Observer: The Colonel George Trofimoff Story, The Tale of America's Highest-Ranking Military Officer Convicted of Spying (The Prison Trilogy) (Volume 2)

Part I: George's Story

1 My arrival at Butner Federal Prison. Meeting George Trofimoff. Becoming cellmates. George has learned I am a lawyer.

2 George and I getting to know each other.

3 I break written prison rules and ask George what he's in for.

4 Was George Trofimoff a spy?

5 Germany and a proud young White Russian.

6 The story of George Trofimoff at age 14 trying to escape German conscription.

7 Searching for the American front.

8 Freedom, and on to France.

9 Self-help work. The Friends.

10 Father lost in the war, but American visa issued to George.

11 America the beautiful. Sunset Farms.

12 The generosity of Uncle Paul; the support of the Friends.

13 So help me God.

14 You're in the Army now.

15 Army language school at Monterrey.

16 Back to Frankfurt and interrogating deserting Soviets; father found; Reunion.

17 Left hand on the Bible, right hand raised high: Oath of Allegiance.

18 Camp King.

19 On leave to Sunset Farms. First car, first marriage, and the CIA.

20 Laos: the clandestine mission.

21 Building the defense against the Communists.

22 Auto Defense. The Montagnards.

23 Vientiane.

24 Divorce. Visit to the Chao Muong.

25 Preparing for Vietnam. Trying to please Laotian generals.

26 The strange culture of the Montagnards.

27 George's new love: Pham Thi Phuc. Jungle rot and sickness.

28 Training the Filipino army to jungle-fight the Communists.

29 Escape from Laos. The loss of Pham Thi Phuc.

30 Assignment in Hawaii. A new love and divorce.

31 On to Seoul, South Korea. The chain of containment for Southeast Asia.

32 Death of George's father. Transfer back to Germany.

33 The ever-romantic George and marriage to Alexa.

34 American military life in Germany.

35 The Berlin Wall. Teuniting with brother, Igor Susemihl.

36 Cuban Missile Crisis. The Kennedy assassination.

37 Graduation from Branch Officers Advance Course. Life as it should be.

38 The Soviet massacre in Prague. George's appointment as Chief of Joint Interest Command, Nuernberg.

39 Taking over the Joint Interest Command. Entering the Command & General Staff College.

40 Christmas at ancient Marienkirche and the Christkindle Fair.

41 Running the Joint Interest Command at Nuernberg.

42 The Nuernberg Joint Interest Command organization and its mission.

43 Agreeing to teach the Branch Officers Advance Course.

Overload. Divorce.

44 George's teaching career in addition to being Chief of the Joint Interest Command. Promotion to Colonel.

45 Lonely George, work, and the new Ruth.

46 New romance, marriage to the very young Marion. The beginning of financial difficulty.

47 Igor Susemihl and the Russian Orthodox Church.

48 The fall of the Wall and its effect on the Joint Interest Command. Divorce.

49 Another marriage and looking towards Florida for retirement.

50 Retirement, accusation, and German arrest.

51 Isolation. Money troubles.

52 On to Florida and the beautiful Indian River Colony Club.

53 Time to get a job. Brother Igor's attempted help. Hello, Publix.

Part II: The Sting 54 The unknown messenger. Igor Galkin.

55 A strange letter in the mailbox.

56 Quid pro quo. Thinking about Galkin's story.

57 George’s faux story.

58 Why, what, where, when, who, and how.

59 My brother is dying.

60 The Wickham Road Comfort Inn at Melbourne.

61 The trial transcription discloses the method of the Sting.

62 The unknown element to George: the Mitrokhin Archives.

63 The transformation from tell me your life's story to we have a job to do.

64 Ignorance of US law plus the feeling of invincibility is a bad formula.

65 Ingredients of a sting.

66 George's effort to sell his story to Galkin.

67 The trap: choose a KGB agent, any picture will do… The hearsay problem of the government.

68 Galkin's set-up for George's arrest.

Part III: The Trial 69 The history of stings and spying on Americans.

70 Looking at George's trial from the appellate viewpoint.

71 Ghostwriting the appeal.

72 Vasiliy Mitrokhin and John Doe. The asleep-at-the-wheel defense counsel.

73 A little history lesson for George.

74 Jury dynamics. Opening statements.

75 Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew.

76 The problem with John Doe editorializing as if he were Vasiliy Mitrokhin.

77 Belated understanding of justice system. Trip to Germany.

78 Witness for the prosecution. Lack of effort.

79 The video presentation of the Comfort Inn meetup.

80 Where are you, defense attorney?

81 John Doe's bona fides, aside from that of Vasiliy Mitrokhin.

82 The Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) and her chart trick, Exhibit 116.

83 What happened to the Sixth Amendment right to confrontation?

84 The government creation of spies Antey, Markiz, and Konzul being George.

85 What do you do with a guy like Oleg Kalugin?

86 The failures of the defense attorney, but it's not inadequate counsel.

87 The devastation of George taking the stand. The government’s use of jail rats.

88 Sixth Amendment relief for defendants by the Supreme Court, but the relief is not retroactive.

89 The real truth.

90 One question remains.

Notes and Sources

Appendices

Part I:

George's Story

1

Butner Federal Prison, located in North Carolina, is relatively new, relatively modern as prisons go. Guys like Bernie Madoff are there, although I was there and gone before he arrived. Part of the structure --- five stories tall and surrounded by concertina wire, electrified fences and double-locked gates --- house those with a serious medical problem. Medical problems are democratic; they attack violent criminals as well as white-collar crime violators. I was the latter, there because I had lymphatic leukemia. But that is not what this story is about.

Butner is organized on the basis of two-man, locked-down cells. I had been there only three weeks when my cellie, a Lakota Sioux from the reservation, was transferred out. Immediately, a new prisoner was brought to my cell. Before this new prisoner could get settled, Colonel George Trofimoff, in a high degree of agitation, entered my cell. I looked up from the small, narrow metal ledge I used as a writing desk.

I was surprised to see the Colonel in my cell. I knew who he was; I had seen him in chow hall. I had been told that he was a retired United States Army colonel. I didn't doubt it. He carried himself with military bearing, tall, straight.

Now, his blue eyes made immediate contact and held my attention. His straightforward, demanding demeanor made me uncomfortable. Even in my short prison experience, I had learned inmates do not make eye-to-eye contact with other inmates. It’s viewed as a personal challenge, often resolved with physical violence on the rec yard. A guard stood behind him.

Mr. Aaron, my name is George Trofimoff.

Yes, I know, I've heard some of the inmates call you 'Colonel.'

I was a Colonel in the United States Army, but I want you to be my cellmate. That is the reason for being here in your cell. I've been here a few months having my prostate cancer treated. Came from the Florida pen. Had been there about a year.

I wasn't sure what was going on, but I was sure that prisoners didn't run around selecting the cellie they wanted. I noticed he possessed a certain arrogance that commanded respect, a degree of friendliness behind that military countenance.

Why do you want me to be your cellie? They're not going to just let you pick a cellie, I said.

You have to agree. I've just been assigned a new one, a black; we're not going to get along. These two new guys, your new cellie and mine, can bunk together. He nodded to the man I had just met, a black prisoner who had been assigned to my cell.

At the time this newly assigned cellmate walked in, the Colonel and the guard also walked in, close behind. I didn't know where this was going, but I didn't want it to get racial. Ethnicity had never made much difference to me, but I had learned since my arrival that inmates preferred segregation.

I don't care who my cellie is, as long as we get along and I'm left alone, I said.

Will you agree? he asked.

Sure, if you can get it done. I don't care, I answered.

I'll get it done. I'm housed in the other quad, he said, then left.

Although the term quad often refers to a quadrangle, like a grassy area at a college, or something that has four corners, the guards and the prisoners called each of our respective wings of a floor a quad. I suppose this was because each wing had a rectangular shape. Each floor was configured in three separate wings of two-man cells. Each wing flowed into a central guard station, where there was a guard and a sally port, electronically-controlled by the guard. Here, inmates could access the elevator to reach the first floor, the chow hall, or the rec yard when time there was allowed. Prisoners were housed on each floor of the prison, except the fourth. No one knew for sure, but rumor had it that, if you made it to the fourth, you were terminal. That may have been true. Guys died periodically in the quads, so I wasn't sure what the difference was. No prisoner knew what was on the fifth floor.

That afternoon, a guard came to my cell and said:

Aaron, you're moving. Get your mattress and personal items.

Since I had not been at Butner long enough to acquire much by way of personal items, it took only a minute before I was following the guard to the next quad.

It will be better here, Trofimoff said as I walked into the cell. We'll get along.

Good, I responded.

Here. I noticed you like to write. I got you a desk, he said.

By my single steel bunk upon which I tossed my one-inch, thin mattress was a hospital-like serving table. It was the kind you see in a hospital -- narrow, on wheels, and vertically adjustable. It was movable and didn’t take up much room. Prison cells are small, so it was perfect for writing. You can’t imagine what a coup having a writing table was; no one there had anything like it. I was sure that it violated some regulation. In prison, everything violates some regulation, but the guard didn't say anything.

As time went on and I got to know George very well, how he accomplished things was always a mystery to me. All I could figure out was, because he had spent his life in the military, he used what he learned in that structured environment to get things done that made life a little easier. He was good at it.

Well, thank you. How on earth did you come up with the table, Colonel?

Call me George. It's no big deal. I saw you trying to write on that little ledge. This will work better, he said.

It sure will. Thank you very much.

You're a lawyer, aren't you, George stated.

I was shocked. How could he possibly have known? At the time one enters prison, we’re told not to tell anyone that we're a lawyer. First of all, it’s against the rules for one inmate to help another in any way; inmates can be disciplined if caught doing so. Second, new lawyer inmates are told that, if found out by others, he'll never be left in peace. Inmates will constantly try to force him to write their appeal, called a writ (short for Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus). He becomes a writ writer. I had no desire to become one. So, I answered George who had made a statement rather than ask a question about my profession.

Yes, I am, but I'm retired, I said.

So am I. I spent my life in the military and retired as a full colonel.

I knew better than to ask George how on earth did you get here? I was just learning prison culture, what you can do, what you can’t do. But I knew this: It is taboo to ask another prisoner what he is in for.

I didn't know it then, but, over the next year that George and I lived together in that small cell, we would get to know each other quite well. I would learn why he was there. Indeed, I would become his writ writer.

2

Inmates have a lot of time on their hands. Most people in society never experience hour upon hour of nothingness, every day. That's not to say every inmate doesn't have a job; they do. It may be working with kitchen staff, getting up at five in the morning; providing janitorial service, or performing some other menial task. There is plenty to do but more people to do it than needed. As a result, jobs last only a couple hours a day. Beyond the work period, inmates read, play gin, or work out ad infinitum.

Eventually, inmates find people they’re comfortable spending time with. When not in lockdown, that is, locked in their cell, they visit with them. For the most part, each ethnicity stays unto itself, Native Americans with Native Americans, blacks with blacks, Hispanics, and whites, the same. In my non-prison life, I had had friends of different ethnicities and never thought much of it. It's different in prison. Gangs existed; though each ethnicity had its own gang, most inmates didn't belong to one.

From my viewpoint, George and I could not have been more compatible. He insisted on cleanliness and neatness. For me, that pretty much worked; I've always liked things clean. As for neatness, I'm a bit of a stacker. For George, every piece of paper had its proper place and probably a catalog reference of where it should go. For the most part, he overlooked my non-cataloging, stacking tendencies.

However, to be unkempt was an altogether different matter, and something he would not overlook. It didn't take a guard to get on me about the four corners of my bunk not being tight and neat. George was there. He made sure the bed was made in military fashion. At the foot of my bunk was the open metal toilet. That toilet was spotless. One day, after taking a leak, I forgot to wipe the rim off with toilet tissue.

Glen, wiping the rim is not a sometime-thing. Please do it every time. I do it. You do it.

Oh, yeah, right, George. Sorry, I forgot.

Over the year we were cellmates, George and I had many days and hours to talk and share our life stories.

In the beginning, we were fascinated by how different our lives had been. George grew up in Berlin under Hitler and Nazi rule. I grew up in West Texas where residents were patriotic but preferred little government control. We would talk about these things after lights out and lockdown. Inmates often lie wide-eyed at that time, unable to fall asleep. It helps to have a cellie to talk to who shares his stories, as well.

One day, as I came in from the rec yard --- we were allowed two hours a day there --- I found George sitting in his chair looking out of our barred cell window. The day was overcast, misting, gray, solemn. George seemed to be one with the feeling of the day. He was dead quiet, not blinking, staring into the open.

I slipped quietly onto my bunk, waiting to see if he would say anything, or if he would just stare into the open with that catatonic gaze.

Finally, he began to talk while continuing to look through the window. As he talked --- perhaps to me, perhaps to his own ethos --- about his war experience as a young boy, I sat, quietly absorbing every word. The story went something like this.

A tall, thin boy, stepping softly, peeked through shrubbery at the edge of the forest. It was early morning, and he was cold to the bone from sleeping on the ground among the trees. The thin brown cotton German Youth Corps issue did not insulate against the late winter-early spring air. He shivered, fearing the fog from his breath might call attention to him. No one knew he was there, and that was good. But the men in the nearby field were preoccupied with the crime they were about to commit.

It was 1944. The year before, the boy had turned fourteen. He had been taken from his family, albeit his foster family, given a uniform of brown cotton pants and a shirt with insignia. Drafted into the Labor Service (the Reich's Arbeitsdienst), he was told to report to Ustral in Poland where he received his military booklet. From there, he was sent to Dresden for labor service.

For the most part, the work consisted of bringing in crops, digging ditches, and removing rubble from American bombings. It was hard manual labor, but the Service had been formed to relieve older German youths of this duty so they could advance to a front to fight the Russian or Allied Armies.

As the boy peered through the shrubbery, he saw a bevy of activity in the adjacent field. Russian soldiers pushed, shoved, marched some forty men to a small rise, a Russian tank following close behind.

He recognized the men being herded as Russians, though not members of the advancing Russian Army. They were members of the old Russian Liberation Army of Vlsov whose numbers had been greatly reduced; a mere few thousand had survived defeat at the hands of the Bolsheviks in the Revolution. Now, in World War II, still holding to dreams of ousting the Communists from Mother Russia, the Russian Liberation Army fought alongside the Germans. They wore German uniforms but were Russians, heart and soul.

One of the Russian Liberation Army remnants was the 501st Infantry Division, stationed in the Pilzen area. The young boy knew this. He had escaped Dresden on foot, walking for days towards Pilzen. Knowing there were Russian expatriates, like himself, stationed and fighting in the Pilzen area gave him a feeling of comfort, of some protection, as he sought to flee Germany, as he sought to escape the horrors of war.

To clear his vision, he frequently rubbed his eyes, crusted from the cold he had caught. The wind whistled through the woods that hid him, across the field from where the soldiers were. He saw that dust whipped around their uniforms and at their faces. But they did not notice.

At first, the boy did not realize what the Russian soldiers and Army tank intended to do with the captives. He saw that seven men had been segregated from the rest of the prisoners. The remaining captives were pushed and beaten into a line on top of the rise.

Suddenly, the tank's machinegun turret opened fire and mowed down the prisoners like a brush hog topping brush. The men, splayed at odd angles in distorted shapes, fell down the side of the berm.

The boy strained with unbelieving eyes, as he saw one man's head explode like a bursting watermelon. Another seemed frozen, statue-like, pleading for mercy in his death throes, his hand raised, his finger pointing to the sky. The boy's sight blurred then, and he could see no more.

The young Russian boy wept, heaved for air, and moaned to despair. He thought he had no tears left, but now he could not stop crying. He had seen the devastation caused by American bombs; he had felt the cruelty of German dictatorship; he had seen death and destruction. But he also knew of the beautiful and heroic stories of Mother Russia. Now this -- Russian forces mass-murdering Russian expatriates. How could political hatred run this deep? How could countrymen do these things to fellow countrymen? He could not comprehend. He could only hurt in the very depth of his soul. And cry.

The day wore into late afternoon. He continued to watch. He had hardly moved all day from his prone position of observation beneath the shrubbery. He came to realize that the men who had been separated from the other Liberation Army soldiers were officers. They had been given shovels and ordered to dig a trench in which to bury the dead. George knew what was to come.

Just before dusk, the seven were ordered to their knees, to face the trench they had dug, their dead comrades lying within. A Russian Army officer walked behind each man, firing one shot into the back of his head. Each toppled into the death trench. Soon, a road grader arrived and covered the ditch. The tank, the Russian Army soldiers, and the light of day left. There was nothing more.

3

George Trofimoff told me this story of his childhood while we sat in our cell on the third floor of a United States Federal Penitentiary. He was a full Colonel in the United States Army. He was seventy-five-years old, and in a fit of depression, a chronic problem among prisoners.

I broke prisoner-mandated rules and asked George what he was in for. I had decided that, if he was willing to tell me about his childhood while in a state of depression, I ought to know why he was here. If he didn’t like me asking, so be it.

George told me that, two years earlier, he had been tried and convicted of spying for the KGB while stationed in Germany. While I was serving a two-year sentence, George was faced with remaining in prison for the rest of his life. How does one face life in prison? The contrast in our sentencing was beyond my comprehension.

As it turned out, George very much wanted to tell me why he was here.

Every prisoner has a story about his conviction, a reason why he shouldn't be in prison. For now, I was more interested in his childhood and WWII experience than in his conviction. I figured George's story would just be another oh-poor-me story, but I did ask him to give it to me in a nutshell.

George's espionage activity allegedly took place in the late '60s, '70s, and early '80s. I say allegedly because I didn't know whether or not he had spied for the Soviets. I had observed that, of the many who were convicted, some were innocent. I didn't make quick judgments on such issues. George said he had been indicted in 2000 as a result of a two-year FBI sting. The year following his indictment, he was tried and convicted in the Tampa, Florida, United States District Court. At the time, I had not been aware of his case, though it was high profile. George became the highest-ranking US military officer ever convicted of spying.

I don’t know how George found out I was a lawyer, but, in time, the reason he had sought me out to be his cellmate became clear. Already, in his two direct appeals, the conviction was affirmed. A successive Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus was denied.

Now, he pleaded with insistence that I figure a way to appeal his case, again. I told him I would look at it later. For now, I was interested in the story of his early life, so different from my own. I couldn't imagine growing up under a Nazi regime, or trying to desert a German army at age fourteen.

4

George had told me that he was born in Berlin but that he was Russian in his mind until he later became a US naturalized citizen. Since then, he saw himself as a loyal American with a proud White Russian heritage. His sentence was for life. In the federal system, life means life. He would spend every waking and sleeping moment in prison.

I would come to know him well in the year we would spend as cellmates – cellies – and, ultimately, I would write his appeal, coram nobis, often using a contraband flashlight after lockdown.

Achieving the rank of colonel in the United States Army is no small accomplishment. It requires being well-educated, intelligent, disciplined, and knowing the ways of war. In exchange, officers are well-paid and well-taken care of by the government. At the same time, much is expected. How could a person in such a position even contemplate spying?

Though I couldn’t say I was knowledgeable about the espionage industry, I wasn’t so naïve to think spies didn’t exist, as do all forms of bribery, legal, illegal, governmental, as well as in private enterprise. I knew that Robert Phillip Hanssen was in one of these prisons, somewhere. He was the FBI agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for twenty-two years, beginning in 1979. He had been arrested in 2001 and charged with selling American secrets to Russia for more than one-point-four-million dollars in cash and diamonds.

I had at least a surface knowledge of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which stipulates that, if it has to be done, tapping of telephones or other forms of electronic communication should be carried out using the least obtrusive technique capable of doing the job. I had read that every such operation should be certified as necessary before the Attorney General, and reviewed by a special court of senior judges.

I was also aware of the post-9/11 Patriot Act. Without question, it had been abused. The United States government spied on its own citizens, and I had observed these things through my own law practice.

However, I knew nothing about international intelligence espionage. Was my cellmate, George Trofimoff, a spy? I wondered. He didn't seem like one, or was my assessment too naïve? Isn’t that what spies do – appear to be one thing while being another? But then, why maintain a façade while in prison? What good does it do? George adamantly expressed his love for and faith in the United States of America. In every respect, George Trofimoff was what you would expect of an Army colonel. Even at age seventy-five, his posture was straight as an arrow, all six-foot-three inches of it. When he spoke to you, he looked you straight in the eye. And he was courteous. His demeanor was one of authority; even young thugs in prison stood back and gave him space. Many of them would come to admire him, though they were not sure why; he carried himself that well.

At first, I declined to write another appeal for George. I deeply felt my own trauma of being in prison, and I had long since lost respect for both the criminal justice system and the implementation of civil law.

I decided to learn George's story. I wanted to learn how an intelligent, seventy-five-year-old man could end up in this situation. I would ultimately exert my best effort at writing a successive appeal for him, in exchange for his telling me his life story…including how he got to this prison.

5

George revered his father, Wladimir Wladimirovich Trofimoff, a descendant of Russian nobility as far back as Czars Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and the entire Romanov succession. He was not of the Romanovs but of nobility. Born in St. Petersburg in 1896, George’s father attended the famous Pagan Corps Academy, spent his senior year as Leib Page (a junior adjutant) with the Czar's family. Upon graduation as Cornet --- an initial ranking in a cavalry regiment --- he was assigned, in 1915-16, to the Imperial Guards' Grondo Hussar Regiment in St. Petersburg.

During the Bolshevik Revolution, George's father served with General Yudenich's Army of the White Forces against the Bolsheviks and their Red Armies in an attempt to recapture St. Petersburg. That attempt failed. The White Forces were sent into disarray in 1919-20, and George's father fled Russia through Finland, arriving in Berlin along with many other expatriates.

The history of the Trofimoff family was a tradition of close family ties, majestic military pomp, and social acceptance. That ended with the defeat of the White Forces and Wladimir's flight to Berlin.

Although fate could have provided George with a traditional family relationship, it did not. He would never know it, as hard as he might reach out to capture the ties that bind a family.

In 1926, George's father married the gifted pianist Ekaterina Kartoli, whom he had met and courted in Berlin's Russian expatriate section. Life there, in that time, was solid with culture, education, hard work. Life centered around the Russian Orthodox Church. Not only were Communist atrocities often told of; they were taught as a part of history in the private Russian school. Though the expatriate community was as vibrant in Germany as it was in many European countries, an expat did not become a citizen of the country of his or her birth, instead holding the same citizenship as his parents. The Communist government had renounced the citizenship of White Russians in the military as traitors, and Germany did not recognize their émigrés as citizens. Upon George's birth on March 9, 1927, he, as his father, would be a man without a country, in exile, stateless.

Young George Trofimoff never knew his Russian expatriate mother. Within a year of his birth, she died from blood poisoning after throat surgery. The timing could not have been worse. The German government was rebuilding Germany's factories at a torrid pace. Because of Wladimir's education in engineering, the government's demands upon him left neither time for home nor the care of a baby. Wladimir knew he could not rear this child. He did remarry later, however, when George was ten, and George often visited in the new home, but it was not the home of his rearing.

Through the Church, Wladimir sought the aid of another Russian family, the Susemihls, who owned a kindergarten. A sister-in-law in the family, Antonia Scharawoff, fell in love with the baby the moment Wladimir brought the child to the kindergarten seeking help. She insisted upon acting as his nanny. For thirteen years, until George was taken from the home and drafted into the Labor Service, Antonia came daily to the Susemihl home.

While other obligations of rearing the young boy were tended to by his nanny, George's shelter and food were provided by the Susemihls.

The arrangement was bifurcated. His nanny was German, the Susemihls were Russian. George grew up speaking both languages, and both the Susemihls and Antonia required perfection. Often, his older foster brother, Igor Susemihl, would allow George to tag along when he played with older kids. Igor was always at the top of his class, particularly science. He was also an outstanding tennis player. George idolized Igor and wanted to be like him.

Periodically, Wladimir visited his son. During those visits, Wladimir told George stories of life under the Czar. The boy listened with keen interest -- his imagination flowering with pictures of the Royal Guard mounted on white, high-stepping steeds -- to the tales his father told of bravery, a life of high esteem, acceptance, and admiration from others. It was probably here that the seeds of military elitism were first sown, flowing to maturity in George's later life. His father told him of his grandfather, Wladimir Ivanovitch Trofimoff, and how he had served as a Brig General on the General Staff in St. Petersburg. George sat wide-eyed --- horrified --- as his father explained how the Bolsheviks, during the Revolution, had shot down his eighty-two-year-old grandfather. His father told George about his grandmother, and he sensed her fear of starving to death after her husband's murder because of the Bolshevik's motto: Who does not work, does not eat. She was old, feeble, and could not work.

While hearing these stories, George felt the pain and guilt his father felt at being unable to extricate his elderly parents from the Communists. George wanted to be grown so that he could go to Mother Russia and take it back from the Communists. As his father talked, George felt the loss of homeland, followed by the feeling of being a misfit, of having no country at all.

That feeling was intensified by the German attitude toward Russian émigrés whom they called Untermensch, inferior beings. Although emigres were allowed to stay, they were residents only. The Germans made sure of that: Russians were not accepted socially, though their labor, talents, or knowledge, as in George's father's case, were expected and received. The Russian émigrés stayed in their Russian enclave, their community, in Berlin, except when called upon by the German government to contribute.

Other stories George's father told, ones telling of the deep beauty of the Russian countryside and pride in Russia's rich history, made George want to travel there, to visit the land of his heritage. Though born in Germany,

George never felt loyal to Germany, but neither did he feel disloyal.

By the time he was fourteen, he was walking the roads to Pilzen to escape the devastation of Dresden.

George was growing up fast, for the ravages of war bring manhood early to a boy-child. When nothing is left but self-reliance, when you do not know what to do or how to do it, the instinct of survival takes over. George had come to fully realize that he was a man without a country. Germany wanted him only for labor and cannon fodder. The Communists, the rulers of Russia, had not only murdered his grandparents and driven his father from his homeland; they would not allow George to be a part of Mother Russia.

I have observed that a man-child never forgets his early tribal stories and will always recall young trauma. He uses both for setting future goals. We are formed early. And so it was with George Trofimoff.

6

The same day George shared the story of his youth, he told me how he had felt disoriented, that something felt wrong after he witnessed the massacre of the White Russians in the field outside Pilzen. He hadn’t known it at the time, he said, but the scene would remain with him the rest of his life. At times, he would lapse back into that same feeling of disorientation, the same feeling he had had the day he told me the story.

In his attempt to escape German Army conscription, young George hadn’t realized he had been walking in the wrong direction. From where he worked as a brown shirt in Dresden, he had traveled one-hundred-fifty miles on foot into the Czech Republic, just outside of Pilzen -- and into the Russian front.

Before he actually reached Pilzen, he came across a farming community having a number of farms. Many of the fields lay fallow, but he found the remnants of a sugar beet field close to one farmhouse.

He hadn't eaten in two days. With ravenous disregard for his safety, exposing himself to full view, he searched and dug for sugar beets or their roots.

Suddenly, an old woman rushed out the back door of her house. She screamed at George in Russian, at once asking what he was doing, telling him to get into the house. It turned out this was, or had been, a community of Russian farmers. The capable ones had fled, but this elderly woman and her husband were too old. They simply awaited their fate against the retreating Nazis and the advancing Russian Army. They were caught in the middle.

As evening fell, darkness offered the hope of a certain safety. The farmer and his wife told George he must leave as soon as possible, since no one could tell for sure when a Russian infantry contingent might come bursting through the door. George told them he had thought he was walking towards freedom, towards the Allied Forces. They laughed. The husband explained that George was walking straight into the front lines of the advancing Russian Army, and they were taking no prisoners.

The little couple was kind to George. The wife poured water from the well into a tub so he could clean himself. There was no meat to be had, so she fed him beet porridge. The elderly woman, in preparation for George's leave-taking before dawn, placed into a small drawstring bag some hard bread and a sugar beet. She also gave him a canteen of water --- the canteen taken from a dead German soldier --- and some pills she said would help heal his cold.

Feeling discouraged and having little hope, George departed in the dark. He had decided to return to Berlin to see if he could find help or advice on how to reach the Allied Forces. He knew it would be a long walk. What he didn’t know at the time was that Berlin lay over two hundred miles from that farmhouse where he had been treated so kindly.

The flicker of hope is hard to extinguish in the young. It had taken George more than three weeks to walk from Dresden to Pilzen, sleeping on the ground, dodging German troops, stealing food from the trash, or anywhere else he could find it. Now, faced with many dangers, he must retrace his path through Dresden, and then on to Berlin with no help or support from anyone. Once back in Berlin, if he could find his father or the Susemihls, he could make a new plan.

If, however, the Army caught him and determined he was absent without leave from the Youth Service and had not reported for full duty in the Army, they may shoot him on the spot. He was a deserter in the eyes of the Germans, and a Czarist in the eyes of the Russians.

As he walked north, George practiced what he would say if caught. He tried different stories: His brother was near death in the Pilzen area. He left Dresden to see him one last time, and was now returning to his duties. Or, the Church had sent him on a temporary assignment of mercy to deliver medicine to the Russian troops fighting for Germany, and now he was returning to his duties in the Reich's Arbeitsdienst. Of course, he knew any German officer would ask to see his papers, his orders, his leave grant, and he would have none to show them. Not only that. A German officer would likely be an atheist, and any excuse using the Russian Orthodox Church would carry no weight.

Every day, almost as if it were predestined that he would be caught, George practiced what he would say and how he would say it.

He had not heard German radio in several weeks. He wondered what it was saying about how the war was going. The last time he listened, it announced great victories at various places, claiming to have destroyed the Russian Army on the Eastern Front. From what George had witnessed in Pilzen, it was the other way around. He suspected the war was not going well for Germany, and he wanted to reach the Allies. If he could reach Berlin, if he could find his father, if he could find his brother Igor, perhaps they could devise a plan of escape.

7

It was a cold night. The coat the