It happened during the day, on the morning of February 15, and they didn’t knock at the door, they called by telephone. How can the everyday life you love and know, that’s filled with routine and things taken for granted, end so suddenly, and forever? How can this cold morning with the bright light on the snow that seems like so many others be the last? Eugenia was ironing, and her son was having breakfast at the kitchen table, drinking from a large cup. Her daughter had gone out to skate. The telephone rang, and at first she and her husband stood looking at it, not moving, not looking at each other. But it could be a call from anyone, maybe from the school, maybe their little girl had fallen while she was skating and the teacher was calling to tell them to come get her, that it wasn’t serious. After several rings, her husband went to the telephone, lifted the receiver, and nodded as he listened to what they were telling him.
“Eugenia,” he said, wanting, in vain, to make his voice sound normal, “it’s for you.” Maybe the boy dipped a piece of bread in his cup of milk and didn’t even look up. “Comrade,” said a young, well-mannered voice on the telephone, “would you have a moment sometime today to come by our office?”
Eugenia Ginzburg buttoned up the boy’s overcoat and sent him out to skate with his sister. She pulled his cap down tight, covered half his face with his muffler, went with him to the door, waved good-bye as he walked off down the snowy street, and never saw him again. No one had come looking for her, no one had pointed a gun at her, handcuffed her, or shoved her into a black van, she just went out as she did any morning and walked toward the station; she could blend in with the crowd converging on the platform as a train approached, and get on, and maybe no one would notice her face. “I’m not doing anything,” she had told the well-mannered man on the phone. “I’ll come right now.” She’d wanted to go alone, but her husband insisted on going with her. Outside, when she heard the familiar sound of the door closing behind her, she thought calmly that she would never hear it again, that she would never step across that threshold again. They walked in silence across the unbroken snow radiating whiteness in the gray February morning. They didn’t hug each other when they went their separate ways at the entrance to the building where the men were waiting for her: to say good-bye would have been to recognize the abyss opening between them. Her husband said, “You’ll see, you’ll be home by suppertime.” She nodded and pushed open the door. As she went in, she turned back and saw him standing motionless in the snow in the middle of the street, his mouth open and eyes afraid. For years, in disciplinary cells, in the stinking cars of trains that never reached their destination, in icy barracks in deserts of snow, in the hallucination of fever and hunger, in the debilitation of forced labor, in the eternal dusk of the polar circle, Eugenia Ginzburg saw that face, the expression she wouldn’t have caught if she hadn’t turned that one time before pushing a door that opened to the busy sound of footsteps, voices, and typewriters.
Three weeks later, on March 8, 1937, Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, who were on a trip to Moscow, were received by Stalin in a large office in the Kremlin. María Teresa León remembered him as bent over and smiling. He had short little teeth, as if his pipe had worn them away. They talked about the war in Spain and about Soviet aid to the Republic. On one wall was a large map of Spain, with pins and little flags indicating the positions of the armies. On another, a map of Madrid. Stalin asked María Teresa León if it would bother her if he lit his pipe. He talked with them for more than two hours, promising them weapons, planes, military instructors. He smiled at us the way you smile at children you want to encourage. Many years later, far from Spain, lost in the duration and distance of exile, María Teresa León remembered Stalin with a kind of distant tenderness. To us he seemed slim and sad, burdened by something, maybe by his fate.
WHEN THEY BEGAN the deportation of Jews from Dresden, Professor Klemperer felt temporarily safe because he was married to an Aryan woman. For the moment, I’m safe. As safe as someone can be on the gallows with a rope around his neck. Any day now a new law can kick the platform from under my feet, and then I’m a hanged man. Men came to get Greta Buber-Neumann on June 19, 1938, but when they showed her the arrest warrant, she pointed out that it bore a date that was nine months old, October 1937. It must have been mislaid in all the red tape of the interrogators and murderers, the intellectuals with round eyeglasses and exquisite ideas about literature and the need to purify the Revolution with blood. Or maybe someone had deliberately kept it in a desk drawer, examining it day after day at an office desk the way you study a valuable manuscript, in an office with the noise of typewriters and heavy doors and locks. Someone decided to prolong for a year the day-and-night torture of the German woman who went from jail to jail in Moscow, vainly seeking news of her husband, and who kept a suitcase in her small, icy room, packed with a few things she needed for the moment she was arrested and shipped to Siberia. She never learned how or when Heinz Neumann died. With a letter and a packet of food under her arm, she went to Moscow in the midst of the tumultuous preparations for May Day, keeping away from the crowd as if she had the plague or leprosy, a foreign woman who didn’t speak Russian well and who couldn’t trust anyone, because her former comrades were either arrested or dead or had turned their backs on her. A figure among the throngs, not wanting to see the red flags or the posters strung above the streets or hear the music thundering over the loudspeakers, the heroic march from Aida, she recalled years later, and Strauss waltzes. On April 30, 1937, Greta Buber-Neumann walks to Lubyanka Prison, hoping to find her husband, who was arrested three days before, and everywhere she sees portraits of Stalin, in the shopwindows, on the fronts of houses, on movie theater doors, portraits encircled with flower garlands or red flags bearing the hammer and sickle. When she passes a group of people who have stopped to watch as workmen with pulleys and ropes raise an enormous portrait of Stalin that covers the entire front of a building, Greta turns away and presses harder against her belly the package of food and clothing that she may never be able to deliver. If only I could never see that face again. In the Opera House square they have just raised a wooden statue of Stalin — more than ten meters tall and mounted on a pedestal encircled with red flags: Stalin, walking energetically in a soldier’s greatcoat and cap. What would you do if you were that woman lost in a vast foreign and hostile city, if they had taken away your passport and the temporary ID that classified you as an official of the Comintern, if they had thrown you out of your job and were about to throw you out of the room you shared with your husband, a room you still hadn’t straightened after the search, still hadn’t made the bed where you spent your last night with him, not sleeping for a minute, still hadn’t picked up the books they threw on the floor and then stomped on or the stuffing from the mattress they expertly gutted looking for hidden documents, weapons, proof? You wait in the room, sitting on the unmade bed, stupefied, hearing steps in the hotel corridor, watching as the gray light of the afternoon slips toward darkness. They will come for you too, and you even wish they would hurry, you have your suitcase packed, or the bundle you will take with you, but days go by, weeks, months, and nothing happens, except that you’ve become invisible, no one looks you in the eye, and when you stand in line in the police stations and prisons beside the relatives of other prisoners and your turn comes, they rudely close the little window in your face because it’s late. They won’t tell you whether or not your husband is locked up in there, or pretend they don’t understand the words you speak in Russian, words you have prepared so carefully, repeating them as you walk down the street like a crazy woman talking to herself. Ever since the Germans entered Prague, Milena Jesenska knew that sooner or later they would come looking for her, but she didn’t hide, didn’t stop writing in newspapers, she only took a few precautions; she sent her ten-year-old daughter to spend a while with friends, and she asked someone in whom she had absolute faith, the writer Willy Haas, to keep for her the letters from Franz Kafka.