GRIM STORY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 May 1938, Page 4

GRIM STORY

NINE MONTHS IN SOVIET CELL. BRITISH WOMAN’S EXPERIENCES. Lovely, dark-eyed variety artist, Eva Loewenberg, just released from the Soviet gaol in which she had been imprisoned for just over nine months, spoke to a reporter in Helsingfors of her long ordeal. She was touring Russia with her sister Ivy last April when Soviet secret police .at Leningrad seized their personal belongings and told them they were under arrest. Ivy was soon released. But Eva was marched off to prison,. charged with espionage and terrorism. From that day until her release her father, mother, sister and 10-year-old daughter, who live at Mount Pleasant lane, Upper Clapton, had heard not a word of her fate. In hurried, desperately eager sentences, Mrs Loewenberg first asked news of Sonia, her 10-year-old daughter in London, then after her sister Ivy. Then the whole story of her long months of fear and suspense came tumbling out. “My greatest luck is that I am English born,” she said. “During the nine months and four days I was in the Cheka prison in Moscow I learned that even the Cheka treats a British subject better than any other in the world. “I kept repeating that to myself every day in prison . . . that they would not dare to harm me. “Nov/ that I am free to move where I like these past months seem like a nightmare. “The night of my arrest I was playing the piano in my cabaret show. In the middle of my performance I was interrupted. “Three grip-looking men wished to speak to me. They were Cheka agents, as I soon found. ' , “They fired questions at me. . . . Where was my husband? Where was he working? and a dozen other queries.

“They took me away to the Cheka offices in spite of my protests. “First the Cheka commissar tried to bully me. He said that my husband was a dangerous spy and that I must be his accomplice. “I told them it was ridiculous. I demanded to speak to the British Consul. They refused my request. “Then began my great ordeal. Every day and every night for four weeks I was ‘grilled.’ I thought they would drive me mad. Half the time their questions seemed meaningless. I didn’t know what they were driving at. , “After those days I was taken back to my cell. Often 1 would drop off to sleep from sheer exhaustion, only to wake up shaking with the nightmare that I was still having that awful fire of questions. “For two whole months I saw nobody but my gaoler. Day after day I sat and looked at the walls of my cell until I thought my nerves would give away.

“Now my one thought is to get home and hold my little girl m my arms. That will help me more than anything to forget all this long, terrible time I have suffered.”