The other members of the “Working Group” all proved impossible to identify with any certainty, as did the men on Josef’s Comintern list. I talked to several long-retired railwaymen, and some had suggestions that fitted those few facts I had, but I got no further than that. I have no idea what happened to them or whether they ever moved on to active resistance.
The pseudonyms Josef used for his Comintern contacts probably weren’t the ones they used for themselves, let alone their real names. I haven’t found a single reference to a Dieter, but I have found mention of a female Comintern agent known as EP whose age and physical appearance are compatible with Josef’s Elise. If the two women were one and the same, then she was one of the German comrades Stalin sent back to Hitler as part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. “EP” died in Ravensbrück in 1941.
That was also the year that my grandfather died, having long outlived Dr. Offner’s expectations. We were able to exchange letters even after the war began because America had not yet entered it, and the last we received in Sofie’s neat writing, a week or so after Pearl Harbor, was the one announcing his death. She and all the rest of her family were murdered by Red Army soldiers in late 1944.
And then there was my mother. I knew that knowing more about her death would serve no useful purpose, but as my wife tells everyone, “Walter can never let anything be.” Perhaps on this occasion I was right, because at least my worst fears proved unfounded. My mother had been ill-treated, but that had been the norm, and according to the octogenarian witness I finally found, she had, like so many others in the same weakened state, been easy prey for pneumonia.
I visited the memorial center at Lichtenburg and stood in front of the plaque above the mass grave, watching her bustle around the house in Hamm, seeing her smile as she kissed me good night.
But what of us who escaped?
The four of us stayed in Scranton for almost a year, Erich and I with the Brennans, Verena and Marco lodging with friends of the Brennans who lived just down the street. During that time Bill Brennan moved heaven and earth to win us immigrant status as refugees from Nazi Germany, and his efforts eventually bore fruit. We were Americans at last!
Once they were legal, Verena and Marco moved to New York City. I didn’t get the impression that Marco’s background was as much of a handicap in Scranton as it had been at home, but I must have been wrong, because Verena decided that a cosmopolitan city would suit her son better. It proved a wise move. Verena had always been a hard worker, and they soon had somewhere to live on the outskirts of Harlem, where he finished school. Marco was called up in 1943 and ended up back in Europe, at least for a while. While he was away, Verena met and married a widower with two grown-up children, and as far as I know has never regretted it. I have met him on a couple of occasions and on both was struck by his basic decency and their mutual devotion. They’re both in their eighties now, and in her last Christmas letter, she said they’d spent the previous fall campaigning for Dukakis.
Marco has had a more checkered time of it. Once back from Europe, he eschewed the opportunity offered by the GI Bill, and settled for a series of dead-end jobs that just about paid for the girls and fun his earlier life had denied him. Eventually tiring of this, he decided to look for his father in Africa and after saving and borrowing enough for his passage set sail a couple of weeks before the Korean War broke out. He found his father, Jean Diallo, who had greatly prospered in the last twenty-five years and was a leading light in the anti-colonial opposition. Jean had a wife and other grown-up children but was willing to take Marco in.
He’s been living in Africa ever since, and though I sometimes get news from his mother, I’ve seen him only once in almost forty years, when he came to New York in 1975 as part of his country’s UN delegation. He’s currently a government minister and has just survived a corruption scandal. No one could deny that over the years Marco was dealt some truly terrible hands, but he has never been bitter or resentful and despite every sign to the contrary has always seemed to believe that things turn out for the best.
Erich, the teenage outlaw, turned into Erich the satisfied adult. He lived with the Brennans until he was called up and after surviving four years in the Pacific came home to marry their youngest daughter, Mary. The army had trained him as a mechanic, and like Marco he saw no attraction in further education. He got work in a local garage, and when the owner suddenly passed away, the Brennans helped him buy out the widow. He ran the business for more than thirty years and became a local institution. He and Mary have four children, all of them now in their forties and each with two of their own. When he’s not playing granddad, Erich plays pool rather badly and takes people out for drives in one of his beautiful antique cars.
I am told by my wife that fifty years later I am still very much the boy in the diary, which should probably give me cause for concern but actually feels quite comforting.
By the time I was called up in late 1944, the war was almost over, and I never saw combat. Unlike Erich and Marco, I made the most of the GI Bill, studying history for several years before going on to teach it. I won’t say I’ve loved every minute, but I can’t imagine a more fulfilling career. Life should be like history, something you never get tired of, a never-ending opportunity to use two of God’s greatest gifts, endeavor and curiosity.
I met Ellie in my last year as a student, and we married two years later. Three children followed, two sons named Richard and David, a daughter named Anna. All are very much still part of our lives. We have one grandchild and are expecting another.
Scranton is only a two-hour drive from our home in Cortland, so we visit Erich and his family quite often. I always enjoy seeing my brother, and I think he feels the same. The two of us are so unalike—in interests, opinions, the lives we lead—but there’s something brothers share that’s not subject to any of that.
The last family gathering was a few weeks ago, at Bill Brennan’s funeral. Esther passed on almost ten years ago, and Bill had been ill for quite a while. I visited them often over the years and remain quite close to several of their children. In all my time in Scranton, in all the years since, I never heard anyone say a bad word about Bill or Esther; if ever other lives were worthy of emulation, then theirs surely were. And over the years, whenever I’ve thought of Josef, it was with heartfelt gratitude for sending us to them.
And so, finally, we come to Josef, or whatever his real name was. Many readers of his diary—American readers particularly—will find it hard to forgive him for being a Communist, let alone a self-confessed terrorist and murderer. I am not here to condone what he did, but as any historian knows, context is everything. When the First World War destroyed one set of moral precepts for organizing our world, many saw the Communist ideals of the Russian Revolution as a natural successor, and by the time it had become clear that this new dream was also prone to corruption, the Nazis had seized power in Germany. People like Josef, who worked and fought for the Communist dream, then had to choose between nightmares—one they believed still showed flickers of hope, one they knew offered only darkness.
As the diary makes clear, working for the Comintern was not for the fainthearted. You lived with the threat of torture and death; you got used to comrades not coming back. But he was doing what he wanted to do, which was fight for what he hoped and believed would one day be a better world. And no matter how wrong he might have been to think that such a newborn world could have a Soviet midwife, I can’t help but admire the intention and the effort.
I am of course biased. He is the reason I’m here in America and have led the life I have. But what was the price? He seemed relieved when we said our goodbyes in that bar’s back room, something I then put down to his being finally free of his burdensome charges. After reading the diary, I wonder. We all assumed he was meeting the local comrades to arrange a passage somewhere, but now I suspect that he was also negotiating his own immediate future. His bosses had ordered him back to Mo
scow, and the comrades in Antwerp—then an important Comintern base—would probably have known as much. And after reading Josef’s account of his last conversation with Dieter, I find it hard to believe that the Belgian comrades would have shipped the four of us off to America just because Josef asked them to.
Did he make a deal? Offer them something—perhaps himself—in exchange for our passage? Then again, why would they not just take him by force and put him on a Russian-bound freighter?
Either possibility assumes an Antwerp apparatus unanimously loyal to Moscow, which in 1938 was probably not the case. Josef had mentioned an old friend when we were planning our escape from Hamm, and perhaps he persuaded this dissident comrade to help us while intending all along to follow the apparat’s orders.
My attempts to find out more have been largely unsuccessful. The Surabaya Queen was sunk on convoy duty in 1942, and I haven’t been able to trace the sailor who looked after us. One thing that Erich remembered was thanking him for all his help, and the sailor wryly remarking that he’d been well paid. With Comintern money, I have to assume. Probably paid by Josef, rather than the local CP.
I doubt we’ll ever know, though having said that, the continuing news on TV of a Soviet Union falling apart suggests that the relevant records may one day become available. Watching the coverage in light of reading his diary, I find it hard to believe that Josef would have thought his old inspiration worth saving.
I have found no further trace of him. I think he went back to Moscow, either as payment for our escape, or because, in spite of the growing disillusion so evident in the diary, the Comintern was still where he felt most at home. A bullet in the back of the head may have been waiting for him, but given the fact that the terror was past its zenith by then, it seems more likely that he ended up in some godforsaken corner of Stalin’s gulag. He might have simply died there or been given a brief reprieve in one of those prisoner units that the Red Army used to clear mines or use up the enemy’s ammunition.
If by some miracle he survived the war and Stalin’s last few years, I think the man who wrote this diary would have found a way to leave the Soviet Union, if only to work for a socialist future in a more conducive setting. And he would, I think, have made his way to America, if only to see what the people he’d saved were making of that gift.
Cortland, NY
October 1989
Acknowledgments
My heartfelt thanks to Juliet Grames, Rachel Kowal and Katie Herman at Soho for making the book better than it was, to Charlie Viney for believing in the original idea, and to my wife and partner, Nancy, for being just that.
Diary of a Dead Man on Leave Page 28