The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (33 page)

IN KUIBYSHEV, just as in Moscow, the diplomats were harried by a few surviving American exiles, often female family members who had escaped the NKVD thus far. Anna and Anastasia Wardamsky, for example, called at the new American embassy building in February 1942, hysterical after their father had disappeared and their third sister, Helena, had fallen “sick with nerves.” The Wardamsky sisters described how their American passports had been confiscated by the Soviet authorities, and Anna frantically complained that “the Embassy was not protecting them.” As their family waited for the hundreds of dollars they needed to pay their passage home, the sisters received the written assurance from American diplomats that
“should the Soviet authorities attempt to prevail upon you to accept Soviet passports, or should efforts be made to force you to accept Soviet passports, you may inform them that any attempt on their part to force any American citizen to bear a Soviet passport involuntarily is a matter of the gravest concern to the Embassy and will be brought to the urgent attention of the Government of the United States of America.”

Inevitably their case became mired in bureaucracy, not helped by the telegrammed refusal of Sumner Welles to issue an emergency repatriation loan. As their case dragged on, the Wardamsky sisters were ordered by the NKVD to leave the closed city of Kuibyshev. In May 1942, Helena telephoned the American embassy to let them know that her sister Anna had been arrested. After the arrest, Helena continued to write frantic appeals to the diplomats asking for intervention on behalf of her missing sister. She was still waiting for the State Department to act when she received the official news that Anna Wardamsky had died in an NKVD prison, supposedly of “heart failure.”
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As might be expected, the death certificates of Americans in Soviet custody were regularly falsified to disguise the true cause. On December 8, 1942, and January 9, 1943, embassy officials were allowed to visit the imprisoned Isaiah Oggins, a forty-five-year-old from Willimantic, Connecticut, after a sustained letter-writing campaign by his wife, Norma, in the United States. In her letters, Norma Oggins had stressed the need of their eleven-year-old son, Robin, to see his father. The boy, she wrote, was “as promising a young American as ever lived.” Although the American diplomats were allowed to visit Isaiah Oggins, nothing more was done to obtain the release of the former American Communist Party member, imprisoned since February 1939.
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For their part, the Soviet security services had no intention of ever allowing Isaiah Oggins to return home. A letter was sent from Victor Abakumov— a protégé of the new secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria—to Stalin in connection with the case:

 
Soon afterward, Isaiah Oggins was executed in Moscow by poison administered by an NKVD doctor named Grigory Mairanovsky. The official Soviet documentation recorded death due to “paralysis of the heart owing to acute sclerosis of the coronary artery with associated angiospams and papillary carcinoma of the urinary bladder.” In the chaos of war, hardly a soul knew or cared about the solitary deaths of such victims.
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Nor was it easy to imagine there were still a few naïve Americans attempting to emigrate to the USSR. Edward Speier was a thirty-six-year-old metalworker from Detroit who had taken the latest proclamations of Soviet-American friendship perhaps a little too seriously. With the United States not yet in the war, Speier chose to help the Soviet cause by stowing away in a boxed locomotive loaded onto a Soviet steamer in Richmond, California. Before organizing his departure, he had told his mother, Henrietta Speier, that he believed “the Russians would welcome the services of a skilled mechanic.” He was arrested on his arrival in Vladivostok in September 1941.

Unusually, American diplomatic officials were allowed to visit Edward Speier twice during the relatively brief period of his detention, a possible sign of Stalin’s new concern for American friendship. The first visit took place only weeks after Speier’s arrest, on December 20, 1941. In his interview, the rugged-looking metalworker—whose black hair and hazel eyes stare out defiantly from his photograph—described himself as one of
“Uncle Sam’s disinherited sons, kicked around and not given a chance to work . . . In every country there are good and bad people, but whereas in the United States the bad people are running the Government in the Soviet Union the bad people are all in jail.”
Edward Speier claimed that he had been persecuted many times in the United States for “stealing food and eating in restaurants without paying.” The American vice consul, Donald Nichols, was left unimpressed by the visit, describing Speier in his dispatch back to Washington as “a very uncouth person who seasons his conversation liberally with profanity and obscenities.”

Six months’ incarceration in an NKVD prison changed Edward Speier’s attitude completely. By his second visit, on March 25, 1942, Speier was denying that he had ever felt badly about the United States, and begging the American consul to help him return home. Twice the Soviet authorities asked the American officials if they wanted Speier back; otherwise “normal Soviet law would be applied.” But nothing was done to save Speier, and his subsequent fate was all too predictable. According to the Soviet death certificate issued to the American diplomats, Edward Speier died on January 3, 1943, at 7:00 A.M. The chief of Speier’s prisoners’ convoy testified that he died of pneumonia on prison train No. 74 en route to a “reformation-labor camp” at Karaganda. His corpse, they said, was forwarded for burial at the camp. With exacting thoroughness the Soviets listed his personal effects:
“1. Warm jacket old. 2. Brown fur hat, old. 3. Knitted black hat, old. 4. Sweater woollen, old. 5. Woollen trousers, green, torn. 6. Pillow, filled with feathers. 7. Leather shoes, torn. 8. Leather shoes, torn. 9. Leather slippers, torn.”
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On hearing the news of her son’s premature death, Henrietta Speier of San Bernardino, California, wrote a series of three letters addressed to the American diplomatic staff in Kuibyshev, which she requested to be forwarded to the Soviet authorities. In her handwritten letters, Mrs. Speier’s spelling was often less than perfect:

 
Lacking an answer to her questions, Henrietta Speier found her grief could only worsen. In her second letter, she continued:

Henrietta Speier’s third and final letter reflected a mother’s gradual understanding of the truth behind her son’s death:

 
There is no record of any answer to Henrietta Speier’s letters.

 
 
BY THE END of 1942, the conditions within the Soviet concentration camps were already well known to the American authorities. In the early stages of the war, Stalin allowed an army to be gathered from the survivors of the 1.7 million Poles consigned to the Gulag in 1939. The American journalist Alice-Leone Moats happened to be present in Kuibyshev in 1941 when a trainload of two thousand Poles arrived back from one of the camps. She found their condition heartrending:

 
The so-called Anders army had been granted permission to leave the USSR to fight alongside the British. One Polish survivor of the camps remembered: “The Russians had a hard time seeing us leave. The elderly ones said it is a miracle, a true miracle. This never happened before. The younger ones envied us.”
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As the Poles gathered in Iran, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Szymanski, an American military liaison officer, wrote a detailed report dated November 23, 1943, describing the facts he had learned concerning the earlier deportations of Polish men, women, and children into the Soviet Gulag:

 
In his report sent back to Washington, D.C., Lieutenant-Colonel Szymanski emphasized that “overwork and undernourishment . . . have done the job of bullets.” Among the witness statements, he quoted a letter from Stanislaus Haracz to his brother in Brooklyn, New York, describing his journey to Siberia. Of the seventy people packed into their train car,
“not a single child arrived at destination, my three children died; their bodies were placed on the snow beside the car and the train moved on; that was their funeral.”
Near the end of this startling document, which read as a shocked American soldier’s first encounter with genocide, Szymanski added:
“One of Mr. Willkie’s secretarys stated to me in Tehran, that Russia and the United States will dictate the peace of Europe. When I repeated this (without mentioning the source) to a very prominent Pole in Tehran, he at first begged me not to jest, and then very sadly said to me that ‘In that case Poland has lost the war and the Allies have lost the war.’ The choice in Europe is not merely: Democracy vs Hitler, as so many Americans seem to think it is.”