The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (49 page)

 
Very quietly, in the midst of this epic confrontation, a press release was issued by the State Department. Given an unassuming title—“Soviet Refusal to Grant Exit Permits to American Citizens in the USSR”—and dated March 20, 1950, the government memo carried the straightforward admission of
“considerable evidence that repressive measures have been taken by Soviet authorities against American citizens attempting to arrange departure from the Soviet Union.”
The State Department officials then explained that “two thousand citizens” were estimated to be trapped in the USSR. It was the first public acknowledgment of the lost American families of the Depression emigration.

Finally, in the midst of conflict, the existence of the forsaken had been publicized. But when the American diplomats in Moscow were planning the destruction of the embassy records by the use of thermite bombs (which, they noted, would have the disadvantage of destroying the Mokhovaya building, in which the Soviets would imprison them “to try and dissuade U.S. Air Forces from attacking Moscow with atomic weapons”), the fate of a couple of thousand American civilians hardly seemed a priority. Of the American servicemen who had so recently joined their ranks, nothing at all was admitted. Although their sightings within the Gulag continued, and the Korean War only increased their numbers.
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AT THE END of 1951 and in the spring of 1952, a Greek refugee from the Soviet Union was interviewed by the American air liaison’s office in Hong Kong. The Greek witness stated that he had seen
“several hundred American prisoners-of-war being transferred from Chinese to Russian trains at Manchouli near the border of Manchuria and Siberia,”
and heard three prisoners of war under guard “conversing in English.” Their uniforms had American sleeve insignia, and among them were a “great number of Negroes,” a race the witness had not seen before. The American prisoners were carrying no belongings except canteens, and the Chinese guards transferred them through a gate bisecting the platform directly into the custody of their Soviet counterparts, who escorted them onto a waiting prison train. The first time he saw the prisoners transferred, there had been sufficient numbers to fill a seven-car train, however, “these shipments were reported often and occurred when United Nation forces in Korea were on the offensive.” In his report, the American air attaché noted that “the source is very careful not to exaggerate information and is positive of identification of American POWs.”
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This information was corroborated when Yuri Rastvorov, a Russian diplomat and lieutenant-colonel of the MVD, defected from the Soviet mission in Tokyo. In a debriefing document dated January 31, 1955, Rastvorov stated that “US and other UN POWS were being held in Siberia.” The Soviet defector had received this intelligence information from “recent arrivals—1950- 1953—from the Soviet Union to the USSR’s Tokyo Mission.”
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Philip Corso, a retired American Army intelligence officer, later described how Rastvorov had told him that “several hundred” American prisoners of war had been sent to Siberia. According to Corso, President Eisenhower received this intelligence but had not wished to force the issue for fear of escalation into nuclear war:
“The general feeling in policy-making bodies was that direct confrontation with the Soviets could be disastrous.”
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Yuri Rastvorov’s report remained classified for the next four decades, along with other evidence such as a CIA report, dated April 30, 1952, that detailed the transfer of “approximately 300 prisoners-of-war” by rail from China to Molotov (the Russian city now known as Perm):

 
Sightings of American prisoners in Soviet camps continued to be reported throughout the 1950s. Often former Gulag prisoners simply walked into American embassies in Western Europe to offer up their information voluntarily. Thus an Austrian former prisoner, Adalbert Skala, told American officials in Vienna of his meeting with a “Lieutenant Racek” in Prison No. Two in the city of Irkutsk, and later at the Lubyanka in Moscow. The Austrian witness remembered Racek as a “lieutenant of armoured troops” captured in Korea. Lieutenant Racek gave the Austrian the address of his father in New York City, to let him know he was still alive. Skala warned his interviewer that the American lieutenant’s health was not good,
“having had a number of front teeth knocked out, having lost his hair, and generally having suffered the effects of mistreatment.”
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Occasionally, an American diplomat received a direct appeal from an American prisoner, smuggled out of the camps by a freed German or Polish former prisoner, although the messengers’ prison clothes were always thoroughly checked for just such contraband. On August 22, 1956, a letter was delivered via the German embassy in Moscow from a camp at Potma in the Komi Republic, west of Archangel:
“I am in camp 7 eleven years without any help whatsoever. I have tried to get in contact with my friends and relatives in the States and so far have had no luck. I wonder if you will be so kind as to help me and send me something here . . .”
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Two years earlier, in March 1954, the employees of a German import-export firm discovered a tag wrapped in a bundle of hides exported from the Soviet Union. The tag was a wooden rectangle about five centimeters long by three centimeters wide, with a round hole drilled in one end, similar to those used by the Gulag authorities to identify the bodies of the dead prisoners. The wooden tag was taken as evidence to the local police station, who reported it to the U.S. Army headquarters in Heidelberg. In tiny letters on both sides of the tag, a desperate plea had been written in English: “I AM IN JAIL IN RUSSIA. GO TO THE NEAREST POLICE STATION AND REPORT IT. MATTER OF DEAD OR LIVE. SAVE ME PLEASE AND ALL THE OTHERS. KRISTIAN HJALTSON.”

Rather than forming a banner headline in newspapers across the Free World, the discovered message was sent directly to the State Department, where an anonymous official placed the tag in an envelope marked “confidential,” and this small artifact of Cold War history disappeared into the archives. There it lay, waiting to be rediscovered, long decades after Kristian Hjaltson’s life had ended.
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AND STILL THE sightings continued. In July 1956, a German journalist named Werner von Borcke visited the American embassy in Vienna to explain how, before his return from a twelve-year sentence in the camps, he had sewn the names and addresses of two American prisoners into his clothes. The Russians had replaced his uniform and the names were lost, but von Borcke remembered that the first name was of an American woman arrested in Berlin who had sustained a grave injury to her leg while felling trees in the forest. She looked ten years older than she was, her brown hair streaked with gray, and her health was poor. The second name was of a “typical American” man, “tall, slender with dark hair and good build, about thirty-five years old, but with the fourth finger of the left hand missing.” He was a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force who had fought in Germany during the war, and spoke of New York and Milwaukee. The other prisoners assumed that he had been captured in Korea. The American was a silent person, and “after his interrogation by Soviet officers became yet more silent and depressed.”
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On September 5, 1960, a Polish prisoner, Richard Romanowski, walked into the American embassy in Brussels, having survived a seven-and-a-half-year sentence in Soviet Camp No. 307, near Bulon, in Eastern Siberia. After his sentence, Romanowski had been returned to his native Poland, but had successfully crossed the Iron Curtain into West Germany, claiming political asylum in Belgium. Two American prisoners, both captured in Korea in 1951, Lieutenant Ted Watson from Buffalo and Sergeant Fred Rosbiki from Chicago, had asked Romanowski to report their presence to the American authorities. Both men, said Romanowski, were in poor health, having been forced to work in a phosphorus mine. At the Brussels embassy, the Polish survivor then carefully explained how the phosphorus attacked the head and liver, bending down to show his own scaling scalp. The American diplomat in Brussels noted in his report that although Romanowski was “almost destitute” and living off only a dollar per day, at no point in their interview had he asked for any money for this information, which he had given quite voluntarily. The Polish survivor had accepted two dollars only “very reluctantly,” to help him return the sixty miles back to his home in Liège.
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That same year, Heinz Meier, a printer, had escaped East Germany. On July 27, 1960, Meier called at the American embassy in Bonn to report a tour he had made with an East German delegation of the Soviet printing industry. Their group had visited a camp 7.5 kilometers from Novosibirsk, where between “12,000 and 13,000 men” were being used as Gulag labor. In the camp, Meier “was approached by two persons who identified themselves as U.S. nationals who had been taken prisoner in Korea, taken to Red China for a year, and then transferred to the USSR.” Meier described a “C. Colman, about 42-44 years of age, who had light blond hair” from Philadelphia. The other American stood nearby and told Meier he was a second lieutenant from New York City. According to Meier’s report,
“Colman said there were originally 28 Americans in the group, but that it had been broken up, and there were now ‘6 or 7’ still together.”
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FEW STRONGER BONDS exist than those forged by soldiers during, and in the aftermath, of conflict. This phenomenon appears to transcend the differences of race and religion. In December 1956, a former prisoner of war from Niigata, Japan, sent a report to the American embassy in Tokyo. Keihachi Sakurai was very anxious to describe the fate of his friend, an American prisoner:

There was no logic within this hidden underworld in which American soldiers were held captive with German and Japanese prisoners, their wartime enemies, in camps run by their former Soviet allies. Both German and Japanese survivors kept promises they had made to the Americans to let their relatives know they were still alive. But only rarely did a report of the sighting of an American prisoner in the USSR reach the international media. In a press conference given on November 3, 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles referred to new information gathered on “Americans reported to be in Russian prison camps. We have asked Ambassador Bohlen to take their cases up with the Soviet Government.” Days earlier, seven Norwegians who had been released after eight years’ imprisonment had informed their national press that the Soviets were holding “scores of other Western prisoners including an American major.” The item only ever made a minor story in the newspapers, and was soon forgotten.
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Two years later, on July 11, 1955, officials at the State Department recommended that President Eisenhower
“seek an opportunity at the next summit meeting to take up with Soviet Premier Bulganin the general question of American citizens held in custody in the Soviet Union, basing his approach on the eye-witness informants who have reported having been in every day contact with these imprisoned Americans.”
In the State Department report prepared for Geneva, it was decided to concentrate their efforts on behalf of the pilots of a U.S. Navy airplane shot down over the Baltic on April 8, 1950, and eight other American citizens. An internal policy document stated
“It is recommended that no publicity be given to the Department’s representations in these cases. The Department particularly desires no publicity regarding Major Wirt Elizabeth Thompson since without confirmation it hesitates to raise the hopes of this man’s parents. They know nothing of his reported presence in the USSR.”
This document then touched on the fate of the original American emigrants to the USSR:
“Two thousand claimants to American citizenship . . . have not been able to communicate with the American Embassy in order to have their citizenship established. Of this number approximately 704 have been verified as American citizens . . . It is believed that no mention should be made at the ‘Summit’ meeting of this group of claimants, our representations in their behalf being confined to approaches from the American embassy to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
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