Olen Steinhauer - The confession

We had the same kind of soup and bread I’d had in Yalta 36, sitting outside in the cold, and were then marched through the predawn night out of the camp and farther east. I was hit a couple times by the barracks guard, and the old, worried man was hit three times. It impressed me that, despite the blackening welt that showed when his shirt rose from his hip, he could keep moving. There were about three hundred of us in all, being beaten across the wheatfields, two miles to Work Site Number Two.

The work on the canal had not been going on long. A crevice about fifty yards wide and a quarter of a mile long had been dug, and we were told that our daily quota was ten cubic yards. If we did not reach that quota, we would be punished. Each of us was given a shovel and a wheelbarrow and sent into the hole. They had picked a sandy area, and as we hefted the heavy wheelbarrows sand spilled out. The guard standing by the truck where we dumped it looked at each load critically, asked our name, and marked down an estimate. This went on.

The first day was the hardest. It was unbelievable how heavy those wheelbarrows were, and how undependable the sandy wall of the canal could get. Often I would make it halfway up, only to slide and see my entire load turn over. A guard would scream at me from above, accusing me of sabotage, while I tried to focus and fill it up again. I didn’t make the quota at all the first week, and each night, after a dinner of more soup, I cut wood outside, under the glare of the camp searchlights.

Although they sometimes made excuses, it became evident that the killings had no logic other than the logic of terror. Those who did not collapse on their own could at any moment be pulled out of roll calls, out of our dinner huddle, out of work details or bed. Sometimes a guard approached a prisoner in the morning and held a small mirror in front of his face. “Take a good look-this is the last time you’ll see yourself alive!” Then he handed the prisoner a burlap bag to carry to the work site, and that night the bag carried him back.

By the second week I was terrorized into submission.

I talked with the other prisoners during the rare instances when exhaustion did not make me mute. There were all kinds: students, Gypsies, factory workers, and even some who had been in the Party-the old worried man had been the head of his metalworking collective until he was turned in. “I know who it was, though,” he whispered to me one night, the worry suddenly fleeing his face. “Wlodja Stanislavsky. He’s one of the machinists, and for the last five years he’s been in love with my wife. But she would never touch that dirty Pole. So he decided to get rid of me.” He shook his head. “That bastard will only have her if he rapes her.”

His name was Tibor Petrescu. He had been in the camp for a month when I arrived, and each Sunday when we were allowed to rest he wrote his wife long, convoluted letters. At first I wrote letters, too. I wrote to Emil, asking him to find a way to get me out, and I wrote to Magda, in order to reassure her of my health and love. I had been a fool to let her and Agnes go-given the chance again, I would have sent Leonek to The Crocodile that night. How could I have hesitated when she asked to be taken back? In the camp I found the limits of my maturity. But after a while, I stopped writing altogether. I had asked Tibor if he ever received answers from his wife, and his no reminded me that mail did not leave this camp. Everything remained stacked in that steel cabinet in the commander’s office to be read over brandies and cigarettes, for a laugh.

I gave up, and gave in to the regime of work. I watched the other prisoners fall, and once brought back a burlap sack filled with Gyula, the student, thinking only that his fear had reached its end.

Despite all the sand we dug, the canal seemed to make no progress. Gogu arrived with a uniformed officer, shouting at us from above, and the next day the quota was raised to twelve cubic yards. I was just able to keep up, but Tibor fell short often, and at night I’d hear him grunting in the yard as I tried to sleep, then the thud as his ax hit wood.

Two and a half months into my stay, I was at the work site, collapsing beneath the weight of a wheelbarrow filled with snow-damp sand, when the mustached barracks guard-the Cosmin I’d heard of in another life-appeared at the edge of the canal. He put his hands on his hips. That morning he had pulled a boy from the roll call, ordered him to strip naked, then made him sit in the snow and cover himself with it, like a blanket. When we marched off to work, the boy was still there, rasping through congested pipes, turning blue. “Kolyeszar!” I looked up, my empty stomach tightening. “Get up here, Kolyeszar!”

I left the wheelbarrow and climbed up the embankment. Cosmin grabbed my ear and started walking forward-I had to bend so it wouldn’t tear off. He walked me to another guard, who kept his machine gun pointed at me.

“Take care of him,” said Cosmin.

I could hardly walk back across the wheatfields. I didn’t know why they hadn’t killed me there, in front of the others. Shooting me in secret just didn’t make sense-it was the one thing I felt must make sense-and only when we were in sight of the camp did I begin to suspect that I wasn’t going to die.

We went in through the back gate and stopped at the commander’s shack. The guard knocked and waited. By the fence was a burlap sack. I knew, by glancing over to the empty yard, that the frozen boy was in it. “Enter.” The guard opened the door and pushed me inside before closing it again. The warmth enveloped me as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Gogu sat at his desk, fanning himself with a file, while beside him, impassive, stood Brano Sev.

He said, “Hello, Ferenc.”

“Hello.”

“Can you excuse us, Comrade Commander?”

Gogu stopped fanning himself and looked at Sev. He seemed about to protest, but then lumbered out, muttering to himself. Sev took the commander’s seat and motioned to a chair. I collapsed into it.

“You don’t look good, Ferenc. Camp life doesn’t suit you.”

“You’re right.”

“And that smell.”

“It’s the pus.”

“Well, let’s see if we can get you out.”

I didn’t answer, afraid that anything I said might ruin this one tenuous possibility.

“I should tell you,” he said after a moment. “You should know that I never knew about this. About Kaminski. He was sent to help me with my work, and for a while he did just that. I was grateful for his help. But when he started showing interest in Nestor Velcea I became suspicious.”

He paused, so I ventured an observation: “But it was you looking at his file.”

“Yes,” he said. “After Kaminski had already been through it. I wanted to know why he was so interested in an ex-camp prisoner, and so interested in your case. The only connection seemed to be that he was running the Office of Internal Corrections at the same time Nestor was put away. But I didn’t know enough to understand everything. Maybe if you had been more honest with me in the first place, I could have helped.”

I looked at my blackened fingernails. “But you did know about Sergei.”

“Of course,” he said without inflection. “I knew about the execution in ’forty-six. You have to understand: Back then we were still fighting a war. It wasn’t as relaxed as it is now.”

“Relaxed?”

As he talked, he arranged his hands on the desk, as if plotting out moves. “People forget. I learned of Sergei’s execution just after Kaminski performed it. It was a necessary thing. Sergei’s investigation threatened to undermine the entire Soviet presence in the country. We still had Fascists in the hills, and foreign instigators were spread throughout the city. They could have used the investigation to devastating effect.”