Dancing Under the Red Star (2 page)

So I read the book. And I was stunned. Victor detailed his life in Russia. Maybe I was naive, but I could hardly believe that such horrible atrocities and human cruelty actually existed.

Some days later, when my mother and I spoke again, she asked if I had noticed Victor’s comment, toward the end, where he wrote, “[I am] the only survivor of all those men and women and children who had gone from Detroit to Gorky and ended in Siberian camps all those many years ago. I am the one, the only one, who got back, who lived through it all.”

I did, in fact, remember reading that.

“Karl,” my mother said, “there is much I haven’t told you about my life. Maybe now would be a good time to talk, while we still have the time.”

I nodded, smiled. Of course, I had heard many details of her life throughout my years, but I wasn’t entirely sure what she’d say next.

“Well, Victor’s comment, that’s not exactly how it went; that’s not exactly what happened. There’s a bit more to it that no one knows…” A tender, melancholy smile warmed her face as she continued. “Victor’s father, like mine—your grandfather—was employed by the Ford Motor Company in Detroit and made the Gorky trip too. Both of our families were in the original four hundred or so chosen to go. Victor’s story has been well documented over the years.”

She paused. I waited eagerly for each word.

“Karl, just for the record, for the sake of accuracy as well as historical correctness… actually Victor Herman was one of two who made it back; he was the
second
one to return. I was the first. I’m sure Victor based his comment on presumption alone. Perhaps he just didn’t know about me—almost no one did! When I got back to America, I certainly didn’t want to publicize my life or my return to the States, because I was afraid of what they might do.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “I never knew for sure if my battle was truly over or if my escape would ever be truly final.”

I was dumbfounded. I sat speechless, listening intently, watching her blot the tears with the corner of her apron. She continued.

“I survived the unbelievable horror of the Siberian labor camps and prisons and came back to America, through Germany, despite incredible odds. But I did finally return home, with you and Mama, stepping back onto my native American soil on November 29, 1961. I remained quiet and kept a low profile, primarily for the sake of my family, for you and Mama. Victor followed some fifteen years later—in 1976.”

Now I had tears of my own to wipe away as I tried to fathom the unspeakable suffering and the remarkable courage of my mother’s life.

“Maybe I also have a story to tell?” she continued, an expression of curiosity and unspoken surrender on her face. “Maybe now is a good time for that? Things have changed. I am no longer afraid, and this is your family history, Karl.”

I could only nod my head in sober agreement. I had always loved and respected my mother, but that day my admiration for her took on new significance.

Dancing Under the Red Star
is the historic narrative and biographical account of a true American survivor. It is the poignant, often shocking, and always disturbing remembrance of the facts—the people, the passions, and the troubled years of Margaret Werner’s life. My mother knew. She lived it.

Our journey beyond the iron curtain and back is a story of defiance, hope, inspiration, and personal triumph—those often unseen elements rooted in the deeper spiritual realities of the human experience.

Today I am a writer, yes—but yesterday, first, I was a son. And now I know where I came from and why I’m here. This is not really
my story,
but then again, maybe it is.

Based on her memories, this is my mother’s story.

God must be out of Russia in five years.

JOSEPH STALIN

One

THE PAIN OF SEVENTEEN

I
f the comforting passage of time, coupled with God’s gentle mercies, kindly erases the tragic memories of my life, even so, June 29, 1938, will still remain the one particular day that I will never forget as long as I live. I was seventeen years old, and destiny was coming, whether I liked it or not.

When I awoke that morning, I think I already knew. In my heart, or maybe it was the pit of my stomach, I sensed there would be something out of the ordinary about this day. It was an eerie premonition, something you could unmistakably identify but not necessarily explain. Just in my waking up, the day already felt strangely surreal and separate from all others.

It was an unusually splendid morning. The entire sky was uncommon, painted a crystal clear blue, with no clouds, and I felt oddly euphoric. And in the midst of the otherwise chaotic circumstances surrounding this time in my life, this day seemed filled with hope and promise, and I couldn’t wait to get it started.

Peering out the window of our second-floor apartment in Gorky’s American Village, I felt the warm and deceptively soothing rays of the Russian summer sunshine on my skin. I was eager to get outside, to meet my best friend, Maria, for a tennis match. I was surging with adrenaline and expectancy. My body, rather than my mind, was happy, perhaps outside of itself. And happy was not an easy thing to be in Russia, in those unpredictably turbulent days, when confusing changes were occurring all around us.

Through no choice of my own, Russia had become my home, although in my mind and in my heart, and sometimes even in my words, I still referred to it as a foreign country. This was not America, where I was born, and no matter how long I stayed, I simply did not belong here. This was not my true home! Here in Gorky, we feared that anything could happen at any moment, and no one ever really knew what to expect from one minute to the next.

I speedily ate a very light breakfast, mainly to satisfy my mother’s demands, then grabbed my tennis racket and hurriedly kissed Mama good-bye, nearly tripping over her feet as I jolted down the stairs to meet Maria.

The brick wall and empty lot of an abandoned storefront around the corner from our tenement was a perfect place to practice tennis by myself or when Maria could not play. We had planned to meet there that morning and then walk to the nearby tennis courts together. She hadn’t arrived yet, so I decided to stretch and loosen up on my own. Maria was eighteen—a beautiful, green-eyed Ukrainian girl who lived in our village because her father and older brother also worked in the automobile factory with my father. She was an excellent athlete and competitor, a renowned young gymnast in her hometown, and now a topnotch tennis player here in the village. We enjoyed each other’s company and athletic competitiveness immensely. In fact, Maria was the only other girl my age in the entire village whose love for sports and general athletic prowess rivaled mine. I’m quite sure that’s why we got along so well. Here in Gorky, Soviet sports had become my life. Athletic competition and organized sports were highly esteemed in Russia and taken very seriously. This suited me! Since early childhood back in Detroit, I had been raised to be athletic and physical, and my nature was to be competitive in everything.

Maria and I were highly touted swimmers for the Gorky region, having won several district and regional competitions together, and we were now ranked high in the national statistics. She swam the fastest 100- and 200-meter backstroke I had ever seen. She was absolutely phenomenal. I swam the best freestyle and butterfly sprint events in our region. Competitive sports made a positive place for us within this unfamiliar society. Russia was a place where we felt free to excel. But today was not a competition; we planned a day of relaxation, a day to dream of the future, a day for fun. My best friend and I were going to play tennis.

Maria soon showed up, and we began to chitchat, volleying back and forth against the wall, talking and giggling about school and sports and, of course, boys. Our voices made a little rhythm with the tapping rackets, the bouncing tennis balls, and the warm summer wind rustling the leaves overhead. I remember thinking what an absolutely perfect day this was. It was about ten o’clock. My papa was at work in the factory, Mama was at home doing her chores, and I planned to spend time with her later in the afternoon.

Mama was actually my best friend, and Maria came next. I always enjoyed the time I spent relaxing and talking with my mother, because she had an unassuming sort of tranquillity about her that made you want to be around her. She had an inner peace and a silent strength that simply refused to be managed by outside circumstances. I counted on her for stability in the confusing world in which we lived. My mother’s gaze drew you in with piercingly light blue, nearly violet eyes. But more than her eyes, it was her heart she was giving you. It was her spirit that always drew you in without effort. When she took my hand in hers, there were no more problems and no more worries. She made you feel that everything would be okay. And that was difficult here in Gorky, to be sure. My papa’s work was hard, and for six years we had been cut off from our American home. But my mama was something else. I always wanted to be just like her.

That summer day Maria and I were planning to play tennis for an hour or so, have a good workout, and then maybe go down to the river, the Oka, for a swim. Afterward I would come back home, help Mama with the chores, and wait for Papa to come home from work. We’d have dinner together, I’d bring him his pipe, and Mama would make him some coffee. Night after night we’d sit and listen to him worry and complain about problems that agitated him so much at the factory, the things he could not change.

My father was an idealist at heart, and change was part of his very nature. He was in constant torment about what he saw at work: the organizational, bureaucratic management “nonsense,” as he liked to say, in the factory. He would shake his head as he recounted the injustices he experienced at work, but then he would reassure us that a better day was coming, just ahead, on the horizon. “Just wait. You’ll see. It won’t be like this forever. I promise,” he’d say, and I always believed him.

Sometimes he would read to me from one of our favorite books—
Black Beauty
or
Treasure Island
—and Mama would sit and smile, taking it all in. She enjoyed her family more than anything, and she was always trying to make life better for her husband. I had grown accustomed to these evenings. They were really no more complicated than that. We had made our own kind of adjustment to living in Russia, but beneath it all, I knew something was intrinsically wrong. I just didn’t know how much.

Maria and I hit the tennis ball around and laughed hysterically about a boy named Boris, a Czech, from our high school. She was telling me about something crazy he did in class the day before, when she suddenly stopped in midsentence and almost dropped her racket. She stood as if paralyzed, looking past me toward my house. She whispered, “Margo, a car just pulled up in front of your building… I thought I saw your father in it.”

My first thought was,
A car? Really?
I didn’t understand why Papa would be home from work at this time, and I certainly didn’t understand why he would be in a car or why a car would even be here. I was puzzled; automobiles were not a common sight in our village, except when there was trouble or something out of the ordinary. But I turned and saw the ominous-looking black sedan in front of our house, and then I saw its back door opening. I knew something was wrong—terribly, terribly wrong. And I knew my papa was in the car. I stood there for a moment and stared, unable to move.

Maria looked at my face, threw her arms around my neck, and began to cry. “Oh, Margo, not your father,” she said in my ear. It was as if she already knew something I did not.

Maria was eighteen, going on thirty. Her mother had died under mysterious circumstances just a year earlier, and before that, her grandparents had been murdered during the Bolshevik Revolution. She was already more familiar with pain than I, and she carried a maturity beyond her years. They say, “Whatever doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.” Maria, despite our relative closeness in age, was already stronger than I was.

A strange man in a dark gray uniform stepped out of the car first and then reached back inside to pull my father out by his arm. Running toward them, I screamed, “Papa! Papa!” I saw the man grab my father’s wrist and force him around the car, where another man got out. He seized my father by his other wrist, and they pushed him toward the apartment. Papa didn’t seem to struggle, at least not much. I thought that was odd. I remember a look of agony on his face, but he didn’t appear to be struggling. What I recall seeing was an uncharacteristic resignation and the absence of the fight that usually marked my father. That was strange to me, because he was a fighter—innately a fighter! For a moment he didn’t seem like my father, my flesh and blood. I wanted this to be any other man but him. But it was not. It was my papa. And I knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, so I couldn’t understand what was happening.