Free Dr Berlin by Francis Bennett Page A

and you will save your hands.
    For one brief moment in his ordeal his mind escapes from the pain, travelling outside his body, and he sees with great clarity what is happening to him. He is aware of the bleeding mess of his hands, the bloodstained table, the marks of blood on his forearms, his shirt, his face and neck, the twisted expressions of his torturers, who stand so close to him, and the overpowering stench of their bodies. He senses their anger against him, an anger whose origins he cannot comprehend; he hears them shout again and again that he and his colleagues are traitors who should die for their crimes against the state.
    He sees a way out of his torture. Why not identify one of his colleagues as a traitor? Someone must have betrayed him without cause – why should he not do the same to another? For a moment he is attracted by this escape route. He will reveal that one of his fellow scientists has betrayed secrets to the Germans and that will be it – a lie but the pain will cease. They may even let him go. It is tempting, to end his terrible suffering.
    Somewhere within him a voice that he recognises as hisown but he is unsure where it comes from tells him that if he lies, he will become an accomplice in their crime, a new link in an endless chain of lies and corruption. Once he goes down that path, if he is lucky enough to survive, he will have lost himself and become their creature. At that moment the life he has always dreamed of will be at an end. He knows that he has been born to build rockets that will reach the stars. Whatever else he does, he must resist the temptation to give in or he will never realise his destiny. He must resist.
    Then he slips into unconsciousness.
    *
    Two weeks later he arrived in Kolyma at the start of a five-year sentence for anti-Soviet activities. Blood seeped through the crude bandages someone had wrapped around his shattered hands. The bones were set by a prisoner who claimed he had been a medic in another life, but he did it badly and without any kind of anaesthetic, and again the pain was intense. Some bones mended, others didn’t, and the swellings reduced but never disappeared. His hands had been beaten permanently out of shape. They no longer had much feeling or mobility and little strength. He was the prisoner with two enlarged fleshy gloves that could hold little on their own. He was unable to work in the mine, dig trenches or cut trees. He saw the danger of his uselessness. To save his life, he suggested that they put a harness around him and use him as they would a horse or a donkey to pull carts or haul logs. For months, before they moved him from Kolyma, his life was little better than that of an animal.
    Eight months later his case was re-investigated, his sentence cut to two years and, after the intercession of his professor, he was moved to a sharaga, an open prison where, with other scientists, also prisoners like himself, he worked on the designs of aeroplanes. For a time he was brought to Butirskaya prison in Moscow, where he was visited by Elza and his children, Olga and Kyrill. On these rare occasions, he felt he waslooking at his family through the wrong end of a telescope. Increasingly they were people he did not know, growing older without him, lives that hardly touched his own. When he was in their presence, he kept his hands out of sight, behind his back or in his pockets. Elza knew what had happened to him. His children, he told her, were too young to understand. He found it hard to resist the temptation to take them in his arms.
    After the war, he never revealed what he had suffered. He made no complaints about the waste of human resources, nor of valuable research time while he was serving his sentence. Nor was he heard to question the authority that had so cruelly disabled him. When he was told about the great advances made by German rocket scientists in the time he had been away, as he called it, he was not surprised. He studied engineering