_September._
_Darlingest ones:--_
At last I have heard from the letter about the Jewish detention camp.
The English Consul came to our rooms yesterday afternoon and said he was
to act as interpreter for the head of the secret police. I was to be
ready to answer his questions about eight o'clock that night. He told me
to keep my temper and say as little as possible.
Shortly before eight the Consul and the chief came round together. We
all sat down. I was quite calm. So often I had created my own terror of
this moment that when it came I met it with relief. I even felt a sense
of superiority over the chief of the secret service. I don't know why,
I'm sure. Perhaps because I was no longer afraid of him. It was as
though I had stuck my head under a pump of ice-cold water. I felt very
clear-headed. I had a curious feeling that things were as they were and
nothing I could say could change them.
"Are you a Jew?" he asked me first.
"No."
"Is your mother or father Jewish?"
"No. There is no Jewish blood in our family." I thought of Dad's
Quakerism and smiled. I wondered what he would have said if he had been
there.
"Then why have you such sympathy for them?" He looked at me narrowly, as
though he had me _there_.
"Because they are suffering."
"Tck." He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth in the most
skeptical fashion.
He took up my letter, translated into Russian, and went through it. The
whole thing was a farce. I answered the questions he asked me, but they
didn't get us anywhere. Of course, everything I knew about the Jewish
detention camp I had written in my letter. All I could do was to repeat
what I had said there. And when he asked questions like, "Who said five
old men had been killed along the way?" or, "How did you know throwing
the bodies into the Dnieper had brought cholera into Kiev this summer?"
I could only reply, "I was told it." "Who told you?" "I forget."