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  When the Party moved like this, Sammy was sure of his path and his destiny.

  Sammy was recruited by J. Peters for the Party’s antimilitary work. Peters’s office on the ninth floor of Party headquarters adjoined those of Brown, the Comintern rep, and Earl Browder.

  He attended Peters’ course on “How to Organize Party Cells in the Armed Forces.” Peters urged the comrades to join the National Guard or to get into the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The route to getting into the guard was first to join the Citizens Military Training Camp at Fort Dix.

  Sammy remembered going to City College’s campus and seeing the demonstrations against the ROTC. He had looked at the ranks of the ROTC, and thought my God, they’re all Y.C.L.ers! Then who were the demonstrators? The Party had mobilized outside elements as protestors. The real comrades going to CCNY were right there, on the way to becoming officers.

  His course completed, Sammy went to see Peters. “You’ll drop your waterfront work. I want you to be one of our key contacts,” Peters said.

  “There’s one problem, comrade,” Sammy said. “I’m not a citizen. And I’ve been arrested a few times.”

  “Eh! American police. They’re schlumperei. Don’t worry about it. I want you to go to San Antonio, Texas. We have contacts at Kelly Field.”

  Peters took out a copy of Smith and Wesson Magazine and taught Sammy how to write messages to him. One, three, four, he explained, meant first page, third paragraph, fourth word. Whenever he wanted to send a message to Peters, he was to go to the local library and use the magazine. “It’s so simple, it’s beautiful,” Peters said. “If you don’t know what magazine to use, you’re lost. Simplicity is best.”

  Almost fifteen years later, when the Rubells were arrested, Sammy would read about an Ex-Lax box top cut in half, and Solomon Rubell’s alleged words, “The simplest things are the cleverest.”

  Ah, Peters, Sammy thought.

  Sammy Kuznekov eased himself out of antiwar work. He left Kelly Field and returned to New York, telling Peters his effectiveness was compromised by his inability to join the armed forces. He was ready to ship out to sea again.

  At the May Day parade in Union Square in 1936, a Spanish navy cadet training ship, the Juan Sebastian Elcano, representing the Popular Front government of Republican Spain that had been elected that February, came rolling by on wheels. The officers and cadets were greeted with wild applause by the demonstrators. A Spanish seaman made a speech. Sammy was struck by their proud presence, their commitment. They had grundschaft, they came right out of the Spanish revolutionary tradition.

  Working a private ship off the coast of Cuba, the radio operator, Sparks, told Sammy, “Well, the war is starting.” The military had risen against the Spanish Republican government; civil war was breaking out. Sammy thought of those seamen he’d seen in the May Day parade, and a shiver passed through him.

  Hurrying back to New York, he went to see the Comintern rep, Brown, on the ninth floor of Party headquarters. “I hear the time has come,” Sammy said. He drilled with the other recruits at Ukrainian Hall, helped recruit for Spain on the waterfront, and slept at night on a cot at the Seaman’s Church Institute on South Street.

  Sammy and the other boys were given a farewell party at a movie theater near Union Square. Earl Browder, the “quiet man from Kansas” with the soul of a file clerk, stood by the door saying goodbye to the boys. Puffing a big cigar, Browder shook Sammy’s hand, and for a long time after Sammy couldn’t get the feel of that fat, clammy hand off of his skin.

  He sailed December 26th on the Normandie, a stowaway in a cabin with two others because he wasn’t a U.S. citizen. There were one hundred and six men secretly bound for Spain and thirteen Lebanese rug merchants.

  From Le Havre they took the night train to Perpignan. The men all sang the “Internationale” in their own languages. They traveled through Avignon and Narbonne, and from train windows they raised the Popular Front clenched fist to the natives. “Viva la republica!” they snouted as the train clambered across the frontier into Spain.

  At Figueras, the people cheered them and pelted them with almonds. Barcelona, then Tarragona, where almond trees blossomed pink and orange trees shone in the sun. Spaniards clenched fists, calling out “Salud” to them.

  On January 8th they reached Albacete, headquarters of the International Brigades, and marched behind a German band to the Guardia Nacional barracks. They stood together in a courtyard, with all the windows and doors facing inward.

  Toilets were four holes on each floor of the building. As the men defecated on the lower floors, there was a curtain of feces falling behind them from all the other floors. It was constantly coming down in all four corners of the building. The smell was intense. They did not care; they were finally in the headquarters of the brigade.

  In the morning they were told to line up in the bullring. As they stood there, they heard an operatic bugle call from the iron balcony. They looked up. The door swung open and a huge character with a big white moustache and a giant black beret walked out. It was Andre Marty, supreme commander.

  Six foot three, the splendid Marty approached the French recruits and said in a foghorn voice, “The glory of France will endure forever.” Approaching the Americans, he bellowed, “Now that the Yanks have arrived, the war will soon be over.” The British: “Who can ever forget the courage of the English square?” The Germans, Roumanians, Hungarians, and finally the Italians: “All the greatest soldiers in the Grand Army of Napoleon were Italians.” Sammy was probably the only man who understood almost every language (he did not know Roumanian).

  The bugler blew once more, Marty made a grand gesture of salute, shouted, “Viva la republica!” and was whisked into his limousine decked with small flags by his chauffeur and aides.

  Sammy and all the other men felt the buttons flying off their chests.

  They arrived at the training camp at Villa Nueva de la Jara after a week at Albacete. There was almost no target practice because there was no live ammunition. There were no trench mortars. There were three rifles, but they jammed after each shot. The men knocked open their bolts with a rock. Each man gave the next a chance with the gun. They passed around a defused Mills “to get a feel of the hand grenade thing.” They were taken by truck at night for their first hooting exercise. Permitted five rounds, they fired into the hills and then were taken back to camp.

  The Americans opened the battalion clinic to the civilian population as a free hospital. They produced a musical in which a black man recited Langston Hughes’s “Scottsboro,” and they sang the “Marching Song of the Lincoln Battalion.” The villagers had been antagonized by the previous group of French volunteers who had raped women and seized wine cellars. These Americans, who did not drink, recited poetry and sang songs, won them over.

  Sammy’s expertise in Russian got him a post as a runner for the brigade commander, and he got to Albacete frequently.

  One day he walked out on to the second floor of the Albacete Guardia Nacional and heard a familiar voice. As he stood by the railing, above the putt-putt of feces from the graduated toilets, he heard Marty declaiming. He looked up. Marty was addressing a new group of volunteers.

  “The glory of France will continue forever … Now that the Yanks have arrived, the war will soon be over … All the greatest soldiers in the Grand Army of Napoleon were Italian… .”

  Putt-putt, putt-putt.

  On February 15th, the American volunteers were assembled at the Albacete bullring again. Andre Marty stood on the floodlit bandstand. He told them that the Republican front along the Jarama River had caved in. It was up to them to save Madrid. “No pasaran!” they shouted with clenched fists.

  They were given rifles, fifty rounds of ammunition, Mills bombs, and triangulated bayonets. The battalion climbed aboard the trucks at midnight and headed toward Madrid, one hundred and fifty miles northwest. They dismounted at Morata de Tajuna, where suddenly a squadron of Italian bombers appeared. Many of the men stood and gawke
d as the bombs exploded, instead of taking cover. At that moment six Russian planes appeared and chewed away at the Capronis, knocking them out of the air. The Americans cheered, slapping each other on the back, firing their rifles into the sky.

  A German Interbrigader led them up the mountain. Looking back, they looked at the pear trees and poplars along the river.

  When they reached a flat-topped knoll, the German told them to dig in. The ground was almost pure rock. Their officers had not told them to bring picks and shovels. They shoveled the dirt with their helmets and bare hands, stabbing at it with their bayonets. Working all night, they made very shallow trenches and fell onto the ground exhausted at daybreak.

  In the daylight, the nationalists immediately spotted the Americans’ trenches, since they had been dug against the skyline. The bullets cracked overhead. Grabbing their bayonets and helmets, they desperately tried to dig deeper. As the bullets kept coming, two men were so curious about what was happening that they peered up. One of them, a tool-and-die maker in his forties, was the oldest man in j the battalion. Both men were shot in the head. Sammy stared at the broken skulls.

  The men stayed in the trenches for four days.

  Lieutenant Colonel Milovan Pohoric was the new commander of the International Brigades. A thick Yugoslav of forty-six, he appeared in an outfit of many straps and belts holding his pistols, binoculars, and map case. A former opera singer, he had been a competent commissar. He was at his best in relaxed moods when he might perform an aria. But he knew nothing about military matters and followed orders from his superiors unquestioningly. Vacillating elements among the Americans said of Pohoric, “When a Moscow button gets pushed, he lights up.”

  Pohoric was not half bad. Above him was a Hungarian, General Lotz, a Red Army veteran, who liked to receive the men while lying on a couch. His staff was not allowed to speak except when, he addressed them. His boots were the glossiest in the brigade.

  That week, seven new Americans arrived in street clothes. More Y.C.L.ers from the Pinky Rodman branch in Brownsville, holding copies of the Daily Worker and Y.C.L. pamphlets like Make Your Dreams Come True by Gil Green and Life with a Purpose by Joe C. Clark. Sammy gave them their only training: one hour of rifle instruction.

  One of the new boys, Abe Gold, spent his time writing home:

  Now, on the Jewish question, the real international language here is Yiddish. Jews from Germany, Roumania, Poland, England, Hungary, all the front ranks of their movements have come to fight the common enemy of the proletariat, and of the Jews as a special oppressed minority.

  We’ve been marching all day long. Guys kept dropping all along the line. Full pack, ammunition, heat took their toll and trucks picking them up. 1 felt like dropping too but thought, if the other guys can do it, so can I.

  Any hour now we’ll be off. You know what I mean. It will be a long action and if things go well we’ll crack into enemy territory. While our forces are incredibly powerful compared to the enemy and we absolutely anticipate victory—accidents can and do happen to individuals. Ill sign off for now.

  Don’t show this letter to my folks. Take care of them.

  Salud and love,

  Your comrade

  Abe

  The officers had no maps.

  Four machine guns worked, sporadically.

  The Lincoln Battalion had been moved south of the San Martin Road. On February 26th, Pohoric told the commander of the battalion, Woodhouse (ex-college football player, recent graduate of the Lenin School in Moscow) that the Lincolns were to be part of the offensive against Hill 693, the highest point on the plateau between the Jarama and Tajuna rivers and protected by nationalist machine gun nests. Lotz and Pohoric believed that if Hill 693 were retaken, they could drive the fascists back across the Jarama. The Lincolns were to create a diversion by attacking enemy lines along the San Martin Road.

  Pohoric said that at 6:45, a battery of Republican artillery would bombard the fascist trenches four hundred yards away. At 6:55 the Republican Air Force would attack. After that, a tank company would grind down the enemy barbed wire and prepare the way for the Americans.

  It was gray, damp, and cold on the morning of February 27th. The four hundred and fifty men peered out at the fog and ate breakfast.

  Woodhouse, constantly smiling, briefed the officers. He said to Sammy, “You stay behind and if anybody remains in the trenches, shoot ‘em. Then come over.”

  At 6:45 a battery of Republican artillery briefly opened fire, but at the Americans instead of at the fascists. They dove for cover, cursing and screaming.

  Seven o’clock arrived, without the air force or the tank company. The men looked at each other. Machine gun slugs pounded into their sandbags.

  Woodhouse kept looking at his watch. He phoned Pohoric and asked about the air and tank support. Pohoric said there would be a short delay.

  Pohoric phoned Woodhouse a few minutes later and asked why the Americans had still not attacked. Woodhouse again asked for help. He said it would be hopeless without support from the flanks. Pohoric ordered him to move the men out. Just then three Republican planes flew overhead and dropped a light packet of bombs nowhere near enemy lines.

  Woodhouse blew his whistle, and the men scrambled up the trench wall. Woodhouse waved them out. As he waved, a bullet broke his shoulder in five places. The dead and wounded lay everywhere. Those who were unhurt hid behind olive trunks and fired at the enemy trenches.

  The attack was over within ten minutes.

  The wounded lay immobile, waiting for the stretcher-bearers who could not get through the enemy fire. The snipers kept firing. In no-man’s-land bodies caught fire; the wind carried the smell of burning flesh.

  When Sammy finally climbed over the top with his bayonet, he saw them: the newly arrived young comrades from Brownsville, all dead, piled on top of each other. Abe was in the middle. Sammy crawled in behind them, and he could hear the bullets hammering an inch above him. Sammy lay there terrified from noon to mid afternoon.

  Then the freezing rains came.

  The chill of fear and the chill of the rain.

  Sammy overcame his terror and made a dash to pull in one of the wounded men. The trench was filled with bleeding, vomiting, coughing men, and with corpses. Many of the wounded drowned in the bottom of the trench in puddles of red mud and ice water. The exhausted men stepped on the wounded and the dead or fell upon them as they slipped in the ice and mud.

  They waited for medical care and food. There was none.

  The men cried aloud and sobbed and shook with rage. And yet they could not help thinking as they stared at their comrades in the bloodied water, “Better him than me.”

  Sammy Kuznekov and a Franco-Belgian, Robert, slid down a hill, filed up another hill, and down to the cookhouse where they found two men, Stahl, the cook, and Koch, an officer. They were both drunk.

  “Why didn’t you bring the rations up front?” Sammy asked them.

  “Well, nobody came,” the cook said.

  “Give me the food for the battalion.”

  “Hold on,” Stahl, a blond Minnesotan with a moustache, said. “I heard there were a lot of casualties. I gotta know the exact figure.”

  Sammy stared at him. “How many rations did you prepare for today?”

  “Four-fifty plus.”

  “Well, that’s exactly what I want.”

  “Now under brigade rules you only get rations for each man you got.”

  Sammy picked up his bayonet. “Stahl, you’re gonna give me the food. I’m not gonna carry it, you’re gonna put it on your mules. And you and Hill are coming with me—”

  “Please! Don’t take me!” Stahl cried.

  “You bastards, I’ll blow your heads off. Do you know that most of the boys are dead or wounded?”

  “Well we don’t know, we have no records,” Stahl said.

  Fuck you,” Sammy said. “I want you to load up your mules with two barrels of rum, if there’s any left after you bastards got thr
ough with it. Plus the cognac. And all the goat chops—”

  “You can’t order me. I’m a lieutenant,” Koch said.

  Sammy put his bayonet to the man’s stomach. “You’re gonna be a dead lieutenant in a minute.”

  The men loaded up the mules with the bags of food and drink.

  It took more than an hour and a half for Sammy and Robert to get back to the men. He could hear the moaning, and in the trenches the wounded wailed in pain.

  He passed out the rum and goat chops and the men drank and ate them like the elixir of life.

  Whenever they heard a cry, Sammy and the other survivors tried to locate the man and drag him in. But many of them were too weak to carry the stretcher cases. “Look,” Sammy said, “two of you guys take a wounded man between you and let your body heat try to keep him warm.” They crawled under the blankets of the wounded to give them warmth and protection from the rain until the stretcher-bearers came,

  The stretcher-bearers arrived at daybreak, when most of the wounded were dead.

  Before they arrived Sammy and the others took their little half-tents (they hadn’t had time to build them) and put them over themselves. There were no holes to crawl into. They passed out on the ground.

  They awoke at daybreak and peered over the top. Dead bodies were strewn everywhere in the trenches.

  Sammy passed out the remaining food and cognac.

  The surviving eighty men made a mass grave for the dead. They dragged the bodies from the trenches onto a spur and placed rocks and earth on top of them.

  The dead were not counted or identified.