The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  “It’s perfectly clear,” declared Bogutzky. “It’s the old man they’re after. And when Kasin thought you were trying to spoil things he cut up rough. He beat you up to impress Obremov, that’s all. And when the old man had gone he was as nice as pie again. They’ve given you up as a bad job, that’s what it amounts to.”

  A few days later I was again called out. The young examiner was in charge again.

  “Is there anything at all you’re prepared to admit? Any anti-Soviet action whatever?”

  “No, none at all.”

  “You’re accused of terrorism.”

  “Not guilty.”

  “Espionage?”

  “Not guilty.”

  “Diversionary activity?”

  “Not guilty.”

  “Anti-Soviet agitation?”

  “Citizen Examiner, they call the slightest piece of objective criticism anti-Soviet agitation. From that point of view most of us are guilty.”

  “Have you ever publicly criticized any action of the Government?”

  “Yes, when the proposal for the prohibition of abortion was put forward for discussion I spoke against it in the Party cell and when the law was subsequently passed, I refused to withdraw when Party Secretary Garber asked me to.”

  He was delighted. At last he’d got something. I tried to argue against the other charges, and to point out how senseless they were, but he refused to allow that.

  “Citizen Examiner,” I said finally, “while under arrest, and it’s about thirty months now, I’ve written to the Prosecutor at least ten times and I’ve never received a reply. I don’t even know whether my letters were forwarded.”

  “You can write again. I will see that your letter is forwarded.”

  In the afternoon I was given paper and a pen and I wrote to the Prosecutor. I described briefly what had happened to me, my long imprisonment and my complete innocence. A week later I was taken for an interview to the Military Prosecutor of the Kiev district. He seemed impressed and he promised to go into the matter.

  “Citizen Prosecutor, they have been examining my case for nearly three years now, and all the time I have been kept in prison. The money I had in the beginning was exhausted long ago and I can’t buy anything to supplement the prison diet. You know what that means: I’m weak from hunger. Please arrange at least to have some of the money to my credit in the Kharkov Savings Bank transferred to my prison account so that I can use the lavochka.”

  “Be patient,” he replied. “It won’t last much longer now.”

  A few days after that the hatch opened and a warder handed through a clean shirt for me and—oh wonder!—a tie!

  “Put them on at once,” he ordered.

  My comrades surrounded me as I struggled into the shirt and began to put on the tie with fumbling, unaccustomed fingers. They were greatly excited and were quite certain that I was going to be released at once.

  “Alex,” begged Yaroshenko, “if they release you and let you stay in Russia do go to see my wife—as soon as you possibly can, please.”

  “Certainly I will, Yaroshenko. But don’t you think it might do her harm?”

  The old railwayman asked me to get in touch with his brother, the lawyer in Zdolbunovo, if they let me go abroad, and I promised that too. Vursta, our spy, wanted me to get in touch with a well-to-do uncle of his in Chicago, who was either a merchant or an industrialist. I promised everything.

  About ten minutes later the warder came back and took me away to be shaved and photographed. I was photographed in three positions and then taken back to the cell, whereupon the warder ordered me to take off the nice clean shirt and the tie. I wasn’t even disappointed. We discussed the mystery and came to the conclusion that someone abroad had shown an interest in my fate and wanted to have proof that I was alive and well.

  For another two weeks nothing out of the ordinary happened. Then one clay the hatch opened and the warder handed through a book. It was for me.

  ‘There’s something for you to read,” he said, “but it’s for you; you’re not to lend it to the others.”

  That was a sensation. And what a book it was! Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

  As I have already mentioned, I was reading it just before my arrest. That I should be given that particular book now seemed a good omen to me. Of course, we took no notice of the prohibition. It was decided that one of us should read it aloud to the others. Yaroshenko was chosen and he was delighted. A few days later when we had finished it I asked for another one. This time I was given a Ukrainian edition of Goethe’s Faust. Yaroshenko wanted to read again.

  “You’ll find it very much more difficult,” I warned him, but that was quite enough to make him more determined than ever to read it, and he did, from beginning to end. It was a very difficult job for him, but he pressed on manfully. From time to time I tried to explain some of the mythological allusions, but he didn’t like being told things, and he easily got insulted so I gave it up.

  “A very nice book,” he declared appreciatively when he came to the end.

  The rest of us were glad that we could change it and get a new one at last. In the course of four weeks we read ten books. After that came Tolstoy’s War and Peace again. The selection, it appeared, was very small.

  At the end of August a new prisoner was brought in. He was an official from Chernigov, where he had already been eighteen months in prison. He had news from the outside world.

  “We’ve made a pact of friendship with the Germans,” he reported. “Ribbentrop himself was in Moscow, with Stalin, Molotov and all the rest of them. I wonder if Kaganovitch was there too. It would have been funny to see the Nazi and the Jew drinking each other’s health.”

  We attached no great importance to the news. We all assumed that it was a formality, very much like the extension of the Russo-German Treaty of Friendship in 1933. None of us dreamed that it was the signal for the beginning of the Second World War.

  But about a week later I gradually became aware that something unusual was going on outside, and my thoughts began to turn to the possibility of war. There was a series of intangible things which I now find difficult to recall in any detail, but taken together they gave me that strange feeling of misgiving as though a great catastrophe were about to occur. We were completely isolated, and it was six weeks before I had any confirmation of my forebodings. By that time half Europe was at war, and the Germans had already reached the San and the Bug.

  I was restless and unable to read, particularly as there were no new books. Bogutzky bemoaned the fact that no one could trust anyone else in Russia nowadays, and that people were afraid to talk openly even to their friends. Before his arrest he had moved in the highest official circles in the Ukraine, and he described the panic caused by the indiscriminate mass terror of the G.P.U. One premier after the other had been arrested. Almost all the People’s Commissars had gone, and their successors soon followed them into prison. Very often they had been dragged in by their predecessors. Leading members of the Party began to denounce their comrades for fear of being denounced themselves. But it had availed them nothing; their turn had come in the end, and they had all landed in the inner prisons of the G.P.U., some earlier than others, that was all. He told us a story about Marchak,{17} the Premier of the Ukrainian Government, and Leplesky, People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs and thus head of the Ukrainian G.P.U. It was evening and they had both been drinking when Leplesky brought the conversation round to the arrest of Tukhachevsky and the other generals.

  “When you come to think of it, it’s a most extraordinary thing that the whole of our General Staff should have gone over to the enemy like that. Now the Germans and the Japs know all the Red Army’s dispositions and they’ll have to be altered. What a packet it will cost us!”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as all that,” replied Marchak. “Perhaps they only said that.”

  Even leading Soviet officials get a little more human when they’ve had a drink or two, and sometimes they say more
than they otherwise would. The next morning when Marchak woke up he was horrified to remember that he had cast doubts on the story of the treachery of the generals. Perhaps Leplesky had led him into a trap? It was true that Leplesky had said just as dangerous things, even more dangerous perhaps, but he would be allowed to; he probably had someone behind him in Moscow and had carried out the provocation on orders.

  Marchak decided to make a clean breast of it all and so he rang up Moscow and told Yezhov. Leplesky was arrested, but two weeks later Marchak was arrested as well. Leplesky had denounced him. Both of them confessed to having conspired together to overthrow the Soviet power. They had also spied on behalf of Poland and Germany, prepared terrorist attempts on the life of Stalin, and drawn up wrong plans in order to disorganize economic life.

  Early in September I was called out to make my concluding deposition, the dvukhsotka. The examiner read me Paragraph 204 of the Penal Code, informed me that I could now read through the whole dossier complete with all documentary exhibits, and told me that I could now correct anything I felt was incorrect. He then handed me about eight hundred pages of manuscript. I began to read it and make corrections, but at once I met with obstinate resistance on the part of the examiner, and finally I had to concentrate on the main points only. Almost every sentence contained some minor misrepresentation. The descriptions of even the most harmless matters were so formulated as to make them sound suspicious. After eight hours of hard work I was only about one fifth through.

  “Weissberg, you are abusing our patience in order to sabotage the examination.”

  “I’m sorry,” I replied, “but I can’t correct the accumulated lies of three years in one night, particularly when you make difficulties over every word.”

  The depositon of Flenning, the German teacher who had declared that in Shepetovka, ten minutes after crossing into Soviet territory, I had tried to recruit him for service on behalf of the Gestapo, was missing. I made a fuss about it, but it was gone.

  “If you sabotage the examination you will never be able to sign the dvukhsotka and you’ll stay here on remand for the rest of your life.”

  I spent two nights going through the depositions and documents, and finally I had to give up. It was quite hopeless. I signed the concluding deposition.

  The next day—it was September 11, 1939—they came for me and Yaroshenko. We were taken below and put into two different cupboards and kept there for over three hours. Then I was taken out and taken to the railway station by car. I never saw Yaroshenko again.

  I was put into a special prison coach. The windows onto the platform were covered, but the window of the door to the corridor was not, so that I could see out and through the windows on the other side of the train. From the position of the sun I realized that we were traveling north. It looked as though we were going to Moscow.

  CHAPTER 17—Moscow

  THE JOURNEY LASTED UNTIL THE AFTERNOON OF THE NEXT DAY. BUT I was left in the prison car until the evening and then taken to the Moscow central prison, the Butyrka, which was an old fortress dating from the time of Peter the Great. It is perhaps the best equipped prison in the Soviet Union. We went into a great reception hall, almost as big as the waiting room of a large railway station. Along each side were what looked something like rows of telephone booths constructed of concrete. I was put in one of these and left there for several hours. Finally I wanted to go to the lavatory so I knocked on the door. A warder arrived and took me out, telling me at the same time that I must speak only in whispers.

  By that time it was midnight. The hutch next to mine was opened to take particulars of the prisoner in it. I put my ear to the wall, and heard the warder inquire:

  “Your name, Citizen?”

  The reply made me start violently.

  “Fritz Houtermanns.”

  ‘When the same warder opened up my hutch I deliberately bellowed my name in order to attract Houtermanns’ attention, which earned me a rebuke. When the man was far enough away I began to knock on the dividing wall. There was no answer. I hammered so hard that the warder came back, but there was still no reply. Two months later we were taken from the Butyrka to the Lubyanka in a prison van. Houtermanns was in the cell next to mine in the Lubyanka for six hours. I could hear him moving around and I tried again to attract his attention by knocking, but it was no use. He had not been to school in the Kholodnaya Gora as I had, and later when I met him again he told me that he had been held almost all the time in the inner prisons of the G.P.U. in almost complete isolation.

  Long after midnight I was taken out of my rabbit hutch and put into a proper cell. I was alone. I know most of the big hotels in Moscow, and, with the exception of the new one on the Okhotny Ryad, not one of them has rooms which can compare with the single cells of the Butyrka for cleanliness and comfort. My cell was covered with linoleum which had been waxed and polished. The window was quite large and it was not covered up with metal sheeting. The glass had steel wire worked into it. It was possible to open this window a little until it touched the outside bars. There was a little cupboard, a chair and a bed with clean bed linen. I was given a bath and clean linen and this was changed every fourteen days. I was allowed to have only the most necessary of my personal things in the cell with me, and the coverlet and the pillow which I had taken with me through a dozen and one other cells were forbidden here and had to be stored away.

  The block commandant formally handed over the cell to me.

  “Citizen, this cell is clean and in good condition. You will be responsible for keeping it so. Every morning you must wax and polish the linoleum. During the day the bed must stay as it is now. Have you any wishes?”

  “May I lie down during the day?”

  “Yes, but you must not sleep.”

  “Shall I be alone in this cell?”

  “Until further notice. Any change is ordered by the examiner, not by me.”

  “Then I should like to write a request for books.”

  “That isn’t necessary. Every prisoner has the right to use the prison library. The librarian will call on you once a week.”

  With that he went and I began to look around. The prison regulations were on the wall next to the central heating pipes. I studied them.

  Books and games were permitted—chess and dominoes. A prisoner was permitted to write applications and requests once a week. I was flabbergasted when I compared conditions here with those in the Kholodnaya Gora. Had things changed here tremendously since the turning point, or was the Butyrka a special model prison to be shown to foreign delegations? I unpacked.

  My clothes were in a terrible state. In the Kholodnaya Cora a friendly officer, a Pole, had occupied his time by repairing our clothing and darning our socks. His thread was made of unraveled old socks waxed with soap. Needles were made out of fish bones. An Assyrian even possessed a broadawl with which shoes could be repaired. But in Kiev there had been nothing of the sort, absolutely nothing, and while I was there my clothing had fallen to pieces. My trousers were beyond repair. The seat was so worn that it was nothing but holes. I was ashamed to go out to exercise and I always wore my coat, although it was hot.

  The last things to go had been my shoes. They had been a source of constant friction with the prison authorities. I had bought them quite cheap at Bata’s in Prague in 1935 and they had lasted me four years. Unfortunately, they closed with zip fasteners, and it was this that caused the trouble. The warders had instructions not to allow anything metal to remain in the cells, and here was something metal. In Kiev they had even wanted to cut out the zip fastener to make my shoes fit into their rules. I had protested vigorously and the matter had even come before the governor.

  “There are strict instructions that nothing metallic may be left in the cells,” he declared.

  “But you have no right to damage my property,” I protested.

  “We don’t want to damage them; it’s only if you want to have them with you in the cell. Otherwise you can leave them in the prison depot
.”

  “But then I shan’t be able to go out for exercise. I shall have to stay in the cell all the time.”

  “You can’t do that; it’s forbidden.”

  “But listen, Citizen Governor, you can see what sort of metal the instructions refer to, knives and such dangerous things. They didn’t think of zip fasteners. Perhaps there weren’t any when the regulations were made.”

  “I can’t help that; I’ve got to carry out my instructions. All metal in the cells is forbidden.”

  “But the Parasha’ is made of metal; so are our plates and drinking cups.”

  “They don’t belong to the prisoners and they come into a different category. The regulation refers only to things in the personal possession of the prisoner at the time he comes to us. It’s no use. I’ve got my orders.”

  “But they’re my only pair of shoes. If you cut out the zip fasteners you’ll ruin them and I shan’t be able to use them in camp.”

  Finally he arranged that my shoes should always be left outside the cell. When I went to exercise, etc., I could put them on, and take them off again before I re-entered my cell. In the cell itself I went about in my bare feet.

  But now the situation was worse. My shoes were just falling to pieces. I shouldn’t be able to go out to exercise. It’s about time they released me, I thought. My means won’t run to a long imprisonment.

  I no longer had any doubt that they intended to release me in the end. If they had intended to sentence me after all it would be senseless to haul me first from Kharkov to Kiev, and now from Kiev to Moscow. But I thought it very improbable that they would ever let me leave the country. But how could they prevent it? I was not a Soviet citizen. However, my own country, Austria, didn’t exist anymore. It had been seized by Germany. Had I automatically become German? I didn’t in the least like the idea of being a citizen of a fascist state. On the other hand, the Germans might not like the idea either. Would they even be prepared to recognize Austrian Jews as German citizens?