The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

The captured Russians joined thousands of others in transit camps in the Soviet zone in eastern Germany. At Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and elsewhere, prisoners were once again clothed in the familiar striped pajamas the world knew so well.7 Among them was John Noble, a twenty-one-year-old American interned by the Germans and arrested by the Soviet police. As a prisoner-clerk at the Soviet jail at Munchenerplatz, John Noble learned of the guards’ “humane” method of execution. On execution days a prisoner was undressed and walked down a corridor. As he turned a corner, he was shot in the back of the head. At the end of the day the bodies were piled up, ready to be doused in gasoline and set alight.8 Five years after the end of the war, while still a prisoner in Buchenwald, John Noble learned there were prisoners who had suffered in this camp under the Nazi and the Soviet regimes. The bodies of thousands of prisoners who had been starved to death since the end of the war were taken out to the forest and buried in mass graves. In Sachsenhausen in the early 1990s, forensic investigators found 12,500 bodies buried in fifty mass graves around the camp, dating from its period as a Stalinist transit camp from 1945 to 1950.