You know nothing. The door of your cell opens, and they shoot you. You cry out in your death agony, and there is no one to hear your cries or tell of them except the prison stones. They say, however, that there were some who weren't successfully finished off, and we may someday read a book about that too. In the rear, the first wartime wave was for those spreading rumors and panic. That was the language of a special decree, outside the Code, issued in the first days of the war. [I myself almost felt the impact of that decree. I was standing in line at the bread store, when a policeman called me out and took me off for the sake of his score. If it had not been for a fortunate intervention, I might have started out in Gulag right away instead of going off to war.] This was just a trial bloodletting in order to maintain a general state of tension. They gave everyone ten years for it, but it was not considered part of Article 58, and therefore those few who survived the war-time camps were amnestied in 1945.
