On a Returning War Prisoner

Andras Toma had been a 20 year old Hungarian soldier when he was captured by the Soviets near the end of World War 2 in 1945. Toma was taken to a POW camp near what is now St Petersburg, Russia. The German soldiers and their allies, including captured Hungarians, often had to trek across hundreds of miles of countryside by foot when the war ended and they were released from custody in order to return to their homelands. I have some friends in Western Germany, near Cologne, who had their ancestor show up unannounced at the front door of the family homestead in 1947, fully two years after the war ended. They thought he was dead. That wasn’t an unusual event. Toma, too, had to stay some years in Soviet custody before his release, and his family had long since though him deceased in the war.

But Toma had survived. After the POW camp, an illness saw the young Hungarian transferred to another facility, a Soviet hospital, still deeper in the Russian interior. He languished there for several months, and then he was transferred to yet another facility, and that’s when he lost track of time. He didn’t realize how long it had been since he was put in the facilities. Back home, since he didn’t return after the war, his family had him declared dead. Again, this wasn’t unusual for families whose sons, husbands, brothers and other relatives didn’t come back.

Meanwhile, Toma was having trouble communicating with the doctors and the staff of the medical facility. Hungarian is a rich language, but it’s also one of the most difficult languages to learn. Besides, it’s not spoken much outside of Hungary. And Toma knew no Russian. So, when the doctors made their rounds and the nurses brought him his food and checked on him, there was almost no interaction between Toma and them. Apparently, he had no conversations with them at all while he was there.

Then, a doctor in the hospital who was from Czechoslovakia noticed the man. the doctor soon realized that, because of his name, Toma was most likely Hungarian. The man, curious as to what seemed to be a patient with no obvious or visible issue by that time, arranged for a records check on the Toma, and the entire story came to light. It seems that, for some unknown reason, Toma had ultimately been placed in a Soviet mental institution. His inability to speak Russian (and the Russians’ lack of Hungarian language skills) had allowed him to stay in the mental facility for an inordinate amount of time both unchallenged and unchecked.

And that’s how Andras Toma finally made it home to his family in Hungary after the war. He was given a hero’s welcome, and he was awarded back pay for all his time in the service, even though the war had ended some time earlier. The joyful reunion between Toma and his family occurred on August 11, 2000.

Because he didn’t speak Russian, Toma had been a POW for over 55 years.

On a Nuclear Threat

We have lived with the distinct possibility of wide-spread nuclear war as a species for 70-some-odd years. The Cold War split the world into two camps, Us and Them, and then the dissolution of the Soviet Union and then the end of that Cold War found nuclear weapons had made their way into the hands of many nations. Today, at least 9 nations boast nuclear capability. But, at the height of the period of tension between the US and the USSR, each side had hundreds if not thousands of nuclear bombs that pretty much guaranteed the planet’s destruction.

The United States developed a strategy of splitting their nuclear arsenal into three areas, known at the Nuclear Triad: Land-based missiles (in silos scattered across the US), bombs on large air bombers, and missiles placed on submarines. This made the US arsenal a bit more “secure” than the Soviet’s almost complete reliance on land-based missiles because, if the Soviets destroyed one of the US’s triad branch, the other two would still be able to carry out attacks. So, the US and the USSR faced each other with nuclear guns pointed at the other’s head for decades. And the men and women who were trained in these nuclear weapons were under tremendous pressure to protect their respective homelands and ways of living.

Take Stan. He was a nuclear technician in the military who monitored the missiles of the other side. The time was September, 1983, and tensions were especially high because the Soviet Union had recently shot down a Korean air liner that had flown over Soviet airspace. Both sides ordered their monitors to be on high alert. Stan was an officer, and his duty was to make sure that his superiors received adequate notification if and when any possible attack was taking place.

And that’s what happened. Stan was watching his team’s monitoring screens when he noticed that a missile had been fired from the central area of the enemy’s territory. Soon, four other missiles were seen to have been fired. Now, you might think that five nuclear bombs would be not so many, but please remember that these were missiles–not the bombs themselves. Each missile had something called MIRVs–Multiple Independently (targetable) Re-entry Vehicles–meaning that, when the missile reached the edge of space and began its descent over the opponent’s land, 10-15 different, individual, and large-scale hydrogen bombs would be released from the missile and hit a different target. Thus, five missiles meant at least 50 nuclear bombs, each of which used a Hiroshima-sized bomb as a detonator.

Protocol–in fact, direct orders–said that Stan was required to report the launching of the missiles to his superior. But something made Stan take a closer look. His training had taught him that the enemy, if he were to launch a nuclear attack, wouldn’t merely launch 5 missiles at first. No, conventional wisdom said that the first-strike by either side would be designed to take out the entirety of the other side. Five missiles? It must be an error at best or an accident at worst, Stan reasoned. And, so, he failed to trigger the early warning system that was in place.

Sure enough, not only was the missile launch a mistake, but it was also not a missile launch at all. Come to find out, sunlight, reflecting on high-altitude clouds over the missile silos, gave a “false positive” reading to Stan’s launch monitors. By disobeying his orders, Stan may have saved the world from a nuclear war. But he was in a bit of a pickle. While his superiors praised him for his restraint in not kicking the false missile launch up the chain of command, they were also worried that admitting that their system couldn’t tell the difference between sunlight reflection and missile launches would make them look as if their much ballyhooed missile defense system was garbage.

So, privately, Stan was applauded by the military, but it would be years later, after the Soviet Union fell, that Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Red Army would receive credit for stopping a nuclear war.

On a Hot Dog Stand

Would you believe me if I told you that, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons targeting a simple hotdog stand? Apparently, that’s true. Now, the location of the stand is key, here, as you can imagine. It was sited in a courtyard, as you probably suspect, a courtyard located in the heart of the United States government near Washington DC. Now, to be sure, it was a rather large hotdog stand, but a hotdog stand nonetheless.

But the Soviets were convinced that the hotdog stand was either a cover for a much more important building beneath it, sort of a bunker or some kind of operations center, or it was a top-secret planning headquarters for the US military. Some Russian analysts believed that the structure was at the heart of the US military establishment. As a result, Russia spent, millions of rubles and countless man hours trying to get close enough to this hotdog stand so they could figure out what was going on inside the small building, possibly underneath it. They never succeeded in finding out the truth.

So, just to be sure, that’s why they had not one, but two of the nuclear warheads targeting this Hot dog sand. Now, what the Soviets didn’t know and couldn’t confirm was that this particular hotdog stand was well, really only a hotdog stand. It wasn’t masquerading as something else. It wasn’t a front for anything. And you might be wondering why the Soviets would target this particular and seemingly innocent hotdog stand , instead of one of the countless other hotdog stands in the US. And the reason is because of the clientele.

You see, the Soviets were able to easily ascertain that most of the people who went to get hotdogs there were people associated with the upper echelon of the US military. That was curious to the Russians. It’s not that the Soviets were paranoid, although they were. Of course, perhaps these military members were simply stopping there to get a hotdog because it was lunch time, and they were hungry. But the Soviets didn’t see it that way. It’s just that if, in the spy game, you see behavior being repeated, that indicates a trend or a “tell”, and a trend can be a tip off for something deeper, something that requires more analysis. And the stakes of the Cold War were simply too high for the Soviets to ignore this trend.

Interestingly, this hotdog stand outlived the Soviet Union. It was torn down in 2006, and a new structure was put in its place. I wish this story had a surprise ending for you. But it really doesn’t. The Soviets were wrong. It was, ultimately, simply a hotdog stand.

Of course, the courtyard in which the hotdog stand stood was located in the exact center of the Pentagon.

On a Business Deal

During the Cold War, one of the not-so-secret secrets was that, despite embargoes on many goods in the Soviet Union, western companies tried desperately to enter the Soviet market. And western consumer goods were in high demand despite the communist rhetoric about the evils of capitalism. One American corporation that desperately desired to enter the Russian market was PepsiCo, the food and soft drink conglomerate.

Long the number two cola company behind Coca-Cola, Pepsi knew that if they could somehow leverage an entre into the USSR, the fiscal reward would be substantial. Besides, there would be the tremendous free publicity that such a news event would generate for the company as the first and only American company in the communist country. Pepsi, after tense and lengthy negotiations, finally was able to enter the USSR market in 1972. Within a very short period, the company was making upwards of half a billion dollars a year in Russia; the drink was incredibly popular (and had the cache of being a “forbidden” decadent western company) with no rival, giving Pepsi a monopoly in the market.

But there was a major catch. Rubles, the Russian currency, was not tradable or usable in the US or most western banks, especially in the amounts Pepsi was making them in Russia. Besides, the country didn’t allow their currency to leave the USSR in such large amounts. So, another round of fierce negotiations followed, and a comprise of sorts was reached. Where there’s money to be made, it is interesting how creative solutions can be found. And that’s what happened here. The leadership of the USSR offered to pay Pepsi not in rubles but, rather in trade goods. Pepsi could then take the trade goods, sell them in the west, and take the profits. While the extra step was not ideal, the amount of money the company was making (and would continue to make as the monopoly) proved to be more important than having to basically become a middle man for Russian trade goods.

The first round of Russian goods to be swapped for Pepsi products was, you guessed it, vodka. And that worked for a while; Pepsi simply opened a liquor branch of the company and sold the vodka in the US and other western nations. This worked for a while, but then the United States and its allies began a boycott of all Soviet goods because of the Russian continued invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Pepsi then had no way of turning their soda profits into raw cash anymore. The company then approached the Soviet hierarchy and asked if they had any other products that they could trade that Pepsi could then turn and sell to recoup their money.

And, of course, the Soviets did. And they traded these products throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, and Pepsi managed to turn the trade goods into cash…eventually. By the way, Russia is still PepsiCo’s second largest market after the United States. Of course, today, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist system, Pepsi is paid in cash. But, for a time, because of the unusual circumstances, the company received metal that they, in turn, sold as scrap. And that metal was in the form of old Soviet warships and submarines.

As a result, for a time in the early 1990s, PepsiCo had the 6th largest navy in the world.

On a Nervous Singer

The room began to fill with partygoers, and the sight of all those happy people coming into the union hall gave Ethel the shakes. “Why?” she said to herself; “why would I agree to sing at a New Year’s Eve party in front of total strangers?” The 18 year old girl retreated to a corner of the hall in an attempt to steel her nerves.

A young man with a pencil-thin mustache noticed her sitting in the corner, twisting her handbag in obvious distress. He approached her and asked, “What’s going on with you then?” Ethel looked up quickly. “Hmm?” she asked. He repeated his inquiry. “What’s going on?” Ethel glanced around the young man and pointed to the incoming crowd of revelers. “That. Them. Those people. That’s what’s going on. I agreed to sing tonight, but now, I’m not so sure.”

“Well, can you sing at all?” the young man asked. Ethel looked up at him a bit surprised. “Well, yes. A bit,” she said. “Then, what’s the trouble?” he wondered, and he pulled up a chair and sat next to Ethel.

She looked at him closely. He was somewhat handsome, she thought, with kind eyes behind his round eyeglasses, and he wore a nice smile. “I guess it’s nerves,” Ethel explained. “This’ll be the largest crowd I’ve ever performed for.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1935, and the Union Hall in New York City was buzzing with excitement. The Great Depression had put a damper on such celebrations in recent years, but the Roosevelt New Deal programs had begun to have a positive effect in some segments of American society by that point. The Union Hall was where what we today might refer to as socialists would meet to discuss how they could help affect even more change in the capitalist system. As they saw it, the moneyed interests represented the biggest culprit in the crushing of the American worker underfoot in recent years. The hall that night was filled with other, young and idealistic young people who put economic theory on the backburner for one moment and wanted simply to have a good time and welcome in what they hoped would be a better year to come for their cause.

And Ethel had agreed to sing. And now she was having second thoughts.

Well, the young man calmed her down. He politely excused himself and returned in moment with a drink that Ethel gladly accepted. She gulped it down, and he smiled at her. “Say, let’s go there (he pointed at this point to a nearby room), and you can sing to me to practice. It might also calm you down some.” Ethel smiled and agreed.

And it worked. Ethel sang that night, but she was singing to her new friend, the young man with the nice smile and the kind eyes and the round glasses and the dapper mustache. And he was waiting for her when she came off the stage to a nice round of applause.

“What’s your name?” he said over the clapping. “Ethel,” she answered, “Ethel Greenglass. And what’s yours?”

The man who would become her husband three years later, the man who would become the father of her two sons, and the man who would seal her fate, answered.

“Good to meet you. I’m Julius Rosenberg.”

On a War Prisoner

My feeble mind isn’t expansive enough to feel the impact of the Holocaust. That 6,000,000 people at least died in the various camps operated by the Nazi Party during the Hitler Regime is beyond me. The addendum to this unspeakable tragedy is that hundreds of thousands of German POWs from several nations also died in camps from disease, malnutrition, abuse, and outright murder.

Take Yakov Dzhugashvili for example. He was one of the countless Soviet war prisoners taken by the German Army as they invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Yakov had been a bright but shy, sensitive boy with some mental health issues; he attempted suicide several times before reaching adulthood, and his overbearing father tried to direct the young man’s life. While Yakov wished to pursue a career in engineering, the father forced him into the military, making him attend artillery officers school. He graduated as a Lieutenant only weeks before the Nazi invasion of his country.

Sent immediately to the front lines, Yakov fought in the Battle of Smolensk. He was captured by the Germans in mid-July after refusing an order to retreat; he ordered his battery to keep firing long after the other units left in an attempt to cover his comrades’ retreat. Sadly, rumors reached his family that he had surrendered freely and as a coward to the Nazis rather than the heroic circumstances that would later be revealed by his fellow soldiers and captives.

Yakov was sent to Sachsenhausen POW Camp, which is a misnomer because it was one of the notorious concentration camps. As one of the earliest officers captured during the invasion of Russia, the Nazis wished to use Yakov as a propaganda tool and possibly force him to make Russian-language radio broadcasts to his fellow soldiers on the front lines. That never materialized, but Yakov probably wouldn’t’ve cooperated in the first place.

The young man’s old depression returned shortly after he was interned in Sachsenhausen. There were reports of self-harm. He would often engage in sometimes violent and almost always non-sensical arguments with fellow prisoners and sometimes even with himself out loud as he walked around the camp grounds. Finally, in early 1943, Yakov died by seemingly purposefully running into the electrified fencing at the camp and then being shot by the guards for attempting to escape.

The Soviet leader, Stalin, once said that one death is a tragedy while a million deaths is only a statistic. Yakov was an example of both of those, being a tragedy and a statistic. In fact, over 3,000,00 Soviet soldiers died in German custody. Stalin also noted that many sons of Russia died in the Great Patriotic War. Yakov was also one of those. And Stalin would know.

You see, Yakov was the son of Stalin himself.