by Jack Barsky
The “blah, blah, blah” had become a real threat. Expulsion from high school would have a severely negative impact on my future. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, and throughout the day I was unable to produce a single coherent thought. On the walk from the classrooms to the dorm—normally a joyful, chatty occasion—I trailed behind the group, hanging my head and brooding.
This was the first serious crisis of my life. When I met up with Rosi, she said, “Albrecht, if you care about me and about yourself, please, please improve your behavior!”
Well, I would show her I was worthy of her love, a motivator stronger than all the others taken together.
I filled the two months of summer vacation with activity—going on camping trips and working in a local factory—but life seemed entirely meaningless without Rosi. We had promised to think about each other every night by looking at the brightest star in the sky at exactly 10:00 p.m. This I did faithfully, every night, often overcome with emotion. The few letters we exchanged made the wait more bearable, but I was incredibly anxious to return to school in September.
One Sunday morning, I woke up early and proceeded gingerly down the creaky steps of the wooden staircase connecting the main living quarters to the second floor. My parents often slept in late on Sundays, so I tiptoed into the study in search of a book to read until it was time for breakfast. To my surprise, my parents were already awake and arguing rather intensely, albeit in hushed voices, in the adjoining living room. As I got closer to the door, I could hear what they were saying.
“I’ve had enough,” my father said. “I’m filing for divorce.”
I heard my mother laugh and say, “Calm down already, Heinz. It is normal for couples to have arguments. Let’s stop this silly discussion before we wake up the boys. Should I make breakfast?”
This response infuriated my father, and he raised his voice.
“You don’t seem to understand: I am getting a divorce. I am sick of your mothering and setting all the rules in this house. I want to live! I want to breathe! I am getting a divorce!”
With that, he walked out the door, got into the car, and drove away. I tiptoed back up the stairs, stunned and guilt-ridden for having eavesdropped.
Before reaching the second level, I heard a loud thud in the living room and rushed back down to find my mother passed out on the floor. I sat her up and pulled her onto the sofa, which was not an easy task for a skinny sixteen-year-old. Before I could think of what to do next, my mother came to and sat up in silence. There was a dazed, otherworldly look on her face as she stared into nothingness for what seemed an eternity. Finally, she raised herself with a forceful jolt and hurried up the stairs.
When I heard heavy footsteps in the attic just above me, I couldn’t ward off the ghoulish vision of my mother dangling from a rope attached to the rafters. So I went up the attic steps and took a peek through the half-opened door. To my relief, she was engaged in some routine cleaning activities.
My mother and I barely spoke the rest of that Sunday. I didn’t ask where my father was, and if my brother asked, I didn’t hear him. Over the next week, conversation was kept to the bare minimum required to manage the logistics of the household.
My brother and I were never given any insight into the divorce proceedings. One day, my father called me into the living room. As we stood across the table from each other, he said, “Albrecht, the court will soon make a decision on the divorce. Since you are sixteen years old, they are willing to give you a voice in deciding who you want to live with when you’re not at school.”
In my mind, the decision had already been made, and I wasted no time in making that clear.
“Vati,” I said, “Hans-Günther and I would like to stay here with Mutti.”
By the characteristic swirling of his tongue inside his mouth, I knew that my father was displeased with my response, but he didn’t say a word. Instead, he nodded curtly and walked out the door.
In late July, he moved into a one-bedroom apartment near the school in Bad Muskau. And though I went to visit him one time at his request, it was clear we had nothing left to say to each other. The relationship that had never really been had now reached its final destination—a dead end. After a few minutes of awkward silence, I made an excuse about having to help a friend with some bike repairs, and I got up to leave. He seemed almost grateful to see me go. I never saw my father again after that day—and never gave him much thought, either.
On our first day back at school, I didn’t see Rosi until after class was out. We walked back to the dorm together, across the Spree River and along a dirt road. I was ecstatic to be reunited with my one true love, but something didn’t seem right.
When Rosi finally opened up, she spoke hesitantly at first, and then quickly got to the point.
“Albrecht, you know I really like you . . .”
I looked over at her, but her eyes were averted and her head was down.
“What is it, Rosi?”
She took a breath and started over. “Albrecht, I had a boyfriend before you and I got together. He’s from my village, and he’s in his second year studying medicine at the university. He came looking for me this summer, and now we are back together.”
I stopped dead in my tracks, and for a moment everything was a jumble. Finally I managed to sputter, “But . . . but . . . what about your promise? What about the star? What about everything we had? Don’t you know how much I love you?”
Rosi responded gently, with her eyes still averted, “I thought we were just having fun. You took everything too seriously. But I should have told you. I’m really sorry.”
Despondent at the thought of losing her, I could already feel the distance between us growing wider.
“Well, can we still be friends?”
“Yes, of course,” she said with relief in her voice, and for the first time since we had left class, she made eye contact with me.
For me, her answer left the back door ajar, and I decided I would win her back. We still had two full years of school together, which gave me the advantage of physical proximity. During my entire junior year, I hung around Rosi and made myself useful whenever and wherever I could. I helped her with her homework, carried her bags on the walk to school, and made myself available to talk whenever she wanted to. I was dogged in my pursuit and even faked a fainting spell one time. Yet nothing worked, and when we parted company at the end of the school year, we were still just friends. But I wasn’t giving up.
AT THE END OF OUR JUNIOR YEAR, my class took a trip to the city of Weimar and visited nearby Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps from the Nazi era. This mandatory class trip was an idea conceived by the East German authorities to raise up future generations of leaders who would be firmly committed to the antifascist, pro-Communist heritage of our nation.
There were forty of us on the tour bus to Weimar, and we were a happy bunch, singing songs and joking during the four-hour drive. But all good humor quickly fell away when we got off the bus and stood before the entrance to the former concentration camp with its infamous inscription on the wrought iron gate: Jedem das Seine (“To Each His Own”). A heavy silence hung over us as we followed the guide into the large inner yard, where roll call had once been held. The guard towers, surrounded by razor wire, loomed ominously above us. The guide led us through the museum, which had been created in one of the buildings that used to house the camp’s administration. We walked by walls with countless pictures showing emaciated, half-naked inmates, piles of corpses about to be bulldozed into a mass grave, and other gut-wrenching images of unspeakable cruelty.
In the next room were exhibits of lamp shades made of tattooed human skin and even two shrunken heads. This was too much to bear. I heard several of the girls begin to sob as they covered their mouths and tried to stifle their tears. Like most of the other boys, I hung my head in horror at what had been done here but remained outwardly stoic.
But the tour was not yet finished. On we went to the crema
torium, where the dead were incinerated until nothing but ashes was left of the prisoners who had been alive only hours before.
Cleverly planned by the museum leadership, the tour ended in a room called the Genickschußanlage, which means “facility to shoot somebody in the neck.” Unsuspecting victims were led into that room under the pretext of having their measurements taken. As soon as the victim was put up against the wall, a hole opened and an executioner on the other side of the wall killed the person with a bullet to the neck. We were told that Ernst Thälmann, the head of the German Communist Party, had been executed in this manner.
Thälmann was a hero of mythical proportions in East Germany. He had been a fighter against Hitler and the Nazis early on, and he was said to have been an all-around good person who died fighting the scourge of fascism.
For me, the loop was closed: Hitler was Satan incarnate; the Soviet Union had defeated Hitler; Ernst Thälmann had died fighting Hitler; and the East German Communist Party was now continuing Thälmann’s fight against the neo-Nazis in West Germany and their American patrons.
At that moment, I swore that if I ever got a chance to make a major contribution to the destruction of the evil forces of fascism and capitalism, I would do my best. This vow became a driving force behind decisions I would make in future years.
After we left Buchenwald, we visited Weimar, where two preeminent German writers and poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, had resided for many years. From there we went to the nearby city of Jena to see the university and the famous Carl Zeiss Planetarium. I immediately fell in love with Jena and thus made another life-shaping decision: I would attend the university there and study chemistry.
Summer vacation came and went, and soon it was time to begin my final year of high school. By now, my grades had improved significantly and I was on course to graduate with highest honors. I had learned how to operate successfully within the system, and all the teachers now treated me with respect.
For me, this was the beginning of a ten-year period during which I pursued academic excellence and seemed destined for stardom and a glorious career within the East German system. Unfortunately, the combination of academic success and the lack of a father figure—or mature mentor—who could offer some guidance and infuse me with a desperately needed dose of humility, allowed me to develop a level of self-confidence bordering on pure arrogance, a fierce independence, and a deep-rooted sense of invulnerability. All of these qualities, it turned out, were critical elements of the psychological makeup that made me an excellent candidate for a career in espionage.
When I returned to Spremberg to start the school year, I was delighted beyond words to discover that Rosi had broken up with her medical school boyfriend. I was now in the clear, without a rival, like a soccer player on a breakaway who has outmaneuvered the entire defense and needs only to nudge the ball gently past the goalie.
By Christmas, my patience and persistence finally paid off and Rosi was once again my girlfriend. As the school year progressed, we talked about taking our relationship to another level, and shortly after my eighteenth birthday, we became lovers. But as final exams approached and the future opened up before us, our lives were moving in different directions. Rosi was headed to Berlin to study psychology, and I would keep my vow to move to Jena and study chemistry.
Although Jena was an eight-hour train ride from Berlin and access to phones was very much restricted, I ignored these inconvenient facts in my unbridled enthusiasm. I was convinced it would not be long before Rosi and I would be reunited and eventually married. I failed to notice that Rosi wasn’t equally upbeat about our future together.
June 16, 1967, was an exceptionally dreary day in Spremberg. Heavy clouds hung over the town, and a steady, chilling drizzle punished anyone who ventured outside. The gloomy weather reflected my mood as I faced my last day with Rosi before we would go our separate ways. Most of the other students had already left, and the dorm was deserted. Having packed the last of our belongings, we sat on my bed and just looked at each other.
Then, in a desperate attempt to make time stand still, we engaged in one last intimate embrace before Rosi had to go. I watched her as she walked along the pathway and disappeared from view, but she never once looked back for a final good-bye.
After she was gone, I grabbed my suitcase and staggered out into the dismal afternoon, hot tears merging with the cooling raindrops. By the time I reached the train station, I was soaked through, but the misery of my condition paled in comparison to the incredible void that had opened up in my soul.
Perhaps, deep down, I knew what had to come. Still, when I received Rosi’s final good-bye letter, which came in August, it hit me hard. This was her first letter since the last day we’d spent together, and I opened it with a mixture of hope and fear.
Dear Albrecht,
I am very sorry to tell you that our relationship has come to an end. We had a great deal of fun during our time together at high school, but it is now time to go our separate ways. Please understand that this is really the end—there is no other way. I am very sorry if this hurts you, but in the end it will be the best solution for both of us.
Greetings,
Rosi
The void I had felt for the past two months took on another dimension—the future. Though I would later make one last attempt to win Rosi back by visiting her in Berlin, in the end I failed miserably, and I finally had to come to terms with my defeat.
The end of our relationship left deep and indelible marks on my soul. For the first two years in Jena, I buried myself in my studies at the university and avoided female companionship altogether. After opening myself up to love only to be kicked squarely in the teeth, I vowed to myself that I would never let it happen again. From now on, nothing and nobody would penetrate my armor. Later I would discover that the ability to keep marching toward a goal without being held back by feelings or relationships was absolutely essential to building an undercover identity in another country. But at the time, I had no idea how profoundly my relationship with Rosi would influence the course of my life.
ON A SULTRY DAY IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, I dragged my heavy bags the final 800 meters from the train station to the student dorm in Jena. My stomach was growling, my mouth was dry, and my muscles were weary, but my mood was upbeat. After all, this was the first day of my life as an adult.
Jena was a dream come true, a real city with public transportation and multiple establishments of every kind—butchers, bakers, clothing stores, and restaurants. And then, of course, there was the magnificent university with its ten thousand students and four-hundred-year history.
When I finally arrived at Nollendorfer Straße 26, I paused for a moment and looked up in wonderment at the oddly configured three-story hotel, built in the early 1900s, that now served as a college dorm. I checked in at the desk, received my room assignment, and made my way upstairs to the two-hundred-square-foot bare-walled rectangle, with three metal bunks, a worn wooden table, and a roughly constructed armoire that I would share with five other bright young men for the next ten months. When I saw that I was the first to arrive, I claimed what dorm experience had taught me to be the best sleeping location—the upper bunk of the bed furthest from the door.
Famished by now, I devoured the two sandwiches my mother had packed me for the trip and climbed onto my bunk to wait for my roommates to arrive. While eating, I was suddenly overcome with thankfulness for my mother. Even though she had not given me the love I was looking for as a child, she had taken very good care of me and my brother. So I pulled out a pen and a piece of paper and wrote a letter expressing my sincere gratitude and also apologized for any trouble I may have caused her in the past.
When my roommates began to trickle in, I watched with some amusement as they tried to cram their belongings into the overflowing armoire. Most of their belongings stayed in their suitcases, which were stowed beneath the beds. As cramped and sparsely furnished as our living quarters seemed, we soon
found out that we were the lucky ones. The rest of the first-year male chemistry students—East Germany’s best and brightest—were housed together in a single large room in a building at the other end of town.
The last of my roommates to arrive was Klaus, a redhead with intense, deep-set eyes. I would soon find out that Klaus was a rarity on campus: a Catholic who made no attempt to hide his faith in God. But he knew better than to try to proselytize his five atheist roommates. Klaus was the only Christian I met during my six years at the university. Whatever remained of a once-vibrant theological faculty had no voice on campus now, and in our philosophy classes we were taught Marxism-Leninism to the exclusion of any other philosophy or religion.
Once classes began, the workload was overwhelming. We had science coming at us from every angle—through lectures, seminars, and labs, along with copious amounts of assigned reading and a seemingly endless series of lab reports to submit. Knowing that the students admitted to the program were drawn from the top 10 percent in the nation, the elite faculty had put together a curriculum that amounted to a full-frontal scientific assault. The demands of this “chemistry boot camp” were so high, in fact, that one quarter of the freshman chemistry majors would resign by the end of the year.
We soon fell into a schedule that had us on the go from 6:00 a.m. till 11:00 p.m. on weekdays, with a mandatory four-hour lab session on Saturday morning. After that, most students who had families close enough to school went home for the rest of the weekend. In my room, only Spencer and I, who both lived long hours away, stayed back on the weekends.
I often hung out with my new friend Günter, who lived in Jena. His family welcomed me with open arms. Günter and I would play chess, shoot the breeze, or listen to records from his eclectic music collection—everything from classical to beat to jazz. On Saturday evenings we would often head to the Rosenkeller student club for beer and dancing—well, mostly for beer. Going in, the hope was always that I might connect with a pretty young lady, but invariably I would walk back to the dorm around midnight, somewhat inebriated, without having met anyone.