by Peter Golden
It was not a promise that I’d keep.
Part IV
11
Munich, West Germany
October 5, 1964
Four Freedoms Radio had booked me into the Henrik Ibsen. According to an engraved brass sign in German and English above the key boxes, the hotel had been renamed thirty years earlier to honor the Norwegian playwright who had written Hedda Gabler there in 1890. The elevator was out of order, and the doorman, who doubled as a bellhop, offered to assist me. He was an elderly, shrunken man in a top hat, cutaway coat, and striped trousers, and I didn’t have the heart to let him carry my luggage. After giving him ten dollars in deutsche marks, I grabbed my bags and followed him up three flights of stairs. The walls of my room were covered with saffron wallpaper blotched with water stains, and there was a window above a courtyard hemmed in by piles of rubble—the handiwork, I assumed, of American and British bombers.
I was exhausted from my trip, but it was the middle of the afternoon, too early for sleep, so I explored the neighborhood, and when it began to rain, I ducked into a café for a hamburger and a Coke. On the barstools, young men and women—students from the University of Munich, I guessed—were staring up at the radio on a shelf behind the bar. The broadcast was in German, and although I’d memorized a batch of phrases from a Berlitz book, I couldn’t understand it. So when my waiter, bald and heavyset, brought the bill, I pointed at the radio. “Was ist das?”
“Der Prozess in Frankfurt am Main.”
“I don’t understand. Ich verstehe nicht Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
“The trial. Guards from das Todeslager.”
“Todeslager?”
He sighed deeply. “Camps for death. Guards from Auschwitz. Verstehen Sie Auschwitz?”
“Ja.” That word I knew. At Beth El, I had a Hebrew-school teacher, Mrs. Tarski, a spindly Polish immigrant with long white hair and a heavy accent. It was common knowledge that she’d survived Auschwitz, but her eight-year-old students would sooner have asked Mrs. Tarski about her bra size than her internment. Nor would Mrs. Tarski want to scare us by bringing up such horrific business, though whenever she raised her left hand to write on the blackboard, I felt frightened by the numbers tattooed on her veiny forearm. I didn’t ask my parents or Emma about the tattoo. They never discussed the war, and the only exposure I had to it was via Birdman Cohen’s father. He had fought in Europe, and his Silver Star was hanging in a frame on the wall behind the Ping-Pong table in the basement rec room. One Rosh Hashanah, when Birdman and I were in seventh grade, we were talking baseball with his dad outside Beth El before services while Mr. Cohen smoked a Camel. A young guy I didn’t recognize drove into the parking lot in a black Mercedes-Benz two-seater with the top down. Mr. Cohen started shouting that the ignorant prick should go park his Kraut-mobile somewhere else. The driver ignored the shouts until Mr. Cohen was halfway to the Benz, flinging his lit cigarette into the beige leather interior, and the guy peeled out of the lot.
“The trial is for the bad apples,” the waiter said, his accent thick and grating. “So the Juden stop accusing all Deutschen.”
My indignation at hearing him say Juden blindsided me, because I hadn’t even reacted that way when kids told Jew jokes in school. By now, three years after the testimony of Adolf Eichmann’s accusers had been televised around the world, I’d assumed that Germans would be embarrassed to blame Jews publicly for anything. Maybe the waiter thought that hanging Eichmann had absolved the rest of Germany.
At my hotel, I bought a copy of the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune. Buried in the back of the paper, across from a Red Smith column lamenting that the Mets had lost over a hundred games for the third straight season, was an article about the twenty-two former members of the SS—out of the estimated six to eight thousand assigned to Auschwitz—who were being tried for murder. A survey revealed that more than half of the German population detested the trials and opposed further prosecutions. A member of the Bundestag, the West German parliament, was quoted as saying that the hour had arrived for West Germans, and their brothers and sisters trapped in the Soviet-controlled prison of East Germany, to understand that “we were all victims of Hitler.” This was why, he said, the Bundestag should vote against extending the statute of limitations for Nazi crimes, which would prevent any trials after 1965.
We were all victims of Hitler. . . .
I read that sentence over and over again, and I was still thinking about it much later, when I put down the paper and dozed off.
* * *
In the packet that the Four Freedoms Committee had mailed to me, I was instructed to be outside the hotel at nine thirty A.M. I’d be picked up and driven to the station, where I was to meet Taft Mifflin in his office on the second floor. I dressed in my deejay outfit—a Levi’s Trucker Jacket, white shirt, black knit tie, and Jack Purcell sneakers with that nice blue smile on the toe cap. I picked up the rust-colored V-neck sweater Emma had bought me. She’d been gone less than a month, so the tears filling my eyes were to be expected, but rubbing the wool between my fingers I felt guilty, because we’d had one of our rare fights over the sweater. It was a December evening, and I was leaving to do my radio show when Emma came out of the kitchen with the sweater in her hand. “I bought this for you. Put it on.”
I was suddenly furious. “I’m old enough to dress myself.”
“Who says?”
That was Emma making a joke, and I stood there with no explanation for my fury beyond my struggle to feel like a grown-up.
“You youngsters want to be stupid—by me that’s A-okay. But, Mishka, isn’t it better to be stupid and warm than stupid and cold?”
“Not necessarily,” I replied, and left without the sweater.
Now, I was ashamed of the teenage stubbornness that had prevented me from accepting the gift. If I’d known more about Emma, it might have occurred to me that for my grandmother, born in the Russian empire soon after the century turned, dressing for winter was a matter of life or death.
I took off my jean jacket and slipped on the sweater.
“Sorry, Emma,” I said.
12
Four Freedoms Radio was located in a muddy field outside Munich, and I was driven there in a Volkswagen bus with a guard in the passenger seat: a man with a shaved head, aviator sunglasses, and a submachine gun across his lap. The station was housed in an elongated four-story building that had all the charm of a dog-food factory. The one bright spot was a large head-and-shoulders portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on a wall with raised brass words below it:
We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way.
The third is freedom from want.
The fourth is freedom from fear.
FDR, State of the Union Address, January 6, 1941
“Come in, come in,” Taft Mifflin said as I knocked on the frosted glass of his open door.
He was sitting behind a wooden desk in a short-sleeve white shirt and skinny black tie. We shook hands, and after I sat across from him in a folding chair and he inquired about my flight and the hotel, I told him everything was swell and blurted out, “Have you heard anything about my grandmother’s murder?”
“I’ve made more calls, and I’m waiting to hear back.”
“Who was the guy in the VW with the Grease Gun?”
Taft grinned as if I were inquiring about a sideshow at a county fair. “When the war ended, Munich was occupied by us and attracted refugees from Eastern Europe who hated living under the Communists. Three million East Germans ran away to West Berlin. That’s why Khrushchev put up the Wall. But he couldn’t do a thing about Munich, so the Soviet propaganda machine denounces the city as the Center of Subversion.”
“Because refugees came here?”
“No, because we broadcast the Western take on the news and commentary and music behind the
Iron Curtain—anything to undermine those bastards—and some of the émigrés get on the radio to say the Kremlin and its Communist bloc puppets are no better than Nazis.”
Taft removed his charcoal-gray suit coat from the back of his chair and put it on. “Ten years ago, before I got here, the Kremlin sent KGB agents to strangle a Four Freedoms employee and dump another one in the Isar River. Security guards were hired, and the KGB backed off. But a few years later, a KGB agent—with Khrushchev’s approval—assassinated a couple of the Soviet’s Ukrainian critics in Munich. He used a cyanide-gas gun.”
“Sounds like a Rube Goldberg contraption.”
Taft opened a drawer and placed a 5x7 black-and-white photo on the desk. “It’s too simple for Rube, and the KGB is proud as hell of it. Take a look.”
I leaned forward. The gas gun appeared to be a six-inch metal tube with a lever on top.
Taft said, “Point it at the target’s face, press the trigger and gunpowder ignites a cyanide capsule. The vapor works fast, and whoever finds the body figures it was a heart attack. We learned about it because the assassin got so disgusted with his KGB handlers he defected to West Berlin. The émigrés trumpeted the defection on the radio. The Kremlin hated the negative publicity, so they called off their dogs and concentrated on using their transmitters to fill the air with signals that jam our programming. But our employees still feel safer with the guards, even though there’s nothing to worry about.”
Ever since I was a kid, when somebody—usually my father—told me not to worry, I worried even more. That the person reassuring me at the moment probably worked for the CIA didn’t lessen my anxiety, nor did the sheet of paper that Taft slid across the desk. “Put your John Hancock on this, and I’ll give you the ten-cent tour.”
There was one sentence on the paper: I, (the undersigned) pledge that I will not reveal any involvement of the United States government in the operation of Four Freedoms Radio.
I said, “At Eddie’s, you told me Four Freedoms is a private company.”
“It is. But the funding is from different sources and—” Taft gave me a ballpoint pen. “Don’t worry.”
I signed on the dotted line. And I worried.
* * *
Taft introduced me to program executives, secretaries, and announcers. He was fluent in Russian, but spoke with a hesitant formality and apologized for it, saying that he’d learned the language after returning from the war and enrolling at the Russian Institute in Manhattan. I was fretting about KGB assassins and beginning to think that coming to Munich was a mistake when Taft mentioned the German custom of zweites Frühstück, the second breakfast, and led me to the cafeteria. The Formica tables were crowded, and my outlook was improved by white sausages, soft pretzels dipped in sweet mustard, and a bottle of Franziskaner Weissbier, a locally brewed wheat beer with a pleasant bittersweet taste and enough alcohol to calm my nerves.
I asked Taft: “Is Four Freedoms reporting on the Auschwitz trial?”
He asked me how I heard about it, and I told him about the article in the Herald Tribune, and my waiter’s anger about the Jews slandering his country. The West Germans, Taft said, were having trouble overcoming their past, and the trials embarrassed them. They didn’t like the big fish being tried at Nuremberg or the guards from Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen that were tried and hanged in Lower Saxony or the American military court trying the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen—the SS death squads—sick bastards who liked murdering old men, women, children.
Even having seen Emma with blood staining her blouse, I couldn’t conjure up a vision of the millions of innocent victims, and it was disconcerting, knowing that Taft was telling the truth about the death squads yet feeling incapable of comprehending it.
“Is America still chasing war criminals?” I asked.
Taft removed a pack of Lucky Strikes and a Zippo lighter from a pocket of his suit coat and offered me one. I shook my head.
“Smart. Surgeon General swears these’ll kill you.” He lit the Lucky, then pocketed the lighter. “The United States no longer has any jurisdiction. We can extradite them, but—”
“But?”
“Germany surrendered, and we planned to denazify it. No dice. Too damn many of them. Over forty million. Half the country, if you count groups like the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls. And that doesn’t include the businessmen who didn’t join but got rich on slave labor or by stealing from Jews. The East German press still goes on about West Germany being lousy with Nazis, and they’re not wrong. Right here in Bavaria, over eighty percent of the state judges and prosecutors belonged to the party.”
Taft flicked the ash of his cigarette into the glass ashtray. “We knew Stalin was going to be a pain in the ass, so we hired ex-Nazis to help us fight the SOB. East Germany was better about rounding them up. The Kremlin insisted. Understandable. The Soviets lost over twenty million, and they won’t be done counting their dead till the next century.”
“Will the Bundestag really let the statute of limitations expire?”
“Most of their constituents want the trials to stop, so they might. And some in our government support ending the trials. Their view: If we go to war with the Russians, we’ll need the West Germans, and they’ll be stronger, more confident, with Hitler a faint memory.” Taft gazed down at the blackened cigarette butts in the ashtray. “I don’t know if that’s true, but Four Freedoms is a guest in West Germany and we avoid that particular debate.”
He puffed on his Lucky, the smoke wreathing his narrow face and pointy chin. Taft seemed to be there and not be there, a man you wouldn’t pick out of a crowd or remember except perhaps for his eyes, which were the somber shade of steel shavings.
“Here’s what I do know,” he said. “The price for West Germany’s support was to leave mass murderers alone, free to collect their pensions and die in their sleep. But there are people who don’t want anyone forgetting the Nazis’ crimes. Ever.”
A frog-eyed man was clomping toward us. He had almost no hair on top and a grizzled mass of curls growing like wings from the sides of his head. When he reached our table, he said with a Russian accent, “Zis your American deejay?”
“Yes, indeed,” Taft replied, his tone jovial. “Mikhail Dainov, meet Konstantin Stasevich. He’s your program director.”
I stood and extended my hand. Konstantin, who evidently was unacquainted with deodorant, eyed me as if I were pointing a pistol at him, and said to Taft, “You vill destroy the Kremlin vith nigger and Jew music? Sure—and maybe my asshole will grow ears.”
Konstantin went back out the way he came in.
“One of your free thinkers?” I asked.
“We’re working on him.”
13
“Heeet eeet!” That was how my producer, Dmitry Lukin, a twenty-year-old émigré from Moscow, pronounced, “Hit it!” Through the soundproof glass that separated the studio from the control room, I could see him, a hot-blooded Beatles freak with a mop top and black collarless suit, bouncing around in his chair.
Through my headphones I heard Dmitry lower the volume on “Midnight in Moscow,” which was my cue to start talking: “You’re listening to ‘Polnoch v Moskve’ on Four Freedoms Radio. A vot i ya—Here I am, Mikhail Dainov, Bezumnyy Russkiy—the Mad Russian. Spinning sides for the coolest cats in Sovietville.”
Deejaying in Munich was easier than in South Orange. Dmitry cued up the records and handled the audio board, and my show was taped instead of live. Every weekday, after scouring teletype reports from the Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters for humorous tidbits, I sifted through an extensive collection of old and new 45s and albums, then wrote out a playlist and began recording programs—two hours for Sunday through Friday, and three hours for Saturday evening. At WSOV, the best of my patter had been in English, since wordplay in Russian was beyond me. Nevertheless, Taft informed me, research indicated that upward of 80 percent of my potential audience had either studied English in school or picked up some th
rough the movies, radio, or records smuggled into the Soviet Union.
“Stick to fifty-fifty Russian/English and use short sentences so listeners can catch them through the jamming,” Taft said, and instructed me to spice up my show with slang to give it a “Made in America” pizzazz—like Levi’s and Pepsi-Cola—that appealed to young Russians.
No sweat, I told him. I threw some into the opening and signed off with “This is the Mad Russian, saying, ‘Later, gators.’ ”
Taft was pleased; Konstantin Stasevich, my official boss, was not. On my second day, Dmitry and I were talking in the studio when Konstantin flung open the door. “Dainov, you must read stories from the TASS teletype and tell the children that the news agency of the Soviet government publishes lies.”
“I can’t read Russian.” Neither my father nor Emma had offered to teach me, and I saw no reason to learn. So much for my career as a fortune-teller.
Konstantin snapped, “Ty durak!” meaning that I was a moron. Then he demanded that I open my show with a song that he himself had written and that served as the station’s standard lead-in, “March of the Four Freedoms,” which sounded like an unhappy marriage between a military anthem and a dirge.
“Fifteen hours of that monkey noise,” he said, “you can for one minute have real music.”
“Not if we don’t want our audience to fall asleep,” Dmitry said in Russian, because his English mostly consisted of “Hit it,” Beatles lyrics, and my on-air slang.
Konstantin started arguing with him, but when Dmitry called him a kastrat—a man with no balls—Konstantin spit at him and stormed out.
* * *
Taft told me to ignore the program director, which was fortunate because Dmitry and I were locked in a battle over my playlists. The station had the albums Please Please Me, With the Beatles, and A Hard Day’s Night. I was a huge Beatles fan, but when Dmitry pushed me to play all three albums on every show, I said, “Nyet.”