US Russia Envoy’s Soviet Ties

America’s latest Russia envoy has an interesting background. Not only does John Beyrle have decades of experience in the former Soviet Union (and apparently the envious gift of being able to speak “flawless Russian”) but his father Joe was something of a minor celebrity in Russia during the 1990s, when he was belatedly awarded “four medals for service in the Red Army” during the Second World War. This from the New York Times:

Joe Beyrle, who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, had been terribly battered during seven months in German captivity. He managed to escape, on his third try, and fled through Polish farmland until he could hear the artillery fire of the eastern front, which sounded “like a welcome from God,” he told [biographer] Mr. [Thomas H.] Taylor for his book, “The Simple Sounds of Freedom.”

He hid in a hayloft, sucking on straw until it was soft enough to swallow, as the Red Army seized the farm, machine-gunned the German couple who lived there and fed the bodies to their pigs. He came out with his hands up, offering the Soviets a damp pack of Lucky Strikes.

When they offered him safe passage home, he said he would rather stay with the battalion. Why, they asked, dumbfounded. His answer was, “To fight the Nazis, fight them with you,” Mr. Taylor writes.

The war ended for him a few weeks later, when a German bomb blew him off a tank, and his commander — a woman he knew only as “the Major” — leaned over him and told him, Proshchai, tovarishch — Goodbye, comrade. Joe Beyrle returned to Muskegon, where everyone’s war stories were gradually papered over by ordinary life.

New U.S. Envoy to Russia Echoes Father Who Fought for Soviets (NYT)