by Jack Barsky
Rosi, on the other hand, was quite emotional. Without any prompting, she volunteered, “You know I made a really bad mistake when I let you go. We were simply too young to appreciate what we had.”
As a tear slowly made its way down her cheek, I said, “That’s okay, no hard feelings. You know, they say that things happen for a reason.” Rosi’s confession felt like an apology that was neither requested nor needed, but it still felt good.
On my last day in Berlin, Matthias and I did something we should have done thirty years earlier: We went to a soccer game together. Befitting the situation, he was the one who took me, not the other way around.
On my way to the airport, I had one more Rip Van Winkle moment. Much like the mistakes I had made in Montreal and New York due to cultural ignorance, I now provided some inadvertent comic relief in the country I once called home.
Before returning the rental car, I had to fill the tank with gas. But when I pulled into the self-service gas station, I couldn’t find the slot for the credit card on the pump. So I went inside and asked the young woman behind the counter quite sincerely, “Can you tell me how this works?”
Given that I was asking in perfect native German, she looked at me as if expecting a hidden camera to pop out at any moment. Then, figuring she would just play along with the joke, she explained slowly, “First you remove the gas cap. Then you take the nozzle, stick it in the tank, and press the lever.”
When her explanation reminded me of the twist-top bottle cap episode in Montreal from way back when, I burst out laughing and explained my dilemma to her. I don’t know if she believed me, but I did learn that in Germany one always pays inside after pumping gas.
In spite of all the memories, and the good food and excellent beer that resulted in a seven-pound weight gain, Germany was not my home anymore. Albrecht had his taste of the past, and he was satisfied, but he was also quite happy to merge with Jack as a whole person who lives in the United States. Miraculously, this Humpty Dumpty was being put back together again.
On my return to the US, I landed at Newark Airport, which is one of the worst places in the country to fly in to. The dingy facility and horrendous service makes you feel as if you’ve just landed in a Third World country. But nevertheless it was home.
No matter what challenges we face in our nation, as long as the beacon of freedom still shines, that’s where my home will be. America has always stood for the freedom to pursue our dreams and our faith; the freedom to come and go; the freedom to think and to express our thoughts without fear; and, most important of all, the freedom to fail.
I pray that this mind-set will continue to prevail in the one great bastion of freedom on earth—the United States of America.
Two days after my return from this eventful trip, I got a call on my cell phone while I was at the office.
“Hello, Jack? My name is Draggan Mihailovich, producer at 60 Minutes.”
Fortunately, I was somewhat prepared for the call. Frau Koelbl had gotten in touch with Steve Kroft, whom she had met two years earlier at a seminar in the US. She told me that 60 Minutes might be interested in my story.
Mr. Mihailovich was very professional but also very insistent, “My assistant and I would like to come to your place and tell you a little bit about what we want to do here. How about this coming Saturday?”
I agreed and immediately called Shawna.
“Guess what—60 Minutes just called.”
“What? 60 Minutes? You’re delusional!” she responded.
“This is real. I don’t know what they have in mind, but they’re coming to our place for a visit.”
The fact that Mr. Mihailovich knew about me and my story was the final link in the series of improbabilities that would ultimately allow me to share my story with the world.
When the bell rang on Saturday, I opened the door, and as Mr. Mihailovich walked in, he waved a copy of Unbroken in the air as an introduction. He told me that he had discovered and interviewed Louis Zamperini, the hero of that book, and he had a hunch that he was onto another story worth pursuing. After a three-hour interview, Draggan seemed excited about featuring my story on his program.
To work with some of the world’s best journalists in the news and entertainment industry was an adventure in itself. But the most important aspect of this production was that it gave me an opportunity to take my two adult American children to Germany and show them where I grew up. In April 2015, I again invaded Germany—this time in the company of a CBS crew and Jessie and Chelsea.
In contrast to my previous visit, the weather in Germany was absolutely rotten, with cold rain and wind every day. There was even a crippling hurricane, an extremely rare occurrence in Germany. But the weather did nothing to dampen our fun and excitement. We traveled in style, but the company we were in was more fascinating than the Mercedes limousines.
It was great to show my kids all the places of my youth. To the amusement of our driver, the three of us constantly talked over one another and bickered about everything that could be bickered about—thus revealing a genetic predisposition toward argumentativeness. But unlike in the past, this time we didn’t take things too seriously. We laughed a lot, and when things got a little tense between two of us, the third one would jump in as a mediator.
The final exclamation point of our trip was a grand family reunion with Matthias and Günther. When Jessie had to fly home earlier than Chelsea and I, Günther came up from Jena to bid him good-bye. When we took Jessie to the airport, we were able to take the one and only picture that features all four of my adult children and me. Now that this family has been reunited, we will persist in our relationships regardless of the ocean that separates us physically.
The 60 Minutes story aired on May 10, 2015. Not surprisingly, the board of directors at my company became uncomfortable with the revelations of my past. As a result, I was laid off, effective May 18, 2015—one more significant life event that fell on my actual birthday. Losing my job wasn’t part of my plan, but I have become accustomed to “interference” from God, and I’ve stopped fighting fights that I’m certain to lose. I’ve learned that when God overrides my plans, it is typically in my best interest. And I am learning how to trust Him with everything in my life. My departure from a job I truly loved has turned out okay. It gave me time to write this book and spend much more time with my little girl, Trinity.
Today, I strongly believe that God opens the doors He wants us to go through, and He shuts those He wants us to avoid. The challenge is to find the doors that are clearly marked with an Enter sign and avoid the pain caused by butting our heads against the ones that are shut tight. The signs are there—and they always have been—but now I’m paying attention. I sense that God is not quite finished with me yet on this earth, and I’m looking forward to what He has in store.
On June 1, 2016, Chelsea’s twenty-ninth birthday, I was sitting on my front porch watching Trinity and her mother walk around the pond on our property. Trinity was stabbing her net into the water hoping to catch a fish. How many times have I told her that she has no chance of catching a fish this way? But she just does not give up.
My thoughts were wandering into the past, to the day when Chelsea was born, when suddenly a scream disrupted my reverie.
“Daddy, Daddy, I caught a fish!”
“Are you sure? It could be a piece of wood,” I yelled across the pond.
“No, Dad. It is a fish, come see,” she hollered back.
I slowly rose from my chair and walked closer to take a look at her catch.
Miracle of miracles, Trinity was proudly holding a ten-inch bass with both hands. I was flabbergasted.
“How did you do this?” I asked in disbelief.
“Magic, Daddy. I have magic.”
Magic, I think as I watch Trinity’s beaming smile. Yes, little one, you have magic. Only God could create something so beautiful, and I love you so much.
Thank you, God.
EPILOGUE
HAVING BEE
N BORN FOUR YEARS and ten days after Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II, my life’s trajectory has its roots firmly planted in that war and its results. As such, I have always had a great interest in the history of Germany in the twentieth century. How was it possible that one of the most civilized countries on the planet could succumb to the wiles of such clownish ghouls as Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels? Why on earth did the German people go along for the ride that would end in mass murder and the biggest war in history? Why would they turn a blind eye to the storm troopers who pulled Jewish neighbors out of their homes in the middle of the night? Why?
Of course, I wasn’t alive when all that happened, so I felt justified in not sharing the burden of the guilt and moral dilemma that plagued the German people. More so, the country I grew up in—East Germany—was led by men with bona fide credentials as fighters against the Nazi evil. The state and its leaders used the word antifascist as the single most important descriptor of their mission. This epithet was extremely successful in rallying an entire country behind its leadership. As a young person, I was absolutely convinced that I was aligned with the most righteous movement in the history of mankind. But was I really?
As I prepared to write this book, I did much research—for the first time—on the history of the Soviet Union as well as the KGB and its predecessors. I had read about those subjects in my younger years, but in those days all the available material had been carefully scrubbed and whitewashed to depict the glorious struggle of Communist revolutionaries in pursuit of a socialist paradise. In that context, it was quite plausible that the security apparatus had to occasionally resort to harsh measures to fight the enemies of the revolution.
When the denunciation of Stalin finally happened, it was focused primarily on condemning the cult of personality, and it certainly did not extend to an indictment of his inner circle—some of whom went on to inherit power after the dictator died. During my years in the Soviet Union, there was nothing I could have found that would have contradicted the notion that I was in a good place and serving a noble cause.
My “silent defection” in 1988 was purely a personal and emotional decision, devoid of ideological underpinnings. And for the next twenty-five years, I deliberately withdrew from the stage of world events as I pursued my American dream. When the Berlin Wall came crashing down, I watched from an emotional and physical distance. All I wanted was my shell of privacy, where I could live out my life in peace with my new family in the United States.
My discovery by the media changed all that, and my hiding between the folds of the curtain of history came to an end. I had to come to terms with my background and my place in the events of the Cold War. The results of my research were disappointing at best, and often heartbreaking. Given my personal experience, Vasili Mitrokhin’s revelation that the first directorate of the KGB was fundamentally ineffective during the second half of the Cold War was not a surprise. However, a deeper dive into the history of the Soviet Union became an eye-opener of unanticipated proportions. In particular, the book Stalin and His Hangmen by Donald Rayfield, a 600-page treatise describing the murderous ways of Stalin’s regime, shook me to the bone.
During the Red Terror, which was conducted shortly after the Russian Revolution by the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, people were killed because they were considered enemies of the revolution. Later, people were killed for all imaginable and unimaginable reasons: They belonged to an ethnic minority; they were suspected to be foreign spies; they spoke a foreign language; they had visited a foreign country; they wrote prose or poetry that was suspect; they owned too much property; or they were family members, or even just friends, of those who were killed.
In the end, the monster ate itself from the inside out. Five out of nine heads of the Soviet security organization—all of whom had murdered hundreds of thousands of people—were themselves executed, together with many of their close associates. And the killing continued . . .
Having read the word shot for the umpteenth time, I broke down in tears as I finally realized that I had made a pact with the devil. The KGB I had joined was the successor to the band of murderers responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million citizens of the Soviet Union—though the actual number killed by Stalin and his henchmen is still in dispute. The people I worked with were all highly educated, clean-cut professionals, and I’m sure their hands were clean—because the dirty work (there was still dirty work being done, albeit on a much reduced scale) was left to others.
In those days, I didn’t know, and perhaps did not want to know, what was happening around me. But ignorance does not absolve me from guilt. I have always tried to be a good person and please others, starting with my parents. When I signed up for the KGB, I justified my often immoral actions with the excuse that I was serving a greater good. But as the mantle of ideological righteousness began to fall away in tatters during my early years in the United States, I was finally able to do the right thing. I could have walked away from Chelsea as I had done with Günther and Matthias. But I had no excuse that could stand up to the power of unconditional love.
So how is it that somebody who wants to be good—and do good—could wind up dedicating a large part of his life to a fundamentally evil cause? The answer is simple: We are not, and cannot be, good as autonomous selves. Try as we might, without guidance from God we have no moral focal point and no consistent frame of reference to determine what is good and what is not. If I’d had a relationship with God in my younger years, I might have been more circumspect. I might have asked some basic questions, the answers to which may have made me uncomfortable, but likely would have influenced my decision. But I didn’t ask those questions because I was so convinced of the power of my own goodness that it became a source of pride, essentially an idol. And therein, I believe, lies the answer to the question of why the Germans went along with Hitler. (And I must confess that I probably would have done the same thing.) Without God, man cannot achieve goodness; without God, man is lost.
Fellow Christians have asked me how I have become a different person after committing my life to Jesus. The answer to this question may be a bit unusual, but it is my answer. By the time I reached my fifties, I had in me all the right behavioral and attitudinal ingredients to pursue the Christian walk. All that was needed was for me to get to know and understand Jesus. As Shawna remarked after observing me in action for a few weeks as my administrative assistant, “You are already a Christian; you just don’t know it.”
When I began to learn about Christianity, I found it fit me like a glove. To draw an analogy: When your hand is ice cold, it has no feeling. It neither desires a glove nor even knows about the existence of the glove. When the hand begins to thaw, it starts to feel pain. That is when the soothing glove is most welcome.
Christ has taken away much of my pain, and I can live out my life on earth knowing that my sins, committed knowingly or unknowingly, have been forgiven by the enormity of His sacrifice. That is where I have landed. I am finally home.
Because I am allowed to leave behind a documented legacy of my unusual life, I’m praying that this legacy will be described by a single word: LOVE. I am so grateful to Jesus Christ for the most loving action any person could take on behalf of another. I thank my wife for helping me grasp that truth. And I want to encourage my children to live lives filled with love for God and their neighbors. There is no other way.
AFTERWORD
BY SPECIAL AGENT JOE REILLY, FBI (RETIRED)
I FIRST “MET” JACK BARSKY IN THE SUMMER OF 1993. We were about five hundred yards apart across a verdant meadow of wildflowers, weeds, and grasses in a little valley awash with hawks, doves, jays, woodpeckers, and other winged creatures. He was on the other end of my field glasses, working in his backyard.
I was pretending to be a bird-watcher, but I was actually a special agent with the FBI, and Jack Barsky was a deep-cover secret agent sent to the US by the Soviet Union. By then, he had been operating on Amer
ican soil for more than ten years, and we were anxious to find out what he was up to. Was he running a spy ring, stealing secrets of scientific, political, or military value? We had to find out.
I positioned myself alongside a little-used dirt road on a hill overlooking Jack’s home. From this vantage point, I had a good view of his modest two-story country house, which sat on two acres of green lawn. After setting up a cheap folding table and covering it with books on ornithology, I set my chair in just the right spot, took out my field glasses from their case, and watched “the birds.” Few cars ever passed, and no one ever inquired about what I was doing.
I followed this routine, intermittently, on weekends and holidays during the warm months of summer and fall. Though I saw an abundance of birds much more often than I saw Jack and his family, I learned a great deal about the Barskys. I knew when Jack would be home, and I wanted to get a better read on this mysterious and sinister person.
Our surveillance team had followed him to and from work and to other places, but I wanted to know more about the man himself. What kind of person was he? I knew that someday we were going to arrest him and try to recruit him to work for us. I wanted to be in the best position to overcome any resistance on his part.
I was surprised by what I learned from just watching him. He worked hard in his yard, planting trees and shrubs. He did most of his own landscaping with some help from his wife and his young daughter. On hot days, they swam in their aboveground pool. He also had a two- or three-year-old boy, who also played in the grass and splashed in the pool.
Barsky seemed quite attached to his children. He often stopped working to play with them. In the evening, he taught his daughter how to play basketball in their driveway. He seemed to be patient and understanding. Often, after a long day of activity, he would emerge from his house wearing jogging clothes and run five miles through the countryside. At first, we followed him, very discreetly, to be sure he wasn’t meeting anyone or engaging in nefarious activities. He wasn’t. In those early months of our investigation, I came to believe that Barsky loved his children, but his relationship with his wife was perfunctory, if not downright cold. In time, these observations proved to be true.