Alex Weissberg: Conspiracy of Silence
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1952)
Alex Weissberg, born in Cracow in 1901, was an Austrian physicist. He joined the Austrian Socialist Party when
he was only seventeen, an in 1927 he passed to the Communist party. In 1931 he went to work for the Ukrainan Physical
Technical Institute in Kharkov. He and Koestler knew since childhood, and when Koestler traveled to the U.S.S.R.
passing through Kharkov it was only natural for him to stay at the Weissbergs: it was their guest for a few months.
Weissberg remained in U.S.S.R, and at the beginning of the great purge he was arrested by the GPU and charged
(amongst other) of plotting with the Gestapo and the Trotskyists to kill Stalin.
He remained in the GPU jail for three years, three times confessing under hardship and three times recantating
what he had confessed. He would probably have disappeared in an administrative execution, if it wheren't for its
Austrian nationality (that he had retained) and for the activity of his wife that (helped by Koestler) had letters
written to Stalin by eminent physicists (including Einstein and Joliot-Curie) advocating his case.
In 1939, after the beginning of WWI, as a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, all the german prisoners
in the U.S.S.R. were handed to the Gestapo. Weissberg, as a Communist Jew, did not have an easy life, managed to
escape, was in the Warshaw Ghetto and then joined the Polish Resistance, where he managed to survive through the
war.
Koestler's Darkness at noon (set in the midst of the Great Purge) was influenced by the news that Weissberg's
wife brought him.
His years through the Great Purge are recounted in his Conspiracy of Silence, a first-hand witness about
the inner workings of the GPU prisons published much later in 1952 with a preface by Koestler.
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