An American Radical:. Susan Rosenberg
with a terrible sense of foreboding. It was mad to be moving so many weapons all at once, in bad weather, by ourselves, and especially when I was on the most wanted list. My bad feeling grew worse and worse. Weighing the danger to others and ourselves, Tim and I debated whether to stop at a motel and wait until daylight before moving on. We kept going because we did not want the explosives to sit in the U-Haul any longer than necessary. Leaving the turnpike, we took the back roads, away from people.
The hours that followed are a blur in my memory. But what happened that evening after Thanksgiving was the end of one lifetime and the beginning of another. My mistake leading to our arrest was simple. It was so simple that I have never been able to get over it. I had rented the storage place with an ID card that I had found in a wallet left mistakenly in a phone booth. Instead of using the name and changing the address, I used the ID itself. When the storage company called the number on the card to confirm the rental, they were told that no one by that name had rented any such space. The company had then notified the police, and when I called again to confirm the arrangements, they insisted on knowing the exact time of our arrival.
When Tim and I finally pulled in, it was pitch dark and very cold. The storage space was deserted and we could not get the combination to the front entrance to work. I had to get help from the manager to open the lock. It was a large place with rows of sheds. The whole area was isolated from any residential neighborhood and surrounded by a fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence topped by a small row of razor wire. As we were unloading the U-Haul, a lone police car cruised down our aisle. Out came one police officer, who proceeded to walk into the shed.
The rookie officer who questioned us was as scared as we were. I had left a gun in the car while we were unloading the U-Haul and I knew that if we were going to control the situation I had to go back to the car and get it. I told the officer that I wanted to show him my ID, but I had left it in the car. I nearly begged him to let me get it. Tim stood in the storage space, trying to prevent the policeman from seeing the weapons and explosives. The policeman told me to get my ID. I quickly walked back to the car, opened the passenger door, and reached down under the seat to find the gun exactly where I had put it. My hand grasped the barrel and then the handle. I felt the cold steel. I looked around to analyze our location, to see if there was any place to exit. I left the gun on the floor of the car, turned around, and went back inside. My ID had been in my bag all along.
I could not bring myself to use the gun. For all of my bravado, I did not want to shoot a police officer, or anyone else. I had never shot or killed or hurt anyone, all I had done was target practice. I did want to run or help create a diversion so that Tim could run, but Tim was trying to pull the sheeting over several boxes on the ground. Surprisingly, the cop did not pull his gun. As he was asking us who we were and what we were doing there, I could see that he was younger than we were. He seemed to be stalling for time, waiting for backup. It all happened so fast. The rookie had made a call, and then other police officers arrived within minutes. The moment they saw the dynamite and the guns, they went crazy. The police kept running between the shed where we had unloaded most of the dynamite to the back end of the U-Haul, which had both doors wide open. They were shouting on their car radios, while some of them drew their guns and ran off to search other aisles in the storage area. The police were yelling at us and at one another. They were afraid of the explosives and the ensuing pandemonium intensified their fear.
Several officers kicked Tim to the ground, until he lay in a pool of blood and mud. I was handcuffed, slapped, and shoved into the backseat of a police car. Seeing Tim on the ground and scores of police officers running back and forth between the U-Haul, the storage space, and us, hearing their shouts, feeling their fear and hatred, and knowing that in the chaos there was absolutely no escape, I slipped into a mental state in which I was no longer there at all. When a short man, a policeman with black hair and garlicky bad breath jammed his double-barreled pump-action shotgun into my temple and started screaming at me, the woman I was vanished. Suddenly I was surveying the scene above the action, and what I saw was a woman at the very absolute end of her life. I shut my eyes. I did not want to look anymore.
“Where the fuck is the backup? Where are the others? You cunt,” he shouted hysterically, repeatedly punching me in the temple with the barrel of the gun. My eye was running, and I could not see as I turned that the barrel had turned with me and moved to the center of my forehead. I looked straight into his eyes, but he could not meet my stare. He just kept screaming, “You bitch, where’s the backup?” My head was throbbing.
I felt as if I was emerging from a tunnel when I shocked myself by screaming, “Do it, motherfucker, just do it right now! Kill me and then it will be done!” I thought it, felt it, and meant it. I was calling for death, but my words had an unintended effect—they shocked him, and broke his hysteria. I wanted to die at that point. I felt everything that was happening at that moment was my fault, I wanted him to shoot me rather than be captured.
He did not pull the trigger, but he resumed hitting me, hard. First he hit me on one side of the head and then the other. Then he slid out of the seat, threw the shotgun on the ground, stuck his head back in the car, and spat on me, his saliva dripping down my cheek.
A few hours later in the New Jersey State Police barracks, the agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), the New Jersey state troopers, and the Cherry Hill, New Jersey, police knew that they had made a significant arrest. They knew it because of the guns and dynamite they had captured. We had shotguns and automatic rifles, false identification, and explosives. There had been a three-year hunt for more than twenty different radicals, but they did not know that we were among the most wanted.
They did not know who we were and Tim and I would not tell them. We would not say anything. We were not cooperating. The police fingerprinted us, but they had to fly our prints to Washington, D.C., and wait for them to be identified. For some reason it took more than fourteen hours to get the results. While the police waited, we were kept in separate rooms, each of us chained to a chair. The agents from the ATF used the good cop/bad cop routine. They pummeled us with questions for hours at a time, and then offered us water (but no access to a bathroom). It was a very long fourteen hours, perhaps the longest I have ever spent. I replayed bits and pieces of my life. I was thinking about how eventually my parents would find out about my arrest and I wondered what they would do. I remembered my mother pleading with me to leave the country. Getting arrested was my fault, I thought, and I knew that everyone in my group would be angry with me. My wrists hurt from the handcuffs, my head was pounding from the earlier blows.
When who I thought was an FBI agent finally walked into the interrogation room, he stared at me so intensely that his eyes felt like they were drilling into my skull. His eyes darted back and forth across my face and then locked into mine. Then his lips curled and he said, “This bitch is a kike. Get the fugitive posters and find the kikes.” As soon as he left, other agents brought a poster into the room and held it to my face, trying to find a match. Poster after poster followed, but within minutes they had identified me.
The FBI agent returned and said, “I can always tell a kike. At least now we know it’s the kikes, the ones with the niggers.”
As I sat chained, waiting for something else to happen, everything in the physical world receded and slow-moving pictures replaced the dirty, windowless room, the stale air, and the overwhelming ache to urinate. The sweet odor of my fear and anger filtered to my nose. My mind had retreated off again into its own world. I was on an inner journey that the police in the room could not begin to understand or even detect.
I was catapulted back to a childhood memory of my best friend’s mother handing me a tuna fish sandwich, her housecoat sleeve riding up her arm to expose a tattooed number on her wrist. Eight years old, I questioned her. “What is that? Why is that on your wrist? Why don’t you wash it off?”
She answered, “I can’t wash it off.”
I persisted. “Why?”
“It’s from the concentration camp.”
“What’s that? Why did you go there?”
Her answer was short and clipped. “Because we are Jewish.”
Later my mother explained to me