Magnitogorsk 16 May 1938

To the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet

On 30 April of this year I wrote you a letter with a fervent plea to commute the sentence of deportation that was handed down for my husband Walter Friedländer, a physician and a repatriate from Hitler’s Germany. I could not imagine that this was the will of the party and the government: a man who fled from Hitler’s Germany, who has legally found refuge in the USSR for two years already, who has lived and worked with all his strength honestly and well, who acquired a child in the USSR, is to be thrown out, into the devil’s maw of fascism. Hold up his deportation before it is too late. On 13 May I found out at the Cheliabinsk Prison that he had already been sent to Minsk. He is already at the border, and this means death for him and his family. Hold up his deportation, otherwise this could happen any day to our year-old baby and to me. Have you given this treatment to all foreigners who have applied for Soviet passports and received them.

My husband is mentally ill, gravely mentally ill. His illness is not outwardly detectable, and it was not detected by investigator Dolgov in Cheliabinsk, it does not show up in fevers or in rashes, but it suppresses his desire to live. In such a sick condition my husband is in no condition to seize the slightest opportunity to write me, his wife, and more importantly, to submit a request to the Supreme Soviet for commutation of his sentence.

In Cheliabinsk I did not receive a single report on him either at the NKVD itself or from the director of the NKVD or from investigator Dolgov. If I called on the telephone in my native Russian for the sole purpose of making an appointment, I was turned down every time, and this has been going on for five months. They would start screaming at me louder and louder, so I would understand less and less, and they would hang up the phone.

How can this be, that the theory of communism that is proclaimed to the whole world, that is contained in Stalin’s Constitution, in holiday slogans, in speeches by members of the government about granting the right of asylum to emigrants from fascist countries, has been so flagrantly violated, and now in Cheliabinsk this theory is completely distorted by the NKVD, for example, by the deportation of my husband. You must not allow us to become victims of fascism here in the USSR.

Detain my husband at the very border. But your most urgent assistance can still save him and his family. In the greatest despair I plead with you to do this.