wait to find out. Within two or three days, I was called out about 9 P.M. one night and entered upon what was to prove my most intensive period of interrogation, with almost daily sessions.
This interrogator had a suite of rooms. As I entered that first night, I noticed a pleasant-looking young fellow, black-haired and swarthy, seated at a desk in the first room, working on some documents. He stared at me rather curiously as I passed, but I couldn’t place him at all. As I entered the second room, I glanced around quickly to give it the once-over. You soon get accustomed in prison to sizing things up and noticing quite a bit out of the corner of your eye.
It was a large, high-ceilinged room with two large windows on the outside wall and a floor of highly polished oak. There was a davenport along one wall, some large overstuffed chairs, and a whole row of green filing cabinets. A huge mahogany desk in the center, piled high with papers, added to the room’s impressiveness, as did the drapes on the windows and the pictures on the walls. I figured immediately that I had reached the big leagues.
My new interrogator was a serious, calm, steady man of about thirty-five or so, well-built, with chestnut hair combed to one side which occasionally fell down into his eyes. His voice was quiet and well-modulated; throughout our long series of interviews he was always a gentleman. He knew his business and went about it in a business-like manner, with no animosity whatsoever, yet thoroughly professional. He told me to sit down, picked a sheet of paper out of the pile on his desk, and said, “Father Walter Ciszek, American, Jesuit, trained in Rome, born in America on November 4, 1904?” I nodded. There was a long pause, then he looked up from the paper and asked me quietly, “Now, are you going to co-operate and be quite open about this whole thing?” “Of course,” I said, “I always am. Just tell me what you want to know. I have nothing to hide.” “Good,” he said, and stood up. “Before we begin, there is someone I’d like you to meet.”
He went to the door and called in the dark young man who had been sitting at the desk in the other room. “This gentleman,” he said, “is one of my staff. Have you ever seen him?” “I don’t think so,” I said. “Well,” he said, “before you were arrested he was sent to Chusovoy to examine your case. He was preparing your dossier when the war broke out and he was summoned back to Moscow. Do you understand?” Again I nodded. The other man said nothing, just stood looking at me, until the interrogator dismissed him.
As he closed the door and walked back to his desk, the interrogator said to me, “Now that you are properly forewarned, I expect no trouble—and I do expect the truth.” He sat down, pulled his chair up to the desk, and said, “What language would you like to use?” Frankly, my Russian at that time was not the best. I used to mix in quite a few Polish expressions, especially for technical terms which I didn’t know in Russian. In the Urals we had talked mostly Polish with the officials but Ukrainian among ourselves; I heard a good deal more Ukrainian there than I did Russian. In Moscow and Saratov, I could carry on a conversation with the Russians in the prison, especially the political prisoners, who spoke a cultured Russian, easy to understand. But my own expressions were limited, and for serious purposes my knowledge of Russian was bad
ly inadequate.
“If you would like to speak Polish,” said the interrogator in Polish, “feel free to do so. I understand it.” That was not quite true. His active Polish vocabulary, I discovered, was not much better than my Russian. In any event, I began my biography in Polish. He kept copious notes, sometimes going over and over a section until he was satisfied he had all the details. This history lasted until almost five o’clock in the morning; I was beginning to grow very, very tired and felt as if I had been pumped dry.
After that I was interrogated every day. For the first week, we went over and over the details of my life in America. He was especially interested in establishing my relationships with the American government, which were, of course, non-existent. From time to time, he’d make little comments like, “Don’t you realize that we are now allies with America and England?” Presumably that was supposed to induce me to speak more freely about my non-existent relationships with the American government.
At such times, I became close-lipped; I answered his questions, but I resisted the temptation to become cynical. I had no idea what he was driving at, and although I knew I had nothing to hide, I volunteered no information whatsoever, usually restricting myself to a simple “yes” or “no.” He, in turn, was constantly complaining, in his gentlemanly fashion, that I was not co-operating with him to the fullest; he saw no reason why he should have to pump so hard to get so little information.
He was one of the few interrogators whose name I ever learned. One day, while he had gone over to the files to pull out another folder, I looked at his passport which was lying on the desk: “Aleksandr Sedov.”
After that first week we went on to details of my life in the seminary, my life in Albertin, my trip to the Urals, and my work in Teplaya-Gora and Chusovoy. He simply couldn’t understand why I should have volunteered to go as a worker into the Urals. Or perhaps I should say, he was definitely not satisfied with my explanations. He’d listen to my attempts to explain the spiritual motives which prompted me to undertake such a vocation, very patiently, with a slightly quizzical and disbelieving lift to his eyebrows.
Probing and poking into all these details took almost a month. At the end of that time Sedov said, “I suppose I ought to congratulate you. You haven’t told me a thing.” I said, “I told you everything.” “You didn’t!” he said sharply, losing his gentle tone for the first time. “The trouble with you is,” I said, “you think you know my life better than I do myself!” “Watch it!” he said, “Don’t get out of line! I know better than to think you told me everything; I can put two and two together. I can tell from the documents you’re hiding something. Your interrogation at Perm shows that much.” “Don’t you believe it,” I said. “They can force you to say anything if they want to, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true.”
“Force?” he said. “What do you mean force? We’re not allowed to use American third-degree methods in the U.S.S.R.” “Well,” I said, “that may be the theory, but I got bounced around like a ball out there in Perm.” “That’s not true,” he said. “It is true,” I said, “and I was the one who went through it, not you!” He looked at me for a while, but said no more. The interrogation ended at that point. It was obvious he didn’t like my mentioning the subject; I didn’t know what might be the result of my bringing it up, but legality or no, the beating was true enough.
Back in my cell, that point began to bother me less than Sedov’s closing remarks that he could tell I was hiding something. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what he was driving at. As usual, he had given me no hint. Level-headed as he seemed to be, there was obviously something in my background that puzzled him, and he seemed determined to get to the root of it. Perhaps it was because he simply couldn’t appreciate religious motives. I spent the rest of the day trying to puzzle it out, but to no avail.
The next day, just before noon, I was called out again—a bit unusual, since our sessions were normally at night. When I walked into Sedov’s office, who was sitting in one of the armchairs but my black-haired interrogator from Perm, looking very worried. I was stunned. Why was I so important that they should call him all the way from Perm on such short notice?
Sedov started right in: “Do you know who that is?” “Yes,” I said, “of course.” “Is he the one you said used force during your interrogations at Perm?” I nodded. The interrogator from Perm blanched. At that moment, I felt a twinge of sympathy for him. He was a man, probably a family man, doing the job assigned to him, perhaps cutting a few corners to get it done effectively in the least amount of time. I couldn’t excuse him; on the other hand, I saw no reason to railroad him into his own prison. There were too many people in prison already.
“All right,” said Sedov, “let’s have the facts. Tell me the whole thing.” “Well,” I said, “this is the interrogator from Perm who got the confession out of me, if you want to call it that. He was very abusive in his language and, as I told him at the time, completely out of character with his responsible position as a leader of the Soviet people. Nobody is going to respect or talk freely to a man who antagonizes you with abusive and profane language.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Sedov, “but you said he used force?” “Well,” I said, “when he saw he wasn’t getting what he wanted, he called in another man whose name I don’t know, a stocky, well-built young fellow, who grabbed me by the neck and socked me in the face if my answer wasn’t the one expected.” “So!” said Sedov. He turned to face the interrogator from Perm and asked, “Who’s that man?” “I don’t know,” he mumbled, paler than ever. “He does know,” I said. “He must know, but I don’t know.” “Well,” said the interrogator from Perm in self-defense, “it was done because he was hiding the facts from us, just as I wrote you in the report.”
With that, Sedov motioned to him with his head and they stepped outside the room. The man from Perm followed him, looking shaken. Again I felt a twinge of sympathy for him. In about five minutes, Sedov returned. He said nothing further about the incident, and I have no idea what happened to the interrogator from Perm, but in any event part of the riddle was now clear to me. The documents sent from Perm to Moscow had stated explicitly that I was keeping something back. That one remark was the cause of my summons to Moscow for more intensive and more experienced interrogation, as well as the reason for all the distrust I had met with in my Lubianka interrogators from the very first.
That session ended one complete month with Sedov. Theoretically, according to the penal statutes, a prisoner can only be held for interrogation for a limit of one month, then he must be either charged or released. (At least that was how the system was explained to me by some of the oldtimers in Lubianka and Saratov.) In extraordinary cases, however, the period of interrogation can be extended for another month. Mine was extended for two months.
During those next two months, Sedov dwelt especially on my relationships with Archbishop Shepticki and the mission I had received from him. Again, I tried my best to explain that my mission from the Metropolitan was the same as that of any other parish priest or missionary: to serve the people. I was their spiritual minister, pure and simple; no politics whatsoever were involved. Sedov couldn’t see it, anymore than any other interrogator had been able to understand it. They had always insisted, as he insisted, that the priestly mission was simply a pretext for some political mission. He never said that in so many words, of course, but the implication was always there behind his questioning.
Sedov kept asking for details on how the Archbishop lived, who lived with him, who visited him, and who his “contacts” were. Time and again I repeated that I had only visited the Metropolitan at his residence twice, and then briefly. I simply had no information to give on the details of the Archbishop’s life or his administration of the diocese. Somehow or other, I got the impression, though again this was never stated explicitly, that they were trying to link Archbishop Shepticki, and my own mission into the Urals, with some pro-German plot.
; Again the eternal questioning about why I wanted to go to the Urals. And again I tried to explain that many of the Ukrainians and White Russians, who had been part of my flock at Albertin or the Archbishop’s diocese in Lvov, had volunteered to work in the Urals, and, as a priest, I wanted to be with them and minister to them. At the root of Sedov’s interest and insistence was the fact that the area around the Urals was one of the major industrial centers for the Soviet war effort. My interrogators, therefore, were convinced that my choice of the Urals perhaps had something to do with sabotage. I denied it.
“Then why were you so anxious to go to Tula in particular?” said Sedov. “Tula?” I said. In the course of our subsequent sparring it developed there was a machine gun factory in Tula, a town some 60 miles from Moscow and one of the defensive salients on which the German invasion had been broken. I had never heard anything about the machine gun factory, but I had heard of Tula. It was one of the places Nestrov had always hoped we could reach because of its closeness to Moscow. Mention of Tula, therefore, made me certain they had already interrogated Nestrov in great detail. The weary round of questioning continued; since there had never actually been any espionage or sabotage plot, they couldn’t prove anything, but they kept doggedly insisting. Tired of the subject as I was, I was equally dogged in insisting that my only motives for entering Russia, or going anywhere in Russia—no matter where—had been purely spiritual ones, like those of priests anywhere.
The worst part of the whole three months came when Sedov went through my wallet and discovered the torn book page Metropolitan Shepticki had given me. Other interrogators had noticed it before, but attached no importance to it. Sedov was a professional. It was something as yet unexplained, and it bothered him. I tried to explain to him that it was a means, something like signet rings of old, of assuring the Metropolitan that any message received from Nestrov or me was authentic. Sedov shook his head.
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