The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  I waited impatiently for my interrogation by the Three Magi, but I waited in vain. Apparently their job was to recruit agents for the G.P.U. It seemed a lunatic idea to try to do their recruiting among men and women with years of accumulated hatred in their hearts against the G.P.U. But after all, it was an old trick. They knew that the Tsarist Okhrana had often released imprisoned revolutionaries to act as its agents, so why not try the same?

  The reasoning was primitive. The Tsarist Okhrana had not persecuted the supporters of the Tsar, but the supporters of the revolution. Revolutionaries are only men of flesh and blood, and here and there one of them would be unable to withstand torture and imprisonment indefinitely and could be brought to betray his comrades. If on his release the man did not keep his word the Okhrana betrayed his treachery to the comrades among whom he lived and worked. Thus such men had a choice between shameful exposure and crime. Often they preferred crime. Such a one was Malinovsky, a friend of Lenin, a Bolshevik Duma Deputy and a secret agent of the Okhrana.

  But in this case the arrested men were supporters of the social order the G.P.U. pretended to defend. The years spent in prison had stoked up their hatred against their oppressors to white-hot fury, particularly as the G.P.U. oppressed them in the name of the idea for which they had always fought. How was it possible to believe that men who had experienced such things would ever willingly agree to work for the G.P.U.?

  I talked to a man named Müller, an ordinary German worker from Stuttgart.

  “Yes, they asked me to work for them,” he admitted, “and I agreed., I was afraid they wouldn’t let me out if I didn’t. But once I’m out they can go to hell. I don’t want to have anything to do with Hitler either. I’ve had enough of politics. I want a bit of peace at last, just working at my own job again.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m a mechanic. In Germany I worked in the Party, in the Red Trade Union Organization and in the Red Front Fighters’ League. The Nazis knew me well, as you can imagine. In May, 1933, I was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. By a bit of good luck I managed to escape. After that I was four years abroad. The Party promised to get me a visa for the Soviet Union and I agreed. However, in the end I didn’t get one. I was in Switzerland at the time. Another comrade and I decided we’d go without a visa. Once we were there it would be all right, we thought. We managed to get to Finland and then from there we went over the frontier near Sostorek. We got to Leningrad and there we went to the nearest G.P.U. post. They arrested us and we’ve never been released since. That was over three years ago. Really we haven’t seen the Soviet Union at all.”

  Müller was an intelligent and thoughtful type of worker. He didn’t even abuse the G.P.U. for robbing him of three years of his life. He was more interested in adapting his mind to circumstances he found it difficult to understand. He was still a staunch socialist, and he was perfectly certain that one day socialism would come, but things had got so complicated that he no longer saw what part he could usefully play in the process.

  A few days after me a second Jew came into our cell. It was the German composer Hans David. He was tall and slim and of very good appearance. During the First World War he had been a German officer and had risen to the rank of captain and been decorated several times for bravery in the field. Petermann set out to reassure him.

  “Ex-soldiers aren’t persecuted in Germany,” he declared confidently. “You’ve no need to worry. You’re protected by your Iron Cross.”

  The views of the Nazis turned out not to conform with those of Petermann. Hans David was handed over to them two months later than I was. In May, 1940, he was released from a Gestapo prison in Lublin. At the time I was already living with relatives in Kraków. When I heard of his arrival in Lublin I sent him a letter and some money. He had neither relatives nor friends in Poland. Later I heard that he had played a big role in the Jewish Council of Lublin and an altogether worthy one. When the mass extermination of the Jews began in 1942 he was seized with all the other members of the Council and sent to Maidanek concentration camp, where he ended in the gas chambers.

  On Christmas Day, 1940, the cell next to ours was cleared and all its inmates went off to Germany. The following day everyone on our floor had diarrhea. Apparently there had been something wrong with our food, though no one had noticed it. The affair was quite harmless, but it was astonishing and even rather amusing to observe the care and attention now paid to our well-being. Three doctors and two nurses were called in to attend to us. We felt quite proud to be the cause of such a medical mobilization. We were obviously important prisoners of state.

  By this time I was beginning to get a little anxious about my future. I certainly didn’t want to be deported to Germany, because I knew that it would probably be very difficult to get out again and I longed to live again under a political democracy. I had already had too much totalitarianism to feel the least enthusiasm at the thought of exchanging one for another. I was determined to protest with all energy to the Three Magi when they called me before them, and to demand that I should be placed over the Finnish frontier or sent by ship to Sweden. However, the Troika never called me. Perhaps they felt that I was an unsuitable candidate for their foreign service, particularly as I was a Jew.

  On December 31st we were all awakened at six o’clock in the morning and told to go to the washroom “with things.” The washroom was in the basement. The basement premises of the Butyrka were fantastic underground casemates, catacombs hewn out of stone, great halls supported by pillars, and in the washroom there were many taps and showers liberally supplied with hot water. We enjoyed ourselves for over two hours with the hot water, soap and towels, and in the meantime all our things were neatly folded and sent off for disinfection. When we were dressed again we were taken out through a maze of rooms and corridors to another part of the prison where a barber was waiting for us. He worked hard and with incredible virtuosity and shaved thirty-six men in three hours. When we were all ready we were put together with men from another cell, who were also to be deported, and then sent to the clothing stores where we were invited to choose what we wanted from a large store of clothing. As I already had good clothing there was very little I needed, but with the others it was different.

  When the dressing was finished we were led off to a hall where we waited for several hours. Almost all the prisoners from the other cell had come back from prison camps in the Far North. Soon after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact the G.P.U. had given orders that all Germans and former Austrians were to be collected and sent to the Butyrka in Moscow. Among them were men who had been sentenced to death and had their sentences commuted to twenty-five-year terms in labor camps. There were even one or two men whose sentences had not been commuted and who were awaiting execution.

  The G.P.U. did not bother about the fact that many of the men had once held high positions in the German Communist Party and other revolutionary organizations, or about the fact that some of us were Jews. There was even a Hungarian Communist, a Jew named Bloch, who had fled from Budapest after the overthrow of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, and lived in Germany with false German papers. Later on he had emigrated to the Soviet Union with the same papers, and now because of them, and despite his protests, he was being handed over to Hitler.

  During the long wait I made the acquaintance of another Hungarian named Farkash, but he, like myself, had been an Austrian national. He had spent over three years in various labor camps, and his descriptions robbed me of another illusion—not that it mattered much by that time. I had always thought that while prison life in the Soviet Union was hard, life in the camps was easier. I had supposed that in prison we had all been treated badly to encourage us to confess, but that once a man was in a camp serving his sentence conditions were better, but Farkash told me terrifying things about the camps. According to him, there was no deliberate sadism, but men were sent into murderous climatic conditions without the proper clothing which would have given them a chance of survival.
The result was that they died like flies.

  “If you managed to get a clerical job you had a chance of survival,” he declared, “but anyone on outside work perished sooner or later, because no one had proper clothing or proper boots. The few rags of clothing they did give you were worthless. If anything wore out or was stolen there were no arrangements whatever for replacing it. The criminals, who kept together, stole everything worth stealing. Ordinary prisoners were helpless; if they protested against the thefts they risked getting a knife in their backs. And the few things you did have were beyond all price.

  “One of the camps I was in was on the Volodna. I had the glasses I wore and a spare pair. Such riches soon became known. One day I was called into the office. A very pretty and very nice girl from Leningrad was employed there. She was short-sighted and a week before someone had stolen her glasses, and she couldn’t do her work properly without them. That meant outside work sooner or later. She wasn’t robust and for her it would mean slow death. She wanted to know if I would sell her my spare pair of glasses if they proved suitable. She tried them on. They weren’t quite like the pair she had lost, but very much better than nothing. ‘I don’t want to sell you the glasses,’ I said, ‘but I’ll willingly lend them to you.’

  ‘That’s nice of you, Comrade, but please sell them to me. I’m serving a ten-year term and without glasses I shall go under for certain.’ But glasses were important to me too, so I wouldn’t sell them. After all, my own could get lost or be stolen at any time. She tried to persuade me and offered me various things, but I still refused to part with them for good. When she saw I was determined she looked at me for a moment, and then she said: ‘Listen, Comrade, I’m the youngest and not least attractive girl in the camp. Will you sell me the glasses?’ That’s a terrible thing, Alexander Semyonovitch, because you must realize that she was a decent girl and not a loose woman. But for her it was a matter of life and death. She saw no other way out. It’s very bad for women in the camps. Most of them have to use their sex to keep alive at all. They try to get hold of physically strong men, and such men were chiefly to be found among the criminals, who always had extra food, and stole warm clothing. They controlled the whole organization and their women always had the easiest jobs. The struggle for existence in the camps is harsh and bitter, Alexander Semyonovitch.”

  What Farkash said about conditions in the camps was materially confirmed by the others who had been there, and I was compelled to revise my own ideas on the subject. In particular I began to obtain some idea of the extent to which forced labor was being used. It was clear that quite a considerable part of Soviet industrial production and construction had been transferred to the camps to be carried out by slave labor.

  In the late afternoon we were called out four at a time in alphabetical order. After a while the men came back to get their things.

  “They showed us a paper with the decision of the OSO to deport us. We had to sign it. We’re going off to Germany this evening.”

  My heart sank: so it was to be Germany after all. I discovered that in the bottom of my heart I had never really believed that they were going to hand us over to the Gestapo. I began to consider whether there was any way in which I could prevent it in my own case. As my name began with W, I was one of the last to be called out. I was taken into a room in which there were three desks and told to go to the one on the left. A young man in the uniform of the G.P.U. rose and handed me a sheet of paper.

  “Read that and sign it, Citizen, please.”

  I read it.

  “A Special Commission of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs [OSO] having examined the case of the Accused Alexander Semyonovitch Weissberg has decided to adjourn the proceedings sine die and to expel the said citizen from the territory of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics as an undesirable alien. The records of the case to be filed in the archives of the VIII Department of the Moscow N.K.V.D.”

  “I see I am to be expelled,” I said. “What does that mean, exactly? Expelled to where?”

  “You will be sent to Germany.”

  “But I don’t want to go to Germany. I have nothing to do with Germany and I want nothing to do with German fascism. I formally ask for permission to go to Sweden.”

  “As far as we are concerned you are going to Germany. When you get there you can ask permission of the German authorities to go to Sweden.”

  “A lot of good that will do, once I’m there.”

  I looked at the expulsion order again.

  “‘Undesirable alien,’” I repeated. “I wasn’t an undesirable alien when I helped to build up your nitrogen industry, Citizen Lieutenant.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Will you allow me to write an application to your Government before they deport me to Germany?”

  “That lies outside my competence. I have no right to do so.”

  I lost my patience and talked in a way that must have been unusual in a G.P.U. prison.

  “You are a Communist, I take it. You know that I am a Jew. Why do you want to hand me over to the Gestapo? If you don’t want me to stay any longer in your country then at least let me go where my life will be in no danger. What harm can that do you? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

  “It’s no use your getting so excited, Citizen. I am only obeying orders. If you want to write a letter to the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs I will forward it, but it will not postpone your expulsion. Please sign here.”

  “And supposing I refuse to sign, what then?”

  “It won’t make any difference. I shall call two witnesses, read the decision to you in their presence, and get them to witness on the form that its contents have been communicated to you. Your signature isn’t absolutely necessary.”

  “So all my signature means is that I acknowledge that the decision has been communicated to me?”

  “That’s all, Citizen.”

  “In that case I’ll sign it.”

  It was the last of the many G.P.U. documents I signed.

  The others had already packed their things when I rejoined them. I tied up my own in a linen sheet—I had never recovered my case—and made a loop so that I could put my head through and carry my bundle more easily.

  Then we were taken into the big reception hall and left waiting. At about midnight we were led out into the courtyard, where several buses were waiting. We got in and were driven off to the railway station. There was enough room in the compartments for each man to lie down at full length. The doors were locked after us. The windows on the platform side were blocked up, but not the windows into the corridor.

  Suddenly we heard the voices of women. It was a group of German women from the Butyrka who were being deported with us. Their voices caused a strange excitement in all of us. We had been in prison for years and had hardly seen women and very rarely had the opportunity of speaking to any, and now here were women who shared our fate and spoke our mother tongue.

  Shortly afterward the train moved out. It was the New Year, 1940. Fifty physically and spiritually bruised and battered souls started on their return journey, from a country which they had freely chosen to serve but which had rejected them, to a country which was their homeland but which had become foreign to them. They stood between the fronts. They had become homeless and rootless, in both countries.

  We traveled out of the Soviet Union into devastated Poland toward Brest-Litovsk. On the other side of the bridge over the Bug the representatives of another totalitarian system awaited us—the Gestapo.

  CHAPTER 19—“The Memory Hole”

  I HAVE TAKEN THE READER WITH ME THROUGH THE LABYRINTH OF THE Great Purge into the Soviet Union, but I have made no attempt to give him any explanation for the fantastic events I have described. I have built up the mosaic of the process from innumerable small stones representing the experiences of individuals. But all the time I have been conscious of the impatience of the reader, of his desire for some explanation. I have been well aware of the
questions he was eager to ask. Let me deal with some of them now.

  We can understand a terror regime when it is directed against the enemies of a government, they will probably say, but why did Stalin destroy his own supporters?

  Why did the members of the opposition make false confessions in the Moscow show trials?

  If the Soviet secret police is anxious to render millions of unreliable people harmless we can understand that it sends them into exile, by administrative decision and without trial, but why does it first use barbarous methods to compel them to make senseless self-accusations?

  Why did Stalin and his secret police wreck the recovery of the country? Why did he, and they, cripple the economic, technical and scientific work of the country by destroying the best managers, technicians and scientists the country possessed?

  Each of us has asked his comrades these questions for years now. Only at a later stage did we find an answer. My talks with the arrested G.P.U. men, with Rozhansky and with General Bogutzky were milestones on the way to my understanding:

  Lenin died in January, 1924. His sickness had previously kept him out of Government affairs for a long time, and since the beginning of 1923 Stalin had begun his organized campaign to take over the leadership on Lenin’s death. At that time he was the Secretary-General of the Communist Party, and that position did not in the least predestine him to become the dictator of Russia, but at the same time it was a position which allowed him unobtrusively to put his own followers into important positions in the Party machine everywhere. He had adopted no program which was in any way fundamentally different from that of the other leaders of the Party. He was not interested in the victory of any particular ideas; all that he was interested in was power.