Recently I was handed a list of deceased faculty and staff of St. Mary High School in Greenwich, Connecticut. I am a 1968 graduate and recognized many of the names on the list.
A few names stood out because of their unique life history that brought them to teach at a small Catholic high school in the 1960's. Msg. Pierre Botton was from Lyon, France. He taught French (naturally), but also founded the choir and an a cappella group called "Les Incroyables", which was my first exposure to choral and a cappella singing. Dr. Rene A. Perez-Amargo, who taught Spanish, was a Cuban emigre and a former member of the Cuban Supreme Court.
The most famous teacher at St. Mary High School was Dr. Robert A. Vogeler, who taught science and mathematics. Although I did not know it at the time, Dr. Vogeler had been imprisoned for fifteen months during 1949-51 by the Communist government of Hungary as an American Spy, which he later wrote about in his best-selling book "I Was Stalin's Prisoner" (1952). Dr. Vogeler was then a 39 year old executive for International Telephone and Telegraph Corp. ("ITT") stationed in Vienna and responsible for Eastern Europe when he was arrested, tortured, forced "to confess", tried before a "kangaroo court", and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for spying. He was tried by the same Judge who in 1949 convicted Cardinal Mindszenty, the most famous Communist prisoner, who was convicted by a "people's court"of espionage and sentenced to life but actually served five years until released during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Dr. Vogeler was released after 527 days in captivity thanks to incessant lobbying by his Belgian "bombshell" wife Lucille Vogeler, who made his treatment a cause celebre which invited world-wide attention and lead to the active intersession of the U. S. State Department. After his release Dr. Vogeler became a valued speaker and expert on the newly forming bloc of totalitarian states which Winston Churchill had dubbed the "Iron Curtain" in a 1946 speech warning America that the Soviet Union was solidifying its control over war-torn Eastern Europe. The communist tactics of trumped up arrests, show trials, suborned witnesses, nationalization of private industry, suppression and intimidation of opponents, systematic rape and robbery are described by Dr. Vogeler in his book in harrowing detail based on his personal experiences and observations. Dr. Vogeler also carefully and methodically documents and demolishes the confession he was forced to sign under duress while exposing the corrupted society and system that imposed injustice and inequality under the guise of the rule of law.
Today, decades after the fall of communism and the liberation Eastern Europe, where our students spend their junior years studying abroad, our tourists roam freely and our business people broker deals, it is hard to imagine what it must have been like immediately after the war in the 1940s and 1950s in places like Vienna, Prague and Budapest where a younger Robert Vogeler was on the front lines between the forces of communism and capitalism as he fought the good fight for IT&T and the United States of America.
After that teaching at St. Mary must have been relatively easy (except perhaps at lunch time).
