The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  As soon as there were twenty-nine men in the cell and no one was called out at night for interrogation the problem was insoluble because no one wanted the upper bed. The cell had a curved ceiling, and the window ended about three feet under the arch, with the result that a pocket of hot air formed and made it like a small oven.

  At midnight three men were called out for interrogation. That left only one without a place, and I had to clamber onto the top bed whether I liked it or not. It was stifling, but at least I had more room. I was quite naked, and if I kept perfectly still it was just tolerable. At the least movement sweat broke out of all pores and dripped down.

  After two days of this the floor of the cell was covered with slime, and the smell of ammonia was constant. Before long we noticed that none of us had to urinate. We got rid of all our water in sweat.

  In the morning we folded back the beds and with the clothing bundles we made ourselves a sort of couch on which we sat huddled up together. When we folded up our legs we could all just manage to find sitting room, but it was a tight fit. Up till about ten it was still fairly easy to breathe, but after that when the sun got hot it became suffocating. The sheet iron in front of the window was burning hot. We threw water on it in the hope of cooling it down, and no doubt it did, but then we had a cell full of steam. However, it seemed to relieve matters a little and we threw water onto the sheet iron several times. But then the governor arrived.

  “Who’s been throwing water out of the window?” he demanded furiously. “If it happens again all water will be taken away.”

  We had now been on hunger strike for two days. The governor had me called to his office.

  “Weissberg,” he said, with a show of friendliness, “for your own good you should realize that this hunger strike is an anti-Soviet demonstration. I haven’t reported it yet, and I don’t want to. If I reported it they would shoot half of you, and you would certainly be included. Now go back and tell them to stop the strike.”

  “You’re wrong if you think I’m the ringleader. It’s just that a man simply can’t eat under such circumstances. It’s a shameful thing to squash men together like that.”

  “I can’t do anything about it, but what is in my power I will gladly do. You shall have a longer exercise period.”

  “That’s not enough to make any difference. Let us go to the washroom four times a day so that in the meantime the cell has a chance of cooling off a bit. And then leave the hatch open to get a current of air through the cell.”

  “You must be mad if you think I can leave the cell door open. If the N.K.V.D. heard about that they’d lock me up too.”

  “Well, the fact is we can’t breathe as things are now. In a week or two we’ll be finished. How long can anyone live under such conditions?”

  “I still can’t do anything about it. It doesn’t depend on me.”

  “When you put me into the punishment cell and I was nearly suffocated did you first have to ask permission of the N.K.V.D. for that?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Right, then take ten of us and lock us up in the punishment cell. It’s empty at the moment, I believe. That will ease the situation for all of us.”

  “Weissberg, I’m warning you for the last time: you’re playing a dangerous game.”

  “Listen, Citizen Commandant: I tell you I didn’t organize any hunger strike. We are not acting collectively. The fact is that in such circumstances they’re just not able to eat.”

  He broke off the discussion. I was taken back to the cell and I reported his offer. It was unanimously rejected. The hunger strike went on. Another day passed. Our hearts began to beat less strongly.

  In the afternoon a decent warder opened the hatch at his own risk. We sat perfectly still and were glad of the cool current of air that came through. If he heard footsteps he immediately came to the cell and closed the hatch. We kept up the struggle for another couple of days. I negotiated with the governor on two further occasions. Each time he offered us extended exercise. We refused.

  On the fifth day we were very exhausted, and the majority voted for breaking off the strike. One or two began to grumble.

  “We ought to have accepted his offer. Now he won’t give us longer exercise.”

  I was sitting below the window. On my left was a young bacteriologist named Batiuk. Next to him was a man of about twenty-three, a former Party secretary. I believe he had been vice-secretary of one of the districts in the Kharkov area. Perhaps he was secretary of the Komsomol and not of the Party. I can’t remember any more. Anyway, he was a decent fellow. As I sat there I tried to remember the names of my fellow prisoners in the order in which they sat. I did that deliberately with this book in mind. Somehow I felt that one day I should get out of the clutches of the G.P.U. and be able to tell my fellow men abroad just what was happening in Soviet Russia. I repeated the names of these twenty-nine men in the same order perhaps a hundred times, and yet with the exception of Batiuk I have forgotten them all. Neither before nor since had I ever deliberately attempted to commit anything to memory. I clearly remember the prisoners in the other cells, but there seems a veil around what happened in my cell. But one thing I can recall very clearly.

  When we agreed to break off our hunger strike the former district secretary said solemnly:

  “Our joint action has failed. Each man must now act on his own responsibility.”

  The words made no particular impression at the time, but later on I recalled the exceptional solemnity with which they had been uttered. One of us, a man from White Russia, decided to continue the strike on his own.

  A little while after that we were taken to the lavatory. I usually went last, but this time for some reason or other I was first. Hardly had the door closed behind us than it was dragged open again by a pale and excited warder.

  “Weissberg, come back to the cell at once,” he shouted.

  Wondering what had happened, I ran back to the cell after him, and he stood aside to let me go in.

  Blood was spattered everywhere. The district secretary had smashed the window and driven a wedge of glass between his ribs into his heart.

  “Get the doctor,” I shouted. Discipline went by the board and the warder took orders from a prisoner and ran off. Batiuk and I carried the body to the sick bay. Before long the governor came running up. I had to go back to the cell, but Batiuk, who was also a doctor, was allowed to stay.

  “When they think a thing’s important the G.P.U. can move quickly,” he said bitterly when he was telling us about it later. “Within ten minutes the leading heart specialist in Kharkov was on the spot. The poor fellow could still speak, but only in a whisper. He beckoned me over to him and as I bent down he whispered in my ear: ‘Tell my sister I was always loyal to the Party. I was never an enemy of the people. It’s all untrue. Tell her to stay loyal to the Party and our country: “

  He was deeply attached to his sister, and he had often spoken of her. They were orphans whose parents had been murdered by the Whites during the civil war.

  We never expected to see him again, and the incident made a deep impression on us; somehow it underlined the horrible injustice that was being done to us all. There was hardly a prisoner in our cell who had not worked readily and often with enthusiasm, and not one who was in any way disloyal to the Soviet power. Why should this happen to us?

  About a week later the governor came in person to superintend the removal of the glass fragments from the window.

  “You took your time, Citizen Governor,” said Gevondi. “We could all have committed suicide by now.”

  “It won’t do that scoundrel any good,” he retorted. “He’ll be severely punished and then he’ll come back.”

  We none of us believed him. We were quite convinced that our unfortunate comrade was already underground. Batiuk had said that it was possible to stitch up the heart, but we didn’t think the G.P.U. would go to all that trouble. They let thousands die in the camps every day without proper attention, and the v
ictims were all as innocent as we were. Why should they bother so much about one man more or less?

  But what the governor said was true, and four weeks later our fellow prisoner was back in our midst, being embraced by us in turn. The conditions in our cell got no better. At first we had thought that it would be only for an hour or so; then we thought it was only overnight. But they had no mercy on us: we had to live in that hell on earth for two and a half months. And heaven had no mercy either: it was the hottest summer for years.

  One of the prisoners was a horse dealer.

  “Human beings are like weeds,” he said. “They take some killing. Now if you treated horses like this they’d all be dead in a couple of days.”

  My only friend in the cell was Batiuk. For reasons of space there was little chance of getting into touch with someone else, and he sat next to me. He was a highly educated and intelligent man and even in the conditions of our cell he behaved always with a natural dignity which was impressive. The G.P.U. accused him of having made bacterial cultures to infect the Red Army. He had confessed, but he treated the G.P.U. men with amused irony.

  “You admit having accepted instructions to develop new forms of bacteria to infect the troops of the Red Army with fatal diseases?” the examiner had asked.

  “Yes, of course, and with special reference to the N.K.V.D. formations.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, you see, the counterrevolutionaries were anxious to protect themselves from the N.K.V.D. They thought my bacteria would cause panic in the organization and wipe out its leading cadres.”

  “You’re talking nonsense. How could you produce bacteria to affect us in particular?”

  “Now I’m glad you asked that question. You see, exactly the same difficulty faced us with regard to the Red Army, but we relied on the progress of science to solve it.”

  The examiner knew perfectly well that Batiuk was pulling his leg, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had his orders: Batiuk was to have worked on a bacteriological plot to infect the Red Army. The accused in the Bukharin trial made the same kind of self-accusations.

  The prisoner from White Russia continued his hunger strike for another week. At nights I surreptitiously gave him pieces of sugar to strengthen his heart. At the end of the week they took him out and began to feed him forcibly, and then he broke off the strike. He was an unfortunate fellow altogether. He suffered from inferiority feelings and he was constantly in trouble with his neighbors, and as cell starosta I had to smooth things over for him. He wasn’t a Jew but he behaved like a Jew who accidentally finds himself in the midst of a band of anti-Semites.

  Conditions in the cell were better at night, because then anything up to a dozen prisoners were called out for interrogation and the rest of us had room to move. The worst time was weekends, when there were no interrogations, and the cell was like an oven. The margarine we got on lavochka day was particularly hard and it melted only at very high temperature, but the temperature in our cell was high enough, and it turned the margarine to oil. One of us would stand in the center of the cell and flap with a wet towel. This drew in air from outside, and we took it in turns, changing every few minutes.

  We sat as though in a Turkish bath and lived only for the times we were able to leave the cell: to go to the lavatory or to exercise. Considerate warders used to leave the cell door open when we were away in order to let fresh air in, and then the steam disappeared and the temperature dropped. For about an hour after that we could breathe a little easier until the temperature rose again. But there was one warder with a heart of stone, and he obeyed his instructions to the letter. When he was on duty we obtained no such relief, and sometimes we feared collapse.

  One of the men in our cell was an old anarchist. He had served a term in the notorious Schlusselberg fortress in Tsarist days.

  “The whole country was indignant about the shameful prison regime then,” he said, “and yet compared with conditions today Tsarist prisons were more like sanatoria. But now nobody protests. All they do when they open their mouths is to thank Stalin for having given them such a ‘beautiful life.’ They’re adopting resolutions now demanding that we should all be ‘wiped off the face of the earth.’ In the old days we really had conspired against Tsarism, and now we’ve done nothing. We worked for the Soviet power like obedient children. Perhaps that was our mistake.”

  Our district secretary interposed indignantly:

  “You mustn’t talk like that,” he said sharply to the old man. “It’s a shameful thing to do. I won’t sit and listen to it.”

  Prisoners who came back from the brikhalovka told us a fantastic story about an anarchist named Eisenberg. The man hadn’t carried on any counterrevolutionary or anarchist activity, of course, but he had openly clung to his old ideas. He was a Jewish tailor, and when still an apprentice he had accepted the ideas of Kropotkin and Bakunin. He upheld them now with Talmudic obstinacy. They described him to us. He was a small, wiry man with burning eyes, reminiscent of an Indian fakir. There wasn’t a scrap of fat and very little lean on his body, but he was a powerful little fellow. His muscles were small and hard, but very strong. He was fifty-five but every day he did his physical exercises with great conscientiousness.

  “So you’re an anarchist, Eisenberg,” said the examiner at their first interview.

  “That’s right, Citizen Examiner.”

  The examiner was surprised. Although they all confessed to their crimes in the end they usually made some show of protesting their innocence at first.

  “You’re very wise to confess at once without making any trouble. That means you’ll get a lighter sentence. Who recruited you?” “Prince Peter Kropotkin, Citizen Examiner.”

  “Don’t make jokes here, man. This is a very serious matter. Who recruited you? Who brought you into the organization?”

  “I am an individual anarchist, Citizen Examiner.”

  “Maybe you are, but I want to know all about your counterrevolutionary organization.”

  “Citizen Examiner, you seem to be new, otherwise you’d know that individual anarchists don’t have an organization. We don’t believe in it. That’s our whole point. It’s in our program. We form a community of like-minded individuals. No one is subordinate to anyone else.”

  “Go and—your grandmother with your community of like-minded individuals,” said the examiner irritably. “If you don’t tell me all about your organization at once I’ll break every bone in your body, you counterrevolutionary son of a bitch.”

  Eisenberg rose and spoke slowly and solemnly:

  “Citizen Examiner, you have insulted me. For that reason I shall answer no more of your questions.”

  The citizen examiner shrieked and raved. He punched Eisenberg in the face. He made him put his hands above his head and stand with his face to the wall, but it was no good. Not a word could he get out of his prisoner. Finally he began to temporize.

  “Eisenberg, now you’re not going to sabotage the examination, are you? That would be an anti-Soviet demonstration, and it would end very badly for you. Now be reasonable.”

  Eisenberg made no answer.

  “Eisenberg, now you don’t want me to call for assistance, do you? They’d beat you up so that your own mother wouldn’t know you.” Eisenberg turned round.

  “Citizen Examiner, you may beat me up, as you say. That’s your trade. You’re a policeman, and I’m a prisoner. I was seven years in the katorga under the Tsar. They beat me up too, but they didn’t insult me. I’m a human being just as you are, and I have a soul just as you have. You have no right to humiliate my personality.”

  The examiner kept him standing with his face to the wall for six hours. Then Eisenberg said quietly:

  “Citizen Examiner, I’m tired now. With your permission I’ll sit down.”

  And without waiting for permission he sat down on the floor. The examiner jumped up and began to punch him.

  “What! You son of a bitch, you think you can res
ist the Soviet power! If you don’t get up at once we’ll beat you to a jelly.”

  Eisenberg took no notice and remained sitting down. The examiner then fetched two of his men. Eisenberg still made not the slightest attempt to resist. They belabored him for an hour and it seemed to have no effect on him at all. The other prisoners who came from the brikhalovka told strange stories about him. They declared that he was able to make himself impervious to all feeling. Finally the G.P.U. strong-arm men noticed that his eyes were quite fixed and expressionless. This we were told by one of the secretaries of the G.P.U. who was in the room at the time and who was later himself arrested and put into our cell. Then they called a doctor, who examined the prisoner and reported that his heart was perfectly sound and functioning normally but that his general physical nature was abnormal. As he really seemed to be quite impervious to pain they gave up beating him and organized a “conveyer.”

  This emaciated, undersized Jewish tailor set up an all-time record in the history of the G.P.U. He survived an almost uninterrupted “conveyer” lasting for thirty-one days and thirty-one nights. I cannot understand how that was physically possible, but since then I have been less skeptical of the stories I have heard about the performances of Indian fakirs.

  With deep excitement and interest the whole brikhalovka and the whole of Kholodnaya Gora followed the battle between the all-powerful G.P.U. and this one man. The “conveyer” was interrupted twice in the twenty-four hours and Eisenberg was sent below to a cell. There he would throw off his clothes and lie down flat on the floor while two of his fellow prisoners rubbed him with wet towels, massaged him and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. Then he ate his meal and slept for ten minutes. After that he was called up again. His examiner was in despair.

  “But, Eisenberg,” he pleaded, “why don’t you be sensible? Look, you admit the chief thing, which is being a counterrevolutionary anarchist, so why hold out so obstinately over this question of your organization? Now tell me who your fellow conspirators were, there’s a good fellow.”