Tag #156052 - Interview #94776 (Grigoriy Stelmakh)

In 1948 my father became nervous: his fellow comrades Tikhonov, former secretary of the Leningrad town committee, and Epshtein were arrested. On 20 January 1949, on my way home from school I saw two men carrying things from our home: my father’s camera and his hunting rifle. When we came home, we saw my mother tossing about the room that was all a mess. There was a search at home. I learned what happened to my father many years later after he returned home. State security officers came to my father’s office and asked him to follow them. He didn’t understand at once what it was about. Only when they asked him to take off his tie and untie and remove his shoe laces, he understood that he was arrested. He was accused by article 58, item 10: anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. He was taken to Spandau, a prison in Berlin. For ten months my father underwent tortures during interrogations. They tried to force him to write evidence against himself that he called to overthrow the existing regime and Stalin. My father didn’t succumb. They tried all methods of NKVD: torture with hunger, when an investigation officer was eating cutlets with fried potatoes before my father who hadn’t eaten for several days, night interrogation, when they didn’t allow a person to fall asleep and woke him up the moment he fell asleep. Besides, my father, an inveterate smoker, suffered without cigarettes, and an interrogation officer smoked good cigarettes in front of him. In November 1949 the investigation officer said that if my father didn’t sign his confession, he was to be ‘acted’ on the following day (in the NKVD language it meant that a person was killed and an ‘act for death from a heart attack’ was issued). My father was thinking all night through. He decided to sign the confession or he would die. He thought of saying that he was forced to do this in court. My father still believed that this was misinterpretation of the party policy and that the just Soviet court would know what was right. The interrogation officer said this was quite another matter. He gave my father a cigarette and somebody brought him food. Next day the investigation officer read to him that by decision of the special meeting he was sentenced to 10 years in jail. My father fainted and fell down and they brought him back to consciousness by pouring water on him. The investigation officer spoke to him in a different tone: ‘Isaac Abramovich, don’t be nervous, when you arrive at the camp you will write a request for review of your case’.

My mother and we stayed in Berlin few weeks after my father was arrested. My mother was trying to seek help from friends, but they all turned away from her. Only one of them advised to hurry up with our departure and helped us to get tickets and pack. My mother took some things that were left to us. She knew that we had a long and hard life without our father ahead of us.