Word: weissberg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Conveyer." Weissberg soon learned that a claim to innocence was considered insufferable "provocation" by the G.P.U.-a deliberate attempt to undermine the confidence of the police authorities. Moreover, his rank entitled him to fabricate a really stunning spy story, superior in every way, for instance, to that of the simple worker in a cooperative fishery, who could only "confess" to having told the Germans how many fish were caught each month. And finally, the G.P.U. expected his "confession" to be watertight, as befitted the work of a well-trained Communist. "You've got to make [it] as though...
...When Weissberg was obstinate, the G.P.U. shoveled him into "The Conveyer" -their nonstop interrogation belt which took innocent men in at one end and turned them out at the other as finished traitors, ready to be driven away to Siberia. They sat him on a plain stool while relays of examiners interrogated him day & night until his head was splitting and his splayed buttocks a mass of burning pulp. After a week of this, Weissberg "confessed"-a ticklish job, because his "crimes" had to dovetail exactly both into the "confessions" of his "accomplices" (i.e., his arrested friends who had incriminated...
...examiners rewarded Weissberg with 24 hours of food and sleep. Refreshed, he boldly recanted the whole document. "You whore! You counter-revolutionary bandit!" raged the examiner, shoving him back on the stool. Weissberg stood it another four days, "confessed" again, again recanted. He then stood the "conveyer" for a further five days-and staggered out triumphant. From then on, the G.P.U. merely kept him in prison and beat him up occasionally...
Nine Million? Weissberg was not the only prisoner who defied the G.P.U. One skinny little Jewish tailor, who openly declared himself an anarchist but refused to admit to counter-revolutionary charges, "survived an almost uninterrupted 'conveyer' lasting for 31 days and . . . nights." Another prisoner, a Kharkov doctor, won through by dint of sheer comic genius and a wonderful memory for names. He not only confessed instantly, but wrote down the names of all his "accomplices"-i.e., "all the several hundred doctors in Kharkov." When the examiner refused to accept such a sweeping statement, the doctor addressed a strong...
...broken on the "conveyer," would implicate a dozen innocent acquaintances. Each of these would implicate a dozen more. Prosecutors signed arrest warrants in bundles, without bothering to read the names. Examiners broke under the strain not only of their work but of fear of being named by their prisoners. Weissberg estimates (on good statistical grounds) that with this sort of thing happening all over the U.S.S.R., the total of purge prisoners could not have been less than 9,000,000. Most of them went to forced labor in Siberia-not because the labor camps needed them, but simply because there...