Second Verse, Same As The First

My father left most parenting duties to my mother.  But he always opened up a little when we traveled.  That was when he’d put on his Artur hat and attempt to impart wisdom to the kids.  

One of his favorite sayings was, “No matter where you go, you’ll find that people are the same.  There are good people and bad people everywhere.”

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The next morning, Artur left Prague on an 850 kilometer train ride, to the northeastern corner of Poland.  Ironically, it was only a matter of hours before he rolled through his intended destination, Warsaw.  The fact that Major Láska was sitting next to him discouraged any thought of jumping the train.  So did the two armed soldiers across from him.  The Soviets were serious about making sure he got to Podlipki. 

When he got off the train, a different set of soldiers took him to the MII-88 complex.  Artur was surprised by the lack of facilities, he was expecting something like Peenemünde.  On the other hand, the chain link fence and the barbed wire looked sufficient to keep him contained.

He entered the main building and was greeted by someone he knew, Helmut Gröttrup.  He had been the program manager for guidance and remote control at Peenemünde.  One of von Braun’s right hand men.  Artur considered him a mentor.  Helmut ran off the names of other scientists who got captured by the Soviets.  

Podlipki would be something like a class reunion for Artur, except that half of the class won the lottery and got adopted by the Americans.  It occurred to him, if he had stayed on the bus, he would be with them now.

Helmut introduced Artur to Sergei Korolev.  A flamboyant, controversial Soviet rocket engineer who made friends and enemies everywhere he went.  Prior to the war, Korolev spent six years in a Soviet prison, for supposedly stealing money from the rocket project he managed.  By the end of the war, he was the lead engineer for MII-88.

In time, Artur would come to think of Korolev in the same light as von Braun.  Perhaps not as brilliant, but extremely focused, an effective leader, and a highly skilled scientist/engineer.  Considered to be the father of practical astronautics, the MII-88 staff nicknamed him The Chief Designer.  

Artur would become close enough to Korolev to name his first child after him.  That would be your author.

Artur’s first impression of Podlipki was correct.  It was little more than a holding pen.  In a few months, the team moved to a remote, swampy location halfway between Moscow and Saint Petersburg.  Gorodomlya Island was in the middle of Lake Seliger, and a long way from anywhere.  

After kilometers of swamp, and a ferry ride to the island, he chuckled when he saw the gate and the barbed wire around the Gorodomlya compound.  Artur had some experience at escaping.  He knew, the expanse of cold water and the relentless swamp made a fence unnecessary.  Just like Peenemünde, he wouldn’t be going anywhere.

Just like before, Artur took solace in mathematics, and the camaraderie of people devoted to a unified task.  They were doing leading edge research at Gorodomlya, and Artur could not resist.  For the second time in his life, he threw himself into work that he loved, for people whose ideology he despised.

Activities at Gorodomlya quickly progressed and Artur was happy on at least one level.  Before, the rockets he helped design were launched as fast as they could be built.  The nightmares of toppled buildings and burned bodies had not let him forget about that.  

The intercontinental ballistic missiles he worked on at Gorodomlya would be capable of carrying much more dangerous warheads than the V-2s.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed how high the stakes had become.  But his Soviet captors weren’t launching the missiles.  Instead, they and their American rivals would build up a massive reserve.  Thus, the Cold War.    

And, something else was different.  Artur.  He had become a rebel.

At Peenemünde, the scientists were “encouraged” to embrace the Nazi philosophy.  Their captors made it clear that dissent was not tolerated.  Artur never believed their absurd propaganda, but he played the game, in order to survive.

Now, he was a prisoner of the Soviets.  When the Communist Party officials came to Gorodomlya to sell their wares, Artur knew he’d dealt with the same kind of men before. 

Now, Artur had tasted freedom, if only for a short time.  He understood what it meant to stand up for himself.  He decided he would never back down to any man, ever again.

The Communists addressed the entire Gorodomlya staff in the meeting hall.  They gave their sales pitch.  Artur spent the time running equations through his head.  At the end, membership forms for the Party were passed out.  Everyone was expected to sign.  

Artur looked at the form.  He picked up the pen that had been placed in front of him.  He snapped it in half.  It made a satisfying sound.  Then he picked up the membership form, and began ripping it into pieces.  

The room went silent.  Every eye turned to Artur.  The leader of the delegation, a Mr. Popovich, confronted him.  Artur looked up at the man.  The veins were bulging from his forehead and he was breathing hard.  He pointed at Artur and said loudly, “You, come with me, now!”  

Artur did not move.  He had locked eyes with the man and wasn’t blinking.  Popovich turned to the guards standing at the door and told them, “Bring this man to the office, I don’t care if you have to carry him.”

The mathematician knew when the odds had turned against him.  He stood and said, “That won’t be necessary.”

Alone in the office with Popovich, he felt calm.  More equations poured through his head while the man once again spewed the party line at him.  After a few minutes, Popovich placed another form and a pen in front of Artur.  “I will make your life a living hell if you do not sign.” 

For the first time in his life, Artur yelled at another human being.  “Why don’t you have one of those soldiers put a bullet in my head?  I don’t care!  I don’t want to be here!  Why don’t you gehen Fick dich?”  Artur did not know how to say “go f**k yourself” in Russian yet.  He could tell by the bulging veins that Popovich understood German.

The man pounded his fist on the desk and cursed.  “You are very fortunate that I have been forbidden from harming any of the scientists.  Otherwise I would beat you with my fists.  As it is, you may feel more cooperative after you’ve spent three days in solitary confinement.”

 

The man spoke to the soldiers on his way out.  They took Artur to a small concrete building on the edge of the complex.  He crouched down and crawled into a tiny enclosure.  He heard the lock click after the door closed.

Artur surveyed his new environment.  Light came through a small window, made with a row of glass blocks embedded in the concrete wall.  The door was constructed of heavy wood, with thick metal hinges.  He wasn’t going anywhere.

As always, when Artur was alone, math poured through his head.  He noticed that the door must have banged into something, there was a crack in the wood at the edge.  He dug his fingernails into the crack and pried loose a splinter.  He found that the hard oak tip would scratch the cheap paint of the cell.  A pen and four walls were now at his disposal.  Artur resumed work on the propulsion problem he had been trying to solve.

Twice a day, a guard brought cold food and water, and replaced the bucket Artur had been using as a bathroom.  By the end of the third day, the walls and ceiling of the cell were covered with formulas.  The guard helped him crawl out of the tiny room, then cuffed his hands behind his back.

As he was marched toward his next confrontation with Popovich, Artur was astonished by the handcuffs.  He was a simple mathematician.  He’d never been in a fight or threatened another human being.  Why Popovich was afraid of him, he had no idea.  

The scene replayed in the office.  Popovich placed a Communist Party membership form and a pen in front of Artur.  “If you agree to sign, I will take off the handcuffs, and you will be free to go afterwards.”

Artur leaned forward, and spit on the paper.