The door, I am told, was padded less for the occupants safety and more to muffle the sound of cries for help and the shrieking of those deranged from torture.
They were, however, in a basement, windows bricked, cool, almost chilly despite the radiating heat of a June afternoon pulsating outside. Inside the cell, a straightjacket hangs from the black-iron tooth of a coatrack (aggressive, jagged, and designed to disturb). The jacket, too, is black with sleeves extending across the room, levitating like some fearful ghost of victorian literature.
I am taken aback, feeling suddenly sick. The English translations call the room "the grimiest" place in the building (this includes the room where executions were carried out and the showers which, despite running both hot and cold water, were always set to an extreme temperature for amusement). The layers above are less jarring. The building, an enormous municipal, neo-classical number still houses a functioning courthouse and other public offices. In fact, we made the mistake of walking into the courts before finding the appropriate entrance on the other side. Bricks in the wall contain the names of "martyrs" (those, for our purposes, killed by the KGB which used to operate within the building). The offices are maintained to some degree to give visitors a vibe of what enormous destruction a single bureaucratic system was capable of.
This is another jarring moment of contrast. The neatness, the organization of the institution is apparent (though not necessarily highlighted). Offices were no doubt bright, efficient, and tidy. Rubber stamps gave endorsement or rejection. There were rooms for coats, heavy wooden desks, wardrobes, no doubt. Yet underneath, prisoners were housed, interrogated, and, sometimes, shot in the years of Stalinism just below the floorboards of these offices in a maze of concrete and metal.
The museum is not without politics. Some criticize the space as anti-communist propaganda, an almost violent-erotic display of NATO's vendetta against the USSR to the point of atoning the crimes of the NS (who killed many more people in this area). It is true that the focus is on the communists and with virtually no mentioning of the crimes of the NS (which is marked in a separate museum). Pictures are flashed in every room. Deportations. Mugshots. Smiling partisans. The whiteness of a forehead disrupted by a bullet hole and left as a warning to the politically sympathetic.
In Tallinn, a similar building was left unopened to the public, converted into apartments and recognizable only by the bricks that cover the basement windows, again designed to prevent the shrieking of the interrogated from disturbing those walking snow-blanketed streets.
I think, too, that the government of my own nation had the sense to torture far enough away where people walking to the grocery store wouldn't stumble upon it, keeping it far enough away for common citizens to think it necessary, blood spilt on the altar of safety and peace.
The only way to get reliable information, they tell themselves, gliding behind buggies through electric cool, looking at a thin layer of dust on a can of peaches.
I wonder as I leave what sorts of buildings out grandchildren in the United States will walk through one day, the abandoned temples of torture and interrogation, the palaces of private execution, cheered by the religious with their banners and picket-signs.
What instruments of torture, tools of dispelling subversion in the name of security, will greet them as they wander through cement halls, huddled against the draft of impossibly cold air and their own terrible heritage?
No comments:
Post a Comment