Читать книгу Out of the Night - Richard Julius Herman Krebs - Страница 9

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I wandered about aimlessly, thinking what to do. Shall I run away from this diseased country? Or shall I join the forces which are actively attacking the wrongs that made my blood rebel? One road tempted me with the free and happy countries I had seen during my seafaring years. The other filled me with the fervor and the high expectations of revolutionary youth. I felt a strangulating loneliness. I yearned for a place where I could belong.

In a water-front tavern I studied the Shipping News. There was a steamer of the Roland Line leaving at five for Panama and Valparaiso. The very names of those ports conjured up before me vistas of high coast-lines, of warmth and abundance, of laughing brown-eyed girls, and of jobs under foreign flags or in the copper mines, of jobs with decent wages and with promise for the future.

I decided to go. With the last of my money I filled a satchel with food—biscuits, sardines, corned beef and a bottle of water, and crossed the river to the India Docks.

The steamer was loaded. The longshoremen were closing the hatches, and the deck-hands were busy lowering the derricks. In an unguarded moment I slipped aboard and ran forward to hide. I climbed into the chain locker, closing the manhole above me. The bulkheads were damp and rusty. Beneath me tons of ponderous chain were curled up like iron snakes. A smell of mud and bilge water filled the place.

I heard the siren roar, muffled commands, the loud tramping of many feet, the rumbling of winches. Then the whole ship vibrated as the engines began to turn over. We were out-bound. In two or three days the ship would have cleared the English Channel and I could come on deck and report myself as a stowaway to the captain.

Somewhere in the river estuary the steamer ran into a fog. I knew it by the roar of the siren which came at steady two-minute intervals. Three, four times the siren roared. The vibration in the bulkheads ceased. The engines were stopped.

I heard the patter of feet on the forecastle head. It was followed by the clashing sound of metal striking metal. Someone was working on the windlass directly above my head. Suddenly I realized: the fog was too dense for the ship to proceed and the pilot had decided to anchor until the weather cleared. They’d drop the anchor and the chain beneath me would rush upward, tons of iron banging upward through the chain locker and I would be smashed to shreds in the darkness below.

A clear voice rang above me: “All clear anchor!”

Faintly, a rumbling voice came from the bridge—“Forty-five fathoms. Stand by to let go!”

“Help!” I yelled. “Hold anchor! Man below! Help, help!”

The clear voice above me said: “God Almighty.”

The next instant I had unfastened the manhole and scrambled out of the chain locker. A young officer came rushing down from the forecastle head.

Seeing me, he shouted: “Any more of you bums down there?”

“No.”

He ran back on the deck. “All clear!”

A command from the bridge: “Let go anchor.”

The anchor thundered to the bottom. All around was soupy fog. From near and far sounded the sirens of other ships groping in the fog. My knees trembled as the officer led me up to the bridge.

“Stowaway, sir,” he reported to the skipper.

Late at night I was taken ashore in the pilot’s launch. I spent the night in a dank police station in Cuxhaven. Next day a cold-eyed police judge sentenced me to seven days in jail for trespassing on the property of the Roland Line.

I served the seven days in the Hamburg city jail. The jail was overcrowded with workers of all ages caught stealing on the wharves, in railroad yards and warehouses, or surprised by police in the act of plundering food stores.

Among my fellow prisoners was a communist agitator, a thin young man whose name was Willy Zcympanski. A fanatic fire burned in his gray eyes. Seeing my eagerness, he singled me out for special attention. His explosive enthusiasm was contagious. The clear sincerity of his devotion thrilled me. More and more I became convinced that dedication to the revolution was the only worthwhile thing in life.

“With us a man can find awareness of his own strength,” Zcympanski said. “He is no longer a homeless cur. A man is born to fight.”

His influence upon me was so strong that I gripped his shoulder.

“Great battles are in the offing,” he continued. “The Party must prepare the armed rising. This time we won’t be losers. Soviet Germany and Soviet Russia will be invincible together. Then we’ll reach out—France, China, America, the whole world. No nobler aim is possible. To achieve it, no sacrifice can be too great.”

On the morning of the fourth day Zcympanski was called out. He went to trial for having organized communist nuclei among the police. Before he went he gave me a message for his sister, who worked at the Hamburg telephone exchange. The message, in code, was written on a piece of toilet paper. He also gave me a ragged little book, urging me to pass it on before my release. It was the Communist Manifesto.

I did not see Zcympanski again until 1932. By then he had become one of the most efficient operatives of the Foreign Division of the G.P.U. Loyal to the last, he committed suicide in a Nazi prison in 1937.

When I was released, a police officer ordered me to leave Hamburg immediately. “We want no vagrants in this town,” he said.

“Who, indeed,” I thought, “is making vagrants out of us?”

I went to see Zcympanski’s sister. She was a handsome blonde of twenty-five, tall and intelligent. Her name was Erika. Immediately she invited me to the first hot bath I had had in weeks. The fact that I had brought her a message from her brother made her regard me as a comrade. The sound of the word comrade, coming from her lips, made my blood leap. She told me I could stay at her apartment as long as I liked. Her warm, yet practical simplicity aroused my trust and admiration. I found in her a trait which is characteristic of many honest revolutionists: a fundamental kindliness and compassion side by side with a cruel disregard for the lives of all who actively opposed the interests of the revolution. On the walls were a portrait of Lenin and the picture of a young mother nursing her child.

“Do you like to read?” she asked me.

I nodded. Beneath the pictures low shelves were crowded with books.

“Revolution is a science,” she smiled. “Without sound theory, action is nonsense.”

I read hungrily. When I did not read, I prepared a frugal meal over the tiny gas range, and then I slept. After three days of it, I craved motion. The Communist Party had called the unemployed masses to a demonstration which was to take place that night. I decided to be there.

It was clear from the start that among the thousands who assembled in the belt of suburbs there were many who were determined that the demonstration should not be a peaceful affair. These were the trained Party members. They came with short pieces of lead pipe in their belts and stones bulging in their pockets. They did not hide their intention of coming to grips with the police.

Torches cast flickering lights over the swelling crowds. A whistle shrilled and the crowds began to move forward behind gray-uniformed military detachments of the Party. Red flags were unrolled, and the workers’ bands began to play the Internationale.

Toward nine o’clock the demonstrations from the outskirts converged. We were now skirting the inner city. All streets leading toward the center were blocked by police. Search-lights fingering over hundreds of crimson flags; sudden fanfares, and the gleaming reflections of torches on steel helmets imparted a strong macabre effect to the whole. And suddenly, after a muffled and manifold repeated command, the head of the demonstration swung toward the banned ground of the inner city.

Immediately the police pitched in. The pace of the masses slowed down. Men in the gray uniforms of the Red Front League pressed forward to assault and break up the police phalanx into small isolated groups. Then twittering sounds pierced the night. Flying squads of the police, emerging from side streets where they had been lurking, drove wedges into the flanks of the demonstration.

“Dissolve! Clear the streets!”

It was impossible to follow that order. Tumult ensued. Rocks flew. Clubs cracked. Throngs ran from pursuing policemen, only to reassemble and return to the fray as soon as their pursuers had turned for a sally in another direction. I found to my astonishment that, in the excitement of a street battle, a blow across the face with a rubber truncheon did not cow a man’s fighting spirit, but lashed it to a bright flame. The intimidating psychological effect which police uniforms usually have on a nondescript mass of rioters vanishes when the rioters discover that even a well-armed policeman is no match for a score of bare fists at close quarters. At times I saw young workers with the red five-pointed star on their caps jab their pocket knives into the legs of police horses. Invariably the horses reared and bolted.

In the end, we were scattered. The battle-field was littered with caps, torn clothing, broken glass, police helmets. With a horde of several hundred men and women I wandered toward the Aussenalster, a residential section of the well-to-do. The flags had disappeared. The bandsmen, to save their instruments, had long since gone home. A ragged, wild-eyed assembly of scarecrows, we roved up and down the broad, clean residential streets, yelling in unison.

“Hunger! Hunger!”

Lights were switched off, shades rattled down, doors were locked as we approached. A single howl out of a hundred throats plunged whole blocks into darkness. Once in a while a police truck sped around a corner, siren yelling, and cursing men leaped to the pavement amid the screaming of brakes. Instead of bread we got beatings. After all, it was what we had asked for.

Toward midnight we parted, tired, bruised, and hoarse from shouting. I turned up the collar of my coat, for it was bitingly cold. I had lost my cap in the brawling. My overcoat was in a pawnshop. As I passed the railway station, a young woman walked beside me. She was older than I; twenty-eight, perhaps.

“Going home?” I asked.

“Home,” she said . . . “that dank hole. . . .”

For a while we walked side by side, saying nothing. She buried her hands in her armpits and whistled a song. Then she said:

“Let’s sleep together.”

“No.”

“Why not? You are a comrade, nicht wahr?”

“Yes,” I said absently.

“So come,” she urged, and her voice sagged into a plaintive wail as she continued: “I need a man. I’m so goddam alone. I have not slept with a man for ages.”

“I like you, but I can’t.”

“Listen, I’m good in bed.”

“I have a girl to go to,” I explained.

She nodded. “I have one, too,” she said.

“A girl?”

“Yes, a little girl. I wish, by Christ, she’d been born dead.”

Two days after taking part in the hunger demonstration, in the second week of May, 1923, I joined the Communist Party. Early in the morning I went to the Red House in Hamburg.

A short, wiry man with strong eyebrows and a salient jaw received me, and asked a few pointed questions. It developed that he had known my father during the wartime underground work of the Spartacists in the Fleet. Considering me a very fit and reliable recruit, he signed me up at once.

“We have very little time to train and choose our cadres,” he said. “We believe in pushing young blood to the fore. We believe in youth, bold, disciplined youth.”

“I shan’t disappoint you,” I replied.

“Remember, a campaign is not a matter of leaflets and meetings, but of action, action and more action. Action means strikes. Mass strikes are the prelude to armed insurrection. We must bring conditions to a revolutionary boiling point, with any and all means at our command. Is that clear to you?”

“Very clear,” I answered.

“All right,” he went on, “you’ll work in the maritime section. Comrade Walter handles that. You know that Germany is an industrial country dependent on industrial exports and raw material imports. So shipping is a jugular vein of German capitalism. Should we succeed in making harbors and ships into fortresses of the Communist Party—we’ve got that jugular vein in our grip. We can break it and the bourgeoisie will bleed to death. You’ll report to Comrade Walter.”

Albert Walter was a thick-set, jovial, highly energetic Bolshevik of international caliber, and the undisputed chieftain of communist activities along the German seaboard. Bronzed, barrel-chested, he had a massive forehead, mobile features, and his small brown eyes seemed always on the alert. He was in his late thirties, and had lived for fifteen years the life of a professional seaman. After his release he made his way to Moscow where Lenin made him a political commissar in the Baltic fleet. In 1922, the Comintern chiefs, considering Walter their most able man in marine affairs, assigned him to head the International Propaganda and Action Committee of Transport Workers (IPAC-Transport). The communists being entrenched more solidly in Hamburg than in any other great seaport, Hamburg became the center for Comintern enterprises in the all-important marine industry.

Albert Walter ordered me to join one of the communist “activist” brigades in the harbor of Hamburg. Each month about a thousand ships entered this port, for the bulk of German exports and imports went through the docks of Hamburg. In the river basins along the Elbe flew the flags of every maritime nation on earth.

Each morning the harbor “activists” gathered on various concentration points along the water-front. There the leader of each brigade assigned his men to certain docks and ships, and supplied them with leaflets and pamphlets, and with the slogans of the day. So armed, we slipped into the harbor and boarded the ships and set out to win over their crews. Most ships were guarded by officers or company watchmen, and a wide range of dodges and tricks had to be employed to board the ships in spite of the guards. Often we swarmed aboard over the hawsers. At times we slunk aboard disguised as hawkers of neckties or as laundrymen. We distributed our leaflets, sold newspapers and pamphlets, launched discussions, and endeavored to enlist the young militants among the crews in the Communist Party.

Our immediate aim was to arouse discontent among the seamen, discontent against rations, wages and ship’s discipline. Wherever a crew was receptive to our agitation, we went on to form an action committee on the ship to prepare for coming strikes, or to build up the Party unit among the men, or to pick particularly able individuals for courier service and other confidential work.

Returning ashore at the end of the day, each “activist” wrote a detailed report on the ships he had visited that day. At headquarters these reports were copied and filed. These shipping files contained detailed data on practically every ship in the merchant service, permitting Albert Walter and his aides to obtain at any time an accurate picture of available forces before deciding on any major action. This system, known as the “Hamburg method,” was later adopted by communist water-front organizations on all continents.

I pitched into Party work with a high fervor. Nothing mattered outside the communist offensive. From early morning, when the stevedores went to work, until the ships’ crews went ashore at nightfall, I went from ship to ship, from wharf to wharf, in fulfillment of Party duty. And in the evenings there were meetings and discussion circles and political courses to attend which rarely broke up before midnight. I had no thought of clothes, amusements or girls. I felt myself a living wheel in the Party machine. I grew leaner, harder, and was supremely happy.

Among the innovations which I introduced was a method of work whereby the most active communists on each ship pledged themselves to engage in propaganda drives among the crews of other German ships in foreign ports of call. At one of the next conferences of the “activist” brigades I gave a detailed report of my experiments which met with acclaim. Up to then I had been classed as an agitator; I was now accepted as an organizer. The proposal of Albert Walter that I was to take charge of all Party work aboard the Hamburg-America Line vessels was accepted. Some fifty ships manned by more than two thousand seamen came into the category. That night I was so elated I could not sleep! All night I made plans—I thought of the fifty ships as my ships. Such responsibility was sweet.

I was on the way to become a professional revolutionist, in accordance with Lenin’s conceptions. I learned well the Party principle that the heart of the Comintern and its affiliated Parties must consist of an inner organization of men and women whose one and only aim in life is to work for the revolution; who are ready for any personal sacrifice the Party should demand, who are pledged to unreserved obedience to their Central Committee and utmost unity of aims.

I was class-conscious because class-consciousness had been a family tradition. I was proud to be a worker and I despised the bourgeois. My attitude to conventional respectability was a derisive one. I had a keen one-sided sense of justice which carried me away into an insane hatred of those I thought responsible for mass suffering and oppression. Policemen were enemies. God was a lie, invented by the rich to make the poor be content with their yoke, and only cowards resorted to prayer. Every employer was a hyena in human form, malevolent, eternally gluttonous, disloyal and pitiless. I believed that a man who fought alone could never win; men must stand together and fight together and make life better for all engaged in useful work. They must struggle with every means at their disposal, shying no lawless deed as long as it would further the cause, giving no quarter until the revolution had triumphed.

Already in June it became clear that decisive revolutionary events were impending. The breath-taking collapse of currency, the rapid disintegration of the anti-communist trade unions, the growing demoralization of the middle class and the spontaneous influx of large numbers of desperate and rebellious young workers into the ranks of the Communist Party were unmistakable signals of the coming tempest. Moscow had given a mandate to Karl Radek, the Comintern’s most clever—and most cynical—propagandist, to direct from Berlin the political campaign for a communist seizure of power. The order of the day called for transformation of sporadic strikes into a general strike, which in turn was to be the prelude to armed insurrection. An emissary of Radek, an ascetic-looking, fair-haired Russian named Kommissarenko, outlined the plans in a meeting of all communist forces in the harbor of Hamburg.

A few of the older communists objected. “But the masses are not ready,” they said. “They’ll stand aside and leave us to fight alone.”

Kommissarenko’s reply came like the crack of a whip: “Once we strike out, the masses will follow. The masses must make the revolution—but we will lead it!”

The young elements carried the day. We cheered the Russian. We were prepared to go ahead with a blind religious elan.

Came the day when all the action committees of the water-front met in a secret session. Ernst Thaelmann, who was then the chief of the Hamburg organization, spoke: “Let nothing deter us. The actions of a determined minority will rouse the fighting spirit of the masses. Stop ships by force when their crew refuses to strike. Board the ships and kill the steam. The Party is with you with every ounce of its strength. With the seamen in action, the workers of other industries will follow—the dockers, the shipyard hands, the railwaymen. Above all, we must teach the masses that there is no substitute for strike and armed rising in the struggle for power.”

I did not sleep that night. Between eleven and three my brigade was busy painting strike slogans in six-foot letters on the sides of ships and quays. In groups of four men we went out in commandeered row-boats, with strips of burlap wrapped around the oars to muffle the sounds of rowing, and slipped from ship to ship, from wharf to wharf, smearing in white and red paint the words: “Strike for the right to live decently. Strike! Strike!” On some ships this slogan reached almost from bow to stern.

In the dark of the night, across the oily harbor water, we could see other boats move stealthily along the sides of sleeping ships. My companions in the boat were Ilja Weiss, a bold, sinewy Hungarian; Hans Wonneberger, a broad-framed sailor; and a boy from the Young Communist League. Weiss led the expedition; Wonneberger and I painted with brushes tied to broom sticks; the young communist bailed the water out of the leaking boat.

While painting in the Hansa Docks, we were surprised by a launch of harbor police. Caught in the beam of a search-light we rowed madly toward a ladder at the end of the wharf. The young communist swarmed up the ladder with catlike agility. I followed close behind. Just then the police launch came alongside and a young officer leaped into our boat, shouting:

“Ha, rioters. Halt! You are under arrest!”

I scrambled up the wharf. Hans Wonneberger dived into the harbor and swam away in the night.

Ilja Weiss snarled: “Take this!”

He crashed a pail half filled with red lead squarely into the officer’s face. The officer gasped for air, then fell. Weiss lunged up the ladder.

“Red Front triumphs,” he yelled.

The men in the police launch started shooting. We ran away in the shadows of a long freight shed and heard the bullets ricochet from the corrugated iron walls.

“Close shave,” chuckled Weiss.

“Where’s Comrade Wonneberger?” I panted.

“Never mind him. He swims like a fish.”

Two minutes later the twittering siren of a police car sounded ahead. We ran into the shed and crawled into a stack of concrete sewer pipes. When all was quiet, we returned to the city on separate routes.

Ilja Weiss is today the secretary of the International Club in Odessa, wanted by most European police departments. Hans Wonneberger made the mistake of falling in love with a girl who turned out to be a secret agent of the Nazi Party in 1932. He was abducted by the G.P.U. to Novorossisk, and has since disappeared in Soviet Russia.

At seven in the morning all Party forces entered the harbor. The gates and the ferry landings were guarded by police. Communist military units engaged the police to allow the mass of agitators to penetrate the harbor from all sides. We overran the gangway guards and told the seamen to strike or to suffer a strike-breaker’s fate. Other “activist” units were working in a similar fashion among the dockers’ gangs. An officer who confronted the group of Ilja Weiss with a pistol in his hand was thrown into the harbor. Columns of striking seamen and unemployed workers mobilized by the Party boarded the ships to chase recalcitrant crews ashore by main force. Trade union officials who advised moderation were beaten up.

By noon the wide reaches of the harbor resembled a battle-field. Communists reinforced by a few hundred strikers waged a hand to hand battle with seamen who refused to heed the communist order. On three wharves we cut the mooring lines of ships, setting the vessels adrift in the hope that they would collide and block the channel to navigation. Mobile police squads descended to join the affray and to make arrests. Trucks filled with prisoners rumbled toward the jails. Steamers which had been boarded by special sabotage units whose task was to douse the fires in the stokehold roared their sirens for police assistance. By three o’clock forty ships lay paralyzed, but the police slowly succeeded in pressing us out of the harbor. Police barricaded the entrances. At the Elbe tunnel stood a machine gun and a sign: “Stop—he who proceeds will be shot.”

Most of the seamen who had followed the communist slogans had lost their berths, and many were in jail. No one thought of criticizing the communist doctrine that no strike, even if the strikers wind up out of a job or in jail, must be regarded as a defeat. Strike is training for civil war; so every strike, no matter how it ends, is a political triumph for the Party.

Even before our wild June action in the harbor of Hamburg had been brought to its conclusion, I was summoned to a secret meeting. The majority of the lesser-known water-front agitators were present. After we had been pledged to silence, one of Thaelmann’s aides issued instructions that all communist sailors in the meeting should inform the Shipowners’ Association of their willingness to man the steamers which had been tied up by the strike.

Murmurs of surprise and indignation ran through the audience. I was deeply shocked by this crafty and dishonest maneuver. That very morning we had led two newly arrived ships’ crews into the strike. Albert Walter’s propaganda squads had distributed the crimson leaflets which told the seamen: “No steam for the engines! No work on deck! STRIKE!”

A rebellious shout came from a comrade behind me:

“We are no strike-breakers!”

The Party officer was unperturbed. He waited patiently until our protests had subsided. Then he spoke.

“Comrades,” he explained, “what the Party demands of you is not blacklegging. What the Party demands is your co-operation in a tactical maneuver which is bound to carry Bolshevism more solidly into the merchant marine. The strike will not continue for long. Shall we give the ship-owning sharks a chance to retaliate by excluding communists from the crews of their ships? Shall we permit the ships to sail without availing ourselves of an opportunity to make each ship a fortress of the Communist Party? . . . We must take advantage of today to strengthen our positions for the battles of tomorrow. We are not a crowd of deaf-mutes. We are communists. Party discipline demands that you follow the Party command.”

It was dirty business, we knew. It was like stabbing a knife into the back of our fellow-workers, the sailors and stokers who had trusted our leadership and followed our strike call.

To us, communists, loyalty to the Party, however, came before loyalty to the proletariat. While the action committees still issued manifestoes exhorting the seamen to continue to strike, ships stealthily manned by communists steamed seaward at dawn.