A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
it my ancestral background, my schooling, or my checkered past that imbued me with a firm rule to look at things “on the one hand”—but then, too, “on the other hand”? Life and politics are hardly drawn in one or even two dimensions. This does not always apply, it is true, and not everywhere. But, rightly or wrongly, this habit forced its way into my thinking about the GDR and East Berlin both before and after the “fall of the Wall” in 1989–90. However, before I reflect about capitalism, socialism, communism, freedom, and democracy or any other isms or solutions for the world’s troubles, I want to describe some of what I experienced.
2—Future Dreams in an Ancient Town
After many hours, and finding no sign of the Red Army, I was finally picked up by the Austrian police, barefoot and bedraggled from my fateful Danubian swim, and escorted, as I demanded, to the Soviet Kommandantur (because, very wisely, I did not trust the cops). I was briefly questioned, then driven the next day to Soviet HQ in Baden near Vienna, and politely but unceremoniously locked up in a small, very primitive cell, under armed guard, for a period of two weeks. After some initial skepticism about the long day I had spent hunting for the Soviet armed forces I had expected to find patrolling this stretch of the Iron Curtain, the guards became friendly. I had fascinating discussions on literature and cinema with the armed soldier outside my cell; using my ten, at most twenty Russian words, mostly from names of books. I would say “Anna Karenina?” He would gradually understand me despite my false pronunciation and then say with a big smile: “Da, da, chital, khorosho!”—“Yes, yes. I’ve read it. Good!” Since I had also seen a number of Soviet films, like Gulliver and Lenin in October, these exchanges and evaluations lasted a while, to our mutual satisfaction, and I learned new vocabulary. Most essential was “ubornaya” for “toilet.”
After twice reading the three available books in English, one a history of Scotland, and getting a complete new outfit of clothes and accessories (“And for you a red tie!”), I was driven to an unknown destination, which turned out to be the GDR, and was placed in an isolated room in a building in Potsdam, near Berlin. I had a one-hour daily walk in the garden behind the guarded house and about once a week got a visit from a friendly fellow called “George,” with only a slight Russian accent, who asked me about myself, chatted about politics, showed me match tricks, and asked if I was interested in moving to Western Europe. I definitely wasn’t and that was dropped.
I suggested assuming a new name to protect my family from difficulties, so he told me to choose one. Try as I could, I could think of no new moniker. When a decision became necessary he asked if Victor Grossman was okay. I didn’t like it at all but, having failed in my own search, accepted it, also in the knowledge that unlike, say, Murphy or Johnson, it retained some of my Jewish identity (though it was seen by some as German, until I corrected them).
After two months, and another set of clothes from the Soviets plus one now from the GDR authorities, I landed in Bautzen, a town of 45,000 inhabitants in a corner of East Germany near the Czech and Polish borders. What I found was certainly not the communist-type Utopia I may have been dreaming of. The war, less than eight years earlier, had not spared the town, long a battle-point: a few remaining ruins, cleared lots, and a cemetery of Soviet soldiers attested to that. But I saw no signs of the hunger or rags that press reports might have led me to expect; life seemed to move along fairly normally. The few vehicles were old, sometimes unusual: delivery trucks with two wheels in back but one in front, or cars with wood ovens mounted in back as motors. In 1952 the shops offered basic groceries and textiles and were quite spartan; I recall long hunts for handkerchiefs and a new washrag. For a few weeks razor blades were short, which meant lining up to get old ones resharpened. Toilet paper was unavailable, so newspapers or pulpy magazines (but no Sears and Roebucks catalogues) were torn into neat squares.
It seems that the Soviet authorities had chosen Bautzen to settle deserters from Western armies because it was as far as possible from West Berlin and West German borders but not directly on a crossing point to Poland or Czechoslovakia. Also, it was large enough to provide jobs but not too large to lose track of us in a big city atmosphere. Our numbers changed, since there were new arrivals every month or so but a similar number would abscond westward again. About fifteen to twenty were Americans, about ten were British, and five to ten were French with a similar number from North African French colonies who deserted so as not to be sent to fight in Indochina. There were a few from the Netherlands, a Spaniard, an Irishman, a Mexican, and a Nigerian. Many were not there for political reasons; some had fled because of various conflicts, often connected with drinking, a few because their relationships with German women were prohibited; of these one such was too “Red East German,” a few were African Americans with white women friends. Some of the British had rejected service in Korea. It was a strange bunch. New arrivals were put up in a hotel, then rooms were found or apartments for families. In general, those who found female partners or wives tended to integrate quite well while single GIs, with no trade and almost no German, and no TV as yet, gathered at various dives or the all-night bar at the train station, thus often missing shifts at their usually low-level jobs, or getting into trouble. One interesting exception was a black American, a trained baker and a boxer, who became a favorite athlete until his age caught up with him. Since he worked regularly and neither smoked nor drank, he had a pleasant apartment on the central square of town, and because he was perhaps the first person of color ever seen in this out-of-the-way town, he often attracted and enjoyed a bunch of happy kids, like the Pied Piper. Though he traveled to matches, the rest of us had only one restriction—not to leave the county without permission. It was a very big county, and since we had as yet little reason to travel this hardly worried us.
After a week or so a job was found for me. I received about 250 marks a month in wages, always paid in cash. Rent for my furnished room was 25 marks a month. Like every working person in the GDR I received a hot lunch, which was the main meal of the day in Germany, for one mark or less, and since I had been given enough clothing, shopping problems bothered me less than those of a sanitary nature. Typically for prewar housing, there was no flush toilet but an indoor privy a half-flight down from my room; the pail of water to flush it had to be constantly refilled. So did the pitcher with basin in my room for washing and shaving. Baths were at a bathhouse. And almost every day power was cut off, always unexpectedly; matches and candles had to be kept handy. Like nearly all homes in those days, my room was heated by a big ceramic oven. That required making a fire every day, a technique with newspaper, kindling, and black coal briquettes, which had to be carried up from the cellar after bringing down the ashes from the day before. The coal had to burn thoroughly, for about an hour, before the oven could be safely screwed shut. I soon gave up and lived for one icy winter in a room heated only on Sundays by my merciful but slightly scornful landlady, who also invited me to join the family for Sunday dinners.
Of course, even for a New Yorker whose family seldom had it easy and almost never lived in a comfortable, roomy apartment, one free of roaches and bugs, life was rather primitive. But I rarely complained or even grumbled about it; I had chosen this path myself and could blame no one, except those distant politicians who passed the McCarran Act.
Then too, at twenty-four, I was very much a devoted young communist. I had not chosen the GDR but I was now here. The aim of the government and ruling party, declared four months before my arrival and proclaimed constantly ever since, was to “build socialism.” That was my aim, too, making me willing to endure growing pains, if that’s what they were, and generally take the bad with the good.
Was there really any good?
My start in this workers’ paradise was helping to tote heavy oak and beech planks at a large factory. This required a long, early walk to work—there were no buses yet—and an equally long, far more tired walk back after work. In those early years there was still a half-day’s work on Saturday. I soon learned to balance one end of a plank on one shoulder while the man in front of me carried his end on the other. It was hard work; I hope they eventually modernized it after I left. In our “brigade” of five men, Jakob, the “brigadier,” received the assignments—how many oak or beech planks were needed—and did the required paper work. Jakob, as a member of the German minority, had been forced to leave his Hungarian home at war’s end. Although I could speak German pretty fluently by then, his accent was at first hard for me to understand. He