I was anxiously reminded of that little Italian with the wire-rimmed glasses who, pointing his Zebaoth’s finger, had pronounced, “It’s him!”
The captain stood up and in habitual Russian soldier’s habit pulled his tunic below his belt. “Citizen Blumenfeld, Isaac Yacobovitch?”
“The same,” I said, throwing a puzzled look at the pale Frau Kubichek.
The captain switched to Russian. “Follow me.”
“Where?…Why?” I asked in Russian too.
“For a check at the Soviet military command. Please, in front of me, Citizen Blumenfeld.”
I knew the difference between the cold “citizen” and “comrade” and it was this exactly, this difference, that froze the blood in my veins.
Outside a Soviet military vehicle was waiting to take citizen Blumenfeld, Isaac Yacobovitch, who at that moment hardly suspected that the Soviet command would only be the first stop in an unrepeatable and exciting trip to the White Silence of the North.
Farewell, Vienna, farewell Mexikoplatz, farewell Frau Kubichek and croissants with walnut filling! Farewell to you too, my poor invalid St. Stephen!
EIGHT
The whole business became rather complicated when the Soviet military investigator gave me an icy look, moved his eyes to the open folder with typed sheets of paper, sighed, carelessly leafed through the contents of the folder, and fixed his eyes on me again. I was standing in front of him and couldn’t understand at all whether I was under arrest or most politely requested to give some kind of information. Finally the investigator said, “You have betrayed your Soviet motherland! Why?”
“What are you talking about, Comrade investigator!” I said with sincere indignation.
“Citizen investigator! I am no comrade of yours,” he corrected me.
“In what sense have I betrayed it…Citizen investigator?”
“Why in the questionnaire did you deceive the American authorities and claim that you were born in Austria-Hungary?”
“Because I was born in Austria-Hungary.”
“The district of Lvov is in the Soviet Union!”
“But when I was born it was Austria-Hungary.”
“Maybe you’ll say it’s Canada? Or the Azore Islands?”
“I’m not claiming that…”
“Your last residence was Kolodetz, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics!”
“My last residence was the concentration camp Flossenbürg in Oberpfalz!” I insisted.
The investigator seemed highly satisfied with this confession of mine, because he leaned back in his chair and with a triumphant voice said, “Well, well, we come to the main subject. And now tell us about your treachery in the camp called Special Site A-17.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know someone named Stakhovich?”
“Of course. He was arrested with another two of our men, Soviets.”
“Oh, is that right! Now the Soviets become ‘ours.’ Did you know they were shot dead?”
“I didn’t know, but I suspected.”
“You betrayed them!”
“I?!”
“You!!!”
“I?!!!”
“Yes, you!!! Are these your initials?” He extended an order for arrest, signed by the Radish with the three letters I.J.B.
“This is the signature of the commandant Immanuel-Johannes Brückner.”
“And not Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld?”
“My God, how could I sign a document from a Nazi concentration camp? I’m a Jew!”
“Treachery has no nationality!”
He was right, the citizen investigator, treachery, as well as idiocy, has no nationality, it’s the most international thing, deserving its own Fourth or even Fifth International!
And further on what’s the use of telling you and boring you with details about the investigator’s sensational discovery, with which he intended to lay me flat and defeat my resistance once and for all, namely, that in the camps I was enrolled under the false name of Heinrich Bjegalski? For him, I mean the investigator and not the doorman of the Lvov ophthalmology clinic, this circumstance, adding to the weight of my guilt, was indisputable proof that I was concealing my Soviet origin. Forget the exact and indisputable information that I had lived in a concentration camp and played chess with the Radish. Was there any point in explaining that in this whole business Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Eliezer Pincus, my dear teacher of German and of all other aspects of knowledge, may his soul rest in peace, were also directly involved? Really, was there any point?
I, my dear brother, am but a speck of dust in the glory of the Creation or, say, an insignificant ant in the multibillion human anthill, and history will hardly pay attention and go back to my case, which is nothing more than a drop in the vast ocean of events. But she, the ant, has her own worldly vanity and would like to leave a good account of herself, which is why I’m sharing with you the protocol of the inquest, personally signed by me in the presence of the investigator. A copy of this protocol I managed to receive quite some time later from a filing officer at the court in Kiev, in exchange for two packets of American chewing gum and a pair of nylon stockings—in those years the tender dream of every female Soviet worker. Excuse me if you occasionally get a whiff of that youthful habit of mine of playing the fool, but insofar as the citizen investigator actually did regard me as a fool who could contribute to his rapid career advancement, why shouldn’t I provide some pleasure to the good man?
PROTOCOL
I, the undersigned Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld, born on January 13, 1900, in Kolodetz by Drogobych, the Lemberg voevodstvo, or Lvov, a Jew, hereby declare that I have never and under any circumstances betrayed my Soviet motherland, or any of my other motherlands, because, excuse me, they are five in number. I was born, as I mentioned above, in the wonderful town of Kolodetz by Drogobych, and grew up as a faithful subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The aforementioned state, which, for your information, no longer exists, I consider to be my first motherland and I think this is fair.
Later on, and in circumstances that I shall describe in court, when the time comes, without leaving my hometown of Kolodetz, Poland became my motherland.
I am grateful to this motherland of mine, because during the time of my Polish citizenship I married Sarah, about whom I will also give account, and she on her side bore three children of mine—two boys and a girl. I served Poland faithfully till the day my motherland was changed again. This happened on September 17, 1939, quite abruptly, when without leaving my hometown Kolodetz, the great Soviet Union became my motherland, which I served faithfully, regularly paying my trade union membership fees, participating in the First of May and the November Seventh demonstrations, and also congratulating my female co-workers on Women’s Day, March 8th. But then certain events transpired in which, I most responsibly declare, I had neither personal participation nor committed a fault of any kind, and the German Reich became my motherland, which, as a Jew from a proven impure race, I must admit did not warm my heart. This for the first time forced some changes in my permanent residence, as well as in those documents concerning my nationality, and after illegally residing—I honestly admit—in Lvov under the name of Heinrich Bjegalski, my address was initially Special Site A-17 in the Oranienburg forest, then the Regional Command in the above-mentioned town of Oranienburg, Berlin district, and finally I resided in the concentration camp of Flossenbürg (Oberpfalz), under the number of U-20-05765, where, despite some material and other inconveniences, of which I do not complain, I awaited the end of the war.
At the time of this interrogation I live in Vienna, on Margaretenstrasse 15. I live alone, because Sarah and the children never came back from the mineral baths, to which I personally sent them in June 1941. I am also obliged to explain that I have a permit for permanent residence in the territory of the Republic of Austria, as well as a
receipt for paid taxes and fees in compliance with the laws of the country, but I would be grateful to God if I would be given the opportunity to visit one more time my hometown of Kolodetz by Drogobych, Lvov region, USSR.
I declare with the utmost responsibility in front of the respected citizen investigator at the Soviet Military Command of the city of Vienna, that the initials of my name Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld (I.J.B.) and the initials of the commandant of Special Site A-17 Immanuel-Johannes Brückner (I.J.B.) coincide simply by chance, and that therefore I am not, please excuse me, a military criminal.
Personally written and signed by:
ISAAC J. BLUMENFELD
City of Vienna, 12 September 1945
And so, my brother, the dark clouds at my horizon became thicker, because besides the evidence of high treason, an additional devastating claim was presented to the national court that I was a military criminal, who with my personal signature had sent three people to their deaths. Except for the rejected request of my court-appointed lawyer for a handwriting analysis, which was said to be a useless waste of time, you understand the contradiction of the case: I was either a Jew or a Nazi military criminal! But major Gribov, the military prosecutor, was a very experienced person—the lessons of the great Soviet state prosecutor Andrei Yanuarievich Vishinski were apparent, and he managed to reconcile the irreconcilable.
I did not pronounce myself guilty, which was probably my most fatal mistake, because sincere repentance would have warmed the hearts of the court threesome, who, without faltering, and seized by revolutionary fervor, stuck me with ten years of rehabilitation labor camp.
And so, Shnat Shmita, once more from the top!
And you, Lord God Yahweh, master of Jewish destinies, who stretches Your hand out in protection above Your chosen people, would You please whisper to me, where are Your windows?
NINE
And now, brother, unfold the map of Eurasia and find Ural—the border between the two continents. Then take a stroll east and cross the river Ob, the first of the three great Siberian rivers. Continue to the northeast and try to cross also the second great river—the powerful Yenisey, and then further to the east the Lena too. Follow my road still further on, to the northeast, beyond the gold-bearing river Indigirka, until you stop at the rugged banks of the turbulent Kolyma. Take its rapids toward the Arctic Ocean until you reach Nizhni Kolymsk, in the foothills of the wild Kolymski mountain ridge, which, you might say, is where Soviet geography comes to a stop. Beyond the mountain ridge are only Ust-Chaun and Chukchi at the Bering Straits, and don’t go any further or you’ll find yourself penetrating the territory of the United States of America. The 70th parallel passes through here and if out of curiosity you follow it clockwise, you’ll make in the opposite direction a mighty polar roundtrip of the planet, passing through the Barents Sea first and then crossing Novaya Zemlya in the Kara Sea. Then you’ll touch the North Cape—the northernmost point in Scandinavia—cut through the middle of icy Greenland and when you get into the legendary route of Amundsen and pass by the Yukon fort, which is still dreaming the golden dreams of Jack London, through the Chukchi Sea, you’ll come back home to where, just opposite the Bear Islands, the constellation of labor camps shines bright. When I say “constellation,” I mean the red five-pointed stars above their strictly guarded entrances, with watchtowers made out of untreated pine-tree trunks. And that unsightly wretch perched on rocks fiercely blown by the icy wind, with eyes staring at the white vastness of the North, that’s me, ZEK-003-476, or to say it more simply—prisoner Blumenfeld, Isaac Jacobovitch, a traitor to the Soviet motherland and simultaneously a Nazi war criminal.
Forgive me for repeating myself if I tell you that I won’t undertake to describe or judge all this camp archipelago, with its unimaginable colorfulness and diversity, rendered in so much detail by the Russian fellow Solzhenitzyn, and by others, better authors than I, and I cannot swear that what I personally saw and experienced there is the same that someone else saw and experienced there, in the other camp, at a distance of fifty, five hundred, or five thousand Russian versts. Because the camps were quite different in regime, as well as composition and designation, and sometimes the workers, for example, in the tungsten and gold mines of the Northern-Anuyski mountain ridge were freer and better fed than the aging invalids—civil war veterans—from some rotten communal housing unit on the outskirts of Kostroma. From other places we would get visitors, according to mysterious schemes I never understood for dislocation and regrouping, inmates with loosening teeth and gums bleeding from scurvy, let alone those with hair falling out in clumps and swollen glands who were coming from the uranium mines, in which only a minority survived. And I’ll immediately point out to you the idlers, who, as I’ve already mentioned, had, according to the Geneva Convention, a special status as bearers of the Iron Cross of Oak Leaves, the camp aristocracy, so to speak, whom I served for awhile when they were working in the “mailboxes”—secret cities in the taiga for super-secret research, technology, and production that had neither a geographic indication on the map nor an address, just a postal code.
You’d be mistaken if you thought that all of us were punished for political activities: in this camp cocktail were flowing powerful streams of Siberian and Caucasian bandits, Georgian speculators and Abkhasian contrabandists, professional pimps and gamblers or simply incorrigible Moscow streetcar pickpockets, declassé types from the swamp of society, and next to them, prostitutes and mamashas from secret brothels and gambling houses. And with them, in the same cocktail, poets and philosophers, biologists and world experts on the reactionary, bourgeois pseudo-sciences genetics and cybernetics, theater directors and movie stars. And you’d be wrong again if you looked for a common trait and perceived all of them, say, as just anti-Soviet elements: there, in the camps, sometimes former participants in the civil war would grab each other by the throat in endless and irreconcilable fights and arguments, one on the White side, the other on the Red, who for the past couple of decades had been free and then, on some convenient occasion, had again been hauled in. You could have become a witness to raging theoretical disputes between Trotskyists and Stalinists, sleeping together in the same bunk, shoulder to shoulder, engineers from the great construction sites of the first five-year plans and sincere saboteurs from the same construction sites, inflexible anti-Communists and cadre Bolsheviks, collaborationists who had served the Nazis but stopped short of being willing to take a bullet, and participants in the resistance movement in the occupied territories or, say, in the Spanish Civil War, who found themselves here for reasons about which they hadn’t the slightest idea.
“Don’t try to comprehend the scheme, the hidden logic in all this mess,” said Mark Semyonovich Lebedev, my new friend and bunkmate, sitting on the rocky ledge polished by ice and winds—a young man whose musical comedies I had seen in Kolodetz, his hair now turned completely silver. “There aren’t any schemes, if the mess in itself is not a scheme, a genetically laid foundation of the regime. Not only in the camps but just in general. Unlike the German camps, in ours there are no rules of the game, and there aren’t any outside either, in society. The Nazis announced their ideological menu ahead of time and followed it strictly till the last second: which nations were to be subject to the Final Solution, which ones would be the manure of the Aryan race, and which ones faithful allies. Clear and precise criteria, announced in advance. True, inhumane and idiotic, unspiritual, barbarian—but criteria nonetheless. And we announced the building of a society of brotherhood, humanism, and justice and started singing that there was no other country where a man could breathe more easily. Then according to the Marxist theory of freedom as a conscious necessity, we realized the necessity of camps, all-around informing, and terror. I’m telling you, there are no rules of the game. But this can also be a rule, I even think—a rule for saving the nation. Do you get it?”
“No,” I admitted sincerely.
“Institutional cha
os, the anarchic movement of particles and the natural instincts for survival take up in lifesaving fashion the energy of the super-centralized postulates and democratize them, if you know what I mean. In fact, this Soviet element of spontaneous democratization in the final account destroyed the systematic Germans who have known since they were children that on the chessboard there are two black and two white horses playing. Against all the rules we put in a third horse and this is how we kicked their asses. Am I clear now?”
“You’re clear. Go on.”
“What did Parteigenosse Hitler expect when he launched a blitz war against us? That the oppressed Soviet people would rise up against their oppressor? That the panicky military specialists, technologists, and engineers liberated from the camps would seek the first opportunity to go over to the side of the Germans? Hell, no! That the population from the territories which the Hitlerites were declaring free from Bolshevism would greet them with bread and salt? Again, hell no! Listen to me, I was there and can testify: the fall of Moscow was inevitable, a mathematical axiom, check and mate in three moves. But the dancing party didn’t take place! Why? General Winter? Bullshit for suckers! After that came General Spring, and General Summer, didn’t they? No, we just put in front of those fieldmarshals a third horse, a fifth ace, and played poker according to the rules of football. Our strength lay in the caprice of chaos, the amateurism of spontaneously moving particles, the game without rules. In other words—in surprise, whose results, by the way, very often surprise even us. For example, to surprise the enemy, who expects you to trump him with the card of internationalism, but you pull out of your sleeve your most traditional, monarchic, Orthodox, and Great Russian nationalism, greasy with use. And to everyone’s astonishment it functions perfectly, despite the party schools and the strict study of the Short Course in the History of the Bolshevik Party.”
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