Dancing Under the Red Star: The Extraordinary Story of Margaret Werner, the Only American Woman to Survive Stalin's Gulag - Softcover

Tobien, Karl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400070783 ISBN 13: 9781400070787

Publisher: WaterBrook, 2006

Synopsis

The shocking and inspirational saga of Margaret Werner and her miraculous survival in the Siberian death camps of Stalinist Russia.

Between 1930 and 1932, Henry Ford sent 450 of his Detroit employees plus their families to live in Gorky, Russia, to operate a new manufacturing facility. This is the true story of one of those families–Carl and Elisabeth Werner and their young daughter Margaret–and their terrifying life in Russia under brutal dictator Joseph Stalin.
Margaret was seventeen when her father was arrested on trumped-up charges of treason. Heartbroken and afraid, she and her mother were left to withstand the hardships of life under the oppressive Soviet state, an existence marked by poverty, starvation, and fear. Refusing to comply with the Socialist agenda, Margaret was ultimately sentenced to ten years of hard labor in Stalin’s Gulag.
Filth, malnutrition, and despair accompanied merciless physical labor. Yet in the midst of inhumane conditions came glimpses of hope and love as Margaret came to realize her dependence upon “the grace, favor, and protection of an unseen God.”
In all, it would be thirty long years before Margaret returned to kiss the ground of home. Of all the Americans who made this virtually unknown journey–ultimately spending years in Siberian death camps–Margaret Werner was the only woman who lived to tell about it. 
Written by her son, Karl Tobien, Dancing Under the Red Star is Margaret’s unforgettable true story: an inspiring chronicle of faith, defiance, and personal triumph

About this title

About the Author:

Karl Tobien was born in 1956 just outside a Soviet slave labor camp in Siberia. He arrived in America in 1961 with his mother, Margaret Werner, and grandmother. Today Karl is an executive consultant and inspirational speaker. He resides in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife, Tina, and their four children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

THE PAIN OF SEVENTEEN
If the comforting passage of time, coupled with God’s gentle mercies, kindly erases the tragic memories of my life, even so, June 29, 1938, will still remain the one particular day that I will never forget as long as I live. I was seventeen years old, and destiny was coming, whether I liked it or not.
When I awoke that morning, I think I already knew. In my heart, or maybe it was the pit of my stomach, I sensed there would be something out of the ordinary about this day. It was an eerie premonition, something you could unmistakably identify but not necessarily explain. Just in my waking up, the day already felt strangely surreal and separate from all others. It was an unusually splendid morning. The entire sky was uncommon, painted a crystal clear blue, with no clouds, and I felt oddly euphoric. And in the midst of the otherwise chaotic circumstances surrounding this time in my life, this day seemed filled with hope and promise, and I couldn’t wait to get it started.
Peering out the window of our second-floor apartment in Gorky’s American Village, I felt the warm and deceptively soothing rays of the Russian summer sunshine on my skin. I was eager to get outside, to meet my best friend, Maria, for a tennis match. I was surging with adrenaline and expectancy. My body, rather than my mind, was happy, perhaps outside of itself. And happy was not an easy thing to be in Russia, in those unpredictably turbulent days, when confusing changes were occurring all around us.
Through no choice of my own, Russia had become my home, although in my mind and in my heart, and sometimes even in my words, I still referred to it as a foreign country. This was not America, where I was born, and no matter how long I stayed, I simply did not belong here. This was not my true home! Here in Gorky, we feared that anything could happen at any moment, and no one ever really knew what to expect from one minute to the next. I speedily ate a very light breakfast, mainly to satisfy my mother’s demands, then grabbed my tennis racket and hurriedly kissed Mama good-bye, nearly tripping over her feet as I jolted down the stairs to meet Maria.
The brick wall and empty lot of an abandoned storefront around the corner from our tenement was a perfect place to practice tennis by myself or when Maria could not play. We had planned to meet there that morning and then walk to the nearby tennis courts together. She hadn’t arrived yet, so I decided to stretch and loosen up on my own. Maria was eighteen–a beautiful, green-eyed Ukrainian girl who lived in our village because her father and older brother also worked in the automobile factory
with my father. She was an excellent athlete and competitor, a renowned young gymnast in her hometown, and now a topnotch tennis player here in the village. We enjoyed each other’s company and athletic competitiveness immensely. In fact, Maria was the only other girl my age in the entire village whose love for sports and general athletic prowess rivaled mine. I’m quite sure that’s why we got along so well. Here in Gorky, Soviet sports had become my life. Athletic competition and organized sports were highly esteemed in Russia and taken very seriously. This suited me! Since early childhood back in Detroit, I had been raised to be athletic and physical, and my nature was to be competitive in everything. Maria and I were highly touted swimmers for the Gorky region, having won several district and regional competitions together, and we were now ranked high in the national statistics. She swam the fastest 100- and 200-meter backstroke I had ever seen. She was absolutely phenomenal. I swam the best freestyle and butterfly sprint events in our region. Competitive sports made a positive place for us within this unfamiliar society. Russia was a place where we felt free to excel. But today was not a competition; we planned a day of relaxation, a day to dream of the future, a day for fun. My best friend and I were going to play tennis.
Maria soon showed up, and we began to chitchat, volleying back and forth against the wall, talking and giggling about school and sports and, of course, boys. Our voices made a little rhythm with the tapping rackets, the bouncing tennis balls, and the warm summer wind rustling the leaves overhead. I remember thinking what an absolutely perfect day this was. It was about ten o’clock. My papa was at work in the factory, Mama was at home doing her chores, and I planned to spend time with her later in the afternoon.
Mama was actually my best friend, and Maria came next. I always enjoyed the time I spent relaxing and talking with my mother, because she had an unassuming sort of tranquility about her that made you want to be around her. She had an inner peace and a silent strength that simply refused to be managed by outside circumstances. I counted on her for stability in the confusing world in which we lived. My mother’s gaze drew you in with piercingly light blue, nearly violet eyes. But more than her eyes, it was her heart she was giving you. It was her spirit that always drew you in without effort. When she took my hand in hers, there were no more problems and no more worries. She made you feel that everything would be okay. And that was difficult here in Gorky, to be sure. My papa’s work was hard, and for seven years we had been cut off from our American home. But my mama was something else. I always wanted to be just like her.
That summer day Maria and I were planning to play tennis for an hour or so, have a good workout, and then maybe go down to the river, the Oka, for a swim. Afterward I would come back home, help Mama with the chores, and wait for Papa to come home from work. We’d have dinner together, I’d bring him his pipe, and Mama would make him some coffee. Night after night we’d sit and listen to him worry and complain about problems that agitated him so much at the factory, the things he could not change. My father was an idealist at heart, and change was part of his very nature. He was in constant torment about what he saw at work: the organizational, bureaucratic management “nonsense,” as he liked to say, in the factory. He would shake his head as he recounted the injustices he experienced at work, but then he would reassure us that a better day was coming, just ahead, on the horizon. “Just wait. You’ll see. It won’t be like this forever. I promise,” he’d say, and I always believed him.
Sometimes he would read to me from one of our favorite books–Black Beauty or Treasure Island–and Mama would sit and smile, taking it all in. She enjoyed her family more than anything, and she was always trying to make life better for her husband. I had grown accustomed to these evenings. They were really no more complicated than that. We had made our own kind of adjustment to living in Russia, but beneath it all, I knew something was intrinsically wrong. I just didn’t know how much.
Maria and I hit the tennis ball around and laughed hysterically about a boy named Boris, a Czech, from our high school. She was telling me about something crazy he did in class the day before, when she suddenly stopped in midsentence and almost dropped her racket. She stood as if paralyzed, looking past me toward my house. She whispered, “Margo, a car just pulled up in front of your building... I thought I saw your father in it.” My first thought was, A car? Really? I didn’t understand why Papa would be home from work at this time, and I certainly didn’t understand why he would be in a car or why a car would even be here. I was puzzled; automobiles were not a common sight in our village, except when there was trouble or something out of the ordinary. But I turned and saw the ominous-looking black sedan in front of our house, and then I saw its back door opening. I knew something was wrong–terribly, terribly wrong. And I knew my papa was in the car. I stood there for a moment and stared, unable to move.
Maria looked at my face, threw her arms around my neck, and began to cry. “Oh, Margo, not your father,” she said in my ear. It was as if she already knew something I did not.
Maria was eighteen, going on thirty. Her mother had died under mysterious circumstances just a year earlier, and before that, her grandparents had been murdered during the Bolshevik Revolution. She was already more familiar with pain than I, and she carried a maturity beyond her years. They say, “Whatever doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.” Maria, despite our relative closeness in age, was already stronger than I was.
A strange man in a dark gray uniform stepped out of the car first and then reached back inside to pull my father out by his arm. Running toward them, I screamed, “Papa! Papa!” I saw the man grab my father’s wrist and force him around the car, where another man got out. He seized my father by his other wrist, and they pushed him toward the apartment. Papa didn’t seem to struggle, at least not much. I thought that was odd. I remember a look of agony on his face, but he didn’t appear to be struggling. What I recall seeing was the uncharacteristic resignation and absence of the fight that usually marked my father. That was strange to me, because he was a fighter–innately a fighter! For a moment he didn’t seem like my father, my flesh and blood. I wanted this to be any other man but him. But it was not. It was my papa. And I knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, so I couldn’t understand what was happening. I loved and admired my father, Carl Werner, more than I could ever describe. I thought he was what a man was all about and what a man should be. I compared every boy and every man I ever met to him. But what was happening here? Why were these men being so mean to him? My papa was foreman of the tool and die department at the Gorky automobile factory and a respected man. This couldn’t be happening! I figured it was all a bad mistake–a terrible mistake–and certainly they would soon have this mess figured out, and things would be normal again. Of course, things in Gorky–in Russia, for that matter–were anything but normal.
About two years earlier, in 1936, Joseph Stalin had commenced infamous purges, instigated and carried out by his bloodthirsty associate Nikolai Yezhov and shortly thereafter by Lavrenti Beria, his notorious chief of the secret police. Beria was directly responsible for millions of deaths and unspeakable cruelty throughout Russia. The period in Soviet history known as the Bolshevik Revolution was over, but the Stalinist regime was at the height of its power and operating at full throttle. Throughout the land, it operated as a heartless killing machine, without conscience. In the period leading up to and during World War II, it took hundreds of thousands, even millions, of prisoners, often with no charges and no trials. You didn’t have to be guilty of anything in Stalinist Russia to find yourself imprisoned or even killed. The Stalinist regime operated on paranoia, with no rational justification.
As my father was roughly pushed toward our building, he looked back over his shoulder, almost as if in confession, to see me running toward him. Then his face was shoved into the door by the two men. I was sprinting toward him but felt as if I was in slow motion, as if I would never get there. The other two men looked stone cold, without showing the slightest feeling or emotion, while my papa was being helplessly led to slaughter. How on earth could this be? The three of them disappeared through the building’s front door as I raced just a few paces behind them, burning with fear and anguish. I flung open the normally cumbersome wooden door as if it were weightless. My heart was pounding right through my chest, and I was panting and crying. I ran up the narrow wooden stairway to see Papa just ahead of me, on the landing.
My papa, oh my dear papa! For the rest of my days, I will never forget his face as he turned to see me standing behind him. It was only a glance, but it was a look I had never seen before and one I wished I hadn’t seen. I saw in his face the end–the end of his innocently blind optimism and the end of his hopes for our life in this country that was not ours. That look bespoke hopelessness, utter despair, and death.
The look haunted me. Tears welled up in his eyes, and I knew that they were more for me than anything else. In a voice that struggled to be firm and reassuring, he said, “Don’t cry, my sweet girl. Everything will be all right.” But his words were empty of faith. I knew at that moment he wanted me to believe his words, but his face told me he didn’t believe them himself.
We knew something of Russia’s brutality even to her own people, and yet my father always thought he could make a difference in this country. We had given up everything we had known in our beloved America and blindly left it all behind us when he brought us here. It was Papa’s decision. And for what? During the hungry years of the Depression back home, he had actually pictured opportunity, livelihood, and financial stability in this country. That’s why he came to Russia in the first place. That’s why we came with him. That’s why I was here. Didn’t they know what our family had given up for Papa’s commitment to this country, this Russia that was now stabbing him in the back as a “reward” for his faith?
The fear in his bewildered brown eyes drained them of all life. He quickly turned away, maybe ashamed that I had seen him that way. At that moment I knew this marked the end of his dream and the beginning of our nightmare. The two men who had arrested my father at work were from the NKVD. Under Stalin, the Soviet secret police had acquired vast punitive powers, and in 1934 the secret police were renamed the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD. No longer subject to party control or restricted by law, the NKVD became a direct instrument for Stalin to use against the party and the country during the Great Terror of the 1930s. Now they had come to search our apartment.
My mind was racing, my heart pulsing uncontrollably. I didn’t know what to do for him. This could not be happening; it just could not be happening! It had to be a mistake. My papa had done nothing wrong; I had to calm down. Once inside the apartment, I fumbled toward the kitchen, where I found some fresh strawberries from our garden. I poured some milk and sugar over them, and with feverishly shaking hands I tried to take them to Papa. I think at that moment they represented my love and much more. They represented everything I wanted to do for him but could not.
I was completely helpless.
I set the bowl down before him, and again our eyes met. “Oh, Papa,” I said, “how is this happening? Please tell me that everything is going to be all right...please, please, please!”
He looked down at the floor, then at the bowl, then at me and over to Mama, and then back at the floor. He said nothing, but he cried silently, violently, from the innermost part of his being. My papa was shaking and looked as though he was barely breathing. He seemed afraid to look up, afraid of what we would see in his eyes. I was scared to death, mainly because I had never seen my papa so fragile and so completely helpless. As for the symbolic strawberries, he could not force down a single bite. We were all speechless and terrified.
Mama was told she could pack him a few necessary items, and she did s...

About this edition

• Publisher: WaterBrook
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1400070783
• ISBN 13: 9781400070787
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384