Marc Fogel: ‘I want to come home’
BUTLER TWP — Each night, at 9:30 p.m., Malphine Fogel prays the rosary for her son. Throughout the day she finds herself checking the time, wondering what he might be doing across the world in that same moment, separated by an eight-hour time difference.
Imprisoned by the Kremlin for the past two and a half years, Marc Fogel, a teacher who taught International Baccalaureate history courses in schools in several countries, including Russia, has since missed the college graduations of his sons, Sam, 23, and Ethan, 25.
Milestones, birthdays, holidays and key political events — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the recent death of anti-corruption activist, opposition leader and lawyer Alexei Navalny — have passed since his arrest and imprisonment.
As his mother turned 95 on Monday, March 11, Marc Fogel, a Butler native and resident of Oakmont, continues to be detained in a maximum security penal colony five to six hours away from Moscow.
“It’s been really hard,” Malphine Fogel said.
“I don’t really care about birthdays,” she said in her Butler Township home Friday, where a lively bouquet of carnations, daisies, snapdragons and asters — a birthday gift from her daughter — sat on the living room table. “Have you ever seen a bouquet as big as this?” she commented earlier.
“I just want to see Marc,” she said.
To celebrate her birthday, Malphine Fogel said she would be joining her daughters in East Brady for a family gathering, in which Marc, the second-oldest child of three, would be absent.
“I know birthdays are important to him,” she said. “He’s very sentimental about events in the family.”
Fogel was charged with “large-scale drugs smuggling” by crossing the Russian border, as well as “large-scale illegal storage of drugs without a commercial purpose” on a return trip in August 2021 after he was found carrying about half an ounce of medical marijuana at a Russian airport.
The medical marijuana had been prescribed for chronic pain caused by a spinal injury.
Today, the teacher is nearly three years into a 14-year prison sentence for what Malphine Fogel says was “something victimless.”
The only thing treating his chronic pain now are the ibuprofen tablets sent to the colony through the U.S. Embassy.
As she looked through old pictures, trying to remember when they were taken, and rifled over letters sent by her son’s former students, she noted she couldn’t pinpoint some of the dates. The pictures showed Marc at his senior prom at Butler High School, as a student at McQuistion Elementary School, at his high school graduation, senior prom and holding his son in Malaysia.
“Time is fleeting,” Malphine Fogel said. “You don’t even realize how fast.”
When her son called Friday morning from the penal colony, he spoke to her in Italian, the mother tongue of her parents, who settled in East Brady after immigrating from Villa Sant'Angelo, in the Abruzzo region in Italy. The 95-year-old remembers Italian being frequently spoken in her childhood home.
These days, Malphine Fogel said she understands Italian more than she speaks it.
“I love to hear it,” she said. “It’s easy to get nostalgic if you think about it.”
In the prison, Marc Fogel is still practicing his Italian. While conversation is hard to come by, and he doesn’t speak Russian, his mother said he is happy to be able to communicate with a Russian inmate, the former head of a post-secondary institution in English and Spanish.
Though the informal English class he organized for other inmates was stopped by authorities, his mother said other inmates will approach him one-on-one to translate an English word or phrase.
On occasion, he visits a chapel that is visited once a month by a Russian Orthodox priest. A visitor there sometimes gifts him things, his mother said, sometimes offering him a piece of cake, or a tangerine.
Meanwhile, in Butler Township, Malphine Fogel worries for her son’s health. She said she often asks him if he has warm socks and enough food to eat.
His back pain means he can no longer tend to the 6-by-6-foot plot on the penal colony he once planted radishes and carrots in, she said.
Over and over, Malphine Fogel expressed concern and confusion over why her son is not named alongside other high-profile Americans who are imprisoned in Russia, like Paul Whelan or Evan Gershkovich, and why her son has not been classified as wrongfully detained.
President Joe Biden made no mention of Marc Fogel during the 2024 State of the Union address, despite acknowledging both Whelan and Gershkovich.
“We'll also work around the clock to bring home Evan and Paul, Americans being unjustly detained by the Russians and others around the world,” Biden stated Thursday.
Michael Driscoll, president of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where Marc Fogel graduated in 1984 with a degree in social studies education, issued a statement ahead of Malphine Fogel’s birthday, as he urged legislators “to do right by Marc.”
“As we join our legislators in wishing Mrs. Malphine Fogel best wishes in celebration of her 95th birthday on Monday, we also share her pain, sadness and worry for her son Marc Fogel, who has been detained in a Russian prison for 2 ½ years,” Driscoll stated.
Through the uncertainty, Malphine Fogel and her family, as well as groups of friends and community members, continue to advocate on his behalf.
“We keep hoping he won’t be forgotten,” she said.
His mother said she wants him to be included in any discussion for potential prisoner swaps.
She recalled how professional basketball player Brittney Griner was similarly sentenced on drug smuggling charges for carrying vaporizer cartridges with less than a gram of cannabis oil, but designated as wrongfully detained. Ten months later, she was released as part of a prisoner swap.
“Marc was certain he would be on that plane with Brittney Griner,” his mother said.
“I can’t imagine the despair and agony he felt, or the fear,” she said. “Even if he came home tomorrow, it couldn’t make up for the despair he felt — that we feel.”
At home, Malphine Fogel keeps envelopes and folders full of letters, newspaper clippings and messages sent by former students.
She pulled out a card, written by a Polish graduate of the Anglo-American School of Moscow, where Marc Fogel taught for 10 years before his arrest, and which closed its doors in May 2023.
On the front of the card, the student had drawn a Cold War map of Europe, likely a nod to a class assignment.
“Every time I would want any type of elucidation, enlightenment or just an interesting encounter, I knew that your (classroom) is the one to visit,” he wrote.
“I would like to thank you for everything that you have done for me as a person, and for our history class.”
When she spoke to her son Friday, Malphine Fogel said she told him a Butler Eagle reporter would be stopping by and asked if there was anything he wanted to share with the press.
“He said, ‘Tell her I want to come home’.”
