Oswald’s Relationship with Ella German
In June, Oswald met Ella German, a worker at the factory, of whom he later said he “perhaps fell in love with her the first minute” he saw her (Commission Exhibit No. 2609, p. 271). He spent New Year’s Day at the German family home, eating and drinking in a friendly atmosphere and returning home “drunk and happy,” and on the walk back he decided to ask Ella to marry him. The following night, after bringing her home from the movies, he proposed on her doorstep; she rejected him, saying she did not love him and feared marrying an American, citing the Polish intervention of the 1920s that had led to the arrest of all Soviet citizens of Polish origin. In one diary entry Oswald attributed her failure to love him to “a state of fear which was always in the Soviet Union.” His affection appeared to continue for some time; he had his last formal date with her in February and remained on friendly terms with her throughout his stay in Russia.
Oswald’s Growing Disillusionment with Soviet Life
Even as Oswald enjoyed his early months in Minsk, the first signs of disillusionment with Russian life appeared. After a friend at a party took him aside and advised him to return to the United States, Oswald noted in his diary that he felt “uneasy inside.” In a later entry he compared life in Minsk to military life, writing that he had become habituated to a small cafe where he dined in the evening, that the food was generally poor and always exactly the same throughout the city, cheap but of low quality, and that he did not really care about quality after three years in the U.S. Marines. In an August–September entry he wrote that he was becoming “increasingly concious of just what sort of a sociaty” he lived in.
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