Dancing Under the Red Star (21 page)

When these interrogatory methods failed, and I did not confess, I found out what “or else” meant. They resorted to other tactics. One officer stared me down for several moments, then slowly turned aside and calmly said, “Citizen Werner, how would it be if we went to pick up your mother also, and then you could both be here together? We can go get her right now if you don’t immediately cooperate!” I knew this threat was no mere scare tactic. They would arrest Mama in a minute if I didn’t say something. They had done it many other times with many other families. I knew I couldn’t let that happen, not to my mama! Not after my papa and I had both been railroaded like this.

I agonized over this new threat. Their intimidation worked well. These guys were very good at what they did, but at the core, they were still garden-variety mobsters. And they had a distinct advantage over me: they were holding all the cards, and I held none. So, purely by default, they won. It still took them another month of their clever interrogations before I finally broke from sheer exhaustion. They wore me out, and they broke me. They outwaited and outlasted me.

There came a time, during one particularly long session, when I just couldn’t keep my eyes open. In a state of exhaustion, I eventually broke down and signed their confession just to get it over with. Then, and only then, was I allowed to sleep. And did I ever sleep, as if I would never wake up.

When I came to my senses, I realized I would have to pay dearly for this confession. But they simply had worn me out. With incredible skill, they had perfected this form of human manipulation, as any consummate artist perfects his craft. I had lost, and they had won, at least for now. Realizing I had no other options, I finally confessed under the continuous pressure of their coercive tactics. “You’re right,” I said. “I am guilty of spying for Britain’s Secret Service.”

Twelve

PRISONER

O
nce a month the inmates in the political prison were given a single sheet of paper and a pen. This was our chance to officially register any complaint or request we had. Although it was something between an exercise in futility and a psychological con job, this procedure must have been intended to preserve the appearance of justice and order. I decided that on the next go-round for complaints, I would faithfully recite the method by which the NKVD officials had obtained my so-called confession. I did not expect anything significant to come of it, but I wanted to bear witness to their manipulative and coercive tactics.

But something did come of it. Three weeks later, at the end of January 1946, in the midst of another interrogation, Fidoli stood up unexpectedly. Smiling warmly, he said, “Margaret, you may return to your cell to gather your things. I have been instructed to prepare your transfer papers for Lubyanka.” I was going to be transferred from the Gorky jail to the notorious and feared political prison in Moscow. It was two hundred miles from Gorky and from Mama. How would I keep in touch with her? What would happen to me in that awful place?

“But, Fidoli,” I pleaded, “are you serious? Why Lubyanka?”

He smiled calmly, shrugged his shoulders, and replied, “Don’t worry, Margaret. You’ll be fine.”

I had no idea what would come next, but I hoped there would be something redeeming about finally getting away from Anastasia.

After being transported in a prisoners’ van to Moscow’s Lubyanka prison, I was again stripped and subjected to a very thorough and humiliating body search. Then I was locked in a windowless cubbyhole with a small, hard bench and some tiny ventilation holes in the door for air. Everything in sight was dark gray. I still didn’t understand why I was here, because I knew that political prisoners like me were not typically housed at Lubyanka. Under Stalin, this notorious institution was reserved for the most hardened offenders of Soviet law: gangsters, murderers, violent criminals of the worst variety.

Why was I here?

I spent many hours jammed in this tiny dark cell. Frightened though I was, it was a relief when a guard finally came to let me out. We walked a long way through the enormous prison to another cell. This one was a pleasant shock: a much larger cell, clean, warm, and bright—not gray—with eight regular iron cots spaced evenly throughout. Of course, in the corner stood the well-known parasha, but this one was made of steel and therefore easier to keep free from odor. Unlike my prior cells, this one seemed fairly livable. I had prepared myself for the worst, so my first thought was that this room had to be a setup. I was rapidly becoming an expert in their tactics, sure they had something else up their sleeves. They usually did.

Seven other women shared this cell, each with her own story. Among them were a well-known doctor from Riga, Latvia, and a famous actress from Moscow, whose name I can’t recall now. At that time she was a respected and leading Soviet actress, and I deeply admired her and her work. I quickly made friends with everyone there, obliged to give my testimony, tell my story, and more obliged to hear everyone else’s. In the many horrendous and unfathomable stories we told each other, we gained a kind of comfort. We heard about each other’s pain, hardships, and suffering. Though our stories were different, they were also much the same. Anguish and sorrow seared us all, connecting us by a common thread. And we shared one great common denominator:
injustice!
None of us had committed the crimes we were charged with. Every one of us had been set up and railroaded by this evil regime. I began to wonder whether anyone incarcerated in the Soviet prison system was truly guilty.

Although we shared and discussed many things, everyone also maintained her private, secluded world of suffering and sadness that went beyond words and beyond the partial comfort we found in mutual understanding. Each of us was here for her own reasons, and we respected the uniqueness of each one’s losses. I ached for my parents. I still missed my father terribly, but my waking thoughts were now of my mama and how she’d be able to cope. I knew what she was going through, thinking of her daughter and only child, the only flesh and blood she had left in this world. Her maternal instincts were being squeezed in a vise. I knew that she would have traded places with me, but I was glad I was here instead of her. Though I hated the prison routine, I was strong enough to bear it.

I was thoroughly examined by the female Latvian doctor, in the cell, but at least in a far corner of the room, out of the guards’ view. She wasn’t favorably impressed with my health, including, she said, my brain. She arrived at that diagnosis and general assessment after closely examining my eyes.

When night fell, we all settled down to sleep, and now I had to comply with a whole new set of night rules. Again the lights were left on, but here we were allowed to sleep with blindfolds. The new problem was that our hands and arms had to be fully exposed at all times throughout the night so the guards could see them. This certainly took some getting used to. If someone tucked her hands under the covers, the guard would rap on the door, waking everyone. This happened at least three or four times a night when a newcomer, like me, was being indoctrinated. It was surprisingly difficult to follow this simple rule. It was like being told that from now on you had to sleep standing up. It took me three nights to learn how to sleep like this; I had to work at it, and that didn’t make me too popular with the other women.

We prisoners at Lubyanka did share some lighter moments. The doctor, who was also a professor of criminal medicine, told us many interesting stories from her experiences in homicide and forensics. And the actress, who had a beautiful monkey fur coat with her, was adept at telling ethnic stories and jokes in dialect. She made us all laugh. She also taught me a few German songs, which I still remember.

Every now and then, the door to our cell would slowly creak open, and a guard would whisper a single initial: the first letter of someone’s last name. That person was being called for interrogation, and the guard would lead her away. When the guards were leading a prisoner down the hall, they made a strange clucking sound with their tongues to warn any approaching guards. This, I learned, was their formal line of communication. Again, it was important that no prisoner was ever recognized by another prisoner in the halls, even accidentally.

My name wasn’t called for about a month. When the guard whispered
W,
I was led a long way through dreary corridors to another nondescript room. There I had to go through the whole procedure all over again: the interrogations, the same mindless questions, my same answers. My prisoner file, which they consulted quite often, was always prominently situated in the same place on the same desk. I was frequently interrogated by a group of officers, but I stuck to my original story, because it was not only the truth but also the only story I had, and the only one I had ever told them. Someone once said, “The nice thing about telling the truth is that it’s the only story you ever have to remember.”

The interrogators were always pressuring me to change my account to fit their charges, but the truth was the truth, and I was determined to stick to it. I was pleasantly surprised that they did not resort to the underhanded and barbaric tactics of their Gorky counterparts. Instead, I was able to get plenty of sleep at any time of the day or night. When we asked, they would even turn off the cell lights during the day, which brought much relief to our constantly tired eyes.

Lubyanka’s food was also significantly better than Gorky’s. The doctor was diabetic, so she received a different diet, which included white bread. She generously shared this with me because we were the only ones from Gorky, and for some reason we were not permitted to receive food packages from relatives. Because the doctor was legally blind and unable to wear her glasses in the shower room, I helped her bathe during our designated times.

The actress received numerous packages from her relatives in Moscow and often treated us to candy, cheese, sausage, and cigarettes. She usually saved all of her leftover pieces of face soap for me, as well. By carefully molding these pieces of soap together in my palms with some water, I could make a fairly large piece of soap. Although it was a rather peculiar color, who cared? We did the best we could with what was available.

In the corner of our room, a large grate of fine grillwork covered the heat register. We used the grate for stringing out our bread to dry, in order to make it edible. We pulled coarse strings out of our towels, plaited and greased them, and used them to cut the bread when it was dry. Improvisation was the order of every day. No laundry facilities were available for the prisoners, so we carried our bedsheets to the bathroom one at a time, and with a little bit of soap and a lot of elbow grease, we laundered them in the cell’s tiny washbasin—a lengthy ordeal. We then dried the sheets by swinging them in the air. We did the same maneuvers with our clothes.

Once a week we were given a needle and about a foot of thread for necessary clothing repairs. We were also allowed to use a pair of blunt scissors for our fingernails, which seemed to grow more rapidly than normal. A nurse gave us small amounts of cotton every month for our personal times. And aspirin, whenever it was available, was dispensed for our aches and pains. Our diabetic doctor also received her insulin shots on schedule.

We had a surprisingly good selection of books, which helped to pass the time and take our minds off our troubles. The books were politically filtered, however, and never of a subversive or controversial nature or contradictory to good Soviet ideology. There were no Bibles; they were strictly forbidden, as were any references to God. Once a day we were allowed to exercise or go for a walk in the jail yard for about twenty minutes. Our circumstances were difficult but not altogether cruel. Practically everything I had heard about this prison—the dreaded Lubyanka—I personally found to be untrue. I had a lot of time to think, probably more time for that than anything else. And if they said, “There is no God,” well, I was beginning to see it much differently.

But as suddenly as I was sent to Moscow, I was returned to Gorky’s Vorobyo’vka. I never learned the reason for either transfer. I suspected it had something to do with my complaint, but even this was inconclusive. This time I was assigned to a solitary cell. It was perhaps five by seven feet, with a low ceiling, dingy, smelly, and slimy. And, yes, it was gray. Once again I was sent to my old interrogator, Fidoli, who began his customary protocol. He wanted to make me confess to things I absolutely had not done, things I was entirely unaware of. I wondered whether these people would ever tire of these tactics.

During one typical interrogation session with Fidoli, I refused to put my hands behind my back. Instead, I continuously paced the small room, taking two mockingly rebellious full steps at a time, until I was tired. I figured a little demonstration would make me feel better. It was a momentary one-woman revolt, a harmless spur-of-the-moment uprising. I either had to let out my inner tension or break down completely in front of him. I wanted to change the rules to the game a little, especially since it was only Fidoli, whom I believed to be entirely safe.