Michal Reiman

“They began by telling me I was one of the head ideologists of the Right. I said: ‘That is an accusation, but you must prove it!’ It was found out that they weren’t prepared at all, they didn’t know what proof to show. About an hour later they said they were hungry, that it was time for lunch, that they want to have something to eat, so I said: ‘Okay, what can I say to that?’ So they went to the canteen and I went with them, we joined the queue; then they sat down and there was one free seat, so I joined them. The conversation turned to children, and I just thought to myself: ‘You’re supposed to throw me out of all my positions, and now you start talking about children, won’t you get yourselves into trouble!’ So we finished (lunch), we went back, it lasted another two hours, or thereabouts. Towards the end I was put before the question of what was my opinion on the incursion. I said: ‘I have not yet seen any evidence to show that an incursion was necessary here.’ To which they immediately replied with a second question: ‘Do you know that you cannot stay here with such a stance?’ I said: ‘If we’d began with this, we could’ve saved ourselves three four hours!’ So the meeting came to an end. I came to work the next day to begin packing the necessities. I came to the party officer and he showed me a paper: ‘Look what the committee wrote!’ So I looked, and there it was: ‘Michal Reiman - one of the head ideologists of the Right, prohibit any work in his line of profession, manual labour only.’ ”

“And then in autumn 1943 we began... It was necessary to make the harvest at least around Moscow, so they brought us out, I don’t know how many of us children, I think it was several classes of us, they took us some fifty kilometres to the west of Moscow. Nowadays it would be near to the Istra and Novi Ierusalim stations. They took us to a village in the region. That was such a horrifying experience, the village was completely burned down, nothing left. Only the one cottage which they herded us into, being children. All the villagers, those who were left, were huddled up in zemlyankas (dugouts). We worked on the fields, with various bits of leftover ammunition and the like scattered around us; we were clever enough to know better than to try anything with the ammunition. So we were there I don’t know how many weeks, slogging away in the kolchoz. In the end they gave us a payout of sorts. I remember it was a sack of potatoes and some cabbages, it must have been about thirty forty kilos.”

“And then I wrote the first article, they came to me when it was the anniversary of the October Revolution: ‘Write something.’ So I wrote an article for L76, I think it was called that, it was published by the German Left, Günter Grass and people like that. So I gave it to them and it didn’t do anything there. But it got to Italy. A man came to me, he translated everything from the dissent into Czech, he was from the Italian Left, he came to me and said: ‘I read the article,’ and he asked if he could use the article. I said: ‘Why not, it’s been made public.’ Then he wrote to me that Rinascita, that was a communist weekly at the time, might publish it. They’ll be really angry in Prague, but if the Italian communists publish it, it could cause some progress. They can froth as much as they want, but they can’t say a thing against it. So they published it and the result was that two three months later I got a letter from Prague saying I had committed some acts of sedition by publishing a defamatory article in Rinascita, and apart from that I had also taken part in a biennial about the dissent.”

“It was pretty big, but all the equipment was for summer. So they brought us there, I don’t know how many of us children. I guess they counted on us being back by winter, like it was just a temporary measure. We didn’t even have food supplies there, no wood, practically nothing was there and practically nothing went on. But I can understand that, as they must have had absolutely different problems - because when your battlefront starts collapsing, everything works a bit differently. So we stayed in the houses which it was not possible to heat without a sufficient supply of wood, in other words we had to collect it ourselves before snowfall, because it wasn’t possible when snow came. Us children heated it up ourselves quite a bit. Luckily there were birches in the area, which was considered to have a good fuel efficiency. So we would stick a few logs into the fire and take a brick out from the chimney so that when the wood burned out the warm air would waft into the room we slept in; but that gave plus minus zero. It was a pretty harsh winter. There wasn’t anything to eat. Mostly it was just oats, but not like the flakes you know today, but ordinary oats for horses. That means they made an unrefined porridge out of it, sometimes with a spot of grease in it, but mostly without. Sugar, that was a rarity whenever they gave us any. We didn’t use it, but kept it instead, because we knew that there should be some feast days sooner or later.”