Glasnost Ends 44 Years Apart for Father, Son

If it wasn’t for a twist, this could be just another one of those cliche, warm-fuzzy stories about how a father and son are reunited after being separated for years.

This story comes courtesy of glasnost.

Meet John Philipps, an interstate trucking dispatcher now living in retirement in Fallbrook.

Meet his son, Victor Philipps, 47, a Soviet citizen and truck driver living in Karaganda, a city of about 600,000 on the southern fringe of Siberia, about 600 miles west of the Chinese border and several life styles removed from Fallbrook.

The two were separated nearly 44 years ago in war-torn Eastern Europe and reunited several weeks ago, after Victor’s umpteenth request for a travel visa was suddenly and quickly approved.

John Philipps can’t believe how good his son looks.

Victor Philipps can’t believe how good America looks.

“On the freeway coming down here (from Los Angeles), he was amazed by the four-lane freeway. And he kept looking at all the pickup trucks and vans and asked, ‘Does the government own all of them?’ ” his father said, chuckling.

John Philipps and his wife, Emily, took Victor to the supermarket on his first morning in Fallbrook.

“He looked at all the fresh meat and all the fresh vegetables, and there was no line outside the store,” his father said. “He told me that, in Russia, the store would be empty in two hours.”

They took him to the North County Fair shopping mall in Escondido and bought him a business suit, blue jeans, shirts and shoes. There were no lines. He wants to go back again.

They took him to Disneyland. He loved the Main Street Electrical Parade.

They took him to Las Vegas. He won $200 on the silver-dollar slots and smiled a lot. They took him to a Vegas production show, and he saw topless show girls. He smiled even more.

Still on tap are a visit to Sea World and some ocean fishing off San Luis Obispo and goodness knows what else.

Then Victor Philipps goes home again, on July 22. Maybe forever, maybe not.

“He wants to come back and live in America forever,” his father says. “So we will see if that can happen. But he has to go back now, or else there would be too much trouble.”

Unsure of Message

Victor says he is not sure how he will convey his images of America to his wife of 23 years and his friends back in Karaganda.

“I don’t know how I would start to tell them,” he says in the German he learned from his mother, his father and stepmother serving as interpreters. “The life style. The dress styles. The openness, the freedom. People are so friendly. They smile more. There is more happiness.”

But for now he’s going back to the Soviet Union, to his one-room apartment in a city with two government television stations, where it’s eight months winter, four months spring and fall, and back to where, as he says, he just sleeps and works, sleeps and works.

Emily Philipps tells of the scene when father and son reunited May 28:

“They had exchanged pictures prior, but the one of Victor was not very current, so we had a sign made so he would spot us at the airport,” she said. “But no sign was needed. When they saw each other, they screamed. ‘Here’s my son!’ John said. And, ‘Here’s my father!’ Victor said. They fell into each other’s arms and cried, and others in our family started to cry too.”

The elder Philipps said: “It was just like when my family and I were separated in 1944. Victor cried then too. He said, ‘Daddy, please don’t go!’ So, when we see each other again, we are crying again.”

The story of the family’s separation has its roots in the early 1800s, when John Philipps’ great-grandfather, a German, moved to the Ukraine at the urging of Russians who needed German agricultural expertise to develop the region’s farming.

Viewed With Suspicion

But, with the outbreak of World War II in 1940, the Russians viewed the German descendants as “bad apples,” much as Japanese-Americans were viewed suspiciously in this country, John Philipps said.

The Germans quickly occupied the Ukraine. In 1943, they moved the German Ukrainians, including Philipps’ family, to Poznan, Poland. In September, 1944, John Philipps was drafted into the German army and sent to Vienna for training as a medic.

While he was absent, the Red Army invaded Poland and promised to return the Ukrainian Germans to Speyer, Philipps said. Instead, his family--his wife, Isabella, his two sons, 4-year-old Victor and 2-year-old Adolf, and his father were put aboard a train heading for Siberia. Adolf died en route.

The family found themselves in a labor camp in Karaganda and were finally released in 1955 by Nikita Khrushchev.

John Philipps, meanwhile, ended up in Austria after the war, grieving over the apparent loss of his family. “I had lost all my relatives--my father, my wife, my children--even my homeland, and in Austria I was treated as a foreigner. There was pain, always thinking of my family, but I had to get on with life.” He worked as a landscaper and a day laborer and, in 1952, married again to a woman who died in 1976.

Philipps came to the United States in 1953. He was nationalized as a U.S. citizen in 1960.

In 1964, he was contacted by the American Red Cross in San Francisco with word that his father, Johann Philipps, was alive in the Soviet Union and looking for him. Through the contact, he learned of the whereabouts of his first wife--who herself had remarried--and his son, Victor.

Constant requests by Victor for a travel visa to the United States were routinely denied over the years, and he had given up hope until Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as the new Soviet leader. “The very next time he asked for the visa, he was told to come back in two weeks, which was last May. He came back in two weeks, and the visa was ready for him,” Philipps said of his son’s experience.

Eight days later, he was on a plane, leaving Moscow.