One man’s escape from McCarthyism

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

In 1951, at the height of the McCarthy era, a time when the US government pursued suspected communists, Victor Grossman was drafted into the army. A committed communist since his teens, he hid his political beliefs.

Stationed in West Germany and under FBI scrutiny, he faced the threat of a possible court martial. To avoid prison, he fled to the Soviet Union in 1952, swimming across the Danube River.

Victor tells Lizzy Kinch about his dramatic escape and life in East Germany. A Whistledown production.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.

(Photo: Victor Grossman. Credit: Victor Grossman)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Lizzie Kinch.
0:14.3	I'm taking you back to the early 1950s, to the story of a man who swam across the Danube
0:20.3	and defected from the US Army to the story of a man who swam across the Danube and defected from the U.S. Army to the Soviet Union.
0:24.9	Oh, I was what they call a red diaper baby. My folks were already infected.
0:31.1	That was Victor Grossman, who was born in the USA in 1928.
0:36.5	I grew up at a time in New York City in Manhattan, which was still
0:41.9	at the end of their depression. I have recollections of sad looking men standing online to get
0:49.3	sued because they couldn't get jobs. And then what made a strong impression on me, the war in Spain. I went with my
0:56.1	cousin collecting money, save Madrid. At high school, Victor joined the Young Communist League. He won a place
1:03.1	at Harvard University, where he studied economics and continued his political activism.
1:08.1	We set up this group at Harvard, which remained secret because everyone was afraid of
1:14.9	the future, career. At the same time, we were very active. The atomic weapon question was
1:21.7	very, very hot. And so was Churchill. Churchill had been invited to Harvard, had just made his famous speech about the Iron Curtain, and we wanted to protest that.
1:32.9	When he graduated in 1949, Victor went to work in an air conditioning factory, answering the party's call for more blue-collar workers.
1:41.4	He did not tell his new colleagues about his Harvard degree. This was not a good
1:45.9	time to be a communist. Communism in reality is not a political party, an evil and malignant
1:51.6	way of life. An international criminal conspiracy. In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy
2:00.0	made his famous speech,
2:01.5	claiming he had a list of 205 communists who were working for the State Department.
2:08.5	A few months later, the Korean War broke out.
2:12.4	America was now militarily engaged in stopping the spread of global communism.
2:16.7	The United States Air Force units doing a round-the-clock job of delivering death and destruction
	...

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