Oil! by Upton Sinclair

There was only one cloud on this second honeymoon, and Bunny kept it hidden in his own soul. There were "youth" papers in both Berlin and Vienna, and he considered himself bound to call at their offices and invite the rebel editors to lunch, and send home letters for Rachel to publish. In Vienna was a paper in the English language devoted to the defense of political prisoners; it was a Communist paper, but so well camouflaged that Bunny didn't realize the fact, and anyhow, he would have wished to meet the editors. He was still making his pitiful attempt to understand both sides -- even here in Central Europe, where the Socialists and the Communists had many times been at open war.

In this obscure office in a working-class part of the city Bunny came upon a ghastly experience. There was exhibited to him a creature that had once been a young man, but now was little more than a skeleton covered with a skin of greenish-yellow. It had only one eye and one ear, and it could not speak because its tongue had been pulled out or cut off, and most of its front teeth had been extracted, and its cheeks were pitted with holes made by cigarettes burned into it. Likewise all the creatures' fingernails had been torn out, and its hands burned with holes; the men in the office bared its shirt, and showed Bunny how the flesh had been ripped and torn by lashes this way and that, like cross-hatchings in a pen and ink drawing.