Dancing Under the Red Star (3 page)

I loved and admired my father, Carl Werner, more than I could ever describe. I thought he was what a man was all about and what a man should be. I compared every boy and every man I ever met to him. But what was happening here? Why were these men being so mean to him? My papa was foreman of the tool and die department at the Gorky automobile factory and a respected man. This couldn’t be happening! I figured it was all a bad mistake—a terrible mistake—and certainly they would soon have this mess figured out, and things would be normal again. Of course, things in Gorky—in Russia, for that matter—were anything but normal.

About two years earlier, in 1936, Joseph Stalin had commenced infamous purges, instigated and carried out by his bloodthirsty associate Nikolai Yezhov and shortly thereafter by Lavrenti Beria, his notorious chief of the secret police. Beria was directly responsible for millions of deaths and unspeakable cruelty throughout Russia. The period in Soviet history known as the Bolshevik Revolution was over, but the Stalinist regime was at the height of its power and operating at full throttle. Throughout the land, it operated as a heartless killing machine, without conscience. In the period leading up to and during World War II, it took hundreds of thousands, even millions, of prisoners, often with no charges and no trials. You didn’t have to be guilty of anything in Stalinist Russia to find yourself imprisoned or even killed. The Stalinist regime operated on paranoia, with no rational justification.

As my father was roughly pushed toward our building, he looked back over his shoulder, almost as if in confession, to see me running toward him. Then his face was practically shoved into the door by the two men. I was sprinting toward him but felt as if I was in slow motion, as if I would never get there. The other two men looked stone cold, without showing the slightest feeling or emotion, while my papa was being helplessly led to slaughter. How on earth could this be? The three of them disappeared through the building’s front door as I raced just a few paces behind them, burning with fear and anguish. I flung open the normally cumbersome wooden door as if it were weightless. My heart was pounding right through my chest, and I was panting and crying. I ran up the narrow wooden stairway to see Papa just ahead of me, on the landing.

My papa, oh my dear papa! For the rest of my days, I will never forget his face as he turned to see me standing behind him. It was only a glance, but it was a look I had never seen before and one I wished I hadn’t seen. I saw in his face the end—the end of his innocently blind optimism and the end of his hopes for our life in this country that was not ours. That look bespoke hopelessness, utter despair, and death.

The look haunted me. Tears welled up in his eyes, and I knew that they were more for me than anything else. In a voice that struggled to be firm and reassuring, he said, “Don’t cry, my sweet girl. Everything will be all right.” But his words were empty of faith. I knew at that moment he wanted me to believe his words, but his face told me he didn’t believe them himself.

We knew something of Russia’s brutality even to her own people, and yet my father always thought he could make a difference in this country. We had given up everything we had known in our beloved America and blindly left it all behind us when he brought us here. It was Papa’s decision. And for what? During the hungry years of the Depression back home, he had actually pictured opportunity, livelihood, and financial stability in this country. That’s why he came to Russia in the first place. That’s why we came with him. That’s why I was here. Didn’t they know what our family had given up for Papa’s commitment to this country, this Russia that was now stabbing him in the back as a “reward” for his faith?

The fear in his bewildered brown eyes drained them of all life. He quickly turned away, maybe ashamed that I had seen him that way. At that moment I knew this marked the end of his dream and the beginning of our nightmare.

The two men who had arrested my father at work were from the NKVD. Under Stalin, the Soviet secret police had acquired vast punitive powers, and in 1934 the secret police were renamed the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD. No longer subject to party control or restricted by law, the NKVD became a direct instrument for Stalin to use against the party and the country during the Great Terror of the 1930s. Now they had come to search our apartment.

My mind was racing, my heart pulsing uncontrollably. I didn’t know what to do for him. This could not be happening; it just could not be happening! It had to be a mistake. My papa had done nothing wrong; I had to calm down. Once inside the apartment, I fumbled toward the kitchen, where I found some fresh strawberries from our garden. I poured some milk and sugar over them, and with feverishly shaking hands I tried to take them to Papa. I think at that moment they represented my love and much more. They represented everything I wanted to do for him but could not. I was completely helpless.

I set the bowl down before him, and again our eyes met. “Oh, Papa,” I said, “how is this happening? Please tell me that everything is going to be all right…please, please, please!”

He looked down at the floor, then at the bowl, then at me and over to Mama, and then back at the floor. He said nothing, but he cried silently, violently, from the innermost part of his being. My papa was shaking and looked as though he was barely breathing. He seemed afraid to look up, afraid of what we would see in his eyes. I was scared to death, mainly because I had never seen my papa so fragile and so completely helpless. As for the symbolic strawberries, he could not force down a single bite. We were all speechless and terrified.

Mama was told she could pack him a few necessary items, and she did so with tears rolling down her cheeks. Not a word escaped her lips. I think she was too shaken to utter a sound. What on earth do you pack for your husband, an innocent man who is being ripped from your home before your very eyes while you can do nothing to stop it? I felt I was going mad inside! I wanted to scream, but more than that, I wanted to kill somebody!

My mother managed to pack a small suitcase, moving stiffly, zombielike—silent and pale. I had never seen her like this either. I think she didn’t really believe this could be happening to us. How could it be? Papa’s dream of Russia was turning into a nightmare. Look what they were doing to the dreamer. I didn’t understand what was taking place in our house. Surely I would wake up soon.

I was shaking with rage and helplessness. I ran to my tiny bedroom and grabbed a photograph of myself and scribbled on the back “To my darling papa from his loving daughter, June 29, 1938.” I ran back as they were forcing him up from the table. My mother groaned, an involuntary cry from deep within, but then she quickly covered her mouth with her trembling hand and, in German—my parents’ language of love—softly whispered to him as if only the two of them could hear,
“Ich immer liebe dich”
(I love you always).

My father could not reply, and I tried to push the photo into his hand as they shoved him toward the door. One of the men put his hand against my chest and sternly said, “No, now back away!” I flung myself toward my papa and screamed, “Please…Papa… please! You leave him alone!” The other officer grabbed my arms and yanked me away from my father.

I was violently thrown to the unforgiving hardwood floor by a power that I didn’t see coming. Strangely, I felt no physical pain; I think my heart absorbed it all. The photo lay beside me on the floor. Mama screamed as she saw me fall hard on my back, and she threw herself down to cover me.

The men dragged my precious father out the door.

I cried, “Please, let me kiss my father good-bye, please!” But they slammed the door shut behind them.

From the hall, the men yelled at my mother and me, “Do not leave this apartment!” Neither of us moved for several moments, but then, unable to contain my dread, I cracked open the door. My father was being pushed down the stairs, and even though he resisted, it was to no avail. One of the officers looked back at me and shouted, “Didn’t I tell you to keep that door closed?”

I drew back inside our apartment, but through the door and from the bottom of the stairs, I heard my father calling, “I’ll be back! You’ll see!” Mama was still on the floor, on her knees, sobbing so hard that her shoulders and her whole body shook. My anger died down as I saw her like that, and I knelt to hug her with an urgency and desperation I had never felt before. She was now all I had, and I was now all she had…and we held on to each other.

Clutching each other tightly, we cried until I thought there were no more tears left in me. I don’t know how long we stayed on the floor, but it surely must have been hours. It felt like days, an eternity—all in one Russian summer afternoon. We held on to each other, trying to grasp that Papa was gone and wondering if we would ever see him again. But he’d said, “I’ll be back! You’ll see!”

The sun was no longer shining through our window as it had on that perfect morning. Now it was dark, and not just because it was evening. We sat there forever, and we spoke no words. What was there to say? At seventeen, this new agony was beyond any of my words. Finally my mother asked if I was hungry, and I said, “No,” but I glanced toward the table and saw my papa’s untouched bowl of strawberries. Waves of pain seared me again, and Mama tenderly stroked my hair. Calling me by her favorite name for me, she said, “Maidie, you should eat something. You must hold on and try to be strong. This is not the end, I promise you. You must have faith and not lose hope. Never give up hope. God will get us through this.”

I’m not sure that I believed her. Although she sounded convincing, I knew her words were as much for herself as for me. Papa was the love of her life, and I knew that her anguish cut deep—very, very deep! I don’t know if we said anything else after that, but I recall lying in my bed and hearing my mama weeping well into the night. As I drifted in and out of sleep that troubled night, I kept hearing faint, muffled, whimpering sounds from the next room. My father was forty-six years old. My mother was forty-three. I had just turned seventeen. Our life, as we knew it, was over. I tossed and turned, trying to understand how this had happened.

The NKVD was the most powerful and feared Soviet institution under Stalin, who used it to eliminate all potential opposition to his leadership until he was the unchallenged leader of both party and state. Now he was purging the party rank and file and terrorizing the entire country with widespread arrests and executions. During the ensuing Great Terror, millions of innocent Soviet citizens were sent off to labor camps or executed in prison.

In Russia, this time from 1937 until mid-1938 was called
Yezhovshchina,
or the Yezhov Affair, the most severe stage of Nikolai Yezhov’s great purges, when more than ten million lives were lost in the jails and labor camps that sprang up like wild mushrooms all over the country. Situated primarily in the Far North—in Siberia or central Asia, where the climates were most severe—these camps were filled with multitudes of free laborers, peasants, and poor people, all unable to defend themselves. To the Soviet regime, human beings were only the means of production—numbers, items, things to count—expendable.

Countless fathers and mothers of my friends were suddenly and savagely arrested under trumped-up charges, taken from their homes in front of their parents and children—even during their evening meals—and never heard of or heard from again. And this country-wide brutality didn’t seem to distinguish nationality or ethnic origin; it had no bias, no favorites. No one was exempt. I don’t even think the Stalinist agenda was particularly anti-Semitic at its root; the Jews were certainly victims, openly targeted perhaps more than the rest of the population. But the fear was universal. Families in untold numbers, of all ethnicities, were irreparably devastated at the snap of a finger, the signing of another false arrest warrant.

Betrayal in its most primitive form was a common way of life during this period in 1930s Russia, even among family members. Mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters routinely and sometimes falsely informed on one another to the police. I suppose it was a last-ditch effort to survive. The pervasive fear of arrest undermined everything. One day you saw your friends, you spoke with them, and the next day someone asked you where they were. It was as if they had suddenly vanished from the planet. “What happened to so-and-so?” was an all-too-regular occurrence. Your neighbor was here one day, gone the next, and no one knew anything about it.

Personal suffering at the very core of the human spirit swept the community like wildfire, and not many were able to escape. The whole world of human experience was driven by pain and fueled by fear. I thought,
If there’s really a devil… I mean if he really exists, then surely this has got to be it; he must live here in Russia!

By the time the terror subsided in 1939, Stalin had managed to bring both the party and the public into complete submission to his rule. Soviet society was so atomized and the people so fearful of reprisals that mass arrests were no longer necessary, but that had not happened yet—not today, not on June 29, 1938, not in time to save my father.