“I think I’m going to die,” I replied.
“Give way, Alexander Semyonovitch,” he urged. “Why go on with this? Look, here are the statements of Vlakh and the others. Read them through and I’ll give you pencil and paper and you can write to Captain Tomuyev what you’ve got to say about them.”
He gave me a pencil and paper and I took advantage of his offer to sit down at a table and write, a detailed refutation of all the absurd charges against me. I had been writing for about half an hour and was beginning to feel much better when Ryeznikov came in. It did not take him long to find out what was happening and he tore the paper out of my hand and ordered me to follow him. We left Weissband behind in a state of great astonishment and I went into Ryeznikov’s room.
Ryeznikov was an expert in operating the “conveyer.” He knew that any interruption of the process was a great relief for the prisoner and might mean the loss of several days.
“Look here, Weissberg,” he said, “I’m not inhuman, but we must bring this business to a satisfactory conclusion. The kindest thing is to increase the pressure to the utmost so that you give way sooner. It’s the best thing for us because it saves time, and it’s the best thing for you because it prevents your becoming a physical wreck. Now come on, out with it.”
“You know I’m not guilty,” I said. “You’re using illegal means to make me confess to things I have never done.”
He immediately leapt to his feet and began to curse like a trooper. But I was getting used to it and it was no longer so easy to intimidate me.
“Citizen Examiner,” I went on, “you can say what you like, but I don’t believe the Prosecutor sanctions your methods. If you do bring me to the point of physical and moral collapse and I sign then I shall be signing lies, and I’ll withdraw my signature at the first opportunity. What you are doing is illegal. Call the Prosecutor. Let him tell me to my face whether the methods you are using are legal.”
By this time we were both tremendously excited and shouting furiously at each other. He picked up a glass and flung it at me. It missed as usual and smashed into fragments against the wall. Then he rang the bell. The guard came.
“Fetch the commandant and two strong men,” he ordered. Then suddenly he was quite calm again.
“We shall not tolerate your resistance to the Soviet power,” he said. “We shall have to use physical force.”
I sat down again and answered equally calmly:
“I refuse to make any statements until the Prosecutor is called.” Ryeznikov went out of the room. Apparently he countermanded his order, for neither the commandant nor the two strong men appeared. Then he returned and continued the interrogation. For about an hour I took not the slightest notice of any of his questions. He was beside himself.
“Let me warn you,” he said solemnly, “you are risking your life. You are deliberating sabotaging the examination. For that we can execute you at once by administrative decision.”
“If I sign what you want me to sign I shall be shot anyhow.”
“Don’t be such a fool,” he snapped. “We don’t shoot valuable people. You’re an expert. We can use you. You’ll admit your guilt and you’ll get five years. If you behave yourself you’ll be free again in a couple of years. And while you’re in camp you’ll work at your own job. In all probability you won’t be there even two years. You’ll probably be brought back to work under control, just as Ramzin was. He confessed his crimes in open court and now he’s a big man in the Soviet Union.”
“If I had anything to confess I’d confess it, but I haven’t. I’m not saying anything more until you fetch the Prosecutor.”
Ryeznikov was wily. He realized he had driven me too far. It was the last thing in the world he wanted. The worst pressure is silent and monotonous. All the prisoner has to think about is how long he can stand it and in the meantime he writhes in pain. Ryeznikov became more conciliatory.
“You talk as though I’d only got to whistle and the Prosecutor will come running,” he said. “I can’t fetch him just like that.” “Well, let me write to him, then.”
“Very well, there you are: write.”
He gave me pencil and paper and I sat down at a table and began to write.
“Citizen Prosecutor, I am completely innocent of the charges against me. The examiner is subjecting me to constant physical pressure. I have been sitting on a stool now for over a hundred hours without sleep. There is a limit to physical endurance. If I collapse morally and physically during the next few days and sign what the examiner wants me to sign then please take note of the fact that I shall be signing inventions, and if I am placed before a court I shall withdraw them at once. I ask you to come and see me in the office of Examiner Ryeznikov. Please do so immediately on receipt of this letter as I am not in a physical condition to hold out much longer.”
I signed and dated this document and handed it to Ryeznikov. I had written it in German to stop Ryeznikov from tearing it up at once. He understood very little German and he usually had to call a translator. Although they broke the law constantly, the G.P.U. men nevertheless respected certain formalities. A declaration signed by a prisoner could not be suppressed. It had to be copied and filed in the dossier. That was one of the useful items of information Rozhansky had given me. Once the translator had been called she was a witness to the fact that I had made the declaration and Ryeznikov could not just tear it up. However, as I have said, Ryeznikov was no fool and he probably realized at once what I was after. Instead of calling the translator he asked me to translate it into Russian for him. I did so, feeling quite certain it would provoke another explosion. But when I had finished he just looked at me and shook his head reproachfully.
“You’ve really got too high an opinion of yourself, Weissberg,” he said. “You think you’re cleverer than all the rest of us. You think you can deny in advance anything you subsequently admit. But it won’t do you any good. We’ve got you in a vise now and we won’t let go until you really have capitulated.”
However, he made no attempt to destroy what I had written. Instead, he put it with the other papers.
“Will that be forwarded to the Prosecutor?” I asked.
“Of course it will,” he replied.
“When can I expect an answer?”
“You probably won’t get an answer at all. He knows as much about your case as I do, and he knows what a cunning enemy you are. He doesn’t want anything to do with people like you.”
The next day I felt an overwhelming tiredness creeping over me and I tried to sleep with my eyes open. For about five minutes I succeeded, but then my head fell forward to my chest and I was roughly shaken. I began to feel very weak. Sometimes I thought I should just fall off the stool. But this feeling of weakness was not so bad as the cramp that I began to get in the evenings. All my limbs pained excruciatingly and my thighs were terribly swollen. I felt as though the neighborhood of my groins was in a vise which was being squeezed tighter and tighter. I began to think with horror of the moment of collapse, and to fear that I would lose control of my mind, and sign anything. If I confessed now I could put in things which were so ridiculous and so easily refuted that later I could easily show that they were false. But if I waited until I collapsed I should no longer be able to do so. Perhaps I ought to give way now.
At midnight Shalit took over. He tortured me to the utmost. Every sentence he shouted began with the word “whore” and ended with the word “organization.”
“You whore, you prostitute, you bought and sold traitor! You have laid your dirty hands on the holiest thing in our country. And now you must reveal your accomplices and your organization.”
This last word was always delivered in a tremendous long-drawn-out shriek.
At first I hadn’t the faintest idea of what he meant by the holiest thing in the Soviet Union, but later on I realized that he was referring to the alleged attempt on the life of the beloved Leader, the Father of the Peoples, the Leader of the World Proletariat, Yosef Vissa
rionovitch Stalin. And then it struck me that there was nothing I would sooner confess to than having organized such an attempt. By that time it no longer sounded like a crime to me, but an act of heroism. But for two reasons I still held out. Certainly, I hated the despot who was responsible for the crimes of his secret police, but I was still on the side of the revolution, and therefore the other crimes they wanted me to confess to—diversionary activity and espionage for a foreign power—were still terrible. In addition, I knew, and Shalit constantly reminded me, that if I confessed I should have to denounce others—those who were supposed to have been in the affair with me. They would demand that I denounce Leipunsky, for instance, and other friends I respected and liked. That still shocked me. But—what could I do? Would they ever stop if I didn’t confess to something or other? I was already a lump of swollen flesh and nerves which pained and pained without ceasing. My brain reeled and there were thunderous noises in my head and red rings before my eyes. I could hold out perhaps another couple of days. But what then?
Shalit went on repeating the same sentence for several hours. It was perhaps three o’clock in the morning. The pains were unbearable. I must do something, I thought. What they are doing to me is illegal. Supposing I openly resist: what will happen? I decided to risk it.
“Citizen Examiner,” I declared, “please interrupt the interrogation. I am only half conscious and I can sit here no longer.”
“Sign a confession, you pimp, and the matter’s over.”
“It’s no use, Citizen Examiner. I can go on no longer.”
And with that I got up and lay down on the floor. Shalit was so astonished he hardly knew what to do. He was not allowed to leave me and there was no one else near. He went to the door and called.
There was no reply. He came back into the room and rang up the commandant. I no longer heard what he said. I felt wonderfully relaxed and rested on the floor. He shrieked and raved and I took no notice of him. My pains had disappeared as soon as I lay down and stretched out my limbs. In a few minutes I had rested myself as much as a man would normally rest in hours. Still no one came when he called. He tried ringing again but there was no answer. Then he took the carafe of water on his table and emptied it over me. The cold water refreshed me—something he had probably not expected. I heard steps in the corridor and I got up.
Three warders came in together with the commandant. Two of them were carrying whips and the third had a strait jacket.
“Is the prisoner continuing his resistance?” asked the commandant “I couldn’t stand it any longer,” I replied. “I was almost unconscious. Now I have recovered a little and can sit down again.”
The commandant quoted some paragraph of the prison regulations and threatened me with physical violence. Then they went off, leaving Shalit behind to continue the interrogation, but it was a Shalit who had suffered considerable deflation.
The short break had greatly refreshed me. It was true that the pains came back quickly, but my general condition was better. I thrust away all thought of capitulation. Shalit continued asking me the question about my organization and now I began to reply, pointing out that the whole thing was nonsense. But he wanted to hear no arguments.
“Turn your face to the wall, you son of a bitch.”
“Listen, Citizen Examiner, I couldn’t have talked to Vlakh in August, 1935, because I was abroad.”
“Turn your face to the wall, you prostitute.”
“Now, Citizen Examiner...”
“Turn your face to the wall.”
I obeyed and began to address the wall in a loud voice. Shalit was non-plused. He didn’t know what to do next. Perhaps he even found the situation so comic that he was trying not to laugh. In any case the incident was soon known all over the place. When a few months later I had to stand for a night in the office of another examiner he observed, “So you’re Weissberg, the fellow who talks to the wall?”
In the morning Shalit was relieved by Weissband. With Weissband it was easier and yet in some respects harder. It was easy to feel his sympathy. But on the other hand, the monotony was oppressive. I had nothing to think about but how near the end must be now, and the terrible pain was interrupted by no form of activity. In the afternoon it was Ryeznikov again.
“The Prosecutor has read your letter,” he informed me. “He is furious with us for forwarding such counterrevolutionary statements. He has told us to exercise the utmost possible pressure to force you to your knees.”
I didn’t believe a word he said, but I gave up all hope of seeing the Prosecutor before the conclusion of the examination. In the evening it was Shalit’s turn again. He had thought up a new line of approach.
“What will your friends think when they learn that a dirty traitor was in their midst all the time?” he asked.
“Those who know me really well will know that I am innocent.”
“We’ll shoot you and then publish the whole affair in the foreign press. Your mother will learn that she gave birth to a traitor to the Soviet Union.”
He was too stupid to take seriously, but the thought of my mother upset me and brought sudden tears to my eyes. Shalit was then perfectly convinced that he had found the right way to soften me up. For hours after that he spoke of nothing but my mother. It nearly made me sick, and it also made me very angry.
In the middle of it the door opened and Captain Tornuyev came in. He noticed my anger and patted me benevolently on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll be all right in the end. Come to my room. I want to have a talk with you.”
I followed him into his room, which I knew quite well from the days when the unfortunate Azak had sat there in his short-lived glory. Tornuyev ordered tea for both of us.
“Alexander Semyonovitch,” he began in a friendly tone, “you must confess. You’re like a fish on the end of a line. You’re hooked, and the more you splash the worse it will be for you. You needn’t admit all the charges. When it isn’t true you can deny it without fear.”
“But none of it’s true, Citizen Captain.”
“Come, come now, Weissberg. Some of it must be true. After all, the N.K.V.D. doesn’t arrest people who’ve done absolutely nothing at all. If so many people give evidence against you then you must be guilty. Any court would believe twenty witnesses against one accused.”
“Nevertheless, Citizen Captain, everything is invented. Nothing is true; not a scrap of it.”
“You won’t get away with that, Alexander Semyonovitch. You’ll just have to admit something or other. You’re an intelligent man. Write what’s necessary and I’ll see to it that no injustice is done to you.”
In the meantime I was enjoying the comfortable leather armchair of the captain and having a wonderful rest. Unfortunately, as soon as we had finished the tea he took me back to Shalit.
“Weissberg’s going to be sensible,” he said as he left the room. “Do you want paper and pencil?” asked Shalit.
“No, thank you. There’s nothing for me to write.”
The torment began again. This was the sixth night and I had grown too weak to fight against the pain. Shalit shouted and raved, and every word was like a blow on my skull. There were strange lights and flashes before my eyes, but the worst was the excruciating agony in my groin. Sitting on a stool contracts a certain complex of muscles, and after a while they begin to pain. If they were relaxed one would probably fall off the stool. To keep that group of muscles flexed almost uninterruptedly for six days and six nights is an enormous strain, and the muscles protest by increasing pain. I don’t know whether that explanation is physiologically accurate, but in that sixth night I knew I could stand it no more. I was afraid that if I left it too long I would sign anything, even the worst things. At midnight Captain Tornuyev came in again.
“Well,” he asked Shalit, “has he written anything?”
“No,” replied Shalit. “He’s still making fools of us.”
“Well, I’ve done my best with kindness, and it has
n’t been any good. We’ll have to settle him finally.”
And with that dark remark he left the room.
“Did you hear what the captain said?” asked Shalit. “And do you realize what that means?”
“Yes, I heard, but I don’t know what it means.”
“I’m afraid you’ll soon learn, but then it will be too late. You’ll just be a lump of raw flesh and not a man any more. We’ve various ways and means of making scoundrels like you talk. If you take my advice you won’t let it come to that. But after all, it’s your affair, not mine.”
After this pleasant intermezzo he began his monotonous raving again. While he was shouting I withdrew my attention completely and tried to think straight. When he noticed that my mind was elsewhere, he would shake me by the shoulders. But despite his interruptions and his shrieking, and despite the almost unbearable pains in groin and thighs, and the increasing pressure around my skull, I forced myself to think calmly. It was clear to me that I was now at the end of my powers of resistance. But what was I to write? Perhaps if I accepted the terrorism I could persuade them to waive the diversionary activity and espionage. After all, they were anxious to come to some sort of conclusion. But I was already experienced enough to know that I couldn’t make a compromise proposal of that sort direct. They would reject it with great indignation. They had to pretend it was all true, and so frank bargaining was impossible. I couldn’t say that although it was a swindle from beginning to end I was prepared to confess having planned to assassinate Stalin. There was nothing dishonorable about that, but espionage and diversionary activity were another matter altogether. I should probably have to say I was exclusively a terrorist, and that diversionary activity and espionage was someone else’s job in our organization.
But this meant that I should have to denounce my supposed accomplices. “Who recruited you for this organization? And whom did you recruit for it?” For a while I dallied with the idea of denouncing my old enemy Davidovitch, and perhaps Kravchenko, the business manager, as well. He was almost certainly a G.P.U. man. But they would probably regard that as a provocation. They would want someone who was at least probable. Very likely they already had a list of people they wanted me to denounce. That would certainly mean Leipunsky and perhaps Shubnikov and probably the other foreigners in the Institute. No, whatever happened I wouldn’t do that.
The Accused Page 33