Red Love (4 page)

The Death House, 1954

Solly Rubell near the end of the road.

—G. L.

If Solly Rubell were asked before that week if he were sure of what he had done, he would have said yes. There was always the terror of dying. But the worst thing was this dot of doubt.

A former comrade who’d fought in Spain had written him in the death house. He had been taken off guard.

Dear Comrade Solomon:

I’m a Lincoln vet.

I want to tell you what you’re dying for.

This letter is going to light a firecracker up your ass.

Here is what I know …

The vet had a foul mouth, but the letter clanged in his head. Then he’d wanted to burn it, but he had to keep reading, until the world seemed to be turning upside down. He couldn’t keep it out of his headaches and nightmares at night.

The vet wrote of Spain. And of the Soviet Union: starving men and women, peasants and workers, sores oozing from their faces and legs, gathered at garbage cans looking for food during collectivization. Rounded up by guards with whips and guns. The stoned Pavement scraping their bare feet, tossed like sacks of flour or bales of hay into freight cars, weeping and screaming for help. Taken to areas where they would starve unseen.

Tens of millions tortured to death in concentration camps.

Then the vet told him of the Jewish doctors’ plot, the murder of Peretz Markish and the other Yiddish poets, the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia.

Comrade Solomon, I come from where you come from. Once I thought I knew the score too. I put my body on the line for Stalin, that putz, that sadist, like you are doing now. But this is fascism, comrade. This is the most anti-Semitic regime on earth—shit and filth and torture and human suffering like you can’t believe.

Is this worth dying for? Sacrificing your children for?

Sammy Kuznekov

He tried to tell Dolly about the letter. She rose up, proclaiming, “What? You too? Methinks you’re beguiled by their offers of forty pieces of silver!” She told him to leave her cell.

She never spoke to him again.

How Sammy Kuznekov Became a Vacillating Element in Spain

Avoid foreign places.

—G. L.

Sammy Kuznekov had been an orphan since the age of two. He came to America from Russia in 1928. He was hungry all the time. He’d ridden the rails, worked on a gas pipeline in Montana, hung around the Wobblies, shipped out as a seaman, and later was an organizer for the farm workers and the Marine Workers Industrial Union. He joined the Young Communist League in Houston, Texas. He had sung with the Wobs:

Shall we always slave and work for wages?
It is outrageous.

In North Dakota he’d seen A. C. Townley, preacher and Silver Shirt, spread straw on the floor at the start of a meeting. As the farmers came in Townley said, “You goddamn bunch of cattle, I hope you feel at home.” They loved it.

Sammy, Jewish, looked like a handsome Nordic devil. A six-foot-two-inch, chestnut-haired, broad-shouldered man, the Party could use him anywhere. J. Peters himself told Sammy, “You look a thousand percent American.”

In 1935 Sammy came to New York City and became secretary of the Young Communist League on the waterfront. He took part in the famed action against the SS
Bremen,
a Nazi ship. Dressed in a tuxedo, he mingled with the hoi polloi, his brass knuckles hidden. When the signal came, the comrades ran across the deck and up to the front where the Nazi flag waved. The Nazi soldiers, not knowing who was who in the elegant crowd, hesitated. Then they struck out blindly. The Y.C.L.ers, kicking off the Nazis, cut the lanyard and the Nazi flag fell. They sang the “Internationale” as they ran.

When the Party moved like this, Sammy was sure of his path and his destiny.

Sammy was recruited by J. Peters for the Party’s antimilitary work. Peters’s office on the ninth floor of Party headquarters adjoined those of Brown, the Comintern rep, and Earl Browder.

He attended Peters’ course on “How to Organize Party Cells in the Armed Forces.” Peters urged the comrades to join the National Guard or to get into the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The route to getting into the guard was first to join the Citizens Military Training Camp at Fort Dix.

Sammy remembered going to City College’s campus and seeing the demonstrations against the ROTC. He had looked at the ranks of the ROTC, and thought my God, they’re all Y.C.L.ers! Then who were the demonstrators? The Party had mobilized outside elements as protestors. The real comrades going to CCNY were right there, on the way to becoming officers.

His course completed, Sammy went to see Peters. “You’ll drop your waterfront work. I want you to be one of our key contacts,” Peters said.

“There’s one problem, comrade,” Sammy said. “I’m not a citizen. And I’ve been arrested a few times.”

“Eh! American police. They’re
schlumperei.
Don’t worry about it. I want you to go to San Antonio, Texas. We have contacts at Kelly Field.”

Peters took out a copy of
Smith and Wesson Magazine
and taught Sammy how to write messages to him. One, three, four, he explained, meant first page, third paragraph, fourth word. Whenever he wanted to send a message to Peters, he was to go to the local library and use the magazine. “It’s so simple, it’s beautiful,” Peters said. “If you don’t know what magazine to use, you’re lost. Simplicity is best.”

Almost fifteen years later, when the Rubells were arrested, Sammy would read about an Ex-Lax box top cut in half, and Solomon Rubell’s alleged words, “The simplest things are the cleverest.”

Ah, Peters, Sammy thought.

Sammy Kuznekov eased himself out of antiwar work. He left Kelly Field and returned to New York, telling Peters his effectiveness was compromised by his inability to join the armed forces. He was ready to ship out to sea again.

At the May Day parade in Union Square in 1936, a Spanish navy cadet training ship,
the Juan Sebastian Elcano,
representing the Popular Front government of Republican Spain that had been elected that February, came rolling by on wheels. The officers and cadets were greeted with wild applause by the demonstrators. A Spanish seaman made a speech. Sammy was struck by their proud presence, their commitment. They had
grundschaft,
they came right out of the Spanish revolutionary tradition.

Working a private ship off the coast of Cuba, the radio operator, Sparks, told Sammy, “Well, the war is starting.” The military had risen against the Spanish Republican government; civil war was breaking out. Sammy thought of those seamen he’d seen in the May Day parade, and a shiver passed through him.

Hurrying back to New York, he went to see the Comintern rep, Brown, on the ninth floor of Party headquarters. “I hear the time has come,” Sammy said. He drilled with the other recruits at Ukrainian Hall, helped recruit for Spain on the waterfront, and slept at night on a cot at the Seaman’s Church Institute on South Street.

Sammy and the other boys were given a farewell party at a movie theater near Union Square. Earl Browder, the “quiet man from Kansas” with the soul of a file clerk, stood by the door saying goodbye to the boys. Puffing a big cigar, Browder shook Sammy’s hand, and for a long time after Sammy couldn’t get the feel of that fat, clammy hand off of his skin.

He sailed December 26th on the
Normandie,
a stowaway in a cabin with two others because he wasn’t a U.S. citizen. There were one hundred and six men secretly bound for Spain and thirteen Lebanese rug merchants.

From Le Havre they took the night train to Perpignan. The men all sang the “Internationale” in their own languages. They traveled through Avignon and Narbonne, and from train windows they raised the Popular Front clenched fist to the natives.
“Viva la republica!”
they snouted as the train clambered across the frontier into Spain.

At Figueras, the people cheered them and pelted them with almonds. Barcelona, then Tarragona, where almond trees blossomed pink and orange trees shone in the sun. Spaniards clenched fists, calling out
“Salud”
to them.

On January 8th they reached Albacete, headquarters of the International Brigades, and marched behind a German band to the Guardia Nacional barracks. They stood together in a courtyard, with all the windows and doors facing inward.

Toilets were four holes on each floor of the building. As the men defecated on the lower floors, there was a curtain of feces falling behind them from all the other floors. It was constantly coming down in all four corners of the building. The smell was intense. They did not care; they were finally in the headquarters of the brigade.

In the morning they were told to line up in the bullring. As they stood there, they heard an operatic bugle call from the iron balcony. They looked up. The door swung open and a huge character with a big white moustache and a giant black beret walked out. It was Andre Marty, supreme commander.

Six foot three, the splendid Marty approached the French recruits and said in a foghorn voice, “The glory of France will endure forever.” Approaching the Americans, he bellowed, “Now that the Yanks have arrived, the war will soon be over.” The British: “Who can ever forget the courage of the English square?” The Germans, Roumanians, Hungarians, and finally the Italians: “All the greatest soldiers in the Grand Army of Napoleon were Italians.” Sammy was probably the only man who understood almost every language (he did not know Roumanian).

The bugler blew once more, Marty made a grand gesture of salute, shouted,
“Viva la republica!”
and was whisked into his limousine decked with small flags by his chauffeur and aides.

Sammy and all the other men felt the buttons flying off their chests.

They arrived at the training camp at Villa Nueva de la Jara after a week at Albacete. There was almost no target practice because there was no live ammunition. There were no trench mortars. There were three rifles, but they jammed after each shot. The men knocked open their bolts with a rock. Each man gave the next a chance with the gun. They passed around a defused Mills “to get a feel of the hand grenade thing.” They were taken by truck at night for their first hooting exercise. Permitted five rounds, they fired into the hills and then were taken back to camp.

The Americans opened the battalion clinic to the civilian population as a free hospital. They produced a musical in which a black man recited Langston Hughes’s “Scottsboro,” and they sang the “Marching Song of the Lincoln Battalion.” The villagers had been antagonized by the previous group of French volunteers who had raped women and seized wine cellars. These Americans, who did not drink, recited poetry and sang songs, won them over.

Sammy’s expertise in Russian got him a post as a runner for the brigade commander, and he got to Albacete frequently.

One day he walked out on to the second floor of the Albacete Guardia Nacional and heard a familiar voice. As he stood by the railing, above the putt-putt of feces from the graduated toilets, he heard Marty declaiming. He looked up. Marty was addressing a new group of volunteers.

“The glory of France will continue forever … Now that the Yanks have arrived, the war will soon be over … All the greatest soldiers in the Grand Army of Napoleon were Italian… .”

Putt-putt, putt-putt.

On February 15th, the American volunteers were assembled at the Albacete bullring again. Andre Marty stood on the floodlit bandstand. He told them that the Republican front along the Jarama River had caved in. It was up to them to save Madrid.
“No pasaran!”
they shouted with clenched fists.

They were given rifles, fifty rounds of ammunition, Mills bombs, and triangulated bayonets. The battalion climbed aboard the trucks at midnight and headed toward Madrid, one hundred and fifty miles northwest. They dismounted at Morata de Tajuna, where suddenly a squadron of Italian bombers appeared. Many of the men stood and gawked as the bombs exploded, instead of taking cover. At that moment six Russian planes appeared and chewed away at the Capronis, knocking them out of the air. The Americans cheered, slapping each other on the back, firing their rifles into the sky.

A German Interbrigader led them up the mountain. Looking back, they looked at the pear trees and poplars along the river.

When they reached a flat-topped knoll, the German told them to dig in. The ground was almost pure rock. Their officers had not told them to bring picks and shovels. They shoveled the dirt with their helmets and bare hands, stabbing at it with their bayonets. Working all night, they made very shallow trenches and fell onto the ground exhausted at daybreak.

In the daylight, the nationalists immediately spotted the Americans’ trenches, since they had been dug against the skyline. The bullets cracked overhead. Grabbing their bayonets and helmets, they desperately tried to dig deeper. As the bullets kept coming, two men were so curious about what was happening that they peered up. One of them, a tool-and-die maker in his forties, was the oldest man in j the battalion. Both men were shot in the head. Sammy stared at the broken skulls.

The men stayed in the trenches for four days.

Lieutenant Colonel Milovan Pohoric was the new commander of the International Brigades. A thick Yugoslav of forty-six, he appeared in an outfit of many straps and belts holding his pistols, binoculars, and map case. A former opera singer, he had been a competent commissar. He was at his best in relaxed moods when he might perform an aria. But he knew nothing about military matters and followed orders from his superiors unquestioningly. Vacillating elements among the Americans said of Pohoric, “When a Moscow button gets pushed, he lights up.”

Pohoric was not half bad. Above him was a Hungarian, General Lotz, a Red Army veteran, who liked to receive the men while lying on a couch. His staff was not allowed to speak except when, he addressed them. His boots were the glossiest in the brigade.

That week, seven new Americans arrived in street clothes. More Y.C.L.ers from the Pinky Rodman branch in Brownsville, holding copies of the
Daily Worker
and Y.C.L. pamphlets like
Make Your Dreams Come True
by Gil Green and
Life with a Purpose
by Joe C. Clark. Sammy gave them their only training: one hour of rifle instruction.

One of the new boys, Abe Gold, spent his time writing home:

Now, on the Jewish question, the real international language here is Yiddish. Jews from Germany, Roumania, Poland, England, Hungary, all the front ranks of their movements have come to fight the common enemy of the proletariat, and of the Jews as a special oppressed minority.

We’ve been marching all day long. Guys kept dropping all along the line. Full pack, ammunition, heat took their toll and trucks picking them up. 1 felt like dropping too but thought, if the other guys can do it, so can I.

Any hour now we’ll be off. You know what I mean. It will be a long action and if things go well we’ll crack into enemy territory. While our forces are incredibly powerful compared to the enemy and we absolutely anticipate victory—accidents can and do happen to individuals. Ill sign off for now.

Don’t show this letter to my folks. Take care of them.

Salud and love,

Your comrade

Abe

The officers had no maps.
Four machine guns worked, sporadically.

The Lincoln Battalion had been moved south of the San Martin Road. On February 26th, Pohoric told the commander of the battalion, Woodhouse (ex-college football player, recent graduate of the Lenin School in Moscow) that the Lincolns were to be part of the offensive against Hill 693, the highest point on the plateau between the Jarama and Tajuna rivers and protected by nationalist machine gun nests. Lotz and Pohoric believed that if Hill 693 were retaken, they could drive the fascists back across the Jarama. The Lincolns were to create a diversion by attacking enemy lines along the San Martin Road.

Pohoric said that at 6:45, a battery of Republican artillery would bombard the fascist trenches four hundred yards away. At 6:55 the Republican Air Force would attack. After that, a tank company would grind down the enemy barbed wire and prepare the way for the Americans.