Mystery of wartime friendship may never be unravelled

In 1945 Anatoly Shandalov, a 16-year-old Russian Jew with a liking for English literature, became friendly with two British sergeants in Lvov. Five years later he was arrested, tortured and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Our correspondent reports from Jerusalem on Mr Shandalov's long search for the two soldiers who changed his life.

In May 1945 Anatoly Shandalov, a 16-year-old Jew who had returned to Lvov in Western Ukraine on the heels of the retreating German army, met two sergeants named Frederick Grace and James Logie from a British military mission as he walked along the street.

Interested in English literature and wanting to improve his English he went back to their hotel. In the course of several meetings they talked about the war and celebrated the defeat of Germany together.

Mr Shandalov recalls: "On parting they left me a note: 'We, two Englishmen, are very glad to have met you. We hope that our friendship will be everlasting. Long live Churchill! Long live Marshal Stalin!' "

At the time the meeting did not seem dangerous to Mr Shandalov. It was the high point of the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the West. Sitting in his small flat in Haifa, speaking near perfect, but slightly literary English, he says: "It never occurred to me, a naive youth, that a contact with allies might be considered a crime by the Soviet state security." After meeting the soldiers he resolved to study English, entered Lvov University and was writing his diploma essay on George Bernard Shaw's play The Chocolate Soldier when he was arrested by the MVD security police in 1950.

During his first interrogation Mr Shandalov was accused of being a British agent. He says the investigator alleged he was recruited by the British SIS to serve as a spy. "I got paid for the service with whiskey, cigarettes and chocolates." He had also, according to testimony of a hotel chambermaid who had eavesdropped on his conversation with Sgts Logie and Grace, "slandered Soviet reality in my talks with the British military mission".

After months of interrogation, sleep deprivation and beatings, Mr Shandalov was sentenced to 25 years in prison and five years loss of civil liberties. Stalin died in 1953 but he was only released in 1956. As an ex-prisoner he found it difficult to get a job. In 1990 he and his wife, with $150 between them, emigrated to Israel.

But for years Mr Shandalov had wanted to trace Frederick Grace and James Logie, the unwitting cause of his troubles. He had heard nothing from them after 1945. He wrote to them, but his letters were never answered. He says: "In all probability they were intercepted." After he reached Israel he wrote to the BBC World Service, Missing Persons Helpline and the Ministry of Defence. None was able to help.

In July, The Independent published part of Mr Shandalov's story and he was disappointed when there was no response. Then in October Agnes White, from West Drayton, wrote to say that she was the daughter of James Logie whom she confirmed was part of the British military mission in Moscow. She had received a clipping about Mr Shandalov from a relative in Oslo. Her father had died of cancer in 1983, but had served as a soldier in Germany and Hong Kong.

It remains unclear what Sgt Logie and Sgt Grace were doing in Lvov in 1945. Even at the height of the wartime alliance the Soviet Union treated allied missions in Moscow as temporarily licensed spies.

Mrs White says her father would never reveal much about what he was doing in the Soviet Union though he did volunteer that "the Russians were treating the Germans much as the Germans had treated the Russians".

He had not mentioned to his family his encounter with a young Russian in a hotel in Lvov, when they had drunk vodka together and sung Noel Coward songs to celebrate VE Day.

Nevertheless, Mr Shandalov feels that he has never escaped the consequences of that brief meeting. By the time he reached Haifa in Israel he was too old to find a job.

Sitting in his unheated room he says he caught himself "in an ironical thought, that then, in remote 1952, in the barracks of the Siberian labour camp, I felt myself warmer and more comfortable".