My Notes

“I was twenty-seven. I’d just successfully defended my dissertation for the degree of doctor of mathematics—when I was taken in the middle of the night and thrown into this prison. I won’t tell you in detail about the monstrous crime I was accused of: there are events that people must neither remember nor know, lest they feel disgust toward themselves. But it’s likely that many are still alive who remember this terrible trial and the ‘beast-man’ they called me in the newspapers. They probably also remember how all the civilized society in the country unanimously demanded the death penalty for the criminal—and only the inexplicable leniency of the head of state at that time is what I must thank for the fact that I’m alive and writing these lines now as a warning to weak and wavering people. I’ll say it briefly: my father, my older brother, and my sister were brutally murdered, and—apparently—I did it myself in order to obtain a truly enormous inheritance...”