Antonio Molina - Sepharad

The only word Münzenberg has received is that he is to wait. He will be received and heard in good time. His inability to do nothing at all makes the waiting worse than the fear. The man and the woman, accustomed to the good life, to the brilliant social activity of Berlin and Paris, are left alone and confined to a Moscow hotel, reluctant to step outside into the wintry streets that seem so gloomy compared with the lights of the capitals of Europe where they have always lived. If they go out for a walk, there will be someone following them. If they go down to the lobby or the dining room, someone will make note of their every move, and if they speak above a whisper, the waiter who serves them tea will remember every word they say. They will be overheard if they make a telephone call, and if they send a letter to Paris, someone will scrutinize it under a strong lamp, inspect it for secret messages, and keep it as material proof of something, whether espionage or treachery.

At the end of several identical days, someone knocks at the door. After an instant of uncertainty, Münzenberg and Babette, tense and pale, find themselves confronting the familiar and yet by now nearly unrecognizable faces of Heinz and Margarete Neumann, the only ones who have decided to, or dared to, visit them. Perhaps they dared because they know they are already condemned, because they too are living the isolation of a contagious illness. Once infected, you can approach only someone who suffers the same illness. The two blond sisters and the two men of working-class origins: four lives trapped together. They speak in low voices, huddled close, all wearing their overcoats in the icy hotel room in Moscow, whispering for fear of microphones, so many things to tell after so many years of separation, so little time to say it all, to exchange warnings, for at any moment men in black leather coats very much like the uniforms of the Gestapo can knock at the door, or kick it down.

They say good-bye, knowing that the four of them will never be together again. Within a few months Neumann is arrested and disappears into the offices and dungeons of Lubyanka Prison, where just outside the front door stands a gigantic statue of Feliks Dzerzhinski, the Polish aristocrat who founded Lenin’s secret police, a man Münzenberg knew very well in the early years of the Revolution.

But the past counts for nothing, it can even become a basis for guilt. Koestler writes that ministers and dukes once bowed before the decisive and rough authority of Willi Münzenberg, but in Moscow no one welcomes him, no one returns his calls. He was everything, and now he is no one: the past is as remote as the bright lights of Paris and Berlin remembered in the gloomy monotony of a Moscow where the only illumination in the streets comes from the black cars of the secret police.

He organized the international campaign that made Dimitrov a hero, not of communism but of popular and democratic resistance to the Nazis. Thanks to him, German judges had to let Dimitrov go free, and now, in Moscow, he is the head of the Comintern. But Dimitrov doesn’t return Münzenberg’s messages; he is never in his office when Münzenberg tries to call on him, and no one knows how long it will be before he returns to Moscow.

The Club of Innocents, the credulous, the idiots of goodwill, the deceived and sacrificed who receive no reward — I have been one of them, Münzenberg thinks during sleepless nights in his hotel room. I helped Hitler and Stalin destroy Europe with equal brutality. I helped invent the legend of their struggle to the death. I was a pawn when in the intoxication of my pride I thought I was directing the game from the shadows.

Maybe his life isn’t that important to him, less important even than all the money, power, and luxury he has had and lost. What matters is that Babette may suffer, that she may be dragged down and have to suffer for the mistakes he made, all the lies he helped spread. To save her, he does not yield, he besieges the directors of the Comintern who once were his friends or subordinates and now pretend not to know him, he brandishes old credentials that now have no currency: his world campaign for aid to Soviet workers during the years of hunger, his early loyalty to the Bolsheviks during the mythological times of the Revolution, the confidence Lenin placed in him. You will die of your convictions. In the sinister and icy mausoleum on Red Square, in a faint illumination reminiscent of a chapel, he has gazed upon the mummy of his former protector, an unrecognizable face with the dull consistency of wax, lids closed over Asiatic eyes. We have come to the kingdom of the dead, and they will not let us return.

At last he wrangles an appointment with a powerful bureaucrat, one of Stalin’s protégés. In Togliatti’s office, Münzenberg shouts, vindicates himself, pounds the table, puts on an impressive spectacle of power and rage, as if he still possessed newspapers that printed millions of copies, and luxurious automobiles. He must return posthaste to Paris, he says, he must organize the greatest propaganda campaign of all time, recruit volunteers, collect funds, medicines, food, he must supply weapons, cement the solidarity of world intellectuals with the Spanish Republic.

Togliatti, who is blunt, quiet, twisted, and cowardly, a hero of the communist and democratic resistance against Mussolini that was almost entirely invented by Münzenberg’s political publicity, agrees, or pretends to agree, to his request; he picks a day for the return trip and assures Münzenberg that passports will be waiting for him and Babette at the office of the station police. Perhaps Münzenberg asks whether he knows anything about Neumann, whether he is able to do anything for Heinz and Greta. Togliatti smiles, servile but also reserved, demonstrating with restrained villainy his present superiority over the former powerful director of the International. He says that he can’t do anything, or that nothing will happen, everything will work out; he implies that this is not a particularly good time for Münzenberg to ask, just as he is about to leave.

Again the man and woman wearing hats and voluminous overcoats stand on the train platform, shoes shined, their great stack of luggage beside them; they look out of place, and insolent, in their broad lapels and fox furs. They cast sideways glances, nervous, uncertain as to whether they will in fact be allowed to leave.

The hour of departure is near, but their passports are not in the police office as Togliatti promised. All around them they sense the net, perhaps with the next step they will fall into it, perhaps each moment of delay is a planned stage in the culmination of their sentence. But they are not going back to that hotel now that the train is ready to depart, they are not going to give up, lock themselves in a room, keep waiting. Münzenberg grips the arm of his wife, so tall and graceful at his side, and guides her toward the steps of the train as he gives instructions for their luggage to be taken to their compartment. If they are going to be arrested, let it happen now. But no one comes near, no one stops them in the corridor of the train, which slowly begins to pull away at the announced time.

At each station stop, they look toward the platform, searching for the soldiers or plainclothes officers who will come on board to arrest them, ask for their passports, shove them around, and make them get off the train, or maybe surround them without a word, lead them away quietly in order not to create unnecessary alarm among the passengers.

“It was the longest train trip of our lives,” Babette Gross tells the American journalist fifty-three years later. In the dim light of the second morning, they come to the border station. “We thought they would be waiting for us there, prolonging the hunt to the last instant.” With a firm step, as the other travelers fell into line on the snowy platform to have their passports checked, Münzenberg strode toward the police office, the belt of his overcoat drawn tight, the lapels of his coat turned up against the cold, the brim of his hat snapped down over his rustic, fleshy, German face.