QUOTE : Stalinist logic ... said that every Soviet person who had lived abroad had to be imprisoned in camp ... Stalin feared that they might bring European freedom back from their European crusade ... I had seen downcast columns of returning war prisoners - the only people around who were grieving instead of celebrating. Even then their gloom had shocked me, though I didn't yet grasp the reason for it ... Very few of the war prisoners returned across the Soviet border as free men, and if one happened to get through by accident because of the prevailing chaos, he was seized later on ... the former POWs, looking out on the Motherland newly restored to them through the same barbed wire through which they had seen Germany ... When they arrived ... police vans were waiting, as were armed guards holding lists of names. They could not even shoot or stab themselves to death since all their weapons had been taken away. Some jumped off the high viaduct into the river or onto the stones ... But the West did not understand at all. The democratic West simply could not understand.