Dancing Under the Red Star (40 page)

Though Margaret had been on a personal quest for God nearly all her life, throughout all her trials and troubles in Russia, seeing and realizing the hand of God in her life all along the way, it was in the fall of 1991 that she actually invited Christ into her life, establishing that relationship, making him Lord and Savior, sealing her eternal fate.

On April 7, 1997, I found the lifeless shell of my mother’s body slumped across her bathroom floor. She was gone. I couldn’t think straight, and I didn’t know what to do. I fell to the floor and cried like a baby until I thought my heart would explode. It’s tough to put into words the searing pain of that moment. I couldn’t breathe, and I struggled to pray. I didn’t expect her to die, not yet! She was not supposed to leave this way. Instead, she was supposed to live to see her story realized and shared with the world.

Now I was the only one left to finish this story my mother gave me, to tell the world what happened to her, what she did, and what her life meant. Thirty-six years earlier, three of us had returned to America, and now there was only me. As I write this, some six years later, I recall that particular day as the most devastating but also the most hopeful day of my life. I realized that her life had reached its earthly fullness. She was tired. She was ready for her promotion.

Before her death, my mother gave me yet another priceless legacy. Working through her friends from her days in the camps, she made it possible for me to be reunited with my father. That is a remarkable story in itself, perhaps for another time. But she acted unselfishly to let me reestablish this significant relationship.

My father, Günter Tobien, had married a German woman named Anna-Marie. They had no children. They resided for my father’s whole life in the northern German city of Bremen. In March 1994, some thirty-three years after I left Germany as a child with my mother and grandmother, I finally saw my father again. We were reunited at his home. My father spoke virtually no English, and my command of German was only a remnant of what it had once been. Fortunately, he spoke slowly and deliberately and straight from his heart. He said things I needed to hear. I suspect it went both ways. We connected, but for most of that time together we spoke only the universal unwritten language of tears and smiles, trying to redeem the lost years. All thirty-three of them.

Those years could not be recaptured or relived, but it was a powerful reunion all the same. My father and I formed a bond as if all those years hadn’t mattered. He was my father, and I loved him. I also knew that he loved me. A part of me that had been missing for so long had just been found, and I finally felt completed. He was a very thoughtful, sensitive, compassionate, and loving man who had missed and longed for me as much as I had missed him. I could see him being filled inside, in a place that had been empty. And I didn’t feel as though I had anything to forgive him for. Instead, I just loved him, and it was easy to do.

The following year, 1995, he and his wife came to our home for a two-week visit. It was their first time in the United States. They both fell in love with my wife, Tina, and our family. Günter met his three beautiful grandchildren—Karla, Matthew, and Kaleb—and clearly his heart was filled with love and joy. (Since that time our sweet Khloe and Karla’s precious children, Olivia Margaret and Elijah, have joined us.) I understood that something eternal was being fulfilled, fully satisfied for him during this magical time together. Perhaps it was also sort of a circle coming around for him.

My father died in October 1996. It was natural I suppose, and yet it felt very unnatural to me. It was hard to lose what I had just gained. However, the relationship was not lost. My dad and I had made our peace; we filled each other’s voids, said whatever there was to say, and then we loved unconditionally. Günter and Anna-Marie Tobien had become a permanent part of our family. Anna-Marie is still precious to us; we call her Oma.

Those renewed relationships were my mother’s parting gift before she heard her heavenly Father calling on that day in April 1997. I believe she left gladly, on her way to another reunion. Though I know she was sorry to leave us behind, she was eager to go and see her papa and mama once again. This time no one could take them away from her. There would be no more good-byes or tears, no more pain.

She left behind much more than the usual remnants of a life. For all of us who knew her and felt that very special love from her, she left a huge deposit. She left us her heart. It is permanently embedded in our lives, shaping who we are today. She completes us, circling us in love, lifting us upward by her life.

Appendix A

TIME LINE

1910—Ford sells its first automobile in Russia.

1918—End of World War I; Lenin founds Russian Communist Party.

1921—Margaret Werner is born to Carl and Elisabeth in Bay City, Michigan.

1922—U.S.S.R. (Soviet Union) officially forms.

1928-29—Stalin implements first Five-Year Plan. United States’ stock market crashes; Great Depression begins (October). In the Soviet Union, agricultural collectivization begins.

1930-32—Ford Motor Company sends employees to its Russian manufacturing facility; Russia officially changes the name of the city of Nizhni Novgorod to Gorky.

1932—Werner family leaves Detroit with Ford Motor Company and arrives in Russia.

1933—Stalin’s second Five-Year Plan begins along with Russian purges. Walter Reuther arrives in Gorky. The Werners visit relatives in Austria and Czechoslovakia.

1937—The Great Terror, or Yezhovshchina, begins, the most severe of Stalin’s great purges throughout the nation.

1938—Stalin’s third Five-Year Plan begins. Soviet secret police arrest Carl Werner. Margaret, age 17, refuses to denounce her father at a Soviet youth rally.

1941—Germany invades Russia. Germany occupies Leningrad in the 900-Day Siege. Gorky is bombed. Margaret is mobilized to dig antitank trenches.

1942—Most brutal winter in Russian history. Germans obliterate Gorky by bombing. Carl Werner dies in prison (not known until 1956).

1945—World War II ends. U.S. President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Churchill, and Soviet Premier Stalin confer at Yalta. Margaret, age 24, is arrested and imprisoned in Gorky’s Vorobyo’vka prison.

1946—Margaret is transferred to Lubyanka prison in Moscow, then back to Gorky, then returned to Moscow, where she’s sentenced to ten years hard labor and shipped to the brutal lumber camp Burepolom.

1947—Henry Ford dies in April.

1948—Margaret is officially transferred to the labor camp at Inta (Komi, ASSR) in Northern Siberia.

1953—Joseph Stalin dies (March). Margaret returns to Gorky to meet with the secret police for jails and prison camps, who detain Elisabeth under suspicion of complicity in Margaret’s charges of espionage.

1955—Margaret is released March 3 and marries former German POW Günter Tobien. Nikita Khrushchev takes control of the Russian Communist Party.

1956—Karl is born in Inta (January 27). Margaret, age 35, returns to Gorky with her baby and reunites with her mother, Elisabeth.

1957—Russia and Germany enter the War Prisoner Exchange Agreement and begin repatriation. Margaret, Elisabeth, and Karl receive permission to go to East Germany (GDR).

1958—Margaret, Elisabeth, and Karl cross into GDR in February, escape to West Berlin on June 28 (twenty years to the day since Carl Werner’s arrest), and settle in Hanover, Germany.

1960—Margaret and Karl visit Italy. Margaret divorces Günter and goes to Hameln for an immigration interview.

1961—Margaret, Elisabeth, and Karl sail from Rotterdam, Holland, and arrive November 29 in the United States.

1987—Elisabeth Werner dies on February 24.

1991—The city of Gorky reverts to its original name of Nizhni Novgorod.

1996—Günter dies on October 26.

1997—Margaret dies on April 7, fifty years to the day after the death of Henry Ford.

Appendix B

HISTORICAL NOTES

V
ICTOR
H
ERMAN

After Victor Herman’s arrest in July 1938 (less than thirty days after Carl Werner’s arrest), he was tried, sentenced, and sent to the Siberia Gulag, where he remained until 1956. After much hardship and suffering, Victor finally returned to the United States in 1976. His Russian wife and two daughters eventually received emigration visas from the Soviet government, permitting them to leave Russia and reunite with Victor in the United States. The account of his experiences was published in
Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life.

Upon his return home, Victor Herman sought compensation from the Ford Motor Company for the fate his family suffered (both parents died), but the company informed him: “The former employment of Sam Herman could not be verified or confirmed.” They flatly rejected him. They categorically denied that Victor’s father, Sam Herman, had ever worked for the Ford Motor Company! In his ultimate frustration and with nowhere else to turn, Victor Herman responded by publicly referring to America as “a stepmother nation.” His siblings remained in Russia. Miriam completed medical school and became a doctor, and Leo committed suicide by hanging.

W
ALTER
R
EUTHER

It was later confirmed that Walter Reuther had been in Russia on assignment, acting as an official delegate to the Gorky factory for Henry Ford. In the years to follow, after his return to America, he became head of the United Auto Workers and of the world’s most powerful labor union, the AFL-CIO. His sympathetic views toward Communism and socialism are well known and documented. Walter Reuther eventually became an influential advisor to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and a leading voice for the Democratic Party for nearly four decades. He must have been oblivious to the horrors of the Russian political structure he formerly supported. Walter Reuther died in a plane crash in 1970, under what authorities called “mysterious circumstances.”

A
LEXANDER
D
UBCEK

Alexander “Sanya” Dubcek eventually returned to his native Czechoslovakia to become the country’s most prominent political figure and chancellor. Though his political persuasion was Communist, it was clear he tried to pursue a milder form of Communist reform: “socialism with a heart.” The Soviets questioned his politics and practices in Czechoslovakia, as well as his loyalty to Russia and Communism in general. When he pleaded with them not to invade his country the Soviets saw his tears as a sign of weakness, and they promptly sent in tanks.

Alexander Dubcek had a chance to set his people free by opposing the Russians, but he missed it. His intentions were noble, but his misguided beliefs doomed many of his countrymen to suffering. Later in life, however, after Czechoslovakia was free from Soviet domination, Dubcek stood in a moment of triumph with the country’s first “elected” leader, Vaclav Havel, and was voted leader of the federal assembly.

In subsequent years, Sanya Dubcek’s political career floundered. After the Soviet domination of his country, he was forced out of office and had to earn his living as a locksmith, a little known fact about his later life. Margaret Werner recalled, “I knew that we cared for one another quite deeply, but after those innocent days we spent together in Gorky—a time I will truly never forget—we never saw one another again…ever.”

L
INA
P
ROKOFIEV

In a newspaper article Margaret Werner read many years later, she learned that Lina spent eight years in Vorkuta in confinement. Sergei Prokofiev officially disowned his wife during World War II to live with a young poet and Communist Party worker, Mira Mendelssohn. When Sergei died in 1953, there was a legal battle over the rights to his estate, particularly as to whether Lina or his supposed new wife, Myra, had full entitlement. Myra had since died, and their marriage was never conclusively documented. The article reported that Lina was finally allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1974. She moved to Chicago. A book entitled
Sergei Prokofiev: A Soviet Tragedy
was later written by Victor Seroff, detailing the life of this famous Russian composer.

Margaret reflected: “I thought that maybe too many years had passed in the interim for either Lina or me to attempt personal contact. Twenty-five years is a very long time. For some, the war was never over. The Soviet reach went far and deep. And primarily for safety and personal reasons, I intentionally tried to keep my whereabouts out of the spotlight. I suppose it was the easier out and for some—like me—a milder and gentler form of denial. It may be the memories that hurt the most, particularly when you’re trying to make sense of it all, maybe even pointing blame, asking ‘why me,’ and hearing no response.”

H
ENRY
F
ORD

Though Ford Motor Company insists its American workers in Gorky returned to the United States in 1932, Carl Werner was still living there in 1938 and working at the plant Ford built to manufacture the trucks essential to Stalin’s Five-Year Plans. What did the Ford Motor Company in Detroit know, and what didn’t they know about the affairs going on in Gorky? What did they disclose, and what did they conceal? And why? What was their involvement, their level of support for their people? Why had they abandoned their employees? What, if anything, was their liability? Now, long after the fact, I still pose the questions, not that I have the historically definitive answers. But it has been suggested that if the Nazi industrialists brought to trial at Nuremberg were even remotely guilty of so-called crimes against mankind, then so must be their collaborators in the Ford family, Henry and his son, Edsel. Certainly they knew of the horrible atrocities taking place in the Soviet Union and specifically in Gorky. And what was the U.S. government doing about all the Americans who were there in harm’s way? Indeed, there are many more questions than answers, and things are not always as they first appear.