Victor Grossman, a New York red-diaper baby of the 1930s, joined the Communist Party as a Harvard student. Fleeing the US Army during the McCarthy Era, he swam the Danube River to the Soviet Zone of Austria and was sent to East Germany. There, he studied journalism, married, and became a freelance writer and popular speaker. He is the only person in the world to hold diplomas from both Harvard and the Karl Marx University.
At one point he directed the Paul Robeson Archive at East Berlin's Academy of Arts.
He was pardoned by the US Army in 1994 and, in 2003,
published an autobiography, Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left,
the Cold War, and Life in East Germany.
His 2019 book A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee tells in rare, personal detail how an activist, husband and father grew up in the U.S. free-market economy; spent thirty-eight years in the GDR’s nationalized economy, and continues to live in Berlin.
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