Gulag

In 1938 they wasted no time looking for papers and examining them—indeed, the police agents didn’t even seem to know the occupation of the man they had come to arrest . . . they simply turned over all the mattresses, swept his papers into a sack, poked around for a while and then disappeared, taking M. [Mandelstam] with them. The whole operation lasted no more than twenty minutes. But in 1934 they stayed all night until the early hours.

During the earlier raid, secret police, who clearly knew what they were looking for, had carefully gone through all of Mandelstam’s papers, discarding old manuscripts, looking for new poetry. The first time around they also ensured that civilian “witnesses” were present, as well as—in their case—a “friend” in police pay, a literary critic known to the Mandelstams, presumably told to be there in order to ensure that the Mandelstams did not secretly start burning papers once they heard the knock at the door.²⁶ Later, they did not bother with such details.

Mass arrests of particular nationalities, such as those that took place in what had been eastern Poland and the Baltic States, the territories occupied by the Red Army from 1939 to 1941, usually had an even more haphazard character. Janusz Bardach, a Jewish teenager in the Polish town of Wlodzimierz-Wolynski, was forced to act as a civilian “witness” during one such mass arrest. He accompanied a group of drunken NKVD thugs who went from house to house on the night of December 5, 1939, rounding up people who were to be either arrested or deported. Sometimes they attacked the wealthier and better-connected citizens, whose names were marked on a list; sometimes they simply hauled in “refugees”—usually Jews who had escaped to Soviet-occupied eastern Poland from Nazi-occupied western Poland—without bothering to write down their names at all. In one house, a group of refugees tried to defend themselves by pointing out that they had been members of the Bund, the Jewish socialist movement. Nevertheless, upon hearing that they came from Lublin, at that time on the other side of the border, Gennady, the leader of the NKVD patrol, began to shout:

“You filthy refugees! Nazi spies!” The children began to cry, which further irritated Gennady. “Make them shut up! Or do you want me to take care of them?”

The mother pulled them close to her, but they couldn’t stop crying. Gennady grabbed the little boy’s hands, jerked him loose from his mother’s arms, and threw him against the floor. “Shut up, I said!” The mother screamed. The father tried to say something but could only gasp for air. Gennady picked up the boy and held him for a second, looking closely at his face, then threw him forcefully against the wall . . .

Later, the men destroyed the home of Bardach’s childhood friends:

Off to the side was Dr. Schechter’s office. His dark mahogany desk stood in the middle, and Gennady walked straight to it. He ran his hand over the smooth wood and then, in a moment of unexpected rage, smashed it with a crowbar. “Capitalist swine! Motherfucking parasites! We need to find these bourgeois exploiters!” He smashed harder and harder without pause, making several holes in the wood . . .

Unable to find the Schechters, the men raped and murdered the gardener’s wife.