Surprisingly, life in the Solovets concentration camp did not bring Friedman to his knees, but rather toughened him up. He categorically refused to play the role of a counter-revolutionary and terrorist. Threats did not work on him, and promises he did not believe. Friedman told Berman that he had already been confused once and believed the promises of the interrogators of the Ministry of Internal Affairs: to his own detriment he now had to pay the price of ten years of imprisonment.
According to Friedmann himself. What happened was that after his arrest in 1935, the NKVD interrogator Boleslav Lutkovsky told him that if he refused to confess. If he confessed and repented, he would be expelled from the Soviet Union as an undesirable alien. Lutkowski pretended to be sympathetic to Friedman and urged him to sign the confession and return to Lithuania as a deportee with the attitude of “communist to communist. In fact, he was sent to Solovets concentration camp with a ten-year prison sentence on his back.
In Solovets camp, Friedman often saw large groups of inmates, like himself, being sent in. From their conversations, he learned about the methods and tactics used by the NKVD interrogators.
Thus, he now stood before Biederman, not as a naive little brat, but as a tough opponent who had seen the world. He had become much wiser as a result of his own painful lessons and the experience of other comrades in Solovets camp. He was like a challenger, tit-for-tat and unyielding in his answers to questions.
To break his will, Berman ordered an interrogation team to interrogate him day and night. The team pulled out all the stops, promises, threats, psychological oppression, and psychological torture. However, when Friedman was returned to Berman, he remained as resolute and unyielding as ever. Berman tries to exploit the desire for survival inherent in man, but remains unsuccessful. Over time, the tension between them reached the point of almost fighting. On one occasion, this conflict arose again, and Friedman yelled in Buhlman’s face.
“You only arrest innocent people indiscriminately and force them to admit that they are Gestapo agents. Why don’t you go and arrest the real Gestapo agents? You don’t know how to catch them!”
Friedman made the last sentence particularly clear, “You don’t know how to catch them!” At the same time, he mockingly waved his index finger in front of Behrman. Berman decided that Friedman was intent on picking a fight with him, so from then on he tried to avoid interrogating him alone.
On one occasion, Berman told me about another confrontation he had with Friedman in front of me. Berman usually did not curse, but in this conflict he took out all the curse words he remembered on the interrogator. But Friedman scornfully sized him up from head to toe and said harmoniously. “Poor intellectual. You don’t even know how to curse yet, so listen and learn!” With that, Friedman cursed away viciously. He cursed so loudly, so nastily, that he would never have been heard in Moscow. He was used to hearing these curses in Solovets, and had learned them. The prisoners there often took out their pain and despair in such curses.
Friedman’s pride and untamedness soon spread among the interrogators and the heads of the Interior Ministry. These people began to frequent Berman’s interrogation room for the purpose of meeting the interrogated man. The staff of the Foreign Service, who had never had the opportunity to arrest anyone but often feared that they would be arrested by others abroad, was particularly interested in Friedman. When Friedman was brought in for interrogation, he often had to wait for a few minutes in Berman’s secretary’s office, and the watchers used these minutes to talk to him and treat him with foreign cigarettes. Friedman spoke to them in a gentle, even almost friendly tone.
Although Berman and Friedman had conflicts with each other and often insulted each other, but later their relationship suddenly eased. Friedman’s boldness and that unimpeachable honesty and strength of character aroused in Buhlmann a sense of reverence that bordered on admiration. When other senior staff members spoke of particularly difficult defendants, Buhlmann had to spit out a haughty: “That’s nothing! They’re not even my Zorroch’s little finger!” And then he would give some specific examples.
Berman was by no means a cold-hearted torturer. Years of work in the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not extinguish the sense of justice and compassion in his heart. But, having been put on Stalin’s wagon like a slave, he had to obediently carry out the orders from above. If he had refused to “interrogate” Friedman, if he had dared to divulge any information about the future trial, he himself would undoubtedly have been arrested immediately and executed as a Trotskyist.
He continued to bring Friedman out of prison for interrogation on time. But instead of the saber-rattling of the past, each interrogation turned into a calm conversation, like a discussion. After a few months, Berman reported to Molchanov that he thought Friedman was completely hopeless and proposed that he be sent back to Solovets to serve his sentence. Molchanov rejected this proposal. He claimed that there was no “irredeemable” person for the Cheka, and that he would leave Friedman in the hands of Kogan of the Secret Service: “He will be able to cure Friedman.” Then he ordered Berman to discuss with Kogan the matter of confronting Friedman with Olivier Berger.
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