My parents left the USSR just as the doors were closing on jewish emigration. They left thinking they’d never see their family again, and the moment they set foot in America they began working on ways to get their parents, brothers, and sisters out. But the timeline had compressed, and the opportunity was no longer open, so what now?
There were a number of ideas and schemes, but the one that ended up working ways that my grandmother bribed a KGB agent who was in charge of green lighting applications for immigration. My grandmother had everyone in the family leave their communal apartment, went to the telephone, and dialed the American Embassy, “I have information I need to share with your government,” she said, and hung up. She had the family leave the apartment so that in the case she was tortured in a gulag, she could say with a clean conscience that the plan was her own, and her family was not present or part of the call.
The KGB had bugged all the lines, and was listening. This set off a chain of events where a file was pulled on my grandmother and set on the counter-intelligence desk of the KGB. The bribed KGB agent would show up to work early, grab the file off the desk, and bring it to his desk, no problem!
As crazy as the plan sounds, it worked. And as crazy as that plan sounds, the risk was worth it to leave the Soviet Union. Two weeks after my family arrived in Austria, the KGB agent they bribed was discovered and sent to Siberia. Two weeks earlier, and they would have been sent with him.
I think of Babasya (my name for her) often when life seems hard–I’ll never know what hard really means. I heard this story only recently, after a night of drinking for my uncle’s 60th birthday. When I asked my dad why I hadn’t heard this story before, he said, “There are certain things so painful you don’t want to remember them.”
Amen.