“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.”