I suppose I should have been used to it. After all, I was accustomed to visiting prisons. As a cop, I’d been in and out of the cement to interview suspects and take statements from others. From time to time I’d even found myself on the wrong side of the Judas hole: once in 1934, when I’d irritated the Potsdam police chief; and again in 1936, when Heydrich had sent me into Dachau as an undercover agent to gain the trust of a small-time criminal. Dachau had been bad, but not as bad as Krasno-Armeesk, and certainly not as bad as the place I was in now. It wasn’t that the place was dirty or anything; the food was good, and they even let me have a shower and some cigarettes. So what was it that bothered me? I suppose it was the fact that I was on my own for the first time since leaving Berlin in 1944. I’d been sharing quarters with one or more Germans for almost two years, and now, all of a sudden, there was only myself to talk to. The guards said nothing. I spoke to them in Russian and they ignored me. The sense of being separated from my comrades, of being cut off, began to grow and, with each day that passed, became a little worse. At the same time, I had an awful feeling of being walled in—again, this was probably a corollary of having spent so much of the last six months outside. Just as the sheer size of Russia had once left me feeling overwhelmed, it was the very smallness of my windowless cell—three paces long and half as wide—that began to weigh on me. Each minute of my day seemed to last forever. Had I really lived for as long as I had with so little to show for it in the way of thoughts and memories? With all that I had done I might reasonably have expected to have occupied myself for hours with a remembrance of things past. Not a bit of it. It was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. My past felt wholly insignificant, almost invisible. As for the future, the days that lay ahead of me seemed as vast and empty as the steppes themselves. But the worst feeling of all was when I thought of my wife; just thinking of her at our little apartment in Berlin, supposing it was still standing, could reduce me to tears. Probably she thought I was dead. I might as well have been dead. I was buried in a tomb. And all that remained was for me to die.
I managed to mark the passing time on the porcelain tile walls with my own excrement. And in this way I noted the passing of four months. Meanwhile, I put on some weight. I even got my smoker’s cough back. Monotony dulled my thinking. I lay on the plank bed with its sackcloth mattress and stared at the caged lightbulb above the door, wondering how long they gave you for knocking a Blue’s hat off. Given the immensity of Pospelov’s crime and punishment, I came to the conclusion that I might expect anything between six months and twenty-five years. I tried to find in me something of his fortitude and optimism, but it was no good: I couldn’t help recalling something else he had said, a joke he made once, only with each passing day it felt less and less like a joke and more like a prediction:
“The first ten years are always the hardest,” he’d said.
I was haunted by that remark.
Most of the time, I hung on to the certainty that before I was sentenced there would have to be a trial. Pospelov said there was always a trial of sorts. But when the trial came, it was over before I knew it.
They came and took me when I least expected it. One minute I was eating my breakfast, the next I was in a large room being fingerprinted and photographed by a little bearded man with a big box range-finder camera. On top of the polished wooden box was a little spirit level—a bubble of air in a yellow liquid that resembled the photographer’s watery, dead eyes. I asked him several questions in my best, most subservient Russian, but the only words he used were “Turn to the side” and “Stand still, please.” The “please” was nice.
After that I expected to be taken back to my cell. Instead, I was steered up a flight of stairs and into a small tribunal room. There was a Soviet flag, a window, a large hero wall featuring the terrible trio of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and, up on a stage, a table behind which were sitting three MVD officers, none of whom I recognized. The senior officer, who was seated in the middle of this troika, asked me if I required a translator, a question that was translated by a translator—another MVD officer. I said I didn’t, but the translator stayed anyway and translated, badly, everything that was said to or about me from then on. Including the indictment against me, which was read out by the prosecutor, a reasonable-looking woman who was also an MVD officer. She was the first woman I’d seen since the march out of Königsberg, and I could hardly keep my eyes off her.
“Bernhard Gunther,” she said in a tremulous voice. Was she nervous? Was this her first case? “You are charged—”
“Wait a minute,” I said in Russian. “Don’t I get a lawyer to defend me?”
“Can you afford to pay for one?” asked the chairman.
“I had some money when I left the camp at Krasno-Armeesk,” I said. “While I was being brought here, it disappeared.”
“Are you suggesting it was stolen?”
“Yes.”
The three judges conferred for a moment. Then the chairman said: “You should have said this before. I’m afraid these proceedings may not be delayed while your allegations are investigated. We shall proceed. Comrade Lieutenant?”
The prosecutor continued to read out the charge: “That you willfully and with malice aforethought assaulted a guard from Voinapleni camp number three, at Krasno-Armeesk, contrary to martial law; that you stole a cigarette from the same guard at camp number three, which is also against martial law; and that you committed these actions with the intent of fomenting a mutiny among the other prisoners at camp three, also contrary to martial law. These are all crimes against Comrade Stalin and the peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
I knew I was in trouble now. If I hadn’t realized it before, I realized it now: Knocking a man’s hat off was one thing; mutiny was something else. Mutiny wasn’t the kind of charge to be dismissed lightly.
“Do you have anything you wish to say in your defense?” said the chairman.
I waited politely for the translator to finish and made my defense. I admitted the assault and the theft of the cigarette. Then, almost as an afterthought, I added: “There was certainly no intention of fomenting a mutiny, sir.”
The chairman nodded, wrote something on a piece of paper—probably a reminder to buy some cigarettes and vodka on his way home that night—and looked expectantly at the prosecutor.
In most circumstances, I like a woman in uniform. The trouble was, this one didn’t seem to like me. We’d never met before, and yet she seemed to know everything about me: the very wicked thought processes that had motivated me to cause the mutiny; my devotion to the cause of Adolf Hitler and Nazism; the pleasure I had taken in the perfidious attack upon the Soviet Union in June 1941; my important part in the collective guilt of all Germans in the murders of millions of innocent Russians; and, not happy with this, that I’d intended to incite the other plenis at camp three to murder many more.
The only surprise was that the court withdrew for several minutes to reach a verdict and, more important, have a cigarette. Smoke was still trailing from the nostrils of one member of the tribunal as they came back into the room.
The prosecutor stood up. The translator stood up. I stood up. The verdict was announced. I was a fascist pig, a German bastard, a capitalist swine, a Nazi criminal; and I was also guilty as charged.
“In accordance with the demands of the prosecutor and in view of your previous record, you are sentenced to death.”
I shook my head, certain the prosecutor had made no such demands—perhaps she had forgotten—nor had my previous record been so much as mentioned. Unless you counted the invasion of the Soviet Union, and that much was true.
“Death?” I shrugged. “I suppose I can count myself lucky I don’t play the piano.”
Oddly, the translator had stopped translating what I was saying. He was waiting for the chairman to finish speaking.
“You are fortunate that this is a country founded on mercy and a respect for human rights,” he was saying. “After
the Great Patriotic War, in which so many innocent Soviet citizens died, it was the wish of Comrade Stalin that the death penalty should be abolished in our country. Consequently, the capital punishment handed down to you is commuted to twenty-five years of hard labor.”
Stunned at my declared fate, I was led out of the court to a yard outside where a Black Maria was waiting for me, its engine running. The driver already had my details, which seemed to indicate that the court’s verdict had been a foregone conclusion. The Black Maria was divided into four little cells, each of them so cramped and low you had to bend over double just to get inside one. The metal door was perforated with little holes, like the mouthpiece of a telephone. They were considerate like that, the Ivans. We set off at speed—you might have thought the driver was in charge of a getaway car after a bank robbery—and when we stopped, we stopped very suddenly, as if the police had forced us to stop. I heard more prisoners being loaded into the Black Maria and then we were off, again at high speed, with the driver laughing loudly as we skidded around one corner and then another. Finally we stopped, the engine was switched off, the doors were flung open, and all was made plain. We were beside a train that was already under steam and making strongly exhaled hints that it was impatient to leave, but to where, no one said. Everyone in the Black Maria was ordered to climb aboard a cattle car alongside several other Germans whose faces looked as grim as I was feeling. Twenty-five years! If I lived that long, it was going to be 1970 before I went home again! The door of the cattle car slid shut with a bang, leaving us all in partial darkness; the bogies shifted a little, throwing us all into each other’s arms, and then the train set off.
“Any idea where we’re going?” said a voice.
“Does it matter?” said someone. “Hell’s the same whichever fiery pit you’re in.”
“This place is too cold to be hell,” said another.
I peered through an airhole in the wall of the cattle car. It was impossible to see where the sun was. The sky was a blank sheet of gray that was soon black with night and salted with snow. At the other end of the wagon, a man was crying. The sound was tearing us all apart.
“Someone say something to that fellow, for God’s sake,” I muttered loudly.
“Like what?” said the man next to me.
“I dunno, but I’d rather not listen to that sound unless I have to.”
“Hey, Fritz,” said a voice. “Stop that crying, will you? You’re spoiling the party for some fellow at the other end of the carriage. This is supposed to be a picnic, see? Not a funeral cortege.”
“That’s what you think.” This accent was unmistakably Berlin. “Take a look out of this airhole. You can see the Kirchhof Cemetery.”
I moved toward the Berliner and got talking to him, and soon afterward we discovered that everyone in the wagon had been tried in the same court on some trumped-up charge, found guilty, and sentenced to a long term of hard labor. I seemed to be about the only man who had committed a real offense.
The Berliner’s name was Walter Bingel, and before the war he’d been a park keeper in the gardens of the Sansouci Palace in Potsdam.
“I was at a camp next to the Zaritsa Gorge, near Rostov,” he explained. “I was sad to leave, as a matter of fact. The potatoes I planted were about ready to pull up. But I managed to bring some seeds with me, so maybe we won’t go hungry at wherever it is we’re going.”
There was much speculation about where this might be. One man said we were going to a coal-mining camp at Vorkuta, north of the Arctic Circle. Then another mentioned the name of Sakhalin, and that silenced everyone, including myself.
“What’s Sakhalin?” asked Bingel.
“It’s a camp in the easternmost part of Russia,” I said.
“A death camp,” said someone else. “They sent a lot of SS there after Stalingrad. Sakhalin means ‘black’ in one of those sub-human languages they use out there. I met a man who claimed he’d been there. An Ivan prisoner.”
“No one really knows if it exists or not,” I added.
“Oh, it exists all right. Full of Nips, it is. The place is so far east, it’s not even attached to the fucking mainland. They don’t bother with a barbed-wire fence at Sakhalin. Why would they? There’s nowhere else to go.”
The train rolled on for almost three whole days, and there was relief when finally they broke the ice on the locks and the door of the wagon opened, because the faces of the guards who greeted us were vaguely European and not Oriental, which seemed to indicate that we’d been spared Sakhalin. Not all of us had been spared, however. As men jumped down from the wagon, it was clear that one man had managed to hang himself from a wooden peg. It was the man who had been crying.
Several hundred of us lined up beside the track awaiting our new orders. Wherever we were now was cold, but not nearly as cold as Stalingrad; perhaps it was the weather, but a new rumor—that we were home—quickly murmured its way through the ranks like a Hindu’s mantra.
“This is Germany! We’re home.”
Unlike most of the rumors to which we German plenis were often prey, there was some truth in this one, for it seemed that we were just across the border in what many of my more rabidly Nazi comrades probably still thought of as the German Protectorate of Bohemia, otherwise known as Czechoslovakia.
And excitement mounted as we marched into Saxony.
“They’re going to let us go! Why else would they have brought us all the way from Russia?”
Why else indeed? But it wasn’t long before our hopes of an early release were dashed.
We marched into a little mining town called Johannesgeorgenstadt and then out the other side, up a hill with a fine view of the local Lutheran church and several tall chimneys, and through the gates of an old Nazi concentration camp—one of almost a hundred subcamps in the Flossenburg complex. Most of us imagined that all of Germany’s KZs had been closed, so it was a bit of a shock to discover one still open and ready for business. A greater shock awaited us, however.
There were almost two hundred German plenis already living and working at the Johannesgeorgenstadt KZ, and even by the poor standards of Soviet prisoner welfare, none of these looked well. The SGO, SS General Klause, soon explained why:
“I’m sorry to see you here, men,” he said. “I wish I could have been welcoming you back to Germany with pleasure, but I’m afraid I can’t. If any of you are familiar with the Erzgebirge mountains, you will know that the area is rich with pitchblende, from which uranium ore is extracted. Uranium is radioactive and has a number of uses, but there’s only one use for it that the Ivans are interested in. Uranium in large quantities is vital for the Soviet atom bomb project, and it’s no exaggeration to say that they perceive the development of such a weapon as a matter of the highest priority. And certainly a much higher priority than your health.
“We’re uncertain what effect prolonged exposure to unrefined pitchblende has on the human body, but you can bet it’s not good—for two reasons. One is that Marie Curie, who discovered the stuff, died from its effect; and the other is that the Blues come down the mine shaft only when they have to. And even then only for short periods and wearing face masks. So if you’re down the pit, try to cover your nose and mouth with a handkerchief.
“On the positive side, the food here is good and plentiful and brutality is kept to a minimum. There are good washing facilities—after all, this was a German camp before it was a Russian one—and we’re allowed a day off once a week; but only because they have to check the lifting gear and the gas levels. Radon gas, I’m told. Colorless, odorless, and that’s about all I know about it, except I’m sure it’s also hazardous. Sorry, that’s another negative. And since we’re back on the side of the debits, I may as well mention now that in this camp the MVD employs a number of Germans as recruiting officers for some new people’s police they’re planning to create in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. A secret police designed to be a German arm of the MVD. The establishment of such a police force in Germ
any is banned by the rules of the Allied Control Commission, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to do it under the table, by subterfuge. But they can’t do it at all if they don’t have the men to do it, so be careful what you say and do, for they will most certainly interrogate and interview you at length. D’you hear? I want no renegades under my command. These Germans the Ivans have working for them are communists. Veteran communists from the old KPD. What we were fighting against. The ugly face of European Bolshevism. If there were some among you who doubted the truth of our National Socialist cause, I imagine you have learned that it was you who were mistaken, not the leader. Remember what I’ve said and watch yourself.”
I was one of the lucky ones, in that I wasn’t ordered down the pit immediately. Instead, I was put on the sorting detail. Wagonloads of rock were brought up from the mine and emptied onto a large conveyor belt that was running between two lines of plenis. Someone showed me how to inspect the pieces of brownish-black rock for veins of the all-important pitchblende. Rocks without veins were thrown away, the others graded by eye and tossed into bins for further selection by a Blue holding a metal tube with a mica window at one end: The better the quality of the ore, the more electric current that was reproduced as white noise by the tube. These higher-quality rocks were taken away for processing in Russia, but the quantities considered useful were small. It seemed that tons of rock would be needed to produce just a small quantity of ore, and none of the men working at the Johannesgeorgenstadt mine were of the opinion that the Ivans would be building an atom bomb anytime soon.
I’d been there almost a month when I was told to report to the mine office. This was housed in a gray stone building next to the pithead winding gear. I went up to the first floor and waited. Through the open door of the office I could see a couple of MVD officers. I could also hear what they said, and I realized that these were two of the Germans General Klause had warned us about.