Dancing Under the Red Star (4 page)

In the summer of 1938, this was my life: my father ripped away from me, my mother’s husband gone, a good man taken from his family. Just like that, it was all over. Dreams shattered and hopes forsaken in one strangely beautiful but wicked Gorky summer day. Now Mama and I were left in this country that was not our own…with no way out. We never wanted to come here in the first place, and now our future was nothing but a matter of Mama’s blind faith.

Thus began the darkest time in our lives. We suddenly had to find a way to go on without Papa, who until this black day had provided us with a better-than-average way of life, at least by Gorky’s simple standards. We had no support or financial means, no savings and no protection. Though I felt a full-blown anger taking control of my heart, I was also hit by a physical sense of hopelessness and despair. They walked in uninvited, as if they were people or something I could actually touch. And right behind them came a powerful new fear.

My sleep that night was anything but peaceful; it came in agonizing increments when my mind was too tired to think. I slept only by default, for sporadic and lurid spurts a few minutes at a time, and I would fearfully awaken between my terrifying dreams to find that my new reality was much worse than any nightmare.

I kept hearing my mama’s words: “Have faith; be strong; do not lose hope.” I didn’t feel much comfort from them now. A stronger force outside of me—fear—was controlling my heart and my thoughts. I thought hard about Mama’s faith in God. God would get us through this? I questioned. How could that be? How could anything or anybody wipe away the horror? How could I be sure God even existed? Was God stronger than fear? That was a good question, because I had no idea what to believe in, but I knew that fear was real, as I now felt fear like a three-alarm fire burning out of control. And I could not help but think,
Where is God in all of this?
as my mind replayed Papa’s words, “I’ll be back. You’ll see,” over and over again.

Two

PAPA DECIDED

I
t was Papa’s decision to move our little family from Detroit to Gorky. Mama and I had never wanted to come, and now we were in a very precarious position without him.

I was their only child, born on May 28, 1921, just outside the city limits of Detroit. My parents and two other couples were desperately trying to eke out a living on a small and unproductive beet farm, waiting for the Depression to end. As it turned out, they would wait for quite some time. During my parents’ early years near Detroit, they did all they could to make ends meet, raising chickens and various vegetables for their own consumption, along with whatever else they could rummage or produce. The land was unfruitful, but sometimes the men hunted skunk, for the pelts, which they were able to sell for a few dollars when there was an interested buyer. And when there were no skunks, their cupboard was bare. Their lives were simple and austere, with no excess in any area, except perhaps their love for one another.

My mother, Elisabeth Rausch-Werner, was of German stock, originally from the Black Forest region in southern Germany. In the 1700s her people, seeking religious freedom and better educational opportunities for their children, had immigrated to Austria, to a region that was later annexed by Hungary. They were called
Donauschwaben
, essentially German-speaking Hungarians, speaking a unique form of the German language. Elisabeth’s father owned the village inn and was also the village cabinetmaker. Her mother was in poor health, and as the eldest of five children, my mother bore the brunt of the household chores and child-rearing responsibilities. Consequently, she received only four years of formal education and schooling in Austria.

In 1912, when my mother was seventeen years old, she immigrated to America with her aunt. They arrived in Cincinnati, Ohio, where my mother held numerous jobs: first as a barmaid, then as a housekeeper in several affluent homes, including that of Walton Bachrach, who would later become mayor of Cincinnati. A few years later Mother moved to Detroit, where she again found employment as a housekeeper. Her talent in the kitchen as a wonderful cook and baker kept her steadily employed. She had a thin, wiry frame but a surprising degree of physical strength for her meager size. Mama’s eyes were the purest, most stunning light blue I have ever seen, at times a solid violet color. She soon joined an amateur German drama club called the Thalia, since acting was a true passion as well as an undeniable talent. It was here that she met Carl Werner, the club’s stage manager. In August 1920 they were wed.

Carl Werner, my father, was an Austrian Jew from the city of Linz. The family was fairly affluent, and he had two brothers—Richard and Friedrich—and one sister, Eva. Their father died when Carl was only four years old, so Carl was reared by his mother and the servants. His brothers and sister all finished high school and went on to the university. My father, however, had other ideas about his future. He opted to work with his hands, and so he attended a technical school to learn the skill of tool and die making. He soon mastered the trade, and upon completion of this technical education, he immigrated to the United States, where he immediately found work in the automotive industry.

In 1917, during World War I, he refused to be drafted, choosing prison instead. He was a true patriot, but he had to draw the line—
his line.
It was that invisible line in the sand that he could not cross without compromising his sense of decency, integrity, and morality. Although he was not a financial success, he loved his American home and his life. However, my father did not believe in war. Losing his life would mean losing his family, and that would be an unacceptable sacrifice to Carl Werner. That’s just who he was. He consequently paid the price, but not for a lack of loyalty to America. Papa thought if a man had no personal integrity, he had absolutely nothing! He was conscientious and he was an idealist, so maybe he was a conscientious idealist rather than a war objector.

During his approximately three-year imprisonment, he spent one year in solitary confinement. Later he described that experience to me as the most significant and deeply revealing time in his life. This serious internal reflection led to a time of personal awakening, when his determination grew in conjunction with his outrage. He said he got to know his inner self, which confirmed his cherished ideals and destroyed his false beliefs. My father kept most personal things tightly concealed. I don’t know what he would have said about some of the later circumstances of his life, the twists of fate and other unforeseen detours, including his arrest, but I suspect his U.S. prison confinement was a walk in the park in comparison to his imprisonment by the NKVD.

Regardless, the American jail did not soften his resolve. Perhaps his opinionated and outspoken nature contributed to some extent to his fate. Who knows? He believed strongly in a pure socialist reform system, and based upon what I have learned, I’d have to say he was right, in a purely idealistic and untainted sense, if this were a perfect world. But as we later came to know, evil exists in this world, in humans as well as in systems; it is inherent in the very core of fallen humankind. Carl Werner said that no political system is ever flawless, but his goal was to “always seek out that which seems to make sense.” He had radical tendencies—those that made sense to him. He was a unionist and an active member of the Proletarian Party during those days. My father wholeheartedly believed in people, and he always took the side of the underdog and the oppressed, because he felt someone had to stand up for them. He approached his job and his career responsibilities with the Ford Motor Company in exactly the same fashion.

Many meetings were held in our small Detroit home at that time, with friends and neighbors and even total strangers. I would guess all of them had to do with the pivotal role he played in the Proletarian agenda in Detroit as well as the controversial employee and labor issues at the automobile plant.

I was an ordinary, fun-loving, ten-year-old American schoolgirl in 1931 when my carefree existence took an abrupt turn for the worse. It was in the middle of the Depression, and everyone around us felt its grave effects. Factories and businesses were closing almost daily; friends of my parents were losing their jobs; whole families had no income; people had a strangely distant and lifeless look about them. Sometimes I even heard Mama and Papa speak of someone committing suicide. Poverty, sadness, and emotional upheaval devastated nearly every family we knew, and we were no exception. The atmosphere seemed thick with this unpredictable lingering gloom that was heavy like a fog and unspoken yet visible in the faces we met. Yes,
depression
was fitting, not only for the state of the economy and social life, but also for the emotional state of my mother and father and most people we knew.
Depression
was the right word.

My earliest childhood recollections take me back to the time when I was an adventurous three-year-old—in 1924, when my parents and I lived in a second-floor apartment in Detroit. I distinctly remember waiting until it was my mandatory nap time, then sneaking down the back steps of our apartment. I was headed to the house across the street so I could play with Adam, the little boy who lived there. That particular day the attraction was his shiny red pedal car. I didn’t see a dairy delivery wagon approaching at the same time I decided to dart into the street. I had no time to react.

I woke up in an all-white bed in an all-white room with a very bright light hanging from the ceiling. My mother and father were pale and frightened by my bedside. I particularly remember the look on my father’s face as he worriedly hovered over me. I was in a hospital, with bandages on my face, but I was lucky to have escaped with only minor nicks and scratches. After that little escapade, my father concocted a brilliant idea; he decided to tie me to the back porch on a dog leash, long enough for playing, but short enough to prevent me from crawling under the fence to join my friends in the next yard. I remember his face as he looked at me, on that leash and in that predicament. He was proud of himself, and I could see that he thought he was quite ingenious. That memory makes me smile, and it makes me miss my papa all the more.

Later our family moved into a newly built red brick house at 14452 Rochedale Avenue, a dead-end street. My “boyfriend,” Tommy Natress, lived down the block. At the end of our street was a great playground for all the kids—a vacant field bordered at the rear by a large wooded area with many trees and narrow winding paths disappearing into the brush. It was the perfect place for a child’s imagination, and we often pretended we were far, far away. This mysterious wooded paradise was also just the place for all the exciting and scary stories kids love to tell. We would try to out-frighten one another with wide eyes and softly whispered details about the infamous bogeyman and other such fictitious elements of our overactive imaginations. But those chills were nothing compared to the story of my own life. In fact, the scariest story I know is the one I’m beginning to tell you now.

This innocent time in Detroit was as far from Gorky as the east is from the west. I remember this as the most joyous time of my life: a time of peace, happiness, and comfort, with no responsibilities. And for children, that’s exactly how it was meant to be. Despite the economy, there was definitely no pain on my horizon, at least none that I could see.

Once a week my parents played pinochle with their friends. On one such night, I became restless and bored from being confined to my bedroom upstairs, so I quietly crept out of bed and went exploring in my parents’ bedroom. The top of my mother’s dresser was covered with many intriguing items, but what I coveted most was her perfume! In reaching for the prize, I accidentally tipped it over, spilling the entire bottle onto my nightgown. Sheepishly I padded silently down the stairs and reluctantly made my appearance, standing under the archway that divided the living room and dining room. Suddenly the living-room audience was silenced. And I can still hear that silence as I replay the scene in my mind.

My father’s reaction to my escapade was, as always, animated and playful. He got up, turned slowly and deliberately—for dramatic impact—and walked robotically toward me in slow motion, wanting me to fear the consequences of my actions, saying, “What has my sweet little girl gotten into now?” He quickly packed me under his arm, took me up the stairs, and put me in the bathtub, where he turned the shower on me. I could tell that his sour exterior was feigned strictly for my benefit, in his customarily theatrical way. Underneath, he was dying to burst out laughing, but he couldn’t let me know. “What should I do with you?” he said sternly. “I’ll just have to think about it, I guess.”

Why do I so distinctly remember that look of loving humor on my father’s face that day? Does it hold a treasure meant only for me, yet undiscovered, whose secret location I alone could find? Was it something I had to hold on to, because such future memories of him would be few? I didn’t know. He was in the prime of his life then, with bright brown eyes, filled with joy, adventure, and vibrancy. He was a powerful man for his moderate size: a strong, chiseled European chin, rough hands, wide forearms, and a strength that rejoiced in physical labor. He wanted nothing but the best for his family. I knew that.