The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

Two years earlier, in March 1954, the employees of a German import-export firm discovered a tag wrapped in a bundle of hides exported from the Soviet Union. The tag was a wooden rectangle about five centimeters long by three centimeters wide, with a round hole drilled in one end, similar to those used by the Gulag authorities to identify the bodies of the dead prisoners. The wooden tag was taken as evidence to the local police station, who reported it to the U.S. Army headquarters in Heidelberg. In tiny letters on both sides of the tag, a desperate plea had been written in English: “I AM IN JAIL IN RUSSIA. GO TO THE NEAREST POLICE STATION AND REPORT IT. MATTER OF DEAD OR LIVE. SAVE ME PLEASE AND ALL THE OTHERS. KRISTIAN HJALTSON.” Rather than forming a banner headline in newspapers across the Free World, the discovered message was sent directly to the State Department, where an anonymous official placed the tag in an envelope marked “confidential,” and this small artifact of Cold War history disappeared into the archives. There it lay, waiting to be rediscovered, long decades after Kristian Hjaltson’s life had ended.