Endgame Vol.1 (80 page)

“At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

“I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. ‘I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.’ Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world—prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal” (Goldman, 56).

“In the first stage Schlabrendorff’s hands were tied behind his back and his fingers encased in a contraption in which spikes penetrated into the fingertips; with the turning of a screw they penetrated deeper. When this produced no answer the prisoner was strapped down on a sort of bedstead and his legs were encased in tubes covered on the inside with sharp metal spikes; the tubes were slowly drawn tighter so that the spikes gradually penetrated deeper into the flesh. During this process his head was pushed into a sort of metal hood and covered with a blanket to muffle his screams. Meanwhile he was belaboured with bamboo canes and leather switches. In the third stage, using the same bedstead, his body was stretched either violently and in jerks or gradually. If he lost consciousness
he was revived with douches of cold water. These tortures had extracted no confession from Schlabrendorff and so another method was tried. He was trussed up, bent forwards so that he could move neither backwards nor forwards, and then beaten from behind with a heavy club; with each blow he fell forward on his face with his full weight. All these tortures were applied to Schlabrendorff on the same day but the only result was that he lost consciousness. The next day he had a heart attack and could not move for several days. As soon as he had recovered, however, the tortures were repeated. Finally Schlabrendorff decided to say something. . . . [He implicated only a dead man the Nazis already knew about. As Hoffmann says on a previous page, “In fact Fabian von Schlabrendorff was so severely tortured that he was ultimately forced to abandon his initial policy of total silence and make statements implicating himself and those already dead. Only in this way, he thought, could he avoid tortures during which he might lose control of himself and his tongue.”] This seemed to temporarily satisfy the
Gestapo
; it was enough to prove complicity” (Hoffmann, 522, 521).

Those in power will stop at nothing: torture is routinely used by those in power today, as is known by those who already experience it. Would that we could emulate the courage of those who already resist, knowing the potential consequences.