The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  “Have you gone mad, Weissberg? You demonstrate against the Soviet power here in prison? Do you want to spoil your chances at the last moment?”

  “Citizen Lieutenant, I have no alternative. I can no longer stand slow starvation, and I have the right to be treated no worse than a Russian prisoner. I want my fifty rubles a month for the lavochka. To ask for that isn’t an anti-Soviet demonstration.”

  “I order you to break off your hunger strike at once.”

  “I’m sorry but I must refuse.”

  “Listen, I was about to do something to help your case along when I was informed of your hunger strike. You must understand that the N.K.V.D. cannot allow itself to be influenced by illegal pressure. We can do nothing for you as long as you continue this hunger strike.”

  “I have begged and prayed for months. I have been patient as you told me to be and you have done absolutely nothing for me. I no longer believe you.”

  “If you break off your hunger strike you will receive everything necessary.”

  “After all I’ve gone through I’m no longer able to believe you, Citizen Examiner.”

  “Alexander Semyonovitch, go now to the commandant and inform him that you are breaking off your hunger strike, and then everything will be done for you.”

  I refused, and he grew angry.

  “You’re banging your head against a brick wall. 1 give you good advice and you obstinately ignore it.”

  “Citizen Examiner, will you promise me personally that if I give up my hunger strike you will see that my request is complied with in some form or other?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “In that case I will give up my hunger strike.”

  “Good, now you’re talking sense at last. Go to the commandant and tell him so.”

  However, we never got as far as that. I was taken back to my cell, which I found empty. My fellow unfortunate had been taken away, probably so that he should not witness my victory. A few minutes afterward the cell door opened again and the manager of the lavochka appeared. He gave me pencil and paper and told me to write down what I wanted.

  “But I have nothing in my prison account,” I pointed out.

  “Never mind.”

  “I don’t know what’s available; I don’t know the prices, and I don’t know how much I may order.”

  “Write down the necessities, and we’ll see what can be done.”

  He went out and left me scratching my head in astonishment. This was unprecedented. Lavochka day came round once a month. If a prisoner happened to be out of his cell for any reason, he missed his chance and had to go without supplementary food for a month. Thus even if they agreed to transfer money to my account there was a risk that I would just miss lavochka day, in which case I might have to wait for nearly a month. And now the lavochka manager came specially to my cell and was prepared to take my order at once.

  But my astonishment was to grow. I sat down and wrote out a whole list of things in the hope that I might perhaps get some of them. Soon afterward the man came back, glanced at my list and departed without comment. Within half an hour he was back again with everything I had ordered, including a fantastic item I had inserted—chocolate bonbons. I was speechless.

  But that was not the end of the miracle. That evening when the time came for my bowl of soup the warder brought not only soup but a meal of roast meat and potatoes.

  No, I thought, this is a dream. By the time I had finished I was not hungry for the first time for longer than I could remember. I really didn’t need the supplies from the lavochka and I decided to keep them by for a while as a sort of iron ration in case the other wonder suddenly ceased. This went on for three days and I could literally feel my strength returning. On the third day—it was December 18, 1939—I was called out “with things” and taken to a medium-sized cell without a window, but with parquet flooring and a table. There I was very carefully searched and then a warder brought a pile of clothes and told me to pick out anything that suited me. I chose a pair of boots, a pair of trousers and a very fine winter overcoat. Inside was the label of a firm of tailors in Stockholm. I wondered what unfortunate had owned that coat; probably some Soviet diplomat had been recalled from Sweden and shot. Now they were giving me his clothes and I would perhaps go back to Stockholm with them.

  When I had chosen, the warder went off with the remaining clothes and I heard him open the door to the adjoining cell. I listened intently and recognized Houtermanns’ voice. So he was getting clothes too? When the warder had gone I did my best to get into touch with Houtermanns by tapping, but again I was unsuccessful.

  That evening we were taken back to the Butyrka by prison van; again Houtermanns and I were put into adjoining rabbit hutches; again I tapped and tapped away, and again without success. It was midnight before we were released. This time I was taken to a different part of the prison. All the lamps had been partly covered with blue paint, apparently as an air-raid precaution. On the third floor I was put into a hutch again and left there for a couple of hours. Then I was taken out to a big, dimly lit cell in which there were about a score of beds complete with bedding against the walls. There were many prisoners in the cell and as soon as the warder had gone they began to question me in German. Who was I? Where did I come from? And so on.

  It was an altogether strange cell. Down the middle was a long table, and on it were various games, including chess and dominoes, and books. There were also a score or so of chairs, and plenty of space. I also noticed that there seemed to be a plentiful supply of food, including bread.

  “What’s it all about?” I asked. “Does anyone know?”

  “They’re sending us all home. We shall be in Germany soon.” “Are you all Germans here, then?”

  “Yes, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m Austrian.”

  “Austria doesn’t exist anymore. You’re formally German like the rest of us.”

  “I wonder! I’m a Jew. They won’t want to send me to Germany, surely. I imagine that if we’re deported we can go where we like.”

  “You’ve got a lively imagination, Comrade. You’ll go to Berlin with the rest of us; you see. In any case, it won’t be so bad. Be glad you can get out of it.”

  “What’s the food like here?”

  “Marvelous. Lovely grub. Every morning a trolley comes rolling along with cocoa and eggs for breakfast.”

  “Don’t pull my leg. I’m confused enough as it is.”

  “I’m not pulling your leg. It’s a fact. We get better food in here than we ever got outside. You’ll see for yourself. Would you like some ham?”

  Some people have a peculiar sense of humor and I was still far from convinced, but they found a practical way of dissipating my doubts by producing hard-boiled eggs, ham and various other good things. Finally a Bavarian Communist named Albrecht, who was the starosta in this peculiar cell, told me to take a bed and get some sleep.

  “There’s no hurry. You’ll find out all about it in the morning.”

  A spare bed was lowered from the wall. It had an iron frame with steel springs, and the mattress on it was good. It was the first really good bed I had slept in since my arrest, but it was some time before I could get to sleep.

  CHAPTER 18—The Bridge of Brest-Litovsk

  THE EXTRADITION CELL, AS IT PROVED TO BE, WAS A STRANGE PLACE.

  Soldiers have coined the expression “No Man’s Land” for the area between hostile fronts. Let us suppose there was a house in No Man’s Land, and that despite all the fighting its inhabitants still lived on in it, but without going outside. Perhaps that gives some idea of the atmosphere which prevailed in our cell.

  In 1945 I experienced the entry of the Russians into Vlochy, one of the suburbs of Warsaw. The German troops had left on January 16th in the early morning, and the Russians did not come in until thirty hours later. The whole place seethed with rumors, one of which was that Warsaw had already been liberated. In those thirty hours there was no authority in Vlochy. The power of the Ge
rmans was broken and the inhabitants breathed freely again for the first time in six years. The new authority had not yet established itself. For several days after the arrival of the first Russian tanks this situation continued. It suited me wonderfully. The ideal of anarchism was temporarily fulfilled. No one was under the orders of anyone else; no one was subordinate to anyone else. A few days later the new power was installed. It took about five years before it succeeded in throttling the freedom of the individual citizen as thoroughly as the Gestapo and the G.P.U. had done before it. On that January 16, 1945, we in Vlochy lived between two different repressive state powers, and we were free of both of them—at least for a few days.

  The prisoners in the extradition cell of the Butyrka were under the pressure of both repressive systems. They still had cause to fear the G.P.U. and now in addition they had cause to fear the Gestapo. An incautious word here could still lead to persecution by Stalin’s apparatus. In a few weeks an incautious word there could lead to persecution by the Gestapo. There might be G.P.U. spies in the cell—or future spies of the Gestapo already determined to purchase the favor of the Nazis by betraying their comrades at the first opportunity. In these circumstances it was almost imprudent to talk at all.

  But the one thing I find extremely difficult is to keep my mouth shut when important matters are at stake, and then such considerations did not make me keep silent. The past few weeks had made me immune to considerations of prudence. I felt the need for speech, free speech at least for a few days.

  Despite what they had told me the night before, when I woke up the next day I found it difficult to believe my eyes. There was the trolley they had mentioned: the sort of thing used in well-run and comfortable households to serve afternoon tea. Both its tiers were loaded with good things. Each of us received white bread, two eggs, butter, ham and cocoa.

  “Why do you think they treat us like this?” I asked Albrecht, our starosta.

  “To feed us up and make us presentable, of course. They don’t want to hand over a band of skeletons; it would look bad.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Some of the fellows have been here over a month. Two batches have already gone off, but no one’s particularly anxious to get away quickly. The food’s too good here.”

  I’d sooner go today than tomorrow, I thought, if it were only to Sweden and not to Germany. I still wasn’t convinced that I should be deported to Germany. I hadn’t been in Europe for years and I had no idea how difficult traveling had become since Hitler. Formerly when foreigners were expelled they had the right to choose where they were sent to. There were expulsions from a particular country, but never expulsions to a particular country, apart, of course, from extradition proceedings. I put forward these considerations of international law in discussions with the others, but they were not impressed; they said that neither would bother about trifles like that, and they were right.

  Our floor and the floor below had only extradition cells. There were about two hundred of us waiting for deportation. On the floor below there was a cell with about thirty German women, and we had established contact with them by tapping, leaving messages in the lavatories, and so on. The one person who defied all my attempts to establish contact was Fritz Houtermanns.

  We knew some of the women, who included Zenzl Muhsam, the widow of the German anarchist poet Erich Muhsam; Carola Neher, a famous German actress; and Grete Buber, the wife of one of the former leaders of the German Communist Party, Heinz Neumann. I had greatly respected and admired Erich Muhsam. When Hitler came to power he had been arrested and imprisoned for a long time. Then one day, according to the official report, he had been found dead in his cell, hanging from the window transverse. Whether he actually committed suicide to avoid further torture or whether the Nazis killed him, we shall probably never know. For them the very appearance of Muhsam, a highly sensitive and cultivated lyric poet, must have been like a red rag to a bull. He represented the very antithesis of their idea of a man. After his death his wife Zenzl had gone to Moscow, where she had been well-known in German emigrant circles as a woman who was not afraid to open her mouth. That had led to her first arrest as early as 1936.

  I had admired Carola Neher, a beautiful woman and a great actress, from the days when she had been the leading lady of the Schiffbauerdam Theater. She had seemed to have no contact with the socialist world and she had always moved in bourgeois society. I was therefore rather surprised to meet her in Moscow in 1934. 1932 was the last year of the Weimar Republic, and intelligent and enlightened circles of German society were already greatly disturbed. Germany was in crisis, and it would obviously bring either fascism or communism. It was in this period that Communist influence greatly increased among the German intelligentsia. Carola Neher, an admired and feted top-line star, was one of those who felt herself drawn to the socialist solution.

  She had not expected wealth and comfort in the Soviet Union, but the misery she met with there was beyond her worst expectations. She worked with Erich Wannerheim in a film he was making based on the Dimitrov affair. Suddenly, in the spring of 1936, she was arrested. It was a great shock to her and quite incomprehensible to the rest of us. She had never taken any part in Party politics, and really she understood very little of what was going on around her. If she had been asked to name the chief opposition leaders she would have been hard put to answer. She had received a ten-year sentence, and had been held in an isolator, where she had been half-starved and ill with typhus. Despite her experiences, she was still a very charming and attractive woman.

  Her misfortunes affected me deeply. How brutal and inhumane this Soviet state was! Here was a young and beautiful woman who had had everything life could afford, and who had surrendered it to follow an idea she understood only imperfectly but which seemed to offer the hope of a newer and better society—and her sacrifice had led to a Russian prison.

  One by one we were called out to be interrogated for the last time by a troika of high G.P.U. officers, referred to by the Germans as the “Three Magi.” To some of the prisoners the sinister proposal was made that they should work for the G.P.U. Carola Neher was one, and she refused with great indignation, and demanded to be sent to Copenhagen, where she had friends, including the German dramatist Bert Brecht. It was this refusal which probably sealed her fate. The rest of us went off, but she was left behind. I have never been able to find out anything about her since. She certainly never succeeded in getting out of the Soviet Union.

  The prisoners in our cell were mostly German Communist workers. Some of them had held high positions in the Party. As far as I can remember now there was only one other intellectual apart from myself, and that was a fellow named Petermann, who had worked for the Comintem. He was intelligent, glib and utterly characterless. It was quite clear from his talk that he was preparing to go over to the Nazis. I did not defend what had been going on in Soviet Russia and I hated the Stalinist regime, but I did defend what I thought was the socialist basis of the country. After all, the means of production and distribution had been socialized, and as a Marxist I was still satisfied with the old formulas. For me the economic basis of society was the important thing; the political superstructure—to use the appropriate jargon—must sooner or later come into line with that basis. A socialist economy would ultimately reject the despotic dictatorship of one man, and then a free socialist society would arise like a phoenix from the ashes.

  I was wrong, but despite my disagreeable experiences in Russian prisons it took me another five years to realize that. However, that wasn’t the cause of my disputes with Petermann. He had already secretly made his peace with Hitler and he was now trying to rationalize his intentions.

  “Bukharin spoke of organized capitalism,” he reminded me. “Perhaps National Socialism is such a form which will ultimately clear the way to socialism. We ought to postpone our discussion until we’ve had a chance of seeing things close up.”

  “Once you’re in Germany you won’t feel inclined to
indulge in any discussions with me,” I answered dryly.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said blithely. “That will all depend. It’s not easy yet to see how the Jewish problem will develop. But in any case, the individual has no right to set himself up against the state idea.”

  That remark ought to have served as a warning to me to hold my tongue. Any continuation of the discussion would be dangerous—not here, but later in Germany. I ignored the danger. In any case, at that time it seemed impossible to me that former comrades could betray each other. My dispute with Petermann became more and more heated, until finally Albrecht intervened.

  “Don’t make so much noise here, you two; you never know who might be listening.”

  I didn’t know whether he was warning me against the present G.P.U. or the future Gestapo, but I broke off the discussion.

  Such discussions always ended in the same way. They began among various prisoners and when they reached a certain point they broke down because the participants were afraid to go on. Anyone who wanted to be anti-Soviet here to curry favor with the Gestapo later ran the risk of incurring the immediate displeasure of the G.P.U. After all, the Russians could change their minds—they often did for no obvious reason—and stop the whole proceedings or at least they could keep obvious anti-Soviet elements behind as too dangerous to let loose. Most of the workers in the cell were wiser than I was: they said nothing.

  Most of them had been honest socialists, and most of them still were. They had become enemies of the G.P.U. and the despotism of Stalin, but not enemies of socialism. They had returned to the camp of socialist democracy. The dictatorship of the proletariat had led to the despotism of a single man and a Byzantine cult which dishonored the dignity of free men. It had led to the annihilation of the Old Guard of the revolution, to a revolting denigration of the heroes of the revolution, to the brutal exploitation of the great majority by a small minority, to the physical destruction or enslavement of nine million innocent people. These German workers wanted nothing further to do with the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, but they had not abandoned the humanitarian ideals of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. They wanted socialism, but they wanted freedom as well.