Sometime during the Depression, out of work and afraid of the future, Daniel Nikitscheik started drinking too much. When he got drunk, he was obnoxious and violent, and he frequently beat his wife, Anna.
They were living on the South Side of Chicago then, an immigrant family from Polish Belarus. Finally, Anna Nikitscheik insisted they return to their native village, where she hoped her husband`s drinking problem could be brought under control.
”She wanted to save the family,” her son Fyodor recalled, ”and she thought that bringing me and my brother back here was the best thing she could do for us.”
It was, in fact, a tragic mistake that condemned the brothers to decades of suffering. ”We never blamed her, but until the day she died, she blamed herself for what happened to us,” said the older brother, Daniel Jr.
Their village, Antopol, was occupied by the Nazis at the outbreak of World War II, and when Fyodor was 15, he was sent to Germany for forced labor in a brick factory. After being liberated by American soldiers, he walked all the way home across Poland.
By that time, western Belarus had been absorbed into the Soviet Union. When the brothers, both born in Chicago, sought to return to the U.S., they were accused of treason and sentenced to long terms in prison camps.
”In the camps, I felt like the unluckiest man alive,” Fyodor Nikitscheik, now 65, said last week in his small house in Kobrin. ”So many things could have happened that would have kept me from that hard life.
”We could have stayed in Chicago. We could have gone back there before the war. I could have told the American soldiers I met in Germany that I was an American citizen, and maybe they could have helped me go back there.”
After being freed during the political thaw that followed Stalin`s death, the brothers put their lives together as best they could, but they were too overwhelmed by the horrors they had experienced to ever again try to get to America.
In the early 1960s, when a Soviet Foreign Ministry official showed up at the older brother`s house and offered to help the family emigrate, Daniel Jr. and his wife were too terrified to admit that was their dearest wish.
”We were afraid it was a provocation, and if we said the wrong thing they would put us back in prison,” Lydia Nikitscheik, 60, recalled. ”So we told him we liked living here very much. You have to understand that awful things were done to us, and they have affected us for the rest of our lives.
”Even now, if there is a knock late at night, I become very frightened. . . . I still dream about the camps, and in my dreams I always scream for someone to help me.”
Just last year, her husband wrote a long letter to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, inquiring if it were still possible to get a passport and visit his father`s grave outside Chicago. But the old fears prevailed and he never sent it. The letter remains in a drawer in the family`s home in Brest, about 35 miles from Kobrin.
In late July, a special Russian-American commission disclosed that the Nikitscheik brothers were among 25 U.S. citizens unjustly sent to prison after seeking to leave the USSR.
The commission, which is also investing the possibility that some American prisoners of war might be living on former Soviet territory, asked for the public`s help in locating any of the 25 civilians who had survived imprisonment and were still alive.
But despite the widespread publicity the disclosure attracted, the Nikitscheiks heard nothing about it. Neither had their relatives, friends or acquaintances, underscoring how difficult it is to find Americans in the former Soviet Union.
Late last week, Russian officials with the commission said they assumed the Nikitscheiks, because they had not come forward, were dead. Of the 25 on the list, they said, only four have been found alive, all in Ukraine.
No new information has been uncovered about Paul Severencheik, another Chicago native who would be in his mid-70s if still alive, the officials said. Daniel Nikitscheik Sr. emigrated to Chicago in 1913, his sons said. Daniel Jr., now 66, has a document attesting that the father became a U.S. citizen on Aug. 4, 1918, and served with the American army during World War I. A color picture of the senior Nikitscheik in his doughboy uniform hangs in Fyodor Nikitscheik`s house. ”He was wounded in France, but not crippled, and he got some kind of pension,” the son said. After being discharged, he added, his father went to work for the Singer Sewing Machine Co.
In 1922, the sons said, their father, wrote to his sister in Antropol asking her to find him a wife. She sent a picture of Anna, and a long-distance courtship ensued.
”My father wanted a beautiful woman, so he sent my mother money to have a better photo taken,” Fyodor Nikitscheik said. ”But she was so poor she spent the money on food. Still, he came here in 1925 and married her.”
The Nikitscheiks left their apartment on South Western Avenue and returned to the Antopol area in 1933, but the father soon left again for Chicago. His sons never saw him again.
”My mother was an illiterate peasant woman,” Daniel Nikitscheik said when asked why she did not return to the U.S. before World War II broke out.
”She wasn`t aware of what was going on in the world, and my brother and I were just boys.”
On the day in April 1943 when the Nazis combed the area looking for men and boys to work in German factories, Daniel hid in the woods, but the boys`
mother made Fyodor stay at home with her.
”She was afraid that if neither one of us was home, they`d burn down the house,” Fyodor explained. ”I guess she thought I was too young to be taken.”
In Germany, he worked six day a weeks and sometimes part of Sunday. He remembers that those who didn`t work hard were beaten.
In the war`s closing days, Fyodor and some other youngsters managed to escape and turn themselves over to American soldiers. Thinking it would be best if he returned to the U.S., he went to an army office building to get help, climbed four flights of stairs-and lost his nerve.
”I had forgotten all my English, and I was afraid they wouldn`t believe me,” he said.
Daniel Jr., meanwhile, had been recruited into the Soviet army that had driven the Germans out of Belarus. He spent several months in training, but his mother made still another mistake: She told army officials that Daniel was an American citizen.
He was excused from army service and spent the rest of the war at home.
After Fyodor returned, the brothers spent the next three years trying to get Soviet papers so they could work. Soviet authorities refused. ”They told us we were Americans,” Fyodor said, ”and we should go to the American Embassy in Moscow for help.”
The older brother made two trips to the embassy, obtained passports, and applied to Belarus officials for permission to emigrate. At first the officials ignored them, but in 1949 the brothers were arrested, along with their mother and Daniel`s wife.
”My crime was being married to a spy and not informing the authorities,” Lydia Nikitscheik said.
Both brothers say they were tortured in an effort to make them confess that the U.S. Embassy had ordered them to carry out acts of espionage. Daniel said he finally broke and falsely confessed to counting planes at a local airport.
”I had never even been to the airport,” he said. ”I just wanted them to stop beating me.”
Daniel and his mother were given 25-year prison terms. His wife was sentenced to 5 years and Fyodor to 15 years. The brothers were sent to in coal mines in Kazakhstan, and Lydia Nikitscheik worked in a lumber camp north of the Arctic Circle.
According to the commission searching for imprisoned Americans, all 25 people on the list released this summer were innocent of the crimes for which they were punished.
Lydia Nikitscheik served her full term, during which, she said, she met
”an American woman named Agnes who was also arrested in 1949. She was in her 60s then, and treated me like a mother. I`ve always wondered what happened to her.”
The others won early release in the mid-1950s, in the massive post-Stalin effort to free those wrongly imprisoned and exonerate those who had perished. Since then, each of the brothers has raised a family on modest incomes, Daniel working as an accountant and Fyodor as a sign painter.
One of their mother`s sisters, who also had emigrated to Chicago, located the father in 1958, and he sent them food packages until he died in 1967. Anna Nikitscheik died in 1976.
The aunt, Fannie Bobrowski, came to visit in 1980, bringing pictures and documents that had belonged to the father. She later moved to St. Paul, and the brothers haven`t heard from her for six years. They assume she, too, is dead.
”We have things to be grateful for,” Daniel Nikitscheik said. ”Good wives, children who turned out well, wonderful grandchildren. But our lives were tragedies, nevertheless. We missed out on so much.”
