Thanks to these precautions, the listening-post saw none of our important dealings, but through an unfortunate accident the vain, ambitious fellow must have noticed that we didn’t trust him and that all kinds of interesting things were going on behind his back. Perhaps in my absence one of the couriers had once incautiously mentioned “His Majesty” instead of the agreed pseudonym of “Baron Fern”, or perhaps the wretched man had been opening letters on the sly – at any rate, before I suspected him of anything, Munich or Berlin had instructed him to keep watch on us. Only much later, long after my arrest, did I remember how his original lacklustre approach to his work had turned to sudden eagerness in the last few months, and he had several times almost importunately offered to take my letters to the post. So I can’t absolve myself of a certain incautiousness, but after all, weren’t the best of diplomats and military men taken in by Hitler’s insidious tricks? The close, indeed loving attention the Gestapo had been paying me over a long period was made evident by the fact that on the very evening when Schuschnigg announced his resignation, I had already been arrested by SS men. Luckily I had managed to burn the most important of our papers as soon as I heard Schuschnigg’s resignation speech on the radio, and as for the remaining documents, with the indispensable certificates for the foreign investments of the monasteries and two archdukes, I sent them to my uncle, hidden in a laundry basket and taken away by my trustworthy old housekeeper literally at the last minute, just before my door was broken down.’

Dr B. stopped to light a cigar. In the flickering light I saw a nervous tic at the right-hand corner of his mouth which I had noticed before, and which recurred every few minutes. It was only a fleeting movement, not much more than the ghost of one, but it gave a curious look of unrest to his entire face.

‘You probably think I’m going to tell you about the concentration camps where everyone who kept faith with our old Austria was taken, about the humiliations, torments and tortures that I suffered there. But nothing of that nature happened. I was in a different category. I wasn’t herded together with those poor souls who suffered physical and mental degradation as resentments long nurtured were vented on them, I was put into that other, very small group from which the Nazis hoped to extract either money or important information. In itself, of course my modest person was of no interest to the Gestapo. But they must have discovered that we had been the front men, administrators and intimates of their bitterest enemy, and what they hoped to get out of me was incriminating material: material to be used against the monasteries which they wanted to prove had been sequestrating property, evidence against the imperial family and all in Austria who sacrificed themselves in support of the monarchy. They suspected – and to be honest, not incorrectly – that considerable amounts of the funds which had passed through our hands were still hidden away safe from their rapacity, so they brought me in at the earliest opportunity to force these secrets out of me, using their tried and trusted methods. People in my category, from whom important evidence or money was to be extracted, were not sent to concentration camps but kept for special processing. You may remember that our chancellor and Baron Rothschild, from whose family they hoped to extort millions, were not put behind barbed wire in a prison camp, but had what looked like preferential treatment and were taken to a hotel, the Hotel Metropole, which was also the Gestapo headquarters and where each had a room of his own. Insignificant as I was, I received the same mark of distinction.

‘A room of your own in a hotel – it sounds very humane, doesn’t it? However, you may believe me if I tell you that when we “prominent people” were not crammed into an icy hut twenty at a time, but accommodated in reasonably well-heated private hotel rooms, they had in store for us a method which was not at all more humane, just more sophisticated. For the pressure they intended to exert, to get the “material” they needed out of us, was to operate more subtly than through crude violence and physical torture: the method was the most exquisitely refined isolation. Nothing was done to us – we were simply placed in a complete void, and everyone knows that nothing on earth exerts such pressure on the human soul as a void. Solitary confinement in a complete vacuum, a room hermetically cut off from the outside world, was intended to create pressure not from without, through violence and the cold, but from within, and to open our lips in the end. At first sight the room I was given didn’t seem at all uncomfortable. It had a door, a bed, an armchair, a washbasin, a barred window. But the door was locked day and night; no book, newspaper, sheet of paper or pencil might lie on the table; the window looked out on a firewall; a complete void had been constructed around my self and even my own body. Everything had been taken from me: my watch, so that I wouldn’t know the time; my pencil, so that I couldn’t write anything; my penknife, to prevent me from opening my veins; even the smallest narcotic such as a cigarette was denied me. Apart from the jailer, who spoke not a word and wouldn’t answer any questions, I never saw a human face and I never heard a human voice. In that place your eyes, ears and all the other senses had not the slightest nourishment from morning to night and from night to morning. You were left irredeemably alone with yourself, your body, and the four or five silent objects, table, bed, window, washbasin; you lived like a diver under a glass dome in the black ocean of this silence, and even worse, like a diver who already guesses that the cable connecting him to the world outside has broken and he will never be pulled up from those soundless depths. There was nothing to do, nothing to hear, nothing to see, you were surrounded everywhere, all the time, by the void, that entirely spaceless, timeless vacuum. You walked up and down, and your thoughts went up and down with you, up and down, again and again. But even thoughts, insubstantial as they may seem, need something to fix on, or they begin to rotate and circle aimlessly around themselves; they can’t tolerate a vacuum either.