Yes, yes, Sean agreed. It would be wonderful.
“You said you figured about two semesters to go on your Ph.D. Are you planning to go back to Cal?”
“Yes.”
And then Momma asked Sean if he had given any thought to starting a family, and Sean said yes, he had given it a lot of thought.
Patrick O’Sullivan kept his peace during dinner, for now it was Momma’s moment to speak of grandchildren and ask what he ate and where he lived in Germany and how he was taking care of himself.
“Goodness no, Sean! I won’t hear of you wiping dishes. It’s not a fit job for a major in the United States Army. You and Pat go on into the living room. I’ll be in shortly.”
Pat set his rocker into motion. Much of the trembling in his hand subsided. Where to begin? What to say?
“How do you spend your days, Poppa?”
“Well, I’ve still the best collection of John McCormack records in the Mission. And there’s the radio. Mother goes up to the church at least once a day ...”
“Are you able to get around at all?”
“Enough. We sleep downstairs. That saves me the steps. On the sunny days I walk up to Dolores Street or to the church. And thank God, the old eyes are as sound as a dollar. I like to read. I read most of the time since the last attack. There is so much to be learned.”
“Poppa, I’ve been thinking. It would be nice for you and Momma to have one of those pretty little houses on Lincoln Way just across from the park. They’re a lot brighter and you would have the park to walk in or just sit in and read ...”
“Come now, Sean. Mother and I wouldn’t know how to live anywhere else. This tired old house may be depressing to you because you’re young and have ambitions and that is how it should be. To us, it’s comfortable like an old shoe. We’ve been here nearly thirty years. All of you boys were born here ...”
“But ... if I should study at Cal I’d want you nearby so we could be together ...”
“You’re worrying too much about us. That’s why you’ve come home, because you’re worried about us.”
The visitors started arriving. Only a few close friends they knew Sean would want to see. And when they had gone the three of them talked far into the night. And remembering and speaking Tim and Liam’s names was not so painful as he believed it would be. When you have become very, very old like Momma and Poppa, memories are a sweet drug to soothe the long hours... .
The next morning Eileen O’Sullivan awoke at an ungodly hour to bake more pies and cookies than any one human could possibly eat in a week. And, while his father took an early afternoon nap, Sean strolled around the neighborhood.
... Mission High on Dolores Street. Room 28. Mr. Whitehurst’s class. That is where he had first caught the fever of political science.
... The Coliseum ... the old “bucket of blood” fight club ... “Introducing! In the red corner wearing green trunks, at one hundred seventy-five and a half, from San Francisco’s rough, tough Mission ... the dancing master ... Schoolboy O’Sullivan!”
Stick him and run, jab and go ... don’t get hit ... don’t let Momma see you with a busted-up face ... jab run, jab run.
... The boys still hung around the ice-cream parlor at Eighteenth and Dolores. Some were inside playing the pin-ball machine, others outside looking over the quail.
... Buy at Lachman’s Furniture. 17 Reasons Why! The neon light blinked off and on ... 17 Reasons Why.
... Bunch of kids on the corner waiting for the Call-Bulletin car to drop off their papers, pitching pennies against the wall.
“Hey taxi!” Sean called on an impulse.
“Where to, general?”
“Run me out to the beach ... Cliff House.”
There were no seals on Seal Rock. The gulls owned it for now. Sean walked past a monstrous structure housing the Sutro Baths, a relic from before the turn of the century. It held a half-dozen pools of varied temperatures, an ice rink, a collection of junk, curios, old autos, pre-earthquake pictures, a hundred rattly-bang music boxes, Tom Thumb’s clothing, penny movies, all in this mammoth hole along with talking birds, mummies, miniature towns made out of matchsticks, bowling games, voice-recording machines, and a magic well which accepted pennies, nickels, and dimes, catering to that American mania for throwing money in pools of water.
When Sean left Sutro he was drawn magnetically to the hills behind it leading down to the ocean. Years before, stairways and caves had been carved in the jagged rock for a sea-level restaurant, but the trick tides flooded the area and caused the project to be abandoned. It had been all but forgotten, except by adventurous little boys and nostalgic soldiers on leave.
From here he was behind the Sutro Baths and could see the archway that ran through the middle of one of the Seal Rocks. Sean felt his way down one of the tunnels. Midway he could see a diffused ray of light from the ocean, and spray pounded into the hole. At the end of the tunnel he climbed out onto the rocks just above the smashing surf and looked at the ocean and its golden gateway into San Francisco.
How many hours had they sat there, the three of them, after hitching rides to the beach on the backs of streetcars. They came and watched the ships sail in and out and played games of great adventure in the rocks and caves; and Tim fought the Irish Revolution and Liam read Irish poetry.
Sean was overcome with the nearness of his brothers and he was gripped with sadness. In all those months and years away he had always looked back to this place and to his native city with affection, but now it was an infinite part of his being. His brothers, their youth ... this city was him and he was flooded by a thousand memories of things he had believed he had forgotten.
He walked away with a leaden heart. At the end of Golden Gate Park, facing the ocean, he walked past the enshrined sloop that had belonged to the explorer Amundsen, who had sailed it into the Arctic Circle.
He walked the entire length of the park ... past the polo fields and lakes where little boys played great seamen with toy boats; and past the buffalo pens and rowboat lakes and those hidden places where sailors and their girls made love; past the Japanese Garden, now called the Oriental Garden ... past all the lushness ... immersed in memory.
Suddenly he was out of the park and the great church of St. Ignatius rose up before him. Sean entered, knelt, and crossed himself. It was that time of day when a few old ladies prayed for the lives of sons they might see again and many candles burned for sons who would never return.
It had been so long ... so very long. All those prayers Sean had set away, had doubted, had neglected, all welled up now in a single desperate cry ... “Oh Mother of God! I don’t want to go back to Germany! Help me do the right thing!”
The quiet acceptance of Sean’s departure the next day made things comfortable for everyone. The matter was being treated with the idea that Sean would soon return for good. And, until he went upstairs to sleep, he could not find it within him to talk about the true purpose of his visit.
Sean tossed restlessly in his bed. His brothers were with him ... their mementos all about him. Baseball gloves, class pictures, Liam’s first notebook of poetry, Tim’s medals, the crucifix on the wall, books, boxing gloves, the crystal radio. Nothing in this room had been touched. It had been kept in spotless anticipation for the homecoming of the warrior sons.
Sean heard his father struggle up the stairs and knock on the door.
“I didn’t wake you?”
“No, Poppa, but you shouldn’t walk the steps.”
The bed creaked as Pat sat on its edge, as he had done a thousand times. He stroked his son’s hair and Sean was a little boy again.
“It has been a long hard journey for you, hasn’t it, son?”
“Yes, Poppa.”
“Was there a woman in England?”
“Yes.”
“I could sense it from the tone of your letters.”
“I never could lie to you or fool you very well ...”
“And you loved her very much?”
“Yes. She was married ... we had to ... break it off.”
“Does that still trouble you so deeply?”
“I haven’t gotten over it fully. I guess I never will.”
“But there’s something else?”
Sean turned his back.
“Why did you make this trip?”
It became so easy to talk with Poppa beside him this way. He always understood. He knew from the first instant that Sean was in a turmoil. “I’ve been asked to stay in the Army. General Hansen wants me to go to Berlin.”
“Well, Mother and I won’t be too disappointed. From your letters we had already anticipated there would be somewhat of a wait until your discharge.”
“You don’t understand, Poppa. It means ... at least four years ... maybe more.”
“Oh ... I see ... well now ... what do you think needs to be done?”
“I want to come home. I want to come home. We should be together now ... the three of us ... that’s what is right.”
“Sean, there are certain indulgences that all parents would like to have. We want the closeness of our children and the pleasure of our grandchildren, but far more rewarding to your mother and me is seeing you grow into the kind of man you have become. This great pride you have given us far outweighs our little selfish pleasures.” The wise father prodded his son to turn around and face him. “What is it you aren’t telling me?”
Sean pointed to the two empty beds. “I can’t go on living with their murderers.”
“This General Hansen. You have a great deal of admiration for him, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He knows your feelings about the Germans?”
“Yes, he does.”
“Knowing this and admiring you also, if he still asks you to go to Berlin it must be mighty important.”
Sean swung his feet to the floor, held his face in his hands. “Yes, it’s important.”
“Tell me.”
“General Hansen sees dangers facing us that few others will admit to. He needs to have certain people with him in Berlin who realize we have to hold a line ... until the rest of the country wakes up to what is happening. He’s afraid he might not be able to find enough people willing to ...”
“Haven’t you pretty well answered your own question?”
Sean sprung to his feet. “How about me, Poppa! Christ, I’ll be in my mid-thirties before I get back. I won’t be fit to compete in class with kids. I won’t be able to study any more. And it may damned well be too late to start a family. And us! Oh Poppa! I may never see you again ... I don’t want to be a soldier!”
Sean O’Sullivan cried in his father’s arms as he had not cried since he was a small child. “Oh God!” he cried, “I hate them ... I want to come home. I miss Liam and Tim ... oh God!”
“Sean O’Sullivan,” his father whispered, “you must be proud to be needed this way. I am a simple man and I do not have a command of language or philosophy. There is only one question you must ask and answer. Your mother does not count. I do not count. You do not count, or your ambitions or your life. Only one question.”
“What is it?”
“Is America worth it.”
They were smiling when Sean left the next morning, without heroics or tears. For them, forty-eight hours was food for an eternity of reveries. An embrace, a wave ... and he was gone.
The C-47 bounced in and out of the layers of cumulus clouds. The plane flew southeasterly over the Rhine River, past a field of shells that had once been Düsseldorf.
The copilot was crapped out on a litter in the cabin. Sean sat in his place. He put on the earphones, enjoying hearing the cryptic jargon of the flyers. The pilot flipped on the intercom switch.
“Hey, Major. Look at that friggin’ wreck down there. Like, Jesus H ... huh?”
The plane inched over Cologne. Only the twin spires of the mighty cathedral stood in the midst of a lunar landscape along the river bank.
“Pretty sharp shooting how they missed the cathedral.”
“Christ takes care of his own.”
“Major, those krauts aren’t going to dig out of this pile of crap for a hundred years.”
“Don’t make book on it.”
The pilot switched back to the en-route frequency and called Wiesbaden tower.
“This is Army four-seven-six-three calling Y-80, over.”
“Y-80 to Army four-seven-six-three, I read you five square, over.”
“This is Army four-seven-six-three. What is the present weather?”
“Visual all the way in. Winds five knots from the northwest.”
As they passed over Coblenz the pilot rechecked his ETA.
“We’ll be landing in twenty minutes,” he said over the intercom. “Where you heading, Major?”
“Berlin,” Sean O’Sullivan answered.
Part 2
The Last Days of April
Chapter One
April 12,1945, Berlin
THE AIR-RAID CELLAR beneath the Falkenstein house shifted with a sudden violent jolt. A wide split opened in one of the walls spewing a shower of granulated plaster. The precious Rosenthal china, which Frau Herta Falkenstein had meticulously wrapped and stored for safety, careened out of an overturned barrel and splintered into a million bits.
Hildegaard Falkenstein whimpered in her mother’s arms.
Another blast! Another! Another! Each closer than the last. The cellar plunged into darkness. A match flame groped for the candle on the wooden table in the center of the room.
“Is everyone all right?” Bruno Falkenstein asked.
Herta and the two girls answered haltingly.
Another hit sent all four of them to the damp floor flat on their bellies. “I can’t stand it any more!” Hildegaard shrieked. She beat her fists on the floor and writhed hysterically. “I can’t stand it! Kill us! Kill us!”
“Keep her quiet!” Falkenstein commanded of his befuddled wife, but the girl continued her tantrum. Hildegaard was becoming more unraveled every day. By the second or third hour of the raids she was usually in a state. Bruno pulled his daughter to her feet, out of his wife’s grasp, and slapped her hard across the cheek.
“Quiet! I demand it!”
She stifled her sobs to whimpers. “Yes ... Father.”
On the opposite side of the room Ernestine clawed through the silt which had fallen from the ceiling over her cot and nightstand. She cut her fingers digging for the little music box, clawing in desperation until she found it. A part of it showed in the debris; she worked it clear and took it up. Five of the ten figures of Prussian Hussars had been knocked off, the box was chipped and gouged. She blew off the dust and wound it ever so carefully and pulled the release plunger. The five remaining horsemen began to circle around and around on the top and the music tinkled and she hummed.
Once there was a faithful Hussar,
Who loved his love for a year or two,
A year or two ... or three or four ...
He swore he’d love her ever more ...
And the crash of the bombs seemed farther away, particularly to Ernestine. They all breathed deeply during the respite. Frau Falkenstein petted Hildegaard, who had slowed to a jerky sobbing.
But the calm was short-lived. Another wave of bombers passed in on the tails of the first and another load of hell from the skies whistled down upon them and the flak crackled back and the room danced again.
Now Bruno Falkenstein’s nerves were also shredded. “Pigs! Dirty American pigs! Ami beasts!”
No one seemed to hear his protest.
Ernestine had drifted into tranquility. Years and miles passed by as she watched the little music box, transfixed. “The Faithful Hussar” ... how many thousands of years ago was it? Only six faithful years? It was 1938 then and there was peace. Peace ... what a strange word. Could it have only been six years ago? I was only seventeen then. Oh Lord! The bombs have been falling on Berlin for a hundred years. Dietrich, my love! The bombs have been falling on us night and day for a hundred years. Oh Dietrich ... my photo album was burned in a raid so long ago I have forgotten what you look like. Can you forgive me?
Springtime, Berlin 1939
Ernestine held the tiller steady while Dietrich Rascher took down the sail and dropped anchor. The dark-green mass of the Grunewald and the shoreline was far away. Ernestine could not conceal her joy that the two of them were able to slip away together from the rest of the Group.
How handsome Dietrich is, she thought. How deftly he moves about the boat. How beautiful his face is. Kind and thoughtful, with puppy-dog eyes.
She looked back to the shore with a twinge of guilt. The Group would be singing Nazi Youth songs. Today there was a lecturer from the party. The devil with it. It was much nicer in the middle of the lake with Dietrich Rascher.
He slipped alongside her. Dietrich could hardly control his pride. Today he had been made senior leader for the entire Dahlem District of Hitler Youth. At the age of nineteen this was quite an honor.
“Let’s don’t go back,” Ernestine said wistfully, “ever, ever, ever. Let us set sail and blow right off the Wannsee up the canal to the North Sea, and then over the oceans to the South Seas.”
“A romantic notion that conflicts with tonight’s lecture.”
“Don’t you ever forget Hitler Youth, even for a moment?”
He shook his head. “Sometimes, Ernestine, I swear I have a feeling you don’t even want to belong to the Group.”
“Oh, but I do, very much. That way I can get to see you more often.”
“Don’t tease about such serious matters. You seemed eager enough to join in the first place.”
“Well, of course, I had to. And then Father ordered Hilde, my brother Gerd, and me to be enthusiastic.”
“Ach.”
“I’m sorry, Dietrich. I know how much this means to you and I shouldn’t tease, but I suppose I’m jealous.”
He sucked in a deep breath, decided to be indulgent, then turned to her and took her hands. “I asked you to sail out here with me today because I have a secret. I am sharing it with no one in the world but you. Ernestine,” he paused proudly, “I have made application for officer’s training in the SS. I think I will be accepted.”
A strange silence brought only the sound of lapping water. The confusion in her angered him. “I was hoping you would be proud,” he snapped.
“I love you, Dietrich.”
“But you don’t see what an honor it is.”
She only shook her head. One was not allowed to say what one truly thought in these matters. The reaction upset him. He gripped her shoulders excitedly. “The Fuehrer has done so much for us, Ernestine. Until he came we Germans had been beaten into the dirt. He said ... lift your heads ... be proud to be Germans. He has given us bread and jobs and land and our pride.”
Ernestine squirmed uncomfortably at his tightening grip, his sudden burst of fanaticism. “We must give back to the Fuehrer what he has given us by obedience. We Germans are the only people in the world capable of giving the devotion demanded of the Aryan race.”
The words had been pounded into her brain since memory. Dietrich recited them well, as any Hitler Youth Leader must. He watched her shrink away and dropped his hands from her. “What do women know of politics,” he snapped. “You should be even more grateful for what Hitler has done for German womanhood.”
And then, nothing.
“Well, for God’s sake, say something!” he demanded.
“You were so kind and gentle when we first met. I don’t want you to lose that.”
He was moved by the hurt in her and he touched her hand softly, lifted it to his lips and kissed it, and she managed a weak smile. “Ernestine ... I love you. And I trust you alone in this world. Here, in the middle of the Wannsee I can say some things that I hate myself for thinking about. There are some things about being a Nazi I have not made peace with. I do not like having to spy on my parents because of a few things in their past. They are old and harmless. Sometimes ... I even feel sorry about a Jewish friend I had.” The sound of his own confession annoyed him; he added quickly, “But we must accept the fact that there are a few unpleasant duties we must perform and we must obey without question. It is small enough a price for what Hitler is giving Germany.”
“I was advised by my councilor to offer my body to you to produce an Aryan child. Do you think that it’s right that we have a child now?”
“I have told you that even Hitler cannot order me to violate you.”
Ernestine softened and cuddled in his waiting arms and thought ... he will never really be an SS officer, in his heart, so long as I continue to own it.
An unwelcome breeze came up. Dietrich raised the sail, pulled up the anchor, and swung the boat away from Potsdam toward the Grunewald encampment.
“Sometimes, Ernestine, I get a strange feeling that you really don’t believe in the Nazis.”
“Of course I do, Dietrich. There is so much happiness in the people these days. I have seen the joy it has brought into my own home with Gerd and my mother and father. I see how much better life is ... only ...”
“Only what?”
“I do have an uncle in the Schwabenwald Concentration Camp.”
“No one blames your family. Ulrich Falkenstein was a traitor to the German people.”
“No, Dietrich,” she answered softly, “he was a good man and he loved Germany very much. I am not permitted to speak his name, but I cannot be made to forget him, either, and I cannot believe he is a traitor.”
“Men like Ulrich Falkenstein would have kept Germany a paupers’ state. They were weak in their illusions of democracy. Germany must be strong.”
“What bothers me, Dietrich, is that I have questions about Uncle Ulrich and about the Jews. I have questions about God and many other things, and I wish I knew where I could go to find another answer.”
“To be a German today is to understand Germany’s destiny.” You must believe without question ... believe without question ... believe without question....
Now only a muted breathing of numbed people could be heard in the Falkenstein cellar. For two hours the American Eighth Air Force from England dumped nearly a thousand tons of bombs on Berlin, and as the last of their flights faded from hearing, the first of the motors of the American Fifteenth Air Force from Italy began to drone above them.
Hildegaard had collapsed. Frau Falkenstein was glassy-eyed. Only Bruno Falkenstein issued small weak curses against the Americans, for Ernestine was completely immersed in memory. Remembering always helped during the long days and nights in the cellar.
A year had passed since Dietrich Rascher was accepted into SS Officers’ Training at Schwabenwald Concentration Camp. He had returned to Berlin. War was with them. As a new SS Untersturmfuehrer it was a certainty he would be leaving for Poland or the occupied countries soon.
Dietrich stared sullenly from the hotel window through streaking rain down to the Kurfurstendamm. Behind him, he could hear “The Faithful Hussar” tinkle from the music box. He had brought it home to Ernestine as a gift. It was hand-carved in the Black Forest with dainty little figures of olden Prussian horsemen of Frederick the Great, and the music works were imported from Switzerland.
It should have been a moment for great happiness, but Dietrich was miserable. People below scurried along, hugging the buildings to keep dry—except for a pair of jack-booted Nazis who swaggered in the middle of the sidewalk in defiance of the rain.
Dietrich wanted to explain ... words stuck in his throat. He wanted to tell Ernestine what the year had been like in the SS school; he wanted her to know all about the brutal training, the punishments, and the “practical work” with the prisoners inside the concentration camp. He had learned to become a bully and to terrorize. And now he had come home and had taken Ernestine with a same lack of conscience.
He wanted to tell her about the exercises in degrading the human spirit and the ease with which he beat up defenseless men; and that after his first revulsion, there was a pleasure in the power one had, in seeing men cower before you.
Dietrich turned from the window. Ernestine lay on the bed, half dressed. She looked like an innocent child, winding up the music box. As he came to her, her eyes showed him how filled with love she was.
Ernestine was reassuring herself that Dietrich had not really changed; he was compassionate, and all during that first trembling night alone he had been ever so gentle with her. Perhaps he was right about his desire to become an SS officer. It had given him manliness and respect. A man must have what he wants. Mother always told her that ... give the man what he wants ... the man is everything.
Dietrich sat alongside her. She tried to understand his silence, longed to make him happy, fulfill him completely. He stroked her hair. It was thick and golden and his fingers became entwined in it. Suddenly, his fingers tightened. He hurt her. He pulled his hand away and stared at it almost madly... .
“Kadett Rascher!”
“Jawohl!”
“I am your Hauptsturmfuehrer. Each new candidate like yourself is assigned a shepherd puppy as he enters his SS training. An SS officer must understand animals, how to train them, and how to use them. And, as our beloved Fuehrer said, how to imitate their power and virility. You shall pick a dog from this litter and after it is properly housebroken the dog will share your quarters with you.”
Dietrich looked into the kennel of furry balls, lifted a puppy, and smiled as its wet nose and tongue drenched him with affection.
“Aha. The only bitch in the litter. What will you call her, Kadett Rascher?”
“I will call her Ernestine. She will be my girl until I can return to another Ernestine.”
Even the cruel taskmasters were pleased at the way Kadett Rascher trained his bitch, Ernestine. There was the magnificent communication between man and beast strived for but seldom reached. No getting away from it, Rascher had a way with animals. He could get more from his bitch whispering in her ear than all the other cadets with their leashes, straps, choke collars, and throw chains. For that first year the young cadet and his dog were together day and night, the patrols of Schwabenwald, the hunts for escapees, guard duty. The hard discipline, the ugliness of the camp were all forgotten in the evening when he sat on his cot and read and reached down and was able to run his hand through the dog’s fur.
A few days before the graduation ceremony, the permanent awarding of the black uniform, the death’s head insignia, and the SS dagger, Kadett Dietrich Rascher and his dog were called into a blank, stone room in the kennel. His Hauptsturmfuehrer was there.
“I am pleased with your progress, Rascher,” the captain said. “You have learned your lessons well. You will be a credit to the master race. Before receiving your SS dagger there is, however, a final obedience test that all SS men must take.”
“Jawohl,” Rascher snapped from his position to attention.
“You will, at this instant, choke your dog to death.”
SS Kadett Dietrich Rascher passed his final test of obedience. With neither qualm, hesitation, nor visible show of personal emotion, he reached down, grabbed the trusting animal, put a choke hold on her, and pressured quickly to snap her neck. He then came back to attention.
“With men like you,” the captain congratulated, “we are undefeatable.”
A sudden wind beat a tattoo of water on the window. Dietrich continued to stare at his hand.
“What is it, darling?” she pleaded, “what is it?”
“How long can this go on?” Bruno Falkenstein moaned. “Maybe it would be better if a bomb fell on us and killed us all.”
“Please don’t speak like that before the girls,” Herta pleaded.
“Yesterday, six hours of raids and the day before that all day. Today, it may never end. What have we done to deserve this?”
Ernestine looked at her father quizzically. Perhaps the people of Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London wondered the same thing, she thought. Strange, father didn’t seem unhappy about it then.
“Turn that damn music box off, it drives me crazy!” he commanded.
“Yes, Father.”
Ernestine was shocked when she saw Dietrich on his furlough from the Eastern Front. She knew that the war would do something to him, but he was still not much more than a boy. Dietrich was twenty-two now, but all that was gentle was gone.
Furloughs were created to bring a soldier happiness and renew his vigor to fight. Ernestine had kept a belief that Dietrich Rascher would never slip beyond the power of her love. She had lost him.
Every night of his leave he was stinking from schnaps and beer. He lolled on the bed too drunk to make love ... he babbled ... was given to sudden wild rages and weeping incoherent confessions about unknown crimes.
Corpses ... Jew corpses ... tens of thousands of naked Jews ... burning barns ... burning villages ... men with beards praying ... naked mothers ... sisters ... grandmothers ... pits filled with burning corpses ... his machine gun rattled into the corpses ... dogs ripped the Jew throats ... the wild eyes of the cheering Ukrainians while the SS gunned the Jews into the pits ... the nightmare, again and again ... he drowned in blood, Jew blood ... his hands and mouth and hair dripping and sticky with blood ....
“Drink! I must have a drink!”
“Dietrich! Wake up, darling! Wake up!”
“Drink! Give me a drink!”
“Oh, my darling. Please let me help you. Please don’t shut me out.”
“Help me tomorrow, woman. I need a drink now.”
“Darling, let me love you. Please! Please! Let us marry ... tomorrow ... now.”
“Marry you? How humorous! I am married to the SS. I have no room for another wife.”
“Oh God, dear God.”
“Stop your bloody weeping and get me schnaps!”
“Now you listen to me, Dietrich Rascher. This war will end one day. I don’t know what you have seen or how it has hurt you, but you will need to forget. I will be waiting here to help you. I will wait until time runs out ... until my heart stops ... I will never stop waiting and I will help you forget.”
The all-clear sounded.
They trudged up to the demolished street. All of them stood in the dusk’s fading light and stared at their broken house. Once it had stood two stories, square and solid. Most of the top floor was gone. The rest was riddled with holes, gouges, smashed and broken windows. The pretty little flower garden, so meticulously nursed by Frau Falkenstein, was destroyed. Falkenstein’s auto was in flames, gutted beyond use.
The neighbors crawled from their cellars one by one and began to dig through the rubble. Reimer’s house down the street, which had taken a direct hit, was flattened to the foundation. The rest of the street was a shambles. Once it was a nice street, lined with shade trees and neatly cut shrubs.
“I had better go to the store and see if there is anything left,” a voice said.
“Don’t bother. The store took direct hits.”
“Frau Winkelmann and both her children are dead.” Perhaps it was better for them, Falkenstein thought. Frau Winkelmann had been crippled in a raid a half year earlier and the children had become a burden to all the neighbors. Her husband had been killed long before in Tunis.
“Someone get over to the defense command and find out about the water main. There is no water coming into my house.”
The air was grimy with unsettled dust, fires burned, and the sirens screeched all around them, hauling off the wounded, digging for the dead. There was little time for either sympathy or contemplation or to mourn dead children, broken homes, or look for bread or fill the water buckets. They knew that the American fires from the day would light a path for the British bombers by night, and when darkness came the raid would go on. Nights were somewhat better. The Americans picked an area to precision-bomb. If you were caught in the American target, like today, it could be ghastly. The Lancaster Bombers of the British tried to saturate the entire city with incendiaries so their target was spread and the chances of survival better.
The value of survival was becoming questionable, anyhow. If you lived through the British raid at night the Americans would come tomorrow and continue their checkerboard destruction ... Dahlem ... Wilmersdorf ... Charlottenburg ... Köpenick.
People were fleeing Berlin by the tens of thousands, but where to go? Perhaps, Bruno Falkenstein thought, find a nice large cathedral and stay there. The Americans were sentimental about bombing churches. Perhaps they would get a rest tomorrow. Perhaps another part of the city would get it. Lord! The Americans had come for a solid month with three hundred bombers or more and the British had come in behind them.
Their beautiful beautiful street had become a rubbish pile, like the rest of Berlin. What the hell is the use of hoping, any more.
Frau Falkenstein’s mind was geared to more practical things. She sent the girls to the reservoir with buckets while she searched for something to eat. She was wily to the ways of survival, knew the short cuts around rationing, played the black market, knew how to hoard and barter.
Ironically, the postman delivered Falkenstein the latest issue of the Berliner Illustrated during the respite. They returned to the cellar for a meal of stale brockwurst and ersatz coffee. Falkenstein read the magazine by candlelight to soothe his frayed nerves. There was not a single mention of the destruction of the German cities. It continued to picture German victories, and, like the radio, promised that secret weapons would reverse the course of the war overnight.
Falkenstein grunted. Some fools at his bureau believed fervently in the secret weapons Goebbels had promised. He had believed in them once also. His mind ran back to the speech of Goebbels in the Sportspalast ... “Do you want total war?” And the masses answered with “heils.” Well, we are getting it now all right. After the V rockets failed in their promise to crush Britain, Falkenstein stopped believing in secret weapons. He longed to listen to the BBC; he knew many neighbors were daring it these days. He flipped the page. It showed the new skiing costumes expected at Garmisch in the coming winter. He threw the magazine on the floor and downed the last lead-like chunk of meat.
The air-raid sirens shrieked outside. The four of them undressed in total darkness and lay in their cots, their eyes opening with each blast. It was a big raid.
“I wish it were all over ... I wish it were all over,” he moaned to himself.
Ernestine grimaced at the irony of her father’s statement. Yes, everyone wished it was over. Father never wished it was over in the early days. She remembered his cries of delight, his boasts after Dunkirk and when Greece was conquered. He was proud to bursting when Gerd sent him letters from Paris.
Only since Stalingrad did they begin wishing it was over; then he began to think of Gerd’s safety. Yes, since Stalingrad the war became tiresome and only then did she hear the very first words that there had been a betrayal by Hitler.
... Stalingrad. That was the last time she had heard from Dietrich Rascher. More than a year had passed since then. Ernestine remembered the last letter from Dietrich, carried out by a flyer friend when they attempted to air-lift supplies to Stalingrad.
My Beloved Ernestine,
More than likely this is the last you shall ever hear from me. I am relieved to be able to write you this one time speaking freely. A comrade in the Air Force has promised to deliver this to you. But even if the letter is found it shall not matter much, for by the time anyone reads it, I shall be dead.
We are beaten. I do not have the “privilege” to surrender as does the regular army. As an SS officer I must take my own life. In the long run, I may be far better off than those poor devils around me. God only knows what will happen to them when they become prisoners of the Russians.
We are freezing cold. My boots become wet, then solid. The ends of my fingers have no feeling in them and I am half blind from the glare of the snow. We are starving. I am dizzy from the lack of food. It becomes a supreme effort to move for a few meters. Our ammunition is almost gone. We are outnumbered by hordes, and now we are being outfought.
No miracle can save us here at Stalingrad. Hitler exhorts us to perform in a superhuman effort, but we cannot respond. Furthermore, we have no great desire to respond any longer. So you see, we were not supermen all along ... only mortals.
Men here at Stalingrad speak openly about the betrayal by Hitler and the Nazis in a manner I have never heard from German lips before. In the last moments of life perhaps it is a good thing to protest. I have been a dedicated Nazi. I have loved Hitler, worshiped him. Yet, at this moment, I cannot find it in my heart to die gloriously. All I want is to sleep.
On the other hand, I cannot condone those around me now who berate Hitler. We all followed him with devotion. We all believed in the Nazis so long as Germany was winning. Only part of the fault belongs to Hitler and the Nazis. The rest of it belongs to the entire German people.
I cannot think of inspiring messages to leave you and Germany. I am just cold, hungry, and quite frightened. Now that I know that I am a mere mortal and Hitler is not my Maker, I have great fears as I go to meet my true Maker. I think He will Judge me harshly for some of the things I did in the SS.
What I really wish, Ernestine, is that I was nineteen again and you and I were sailing on the Wannsee and I could have turned our boat toward a canal and sailed to the North Sea and over the oceans to the South Seas ... forever and ever and ever.
My respects to your father and mother. My affection to Hilde, and my hopes that your brother, Gerd, returns safely from the war.
What little love I have given or received in this life has been yours. I fear it is not worth much.
Always,
Dietrich
Chapter Two
April 21, 1945
THE LITTLE STONE BRIDGE fording the Oder River was damaged by gunfire during the German retreat. It now strained under a burden for which it had never been built.
An endless parade of Stalin tanks and other treaded monsters from the bottomless Russian arsenal buckled the bridge down to its foundations. Mammoth units of self-propelled artillery, antitank pieces, the new rocket launchers, and iron-wheeled horse-drawn gondola wagons and trucks bearing the name Studebaker and Chevrolet all joined the line waiting to cross. Horses, men, iron moved toward the final day in Berlin.
Colonel Igor Karlovy, chief of engineers of the Third White Russian Front, dived below the surface of the river to study the effects on the strained underpinnings of the bridge. He surfaced and swam for shore, where a waiting party of helping hands pulled him up the bank. He was surrounded by impatient consultants as he wiped himself dry and lit a cigarette. He dressed. Igor Karlovy was a powerful, muscled man though a bit below average in height. Blond hair, a trace of high cheekbones, and ice-blue eyes gave testament to a Tartar element in his ancestry centuries before. His naked torso revealed shrapnel wounds from another battle. Once his tunic was buttoned about his neck his appearance seemed more aged than thirty-six years. It was a face that had known much, felt much, suffered much. He carried obvious authority.
“The bridge will collapse. There is no possible way to reinforce it. Erosion has set in in the foundation.”
Field Marshal Popov’s personal aide, a nervous major, inquired, “How long will the bridge hold up?”
“Ask the bridge,” Karlovy answered.
“We have more than two thousand heavy pieces to get over in this sector. If this bridge goes it can delay the entire offensive on Berlin.”
Igor merely shrugged. “Berlin is not going to run away.” Popov’s aide did not fathom Igor Karlovy’s humor. He knew the marshal had his heart set on opening the offensive so Berlin might fall by May Day.
The entourage followed Colonel Karlovy downstream. He consulted with two other engineers and decided upon the best place to erect temporary crossings.
“The main highway will have to be diverted so there must be a rampway built to get the mobile equipment down the bank. I suggest cutting some of these lovely German trees and constructing a log road. Now, if Marshal Popov will assign a regiment of men for labor I think we can have a crossing by tomorrow morning.”
“No sooner?”
“Certainly not.”
The aide stomped off to get the labor. Igor drew up hasty plans for building of a crossing. Captain Ivan Orlov pushed into the circle and drew the colonel out. He pointed to his watch excitedly. “Commissar Azov is waiting for us at Eberswalde.”
Captain Orlov obviously dropped Azov’s name for the colonel knew V. V. Azov was more powerful than Popov himself. Ivan Orlov, the party man assigned to watch the engineers, was apt to panic at the thought of being late to see the commissar.
“Drive across the bridge before it collapses and wait until I get things set up. If the bridge goes down, I’ll swim over to you as quickly as I can ... now, please ...”
Captain Ivan Orlov went off to the Mercedes staff car they had commandeered from a German general in Warsaw. He blew the horn with jerky violence and swung the vehicle between a pair of gargantuan SU-100 tanks rumbling over the trembling bridge.
Toward midday a human blanket of labor swarmed over the area. The masses of men and women had stripped a small forest, hand-carried in tons of fill dirt, and laid a rampway to the water’s edge. Others working in the swift stream had started the temporary bridge. Satisfied that the bridge would be built in less time than he predicted, Igor turned the job over to the subordinate engineers.
Captain Ivan Orlov was near frantic by the delay. He sped the car toward Eberswalde, zigzagging between the endless lines of tanks, guns, gondola wagons, horsemen, blowing the horn incessantly, sending foot troops scurrying into the ditches. He jabbered without respite. Igor tried to ignore him. What a magnificent sight, this great great mass of men and guns. Soon the five horrible years would be over. They were at the gates of Berlin ... Russians ... Ukrainians ... squat Asians from Mongol and Tartar lands ... dark-eyed Armenians and Georgians.
Igor was disturbed by gossip in the high command that Stalin preferred a street fight for Berlin rather than allow Nazi surrender. It would be a pretext to take Berlin apart street by street, house by house. What a shame to lose many thousands of young men in this last hour of war.
Igor rolled up his overcoat, made a pillow of it, and pretended to doze in order to shut off Ivan Orlov’s chatter. An intersection clogged with wagons brought them to a halt. A large-busted woman in military-police uniform answered Orlov’s long, undinted horn blast.
“Out of the way, damn you, clear that road!”
“What is your great hurry, comrade?” the woman soldier demanded.
“We have a meeting with a commissar.”
“Excuse me, comrade. Clear the way! Let them through!”
The People’s Military and Civil Governing Group was temporarily established in the boys’ gymnasium in the town of Eberswalde, some fifty kilometers north of Berlin, where they awaited the fall of the capital. White flags of surrender hanging from the town’s windows clashed with the red flags atop the schoolhouse.
Captain Ivan Orlov, now an hour late, leaped from the Mercedes. He quickly identified himself to two blue-capped guards from political security and trotted down the main corridor, which still held a portrait of Adolf Hitler.
Igor was met at the door by his two junior officers, Captain Boris Chernov and young Lieutenant Feodor Guchkov. They had not seen the colonel for several days. There were embraces and backslaps.
“Have you heard, Igor? Popov’s White Russian Front has approached the eastern and southern suburbs of Berlin!”
“And the Ukrainian Front is pouring in from the north!” Feodor added. “We have them in a pincers.”
“It’s official. We have joined hands with the Americans at the Elbe River!”
“Magnificent!” Igor Karlovy roared, “but for now I’d better get in to see Comrade Azov.”
“We’ll wait here,” Feodor said. “Tonight the bombardment of Berlin begins in earnest. I know a place up near the front lines where we can watch it.”
“Bring the vodka,” Igor said, and asked for directions to V. V. Azov’s office. He stopped for a moment to look into the auditorium. The Agitation and Propaganda Corps were hard at it: stacks of broadsheets holding portraits of Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Engels; stacks of leaflets; long strips of red lettering on white cloth carrying slogans would come in on the heels of the last shot.
V. V. Azov sat deadpanned behind his desk. Ivan Orlov was nervously repeating an apology of why they were late. “Marshal Popov personally asked Colonel Karlovy to look after the bridge.”
Azov silenced the captain by holding up his hand without indication of belief or disbelief. He seemed remote from the elation of the great turn of events. One almost never saw a smile, a frown, or any of those indications attributed to human reactions. He greeted Igor Karlovy matter-of-factly. His thick black hair was in place and his huge moustache was combed and carefully turned. The simple tunic was opened at the throat. Behind his dull gray eyes was a brain trained to receive and disseminate information without emotion.
“I heard the news of our joining with the Americans!” Igor said. “It’s marvelous!”
Azov opened his mouth slowly, began to speak with automation in expressionless tones. “We can well understand the elation of the moment. However, Comrade Colonel, we are not to lose sight of the fact that the American participation in this war has been a minor factor.”
From a long-standing dealing with commissars, Igor knew how to interpret Azov’s pronouncement. For several months now the Russian people had been indoctrinated to the effect that the winning of the war was a singular Russian effort. Hearing it from Azov’s lips, Igor knew, was a voicing of official policy. It was for damned sure, Igor knew, that the Agitation and Propaganda people were preparing literature to downgrade the American participation.
“Of greater importance,” Azov continued, “is that you and our comrades on the German People’s Liberation Committee draw up the final plans for the dismemberment of Berlin’s industrial complex as the first installment for war reparations.”
“It shall be done, Comrade Commissar,” Igor Karlovy answered.
Having run out of patience with the German People’s Liberation Committee, Igor left Captain Ivan Orlov to quibble with them and sought out Boris Chernov and Feodor Guchkov. The three of them left Eberswalde in the direction of the front lines with two loaves of bread, five bottles of vodka, an accordion, a mandolin, and a balalaika. Young Feodor uncorked the first bottle and broke into song. Boris drove the battered car off to a side road filled with chuck holes. They banged their way uphill, then cut diagonally over a farmer’s field to a small bluff, parked, and walked to the edge. An awesome vista unfolded below them. Thousands of individual guns of light-artillery brigades, heavy artillery, rocket-launcher regiments, and self-propelled guns were aligned wheel to wheel as far as the eye could see in either direction.
This called for a second bottle of vodka. The three men squatted on a mound of boulders eating the bread and a portion of rice from their kits, washing it down with the Polish vodka.
Igor put the field glasses to his eyes. In front of the rows of cannons, divisions of tanks were deployed and ready. What seemed to be a million infantry and horsemen swarmed through the forests, on the roads, through the fields toward the hazy outlines of the northern suburbs of Berlin.
One by one, fire control up forward called for the artillery to shoot test rounds. Forward observation posts called for necessary adjustments. With the coming of darkness the tempo increased until every firing piece in the line began to rain steel into Berlin in the most concentrated artillery saturation of a single target in the history of warfare. The guns recoiled angrily, launchers hissed their rockets away in a deadly arch, and black smoke erupted on the horizon from tortured Berlin. The guns leaped back a dozen at a time making the earth shake violently and the sky was lit with ten thousand flashes of lightning from the muzzles and the roar became horrendous. A hot wind blew up to the knoll from the unnatural agitation, bringing to their nostrils the smell of burned gunpowder.
Igor Karlovy and his two officers were becoming numbed by the fury and the vodka. Boris Chernov shook his fist toward Berlin and cursed and Feodor cheered and screamed encouragement.
“Kill the Nazi bastards!”
The barrage reached a new savagery. Igor Karlovy stood still as a statue. The light flashes reflected in his eyes and brought to him the memory of other fires....
Igor Karlovy was in Leningrad in his memory and he stood on the Sovietsky Prospekt staring over the frozen Neva River. Then it was German and Finnish guns pouring it on Leningrad and the fires were all around him. He saw Children’s Home #25 crumple under a direct hit! He ran toward it. The screams of agony reached his ears. The children had been caught unawares.
DEATH TO THE NAZI BABY MURDERERS! An enormous sign hung over the entrance of Factory #67. Above the sign, a portrait of a woman worker holding a mutilated infant in her arms. All over Leningrad signs and slogans snarled at the Nazi tormentors, and other signs and slogans exhorted the workers and soldiers to put up superhuman efforts.
“Look, Colonel, look!” Feodor cried, throwing his arms about Igor. His drunken tongue wagged freely. “Look at the fires in Berlin! Kill the bastards!”
How long! How very long had Igor Karlovy waited to see this glorious moment. Berlin burning! Berlin in mortal pain! How many times did he believe it would never come. All of those terrible days gone by are memory now ... all thirty months of the siege....
“Death to the Nazi bastards! Rapers of our motherland!”
When Igor Karlovy was transferred to Leningrad in 1941 it was a confused and frightened city. There was terrible shock among the people with the realization that the Red Army was vulnerable.
The first weeks of the campaign against the Finns had ended in disaster. The Finns, dressed in white, skiing as ghosts in the snow, and using their forests for cover, butchered the onrushing Reds. Here, the Russian steam-roller tactics did not work. Until the Russians learned to fight the Finnish way, they were slaughtered by an enemy a fiftieth their size.
There was Soviet indignation against the Americans, who overtly took the side of the Finns just because a few dollars had been paid yearly on an old war debt. The Americans didn’t understand that Finland had military positions on the Karelian Isthmus at Leningrad’s throat, and that the Finnish dictator, Mannerheim, had been sleeping with the German staff. For the Soviet Union not to challenge these Finnish positions would have been to court suicide.
Just as the Finnish campaign ended, Igor Karlovy went to Leningrad. The city had a meaning, like Moscow itself. Not only was it a great Soviet cultural center and seaport, but the cradle of the October Revolution. With the Soviet Armed Forces reorganizing, it was a time and a place for a young officer to make his name.
The sneak attack by Germany against the Soviet Union came in June of 1941. By September, thirty German divisions and the revenge-seeking Finnish Army were pressing on Leningrad.
The masses of the city were confused and angry! Never before had the leaders heard so much open bitterness against the regime. The masses cried “betrayal.” They had been duped into thinking the Red Army was invincible and further betrayed because Leningrad was literally defenseless and without stores.
Then passivity overcame them. It was not that they welcomed the Germans, for they knew they would be dealt with harshly, but that, with great relief, they knew the Communists would soon flee.
The panicked Communist leaders were packed and ready to go when ordered by Stalin to stay, and Leningrad was commanded to hold no matter what the cost.
A million workers from factories and schools and the Army went out to build a great belt of defenses against the approaching Nazi armies.
Yes, it was a time a young Red Air Force engineer could make a name. Although primarily concerned with runways, air traffic, and air installations, the needs of the day took him into other fields of engineering. Igor Karlovy demonstrated a type of initiative and inventiveness desperately needed in the construction of defenses. It was he who conceived a plan to dismantle the unfinished stadium and use the thousands of concrete slabs on the perimeters.
By the time the Red Army had fallen back into Leningrad, the Russian people had come to learn that the German was no liberator. Driven by sheer fear, tens of thousands of men and women formed into defense battalions and manned the parapets.
Within sight, feel, and smell of Leningrad, Hitler went against the advice of his generals and ruled against a street fight. With the Finns as an ally, Germany set siege to the city. Hitler was certain the siege would break the Russians just as demoralization, bombardment, and starvation had worked in Warsaw and other unfortunate cities of Europe. Hitler felt the Russians were subhumans so the will to resist would quickly be crushed from them. One of the monumental sieges of all time had begun.
The Red Army artillery continued the bashing of Berlin in unabated fury into the night. Young Feodor was passed out drunk. Boris Chernov slept in the back seat of the car. Igor Karlovy alone retained the watch, for he was sober and the pain of memory now stuck sharply.
He recalled the unmerciful agony of the winter of 1941. Leningrad was cut off from Russia except for a single passage over Lake Ladoga at their backs. There were not enough ships on the lake to either evacuate the old and young or to bring in sufficient fuel, food, and ammunition, and they were forced to cross under the guns of the enemy. The Communist leaders, harangued from Moscow, in turn harangued the masses.
In those days, a Red Air Force engineer slept little. Igor was involved in the building of a half-dozen small airstrips to attempt an airlift of supplies. The plan fell woefully short.
When Lake Ladoga froze he and the other engineers performed the perilous feat of cutting roads over the top of the ice to keep the meager convoys of trucks and sleds moving. There was that grim day when all the wooden homes in Leningrad were ordered dismantled for firewood and the peat bogs around the islands had to be worked by battalions of women under German artillery fire.
Yet, somehow, the people bore it. The Russians demonstrated their limitless capacity to endure suffering. In Leningrad, as in all of Russia, practically no civilian goods were produced. The workers were compelled to labor unbelievable numbers of hours for the meagerest existence. In the hinterland twenty million men and women were armed and trained in the nation’s singular dedication to survival.
In Leningrad ration cards became the key to life and the means of controlling the masses and inducing more labor from them. Inside every factory, labor battalion, and army unit was the political commissar, the party member, political intelligence, and the informer to apply unrelenting pressure and fear tactics. There was a shortage of almost everything except slogans and portraits of Stalin. The news of German atrocities was pounded into the brains of the masses day and night. There was no respite even in this hell. As coal reserves diminished, power failures stopped industry, transport, light, and heat.
The dagger of death in 1941 was an icicle and the dagger struck 400,000 civilians dead. The sight of frozen corpses in Leningrad’s gutters became as common as the sight of the slogans. Starved, bombarded from within and without, frozen, half crazed with fear, the people of Leningrad clung to the thread of life and were driven to exert yet one more ounce of energy.
As the siege guns pounded, the unyielding stone of Leningrad began to crumble away, bit by bit. The casualties in hospitals, schools, and factories were appalling. Stukas and Messerschmitts screamed down from the skies ... days ... weeks ... months ... years....
In the spring of 1942 a recovering Red Army broke through from the south to open an eight-mile corridor in the siege ring called the Schlusselberg Gap. Karlovy’s engineers and hordes of women laborers built a rail line through the Gap and constructed bull-dog defenses on either side of it. The Germans were never able to close this thin bottleneck. Hitler continued in the belief that he could starve the Russian into submission, but from the first trainload of supplies through the Schlusselberg Gap to Leningrad, the city was destined to hold.
Despite this lifeline opened to the rest of Russia, the saga of the siege was still being written. The hunger, disease, artillery, air raids, and cold of two more Russian winters would claim yet another half-million lives.
DEATH TO THE NAZI BABY MURDERERS!
Yes, a million dead. That was the price for Leningrad.
Igor was standing on the Sovietsky Prospekt when Children’s Home #25 crumpled under a shell hit. He ran toward it with the screams of the children drumming in his ears. “God! My baby is in there! My baby! Yuri! Yuri!” Yuri Karlovy was born, lived and died during the siege.
At dawn the Russian guns were white-hot and warped from firing. Boris and Feodor still slept. The thrice-decorated hero of the Soviet Union, holder of the Lenin Order for Courage, gathered his boys up and drove back to Eberswalde as the mighty Red Army stormed the gates of Berlin.
Chapter Three
THE STAGE WAS SET for the grizzly playing out of the German death wish. From the chancellory bunker, Adolf Hitler brought on ultimate self-destruction by a deliberate decision to fight to the last. Indeed, it was all in the tradition of the fiery deaths of the idols of Teutonic legends; this was, however, no myth.
Like Berwin of Rombaden, he exhorted his warriors to perform superhuman feats. However, unlike the Aryans of the legend, Hitler’s “Aryans” existed in name only, and they could not respond. He commanded nonexistent paper armies to come to the rescue and counterattack. He went through an odious ritual of a marriage ceremony with Eva Braun, a woman as stupid and dull as Emma Stoll. And, in the last moments, he ranted that all of Germany had betrayed him and was unworthy of his genius.
The Russians, whom he had declared subhumans, followed their monstrous barrages by frontal assaults into the bowels of his kingdom. As the tortured city gurgled in its death throes, he waited until the enemy was within touching distance, and then he ordered the torch set to his body.
Children and old men of the People’s Army, disorganized military units, and frantic Nazis bloodied the Russian intruder mightily. The final bath of blood was a fitting sacrifice to the end of the pagan gods. The German fought from the bunkers and the rooftops and the street corners and the windows. Berlin was a city of mighty stone and steel, as was Leningrad, but unlike the Germans, the Red Army did not shy away from a street fight.
In the last days of April Russian victories were counted in inches, casualties in tens of thousands. No siege, this; batter it out foot by foot, room by room; isolate it house by house, street by street, section by section; reduce it to shambles. Artillery and tanks fired down great streets at point-blank and walls grotesquely buckled and crashed. Human fodder, bearing bayonets and flamethrowers, gutted and gored its way forward. Rivers of blood spilled into the gutters. The back of the Nazi was being broken by unstoppable sledge-hammer blows. The German committed suicide, fought, bled, escaped, surrendered. The civilians cowered and starved and became dehydrated from anguished thirst.
The magnificent Unter Den Linden and Siegesalee with their immense boulevards and great massive structures were reduced to hideous shells. Sizzling bridges collapsed into the Spree and the Brandenburger Gate was riddled to a sieve; the castles and Reichstag smoldered and the factories that somehow lived through the months of bombing crumpled under short flat hits of cannon and the incessant tattoo of machine guns, grenades, and mortars. This violent racket went on without respite until exhaustion beyond exhaustion overcame the defenders. And then they were systematically cut off and their ammunition fell to the zero point.
By the first day of May white flags sprouted by the tens of thousands and the upraised hands of surrender followed. The sound and the fury diminished as lone fanatical suicide units made the final futile gesture.
On the second of May Red Army vehicles rolled freely through those places not blocked by wreckage. They controlled a city that had undergone more damage at the hands of man than any single place on earth. Berlin was obliterated from one end to the other and a hundred thousand dead civilians lay beneath the mountains of brick.
Months before, as the Red Army began the final offensive, Russian journalists, with official blessings, promised the soldiers that Berlin and all in it would be spoils of the victors.
As the combat troops gained complete control they were suddenly and strangely withdrawn from Berlin, battalion by battalion, and replaced by garrison forces of inferior quality. The replacement troops contained a great number of Asians from distant Soviet Republics. They began the final chapter of horror on the beaten enemy.
During the last days of April the Falkenstein family and all their neighbors locked up in their cellars as SS officers from a nearby camp made a last-ditch stand in the Dahlem District. The whine of bullets, the crash of mortars, and the burst of shell made them flinch and cover through the pitched battle.
Fear made them forget hunger. In the Falkenstein cellar there was a new sound, unheard for years—the voice of Bruno Falkenstein praying.
Their minds had grown hazy. Radio gone, toilet unworkable, a single candle left, no water, no food.
There was a short and violent exchange of gunfire early in the third morning of the battle, and then great, unearthly silence. The quiet lasted for what seemed hours; no one could remember such silence for years.
The longer the stillness held, the more terrifying it became. The four of them, grimy, stinking, starved, sat in their stupor for over an hour without uttering a word. At last Frau Falkenstein creaked her large body from the cot and labored up on a stool to look through a window on the level of the street. She drew the boarding and blanket aside and squinted into an eternal grayness that revealed nothing.
“What shall we do, Bruno?”
“I don’t know,” he rasped.
“We must find food and water or we’ll all be dead.”
“I’ll go up and see if anyone is there,” Ernestine said. Her father protested, but she insisted she was better able to move around than the others. “Don’t come up looking for me and don’t leave here until I get back.”
“For God’s sake be careful, Ernestine.”
She climbed the steep stairs, shoved the trap door open, and glanced about the shambles in the hallway. Her body was slight and deft. She hoisted herself out carefully, dropped the trap door down, and as an afterthought dragged a carpet from the anteroom and covered the door.
The living room, shattered long before, was boarded up from the rest of the house. She pushed open a temporary door and peered outside. Not a sign of life in the streets. The scars of battle were much in evidence, the street smoldering from one end to the other.
She decided to try a dash straight across the way to their neighbors the Kaisers. She ran, moved even more swiftly by the sound of her own steps.
In the middle of the street her heel fell into a small mortar hole and she crashed to the pavement, twisting her ankle. She emitted a cry of disgust and pain, rolled over onto her hands and knees, and tried to lift herself. The foot gave way. She gritted her teeth and tried to drag herself, when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, someone moving.
Ernestine peered up slowly. A few yards away, at the intersection, two men with tommy guns over their backs stopped and watched her. They wore crossed bandoliers, bloomered brown trousers, short boots, and red stars on their caps. Russians! They moved at her cautiously, smiling.
Her ankle throbbed; she stifled the impulse to attempt to run. One of them now had his weapon pointed at her. Both of them seemed to be boys in their late teens; one was a blond and rather husky, the other dark with a shaggy growth of hair.
“Kumm frau,” the blond said, sneaking up to her. “Kumm frau.”
“Tick, tick, tick, tick,” the shaggy one said, pointing to her wrist. He leaned over, grabbed her arm, tore the wrist watch off, and put it to his ear and laughed. ‘Tick, tick, tick, tick.” His comrade listened, also amused.
She tried to crawl away while they played with the watch, but they walked behind her taunting, “Kumm frau!”
Ernestine sprang to her feet, tried to run, staggered blindly, limping on the pained ankle. The blond one snatched her long hair and flung her ruthlessly to the pavement again. “Kumm frau!” he repeated, looking about for some place to take her. As he reached down she saw the eyes of a wild man and heard the breathing of a dog in heat. She lashed at his face and tore it open with her fingernails. He wrestled her to her feet, banded his arms around her, and dragged her toward the garden plot in the Kaiser yard. She dared not scream for that would have brought others up into danger, but she kicked and squirmed in fury and her teeth found their way into the Russian’s hand. He bellowed in pain, and released her. The shaggy-haired one smashed his fist into her mouth.
Ernestine spun under the impact of the blow, landing hard in the dirt. It went into her mouth and nose and eyes. The world whirled crazily. She clawed at the wet ground to stop the spinning ... saw her own blood dripping, herself sinking into it ... and slowly pushed herself up to a sitting position, holding her head, groaning. Another punch from the shaggy one knocked her flat on her back. He grabbed her arms and pinned her down to the earth digging his knees into her wrist. The blond one knelt over her grunting, his trousers down.
An hour later Ernestine knocked almost soundlessly on the trap door. It creaked open. She dragged her body over the edge, spilled down the steps, and lay crumpled on the floor. Her dress was in shreds, both breasts bared, both eyes swollen shut. Blood gushed from her mouth. She gurgled a single long groan, and then blessed darkness rendered her unconscious.
Bruno Falkenstein reached under his pillow, snatched his luger pistol and lunged for the steps. His wife threw her arms around his legs. “No! Don’t go outside armed!”
“I’ll kill those bastards!”
“Bruno! Give me the gun and find Dr. Hahn! For God’s sake listen to me! She may be dying!”
The locating of Dr. Hahn became a monumental task. Falkenstein lost his watch to the first Russian, a second roughed him up for not having a watch, and a third beat him for the sport of it. Several times he was ordered to go back, forcing him to use round-about methods. When at last the doctor was found, he was treating a nine-year-old girl who had been raped by six Russians. The child was mutilated and in shock. He promised Falkenstein to come as soon as he could.
It was yet another long hour before Dr. Hahn was able to get to the Falkenstein cellar.
“The little girl?”
“Dead. They’re going crazy up there. There’s no end to it.”
The physician who had brought both Ernestine and Hilde into the world as well as their brother, Gerd, knelt alongside Ernestine’s cot. He rolled her over gently, forced her swollen eyelids apart, and flashed a light into her pupils. The blood from her mouth had caked dry; heart and pulse were weak but steady; there were massive cuts and bruises. He ministered to the wounds from his diminished supply of drugs, cleaned them with a solution, and then waved an ammonia stick under her nose. She groaned to a sort of consciousness.
“Ernestine. It is Dr. Hahn.”
She shook her head that she understood.
“I want to probe for breaks. You will tell me how badly it hurts.”
He probed about her body, then remained in utter frustration for a long moment. “She is not in shock and that is good. The ankle is not broken, only sprained, but I suspect a couple of ribs fractured and perhaps a concussion. Needless to say she is badly off from the beating and violations. I don’t know what we can do about either food or medicine ...”
Everyone froze simultaneously at the sound of feet shuffling overhead.
“Lord! We forgot to close the trap door,” Bruno whispered.
“Quiet!”
The sounds above became more pronounced ... laughter ... talk in a strange language ... something was kicked over and crashed. Frau Falkenstein grabbed Ernestine beneath the armpits and rolled her under one of the cots as the candle was doused.
Falkenstein wanted to go for his pistol, but the footsteps were just above them now! The ray of a flashlight probed through the trap-door opening, along the walls, and stopped as it found Hildegaard’s face. She shrieked!
A soldier dropped to the floor, whirled his submachine gun at them, called up to the others. Three more followed. They were Mongols, short and squat with yellow skin and long, drooping moustaches. They were ragged and foul-smelling from drink. The last of them carried a square canvas filled with loot: clocks, silverware, porcelain pieces, candlesticks.
The leader, swaggering and nearly senseless from alcohol, stepped up to them. ‘Tick, tick, tick, tick,” he said.
‘They want your watches,” Dr. Hahn said. “Give them up.”
Hildegaard and Herta Falkenstein nervously took them off and put them on the center table. The leader snatched them, listened to the movements, and attached them to his left arm, where he already wore a dozen watches.
He jabbered an order to the one with the submachine gun, who smiled through brown and yellow decaying teeth as he separated Dr. Hahn and Falkenstein from the women, leveling a gun barrel at their chests and motioning them to turn their faces to the wall.
“Kurmm frau,” the leader said, advancing toward Hildegaard Falkenstein.
“Listen,” Dr. Hahn said rapidly, “it is useless to struggle. They might kill you. Do as they say ... don’t resist.”
“Mother!” Hildegaard shrieked, and clung inside Herta’s inept protective grasp. “Mother! Tell them I’m sick! Tell them not to make me do it!”
Herta Falkenstein held her daughter tightly for an instant, and then they pried her loose and flung her onto the cot under which Ernestine was hidden.
“Animals! Bastards!” Bruno screamed as he turned and lunged. He caught the barrel of the guard’s gun over the bridge of his nose, sending his glasses to the floor, smashed. Another crack on his jaw with the gun butt sent him sliding in slow motion to the ground, now on his hands and knees, pawing around senselessly. One last blow flattened him and a pool of blood began to form under his face.
The leader tore the clothes from Hildegaard’s body. This sent the other three soldiers into spasms of laughter as the girl screamed, tried to shield herself, prayed, and cried. He knocked her flat, and mounted her. Another of the soldiers shoved Herta Falkenstein onto another cot. Her fat, flabby body and immense hanging breasts delighted the Mongols. They chortled and whooped as they forced themselves on her.
The two women lay rigid and unprotesting. When the first two assailants were done, they traded women. The other two became angry and pushed their comrades off and took their own turns. All of this went on as the leader began vomiting from liquor and the others urinated and moved their bowels on the floor. Each new disgusting act was considered terribly humorous, causing them to scream with laughter.
Two hours after they arrived, they shot up the shelves in the cellar in a last burst of vandalism and left.
As Dr. Hahn went to the women, Bruno Falkenstein crawled toward his cot, took his pistol from under the mattress, and stuck the barrel in his mouth. The doctor leaped on him and kicked the pistol from his hands. He writhed on the floor weeping.
“You idiot! Help me with your women!”
“Why did you stop me? What is there to live for? We are all ruined!”
Old Dr. Hahn stood in this chamber of horrors with the fetid smell reaching deeply into his nostrils. He saw the agonized man beating the floor with his fists, and he saw the shambles and heard the three women groan.
Frau Herta Falkenstein crawled from her cot and knelt beside her prostrate husband and touched his head. He pulled away from her. “Bruno,” she moaned, “go to Hilde. Tell her you love her. Please go to Hilde and tell her you love her.”
“Ruined,” he wept. “We are ruined.”
Chapter Four
HEINRICH HIRSCH WALKED ALONE and unarmed in the middle of a street still smoldering from battle in the Neukölln District of Berlin. He stopped before a three-story building on Geyer Strasse 2. A bullet-pocked sign, “Backerei,” groaned back and forth. The window was smashed and boarded. He looked up to the second floor. A window box held petunias that drooped wearily.
The young man was tall and slender. He had thin Semitic features revealing he was half Jewish, from his mother’s side of the family. He wore shiny new boots, semimilitary garb, and a red star on his arm band.
He walked the creaking steps to apartment four at the front of the building, second floor, and knocked. The door was opened slowly by a frightened old woman. Upon seeing his Russian attire, she paled.
Heinrich shoved the door wide and entered the room. The old woman flattened herself against a wall and watched his movements as he came to the center of the room and let his eyes play everywhere. “Don’t worry, old woman,” he said. “I lived here once. I only want to look around.”
Was it only ten years ago? ... ten years, nearly to the day. He remembered walking into the room and seeing the grim faces of the comrades. He was ordered into his room to go to sleep.
Heinrich walked to a small hallway and shoved open a door to a tiny bedroom. He lay there that night ten years ago listening to the arguments of the comrades. He had lain awake many nights in those days listening. The comrades were confused about the Nazi stampede. What to do? Where to hit back? How to fight?
One by one important party members disappeared. Names of the concentration camps, the Oranienburgs and Dachaus, began to be heard.
And then ... it came his father’s time. They had talked that night until late. When they left, his mother and father went to sleep in the next room in their big soft bed with its great down comforter.
He remembered wakening to the sound of whistles in the street ... then footsteps racing up the steps and angry thumps on the apartment door ... and last... his mother’s scream!
Much of what followed was in blurs. For several days he and his mother hid in the home of comrades in Spandau in a basement. The news came back that his father, Werner Hirsch, a Communist official, had been spiraled into martyrdom, beaten to death in Gestapo headquarters.
Heinrich remembered a wild drive in the middle of the night to Rostock on the Baltic Sea and hiding in the hold of a stinking old fishing boat that stole over the straits to the sanctuary of Sweden, where other comrades kept them hidden.
After three weeks his mother told him, “The comrades have decided that we should go on to the Soviet Union. We will be safe at last.”
The Soviet Union! From earliest memory his mother and father had labored, lived, struggled for the dream of a socialist state in Germany. The Soviet Union was the womb, the mother. It would be almost like coming home for the very first time.
Heinrich remembered the swell of tension in the gray Finnish morning as they boarded the train for the ride to Leningrad. Tears fell from his mother’s eyes as she first saw the great stone buildings of this mighty fortress of socialism. ... They would soon be in Moscow.
In 1935 Communist refugees from Germany were treated as heroes, for they were the living symbols of the struggle against Hitler. The son of Werner Hirsch was to be a student at School #78 in Moscow, which had been established exclusively for the children from Germany, Austria, and German-speaking countries. School #78 was given great attention. It was a modern four-story building; the children lived in and were given special diets of German food, the best uniforms, tours about the country; were given special seats in cultural events and the most superb health supervision. Outside school a League of German Communists coordinated their activities.
For fifteen-year-old Heinrich Hirsch it was the most wonderful life he had ever known. The dank meeting halls in Berlin, the shabby life, the terror were all behind him.
School #78 was spared that drab, lusterless place called Moscow. The children were only allowed to see a few gems in its sea of dejection.
Heinrich’s mother worked as a translator of German documents in one of the political bureaus. He was allowed to visit her one day a week. The two had been exceedingly close, and their weekly meeting brought on an uncomfortable situation. There was scarcely a place where they could be alone to talk; surely not in the German Culture Center, for they would not have a moment’s peace; even in the parks there was a constant blare of loudspeakers eulogizing Soviet life, playing nationalistic music, or reporting the news.
They spent their time in her room. It was a single small room in the apartment of a comrade from Berlin in an abominable old wooden house. The foundation had sunk and the outer walls were propped with timbers to keep them from collapsing. Some twenty persons from five families shared a single bathroom and kitchen.
But this was the best that could be arranged. Heinrich had been thoroughly indoctrinated that these housing conditions were a result of the first war, the counterrevolution, the devotion to industrialization, and the pressure of the imperialist countries. His mother seemed quite content with her lot, particularly the good fortune of her son.
Several months after their arrival, Heinrich Hirsch stood on the stage of the auditorium of School #78. Above the stage hung a great portrait of Stalin, and in blood-red lettering his words, THERE IS NO FORTRESS THE BOLSHEVIKS CANNOT STORM!
He received a red scarf in a ceremony making him a member of the Pioneers and repeated the oath: “I solemnly promise in the presence of my comrades and parents that as a Pioneer of the Soviet Union I will fight bravely for the interests of the working class and to safeguard the sacred legacy of Lenin.”
Then a buckle, engraved with five logs representing the five continents and the three flames of the fire of International Communism, was slipped on the scarf.
This was the formal opening of his religious studies. Denied the God of his mother, he adopted Communism as his religion. Karl Marx was god, Lenin the son of god, and Stalin the great disciple.
Their writings were studied as meticulously as a Jesuit studies Christianity, and under greater discipline. Like all religions, this one, too, promised a heaven that seemed beyond the reach of the living.
The first time Heinrich Hirsch knew mortal fear it came in the form of Nazis and Brownshirts marching in jackboots.
This time it came on a knock on the door in the middle of the night. The purges!
There were new banner headlines and inflamed speeches and the loudspeakers harangued: SPIES! TRAITORS! FASCIST HIRELINGS! AGENTS! SPECULATORS! SWINDLERS! DEVIATIONISTS! PROVOCATEURS! TROTSKYITES! MUTINEERS!
There was advice to FIND THEM! SHOOT THEM! DESTROY THEM!
And each new blast ended with a solemn prayer: LONG LIVE COMRADE STALIN AND OUR GLORIOUS COMMUNIST PARTY!
Things began to change at School #78. Almost overnight the food became gruel, like that of the rest of the Russians, and the pampering stopped. One by one teachers disappeared; the parties, the weekend dances, the fun and laughter stopped.
On a Saturday, eighteen months after his arrival in Moscow, Heinrich Hirsch went one day to the room of his mother. The door was sealed and padlocked. Frantically, the boy tried to open it, then ran through the house pleading with everyone, one by one, to try to find out what had happened. No one heard anything, saw anything, knew anything.
Three weeks later he received a postcard. The message was printed. The signature might have been his mother’s. It read: “I have been guilty of provocations and confessed to treason against the Soviet Union and have voluntarily accepted deportation to Siberia. Forget about me.”
Mother a traitor of the Soviet Union! Impossible! Impossible!
Then, other children of School #78 went out on weekends and found sealed doors and received postcards from parents confessing to treason.
The teachers were too frightened to speak about it, but after a time the students talked among themselves. Each one knew that his own parent was not guilty, but the intense indoctrination paid off. They each came to justify the fact there would be a few mistakes of justice under the urgencies of the times.
Despite this black mark against him, Heinrich Hirsch had shown such great skill in political studies that he came to the second stage in his career as a Communist. He was called for an interview with the possibility of joining Komsomol, the Young Communist League.
He recited his new duties flawlessly:
“To study the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and our beloved Stalin; to encourage the masses toward our ideals; to carry out all resolutions, proclamations, and edicts of the Supreme Soviet and the Communist Party without question; to protect our great socialist heritage with sacrifice; to acquire knowledge, culture, and develop physically and never cease working for the Motherland against its enemies and to never cease the struggle until all peoples are freed of fascist and imperialist bondage through International Communism.”
“What is the principle upon which Komsomol is founded?”
“The principle of democratic centralism.”
He was admitted to higher institutions for languages, then Marxism, and then International Communism. Heinrich Hirsch closed his mind to the things happening around him. Names of men who were heroes of the Revolution yesterday became the names of traitors today. Marshals of the Red Army, members of Lenin’s Politburo, members of the Central Committee all fell under the ax of the purge. Suicides of great names often took the place of official confessions. One had no choice but to study and keep his nose clean.
At Institute #16 for advanced studies of foreign Communism Heinrich again saw Rudi Wöhlman, titular head of the German Communists in the Soviet Union. Wöhlman had come to Institute #16 for a series of lectures on German Communism.
He remembered Heinrich as a little boy of five in Berlin and, of course, remembered his martyred father, Werner Hirsch, very well. Often times Heinrich heard his father speak of Rudi Wöhlman as the great hope of the German Communists.
Wöhlman had left Berlin for special schooling in Moscow in the mid-1920s, but never returned. It was a great disappointment for the German Communists. After his training in Moscow, Wöhlman was assigned as a commissar of the Soviet Union’s German-speaking Volga Republic.
No wonder Heinrich looked forward to his lectures with great anticipation. Here at last was the link between Moscow and Berlin. What followed was a terrible disappointment. Rudi Wöhlman’s speeches were a recitation of the current political line; he delivered them with parrot-like perfection, the words a rehash of a hundred speeches Heinrich had listened to before.
Rudi Wöhlman showed himself to be a shrewd politician rather than a man of thought. He had a sheen of glibness which hid the lack of depth or intelligence. He used the same verbal acrobatics all the teachers used. Wöhlman kept it safe, worked around the core of delicate problems, kept clear of personal opinions, and sidestepped pointed questions by having the students argue them, then placing himself as a final judge. A man of slight build with an immaculately trimmed goatee and darting eyes, each thought and word was calculated to keep him out of trouble.
By the end of the third lecture, Heinrich came to the conclusion that Rudi Wöhlman was a German in name only. He had not suffered during the Nazi era, nor did he show any allegiance to the German working class. Wöhlman was another of those “foreign” comrades whom Moscow kept because they had meaningful names in their former native lands. In fact, they had no grasp of the struggle in the countries they pretended to represent, but merely carried out Moscow edicts.
Heinrich’s own father, although a devout Communist, was nonetheless a devout German. He had impressed in the boy that Marx and Engels and the Communist idea were all German. The Soviet Union had merely borrowed them. Wöhlman’s lectures left no doubt that Moscow now was the mecca of Communism.
The first disasters of the campaign against Finland and the vulnerability of the Red Army threw him into a quandary.
The great shock came with the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. Barrages of written and verbal explanations came from the propaganda organs to “prove” that the pact was a scientific treaty consistent with socialist aims. But, explain as they might with all of their persuasive forces, the complete reversal overnight of Soviet foreign policy and avowed Communist goals had a lasting effect upon him and thousands of others. Heinrich Hirsch could not remember when he was not fighting Nazis. These Nazis, now in pact with Russia, were the very same who had murdered his father.
The recourse? There was no way to either question or protest—only justify. He reasoned that if there were flaws it was not in the system, which was scientifically perfect, but with the mortals who ran it and the pressures of the outside. After all, if the Western imperialists had not placed the Soviet Union in such circumstances, he reasoned, we would never have made an agreement with the Nazis.
The German panzers spilled into the Russian motherland in June of 1941, canceling the Pact. The words “fascist,” “Hitlerite,” and “Nazi,” which had not been heard in Moscow for the nearly two years of the treaty’s life, now poured out again in damnation of the aggressors. And all newscasts, speeches, writing ended with the cry, “Death to the Nazi enemy.”
On a night in September of 1941, three months after the German invasion, Heinrich Hirsch was awakened by a knocking on his door. Four NKVD men gave him ten minutes to gather a few personal items in a single bag. At secret-police headquarters his papers and Komsomol card were revoked. He was issued a new identification paper stamped with the words GERMAN and JEW, placed into a waiting truck filled with others who had been processed, and driven in the predawn hours to a barbed-wire enclosure on a rail siding on the outskirts of Moscow. A train of eighty-odd cars, some of them freight and cattle cars, stood by.
Every few moments another truckload of deportees arrived. By morning they had been crammed into the train cars. The windows were barred. Obviously these very cars had made other excursions with “suspect elements.” The shades were drawn, the doors locked and guarded. The train left Moscow in a southeasterly direction toward an unknown destination.
There were seventy persons packed into Heinrich’s car. He found himself to be one of the few true Germans in the lot. For the most part they were made up of persons of German ancestry from the Volga Republic. Rumor spread, even through locked cars, that the entire Volga Republic was being deported en masse; some had a German mother or father ... some had Germanic names ... some had no idea why they were there.
It was a tortuous trip of stop and go. The car stank from the lack of air. Rations and water were thrown in once daily as one feeds a pack of animals in a cage. The only way one could relieve himself was through a twelve-inch hole cut in the floor in the center of the car.
Ten days and a thousand miles later they were allowed to lift the blinds for the first time and leave the train for a stretch. There were dead to be removed from the car, and seriously ill to be left to die. The station was a mob scene of refugees. Tens of thousands of homeless persons who had fled in the face of the German assault were wandering aimlessly, unfed, desperate.
From the signs and the appearance of new guards and rail workers with dark eyes and yellow-brown skins and stubby legs, Heinrich reasoned they had passed beyond the Volga River into the foothills of the Urals in the faraway Soviet Republic of Kazakh.
They continued their journey south, far far past the Urals to Lake Balkesh, at that place where the borders of Siberia, Mongolia, and China meet, and then swung north to the remote city of Karaganda and even beyond that for several hundred miles.
On the twenty-sixth day of this nightmare, the train came to a halt at a wooden shed at a siding of a village bearing the name: Settlement #128. The passengers debarked. Dozens of horse-drawn carts awaited them. The roll was called:
“Bloss. Settlement #89.”
“Hauser. Settlement #44.”
“Bauer. Settlement #123.”
Heinrich Hirsch watched them trudge off to the carts with only a small bundle of their belongings. So this was it, the land of the exiles! Villages without names a thousand miles from nowhere. Here were the survivors of the Kulaks, the independent farmers whom Stalin exiled in his drive to collectivize agriculture at the end of the twenties. Here were the political survivors of the purges. Here were German prisoners from the first war who had never been returned. No doubt his mother was in one of those nameless villages. He dared not inquire.
The odyssey of Heinrich Hirsch could have ended with him going off in the back of a cart down a dirt road into oblivion except that the regime had other uses for him. He was returned to Karaganda.
Heinrich had heard about the city. Karaganda, built under the first five-year plan, was praised in meeting after meeting.
Karaganda could disillusion the most stalwart servant of the party. This planned city of a quarter of a million, the epitome of the Soviet pioneering spirit, turned out to be a dirty, dilapidated hole beyond description, with an evil film of coal dust infecting it.
On the outskirts Heinrich Hirsch saw thousands of large holes in the ground. These were covered with rags, wood, and tin. These oversized graves served as homes for the less fortunate Kulaks who had not been resettled in the nameless villages. A great number of them were aged, crippled, and helpless. In this place they lived on scraps and awaited merciful death from the final horror of “People’s Socialism.”
There were a few modern buildings in Karaganda. They belonged to the NKVD, the Town Soviet, District Committee of the Communist Party, and the Educational and Cultural Institute. In this forsaken hole, Heinrich Hirsch assumed new duties as a reinstated Komsomol member of the Agitation and Propaganda Corps.
There were two objectives. First, the entire German Volga Republic had been deported, many into this district. He had to continue to enlighten the exiles, and keep up their agricultural and manufacturing quotas.
The second objective became more apparent as the war wore on. Trainloads of German prisoners arrived and were encamped. Heinrich Hirsch was on one of the teams to reeducate them. He found German defectors, obtained signatures for petitions against Nazi Germany and used them for broadcasts and newspaper articles.
He retrained them as Communists. Repentant German prisoners could become members of the “anti-Fascists” who were slated to become important in Russia’s postwar occupation plans for Germany.
Hirsch did his job well. In 1943 Rudi Wöhlman traveled to Karaganda and assigned many Germans to new duties. Among the appointees was Heinrich Hirsch, who had undergone his third redemption.
Once again he crossed the great Kuzkah desert. This time he traveled on an unguarded train and with new papers without the damnations GERMAN and JEW stamped on them. His destination was the city of Ufa in the Autonomous Republic of Bashkir, some eight hundred miles east of Moscow.
As the Russians evacuated citizens and machinery into their vast lands certain cities received certain types of evacuees with similar characteristics; Alma Ata and Tashkent became wartime centers of artists and scientists; others drew manufacturing complexes and became transport or training points.
Ufa became the center of International Communism. Under agreement with the Western Allies, the International Comintern had been officially dissolved. But in remote Ufa, it continued to operate under a different set of titles.
Heinrich Hirsch was attached as a member of the International Society for the Aid of Class War Prisoners. In Ufa he joined the cream of foreign Communist trainees.
Like most Soviet cities in the hinterlands, Ufa was jammed with starving refugees and the horrible privations of wartime. However, this did not affect the Comintern trainees who continued to live splendidly.
His particular school was known as Technical School #77 for Industrial Economy. In this institute Germans, Czechs, Austrians, Spaniards, Bulgars, Poles, Italians, French, South Americans, and Africans all trained for the singular purposes of infiltrating, subverting, and destroying their former homelands.
In this inner sanctum of hard-core trainees the tactics of keeping the imperialists on the defensive were emphasized by use of constant, prodding harassment and pressure. Lenin remained the infallible source of inspiration. “Push out a bayonet. If it strikes fat, push deeper. If it strikes iron, pull back for another day.”
In order to learn how to counter imperialist propaganda the students were exposed to Western books, newspapers, speeches, broadcasts. For in Ufa, the enemy, the true enemy, was everyone who was not a Communist. This meant the temporary American and British allies just as it had meant the Nazis during the Non-Aggression Pact days.
During the meticulous courses in counterpropaganda Heinrich Hirsch, for the first time, was exposed to Jefferson, Lincoln, and Paine and Western thought. All of the Anglo/American ideologies were thoroughly dissected and destroyed in the classrooms, but at the same time, a new flood of thought opened.
For the first time in his life he was able to read that all of the world’s ideas were not discovered by Marx, Lenin, or Stalin. Added to his earlier confusions and disillusions, Hirsch knew that he could become an agent of the revolution only through the fear of power and the silencing forever of his own voices of inquisitiveness.
Something else happened to him in Ufa. Heinrich had reached his twenty-third year without ever having sex with a woman. He had always been too tired from his studies and too dedicated to indulge in such nonsense.
In Ufa he met Maria Majoros, the young daughter of a Spanish Communist who, like his own father, was a martyr of the Communist world.
At what moment does one try to describe the first awakening? What happens when the long suppressed emotion bursts alive like springtime? How does one tell of the sensation of first love? First a meeting of the eyes ... then, perhaps, stolen glances ... going out of the way to be at a place where you know she is passing ... a first rendezvous filled with trembling and fumbling, and then ... a knowing of love.
It was discovery that there were other things on this earth that belonged to most men that had been denied him.
Wild great cries of love to each other in stolen places ...
BULLETIN!
HEINRICH HIRSCH AND MARIA MAJOROS WILL APPEAR BEFORE THE KOMSOMOL COMMITTEE FOR THE PURPOSE OF SELF-CRITICISM.
Who told on them? Did it really matter? Was there ever life away from prying eyes?
They took their medicine. They stood side by side daring not to look at each other. The portrait of Stalin glared down at them; it always did. The angry eyes of the Komsomol Committee executives scorned them, and they confessed their shame.
“I beg for the understanding of my comrades for this petit bourgeois indulgent act I have committed,” Heinrich Hirsch said of the love of the only woman he had known. “I am humiliated for allowing myself to forget my Communist upbringing and behavior unworthy of a member of Komsomol.”
For an hour Heinrich Hirsch was berated; and then, Maria Majoros, a woman of proud Spanish blood, blurted her “confession”:
“The manifestations and provocations of my act with Heinrich Hirsch are contrary to the duty of a socialist woman. I beg mercy from my comrades to prove myself again worthy of making my contribution to world revolution.”
When the further debasement of Maria Majoros was over the girl was sent away from Ufa, never to be heard from again.
Heinrich Hirsch, the twenty-five-year-old deputy to Rudi Wöhlman on the German People’s Liberation Committee, had now finished his journey into the past at the flat on Geyer Strasse 2.
The old woman in the room was still filled with a fear of the strange young man.
“Don’t be frightened, Mutter,” he said softly, “I just wanted to see what it looked like.”
He walked outside into the shambles of Berlin. The homecoming was done.
Chapter Five
IGOR KARLOVY REQUISITIONED A mansion in Karlshorst for his billet. It was relatively undamaged, and the twelve rooms were the most luxurious he had ever been in. The headquarters office was established in the main drawing room; he did his own work in his enormous, lush bedroom. Reports poured in from all over the city with data for the dismantling of the Berlin industrial complex. In a few days he was due to hand in his own findings to Commissar Azov and the German People’s Liberation Committee.
A sound of singing reached his ears, the voices of his men. Igor took off his glasses, put them down for a moment, and listened from his desk. The song, known to him from childhood, was called “Volga, Volga,” a song of the cossacks and their lure. It was Russian, melodic, and mournful. Young Feodor’s voice sang with nostalgia.
A fine boy, young Feodor, Igor thought ... my most promising officer. They had been through it all together, Feodor and the colonel. They were more like brothers than senior and junior officers.
The voice of Ivan Orlov joined in the chorus. Ivan sings well, Igor thought, but that is about all. He hangs too closely on the words of the commissars and the edicts. He spies on us.
Igor stretched, yawned, patted his flat hard stomach, and slipped into his tunic without buttoning it and went into the living room. The singers were warmly comfortable after the first flushes of victory and the afterglow of Vodka. They sat about in the deep comfort of the great house with their boots off and their tunics open.
“Sit still, sit still,” Igor said as he entered.
Feodor tossed a mandolin to the colonel; he perched his foot on a stool, lit a cigarette, and caught up in the chorus:
Volga, Volga you’re my mother,
Volga, you’re a Russian stream ...
Captain Boris Chernov came in from the outside just as the song came to its sorrowful end telling of a young princess being thrown into the waters as a sacrifice.
“You’re late,” Igor admonished. “I’ve been holding up the entire report on your account.”
“Forgive me, Comrade Colonel,” Boris said, slyly holding up a woman’s delicate watch. “I got delayed by a little German dumpling.”
Ivan Orlov laughed. Igor set his instrument down, snatched the papers out of Boris’ case, and returned to his bedroom slamming the door behind him.
“What bothers the colonel?” Boris asked.
“He thinks our officers shouldn’t screw the German women,” Feodor snapped, coming to the colonel’s defense.
“Nonsense,” Ivan Orlov said.
“Let me tell you that many officers are condemning the whole thing and want to put a stop to it.”
“I was at headquarters”—Boris laughed—“an old woman was complaining she was raped eighty-four times. The doctor insisted she was enjoying it or she wouldn’t have bothered to count.”
Ivan laughed; Feodor got more angry.
“Come now, Feodor,” Boris said. “Do you think the Germans deserve better?”
“The hell with both of you,” Feodor answered. “Besides, I don’t think much of your taste. As for me, I wouldn’t stick mine between a German woman’s legs.”
Igor Karlovy was standing in the doorway, his fists clenched. “Carry on your goddamned discussion elsewhere. I’m trying to finish my work.”
Forty-eight hours after his report was filed, Commissar Azov summoned Igor to meet with the head of the German People’s Liberation Committee.
V. V. Azov, who made a fine art of keeping himself inconspicuous, mysterious, and anonymous, had a mansion in Potsdam on the Wannsee. His house was in a forest, shades eternally drawn, grounds heavily guarded.
The usual portrait of Stalin hung over the conference table in the dark-paneled room replacing an oil of Prussian nobility. Even in the worst days of Leningrad, Igor thought, there was never a shortage of Stalin’s portraits. V. V. Azov looked expressionless and bored as he took his place at the table.
Two members of the German People’s Liberation Committee sat opposite him. Igor personally disliked most of the Germans on the committee. It was true that all of them were tested Communists who had fled Hitler, yet he felt there was too much German left in their souls.
Rudi Wöhlman’s face reminded Igor of the little field rats that used to attack the grain stores on the family farm ... thin face, thin beard, glinting front teeth. He had brought with him his young aide, Heinrich Hirsch.
“To get directly to the point,” Azov said, “I find your report unsatisfactory.”
Igor had dealt with party people successfully all during the siege and the great offenses out of Russia, across Poland, East Prussia, and Germany. He wished they would let him stick to Air Force problems, but his own talent trapped him; he knew the language. “If the Comrade Commissar would get to specifics I am certain I can offer explanations.”
“Many of our recommendations have been rejected,” Heinrich Hirsch said sharply.
“Let us take the transfer of railroad cars as an example. You deleted it,” Azov said.
“I am certain,” Igor answered, “the Commissar is aware there is a different gauge in the German and Soviet rail systems that make their rolling stock useless to us. With our transport and distribution problems the rail cars have better use in Germany.”
Azov nodded that the point was well taken. “However,” he said drolly, “the German and Polish rail systems are compatible. Our Polish comrades have suffered untold brutality at the hands of the Nazi beasts. The Lublin People’s Committee for a Free and Democratic Poland have asked us to help them in rebuilding their shattered homeland. Delivery of the rail stock in the Brandenburg Province will be among the first Polish reparations.”
Igor pretended to study his folio in order to give himself time to decipher the true meaning of Azov’s rhetoric. Dozens of such conferences had taught him not to be taken by a surprise announcement of policy. What he unscrambled was that the Lublin Poles had been installed to run the country.
“It poses a technical problem,” Igor said carefully.
“Which is?”
“The Brandenburg Province, and Berlin in particular, has never been self-sustaining in food even in the best of days. Furthermore, food surplus must come from eastern German provinces. This means we need rail stock. Also, I have studied the draft of our agreement with the Americans and British. As I interpret it, the immediate areas around Berlin are responsible for feeding the city. This will all be impossible without freight cars.”
Azov tapped his fingers on the tabletop, digesting Igor Karlovy’s line of logic. Wöhlman looked from one to another, not daring to venture an opinion at this point.
“Your interpretation of the treaty with the Western Allies is incorrect,” Azov said. “The Americans and British must feed their own sectors of Berlin from their own sources. Therefore, we will be responsible for feeding less than a third of the city.”
Again, Igor tried to separate political implications from realities. Azov’s words, which were official policy, said that Russia would find a way to break the treaty. America and Britain would be compelled to bring in food from a distance of at least two hundred kilometers, if not from overseas. Furthermore, Berlin depended upon coal for industrial power from the Ruhr. The loss of freight cars was obviously intended to place such a burden on the Western Allies that it might be impossible for them to stay in Berlin. Igor nodded that he understood. “Certainly our Polish comrades should have the rolling stock,” he said. “I will reevaluate the situation at once.”
Next Azov listed several classifications of machinery which had been omitted from the report.
“The machinery you speak of,” he answered, “cannot be integrated into the Soviet system. It is useless to us. Furthermore, it will take tens of thousands of man hours to dismantle it and move it by rail and unload it for the sole purpose of letting it rust in depots. It is an expensive waste of both rail space and man power.”
“However, Comrade Colonel,” Azov came back with “policy,” “even if the machinery is valueless to us it has great value to the Germans, particularly if they entertain the notion of a war of revenge against the Soviet Union.”
Wöhlman now felt safe in handing Azov a list. He cleared his throat. “I call your attention to the recommendations of the German People’s Liberation Committee in paragraph twenty-two, which we presented to you as far back as Warsaw. You have not included them, Comrade Colonel.”
This coming from Rudi Wöhlman was too much. For an instant Igor almost lost his composure. He felt like shouting, “What the hell side are you on, Wöhlman? Are you a German or not?” Of course, he said nothing, stifling his anger with a slight smile.
Colonel Karlovy knew the notorious paragraph twenty-two from memory. It listed the removal of Berlin’s toilets, sinks, doorknobs, window sashes, wiring, light bulbs, chairs and desks, typewriters, window shades, bidets, and many dozen other such items as part of Berlin’s “industrial complex.” How eager to please Rudi Wöhlman was! He’d even take the toilets out of Berlin!
“I fail to understand,” Igor said, now calming himself, “how German toilets will either add to the wealth of the Soviet Union or to future German war-making potential. If Comrade Wöhlman would be so good as to explain?”
Comrade Wöhlman was flustered long enough for Azov to step in and save him. “Before the re-education of the German working class they must be made to realize what happens to those who dare attack the Soviet Union. Only after the Germans atone for attacking our motherland will the Liberation Committee be in a position to build socialism.” With that pronouncement Igor knew the conversation was at an end. “I take it then,” Azov continued, “you are aware of the deficiencies in your report.”
The moment had come. Igor Karlovy nodded his head and mumbled an apology for his mistakes.
“Whatever you do, give priority attention to those sections of West Berlin scheduled for American and British occupation. We want everything cleared out before they come.”
The meeting was abruptly ended upon Igor’s promise to have an amended report ready in seventy-two hours.
“If you will drive me in to our headquarters,” Heinrich Hirsch said, “I will get ready the lists of our original recommendations.”
“By all means, Comrade Hirsch.”
They passed through the gates of Azov’s mansion onto Königs Road and the devastation of Berlin. Heinrich Hirsch was the least offensive of the Germans to Igor. He was the youngest member of the committee and obviously Wöhlman’s right hand. Small wonder. In the meetings they had had, he found Hirsch’s tongue like a razor, an astute brain reacting quickly with a depth of knowledge of the dialectics. Most of the party people pondered on each word, weighed their answers meticulously; not so Hirsch. Igor knew he was the son of a martyred German Communist. Beside that, only a few hazy half facts. One never asked about another’s background or experiences. One had to treat another with basic distrust, for he never knew if he was talking to a spy or just how words would be used against him someday. The fact that Hirsch had emerged as a member of the committee at such an early age testified to his stature. For a long while they were wordless. They passed near the lake with the pale green birch trees forming a mantle on both sides of the road.
“I agree with your position,” Hirsch said at last.
“What position?”
“Your attempt to save Berlin from being stripped down to the last nail and screw.”
“It was not a position, Comrade Hirsch. I am merely an engineer. Positions, as you call them, come from Commissar Azov.”
“Nevertheless,” Hirsch countered quickly, “you chose to ignore Rudi Wöhlman’s recommendations and drew up different plans.”
“On what I believed to be a purely scientific basis. I was only thinking in the mathematical terms of work hours and transportation. Now that I have been made aware of the political considerations my position, as you call it, has been clarified.”
It was the kind of wording both of them knew well. “Hell, let’s face it,” Heinrich persisted, to Igor’s discomfort, “it’s damned bad business. Not only the stripping of the city but abuses by the soldiers.”
Igor stared directly ahead, pretending to be bored. His brain worked feverishly to avoid being drawn into such a discussion. Igor took the road that cut diagonally across the Grunewald. There was not too much damage in this area. “The present behavior of the Red Army is destroying a great image.”
“Just a minute, Comrade Hirsch. The Soviet Union did not invite the Nazis to invade, destroy our cities, burn our fields, kill our children, and rape our women,” Igor recited from the standard line. “Our men have fought hard and have been bloodied for thousands of miles. After what has been done to us, the German people would be fools to expect less. Besides,” he added as an afterthought, “soldiers are soldiers.”
Hirsch struck back immediately. “In all candor Comrade Colonel, this continued rape can only diminish the stature of the Red Army regardless of the provocations. Both Marx and Lenin have pointed out that in order for us to successfully carry out world revolution we must first have the support of a socialist German working class.”
“The German working class will be rebuilt after every vestige of the Nazi is purged from him.”
“But, Comrade Colonel, I raise the question of whether our soldiers are discriminating between Nazis and non-Nazis in their ... er ... sport. Certainly the rape of a ten-year-old girl will do nothing to induce the Germans to accept the Soviet way of life.”
“There are bound to be a few mistakes,” Igor answered weakly.
“A few hundred thousand is more like it. Colonel Karlovy, I dare this conversation with you out of mutual love of the Soviet Union. I have begged Comrade Wöhlman to speak to Azov. The fact of the matter is that Wöhlman at times appears to be more intent on pleasing the commissars and keeping in their good graces than he is of representing the new Germany. If these abuses are allowed to continue it must end in earning the everlasting hatred of the German people and it must sow the seeds of a war of revenge. You are a hero of the Soviet Union in a position to exert pressure. Many Red Army officers are disgusted with the events in Berlin.”
Igor was now terribly uncomfortable. They had emerged from the forest and were moving toward the wreckage of central Berlin. Igor knew nothing could stop the rape and looting except orders from Azov. Acts of “individualism” was just the type of thing that killed half the officer corps off during the purges. “Comrade Hirsch, many things you have said to me could bring you grave consequences. For this time alone, I will forget you ever opened your mouth.”
Heinrich Hirsch stared at Igor. There was no more to be said. They reached the Brandenburg Gate, where the red flag hung limply atop the monument to former German victories, and crossed beneath to the Unter Den Linden. The avenue of former grandeur was perhaps the most horrible in all of Berlin with its massive gutted shells. Hirsch asked to be let out.
“I’m sorry I spoke to you, Colonel Karlovy,” he said. “I was gravely mistaken. I thought you were different.”
Igor, smarting from the last remark, watched Hirsch go off. He gripped the wheel of the car tightly ... damned bastard!
He was wearing thin with the whole mess in Berlin. And now, this business of stripping toilets. What the hell, political decisions were not handed down for discussion. As one who was trained in the days of the purges, Igor knew how to go into mental vacuums. The officers’ training created situations to compel the men to inform on each other. Spying was an accepted way of life. One had to be careful not to form lasting friendships for he could never tell when the most innocent complaint would be twisted against him. Spying kept minds alert and prevented cliques of military deviationists from forming.
Despite this conditioning Igor Karlovy was reachable. There were memories to haunt him. Always at a time like this the ghost and the voice of Peter Egorov was heard. He drove back to his house, forgetting his work, locking his door behind him, drinking quickly to drown out the memory of Peter.
He lay on his bed and the sweat began to form in cold beads. Damn you Peter Egorov! Damn you! Why did you do it? Will you leave me in peace! You know you were a fool ... you know that.
More vodka ... yes, more vodka to burn away the memory.
Lieutenant Peter Egorov and Feodor Guchkov were the favorites of Colonel Karlovy. All of the young engineers looked to Igor as their idol during the siege of Leningrad.
His ingenuity, bravery, and bravado had become legend. What was more, Colonel Karlovy was not a party member. Things in his command were relaxed. Members of his immediate staff were like family. What a hell of a time they had, the three of them. Loving, fighting, and drinking. Igor, Feodor, and Peter Egorov.
What a brilliant young officer Peter was! A superb engineer with endless talents for improvising, particularly in keeping up factory production. So bright was Peter that those factories in his immediate command even increased production in the middle of the siege.
Peter had a Cossack’s lust for life. Perhaps that is why Igor, a Cossack himself, was drawn to the younger man. He had all the attributes ... he sang like a nightingale or fought like a tiger as the occasion demanded. He loved women and women loved him.
When the siege was broken and the lines rolled westward, Igor was borrowed from the Red Air Force and promoted as chief engineer of the entire front. Peter and Feodor came along on his staff. Throughout the offenses of 1944 and 1945 the engineers moved with the armies through the Baltics, White Russia, and into Poland, erecting bridges, blowing up other bridges, repairing ports, laying airstrips, demolishing unsafe buildings, cutting roads, repairing rails.
The White Russian Front rolled up to the gates of Warsaw and halted on the east bank of the Vistula River in the industrial suburb of Praga. After Praga was cleared a queer edict came down from the top not to pursue the Germans across the river into Warsaw.
At first the field commanders were told that the entire front had to regroup and resupply. Later the word was passed down that there was an uprising inside Warsaw by “military adventurers” representing the imperialist London Polish Group. Although these explanations were hazy, officers of the Red Army were conditioned too well to inquire further. They could, nevertheless, see the destruction of Warsaw just across the river with their naked eyes.
Days wore on that brought counterrumors that Nazi panzer divisions were being allowed to reduce Warsaw to the ground and that civilians were being massacred.
In the meanwhile a Moscow-trained People’s Committee for Free and Democratic Poland had been installed in Lublin, to the south. The Red Army could feel the anger and resentment of the Polish population. Igor smelled the rage of the Poles; he knew such things from his own childhood. The Lublin committee was apparently having a difficult time convincing the Poles that the Soviet Union had truly liberated them.
One night during the second week of the fighting in Warsaw Peter Egorov came to Igor’s quarters.
“Many of us are fed up with the butchering of the people in Warsaw,” he said. “We know we have the strength to cross the river and help them.”
“Calm down, Peter. It is unfortunate that a few civilians are caught in the middle. You know that this Polish Home Army is nothing more than a fascist tool.”
“For God’s sake, Colonel! They are Poles fighting for Poland against Nazis!”
“Be careful how you talk, Peter.”
“I’ve been careful how I’ve talked all my life. For once I want to shout out what is in my heart Colonel ... listen to me ... there are other officers who feel as I do. Among us we can organize several hundred troops. We plan to lay down a bridge upstream and bring over weapons to the defenders and stay on and fight. With you, Igor Karlovy, leading us, five thousand troops will cross behind you. Believe me, Colonel... this is the way to go out.”
For an instant Igor’s heart was seized with the fire!
“Imagine. If the Red Army came to the rescue of Warsaw then the Poles would know we are their liberators instead of their captors,” Peter cried.
Peter was a Ukrainian and a Pole. Igor had long ago sensed the dangerous trait of “nationalism” in him; it had lain dormant, but began seething beneath the surface. Now, as they stood opposite Warsaw, it exploded.
“I will forget you spoke to me, Peter, and I suggest you forget your madness.”
Peter did not forget. He and six other junior officers and fifty soldiers of the rank were betrayed on the night before they were to attempt their crossing.
Commissar V. V. Azov ordered a special three-man military court to try them. One of the judges was Igor Karlovy. He was deliberately selected because Peter Egorov was a member of his engineering staff. Who had betrayed them?
It did not much matter. Perhaps it was Ivan Orlov. Everyone knew he was the party man. Perhaps it was someone else. It would never be known.
Before the court convened, confessions were obtained by the secret and political police. The young rebels were questioned around the clock in the Praga prison. Old hands at obtaining confessions, the secret police broke the rebels down one by one, mainly by a promise of sleep. Fifty-six sworn statements all confessed to “an anti-Soviet plot for the purpose of committing sabotage, treason, and collaboration with the enemy.” The “enemy,” in this case, was the Polish Underground.
A secret trial followed. The court convened in the warden’s office beneath a portrait of Stalin and a slogan speaking well of Soviet justice.
Justice was delivered quickly. There was a reading of the charges, a reading of the confessions, brief deliberations by the judges, and the pronouncement of the death sentence, to be carried out immediately.
V. V. Azov did not take part in the proceedings but stayed on merely as a “spectator” in the interest of the state. The three judges signed the execution order. Azov gave Igor Karlovy a demonstration of the finality of his power.
“Comrade Colonel,” Azov said, “you will personally supervise the executions.”
How strange ... how terribly strange. As Peter Egorov was led into the courtyard and placed against the firing wall he wore a smile on his face. It was a look of fulfillment, of satisfaction, of knowing a great secret. Until the last instant of his life, Peter Egorov smiled mockingly into the eyes of Igor Karlovy ... until he slumped over dead.
Chapter Six
THE COLONEL REMAINED IN a black mood the next day. He was testy while the stream of appointments worked through his office and several times during conferences on redisposal of labor forces he snapped at subordinates in a manner unlike him.
Ivan Orlov attributed the colonel’s behavior to the fact that he had been dressed down by Azov. The other dozen officers and men stationed m the mansion kept silent. Only Feodor really knew that the ghost of Peter Egorov had returned. He had seen the colonel like this before. If enough vodka was in him he’d sometimes babble to Feodor that he had done the right thing at the trial and that Peter had brought on his own death.
Heinrich Hirsch had touched it off. Why must one always come back to that situation of being forced into a decision against the regime? Igor told himself that he was an engineer. All he wished was a chance to build again—that and a little peace of mind. Why did this damned situation recur and recur?
By evening Igor retreated to his office in his bedroom. A tray was brought to him and he locked himself in. After a long while, immersed in figures, he calmed down. The mocking eyes of Peter, the blood-drenched paving stones of the prison yard, the challenge of Heinrich Hirsch all melted into the rows of numbers.
The night was warmish. He took off his tunic and placed it on the back of his chair, shoved his papers to one side, walked to his balcony, and leaned against the doorframe. A restless breeze rustled the leaves of the trees. Hirsch was right, of course. It was shameful, all of it ... raping of thousands of little girls and old women. The women of Berlin were creeping around with mud on their faces to make themselves appear repulsive. Others pretended to be feeble-minded so the soldiers would leave them alone. It would take years, if not forever, to make the German people believe in the Soviet way after this. But, what the hell! Hirsch was as foolish as Peter Egorov had been. Only orders from Azov could stop it.
He looked over his shoulder back into the room to the waiting work but was in no mood to concentrate. The balminess of the night soon consumed him with sentimentality. He hummed, and then sang softly to himself ...“Daleko”...“Daleko” ...
Far, far away,
Where the fog swells,
Where gentle breezes,
Sway o’er the wheat,
In your own land,
By a hill in the Steppe,
You live as you did,
Think often of me,
Day ... night ... all the time,
From me far away,
Await my love ...
A strange sound stopped his song; he cocked his head to listen. Something was rustling about in the bushes of the garden. Perhaps a stray cat. No, wait! He went to the rail ... a heavy thrashing ... angry grunts of a man’s voice, then! a short sharp cry of a woman!
Igor hand-sprang the rail and dropped gingerly to the ground. A fierce struggle was going on.
“Kumm frau!”
Igor sprinted to the place and pushed the bushes aside. In the semi-darkness he could make out a man in Russian uniform atop the writhing figure of a woman pinned to the earth. Igor swung his boot up, kicking the soldier on the side of the head, knocking him off the woman. The soldier crawled to his hands and knees, dragged himself up to receive a thunderous fist in his mouth. The soldier went down again flat on his back. Igor glowered over him.
“Animal!”
He reached down, gripped the dazed man, jerked him upright, and dragged him into the light. Feodor! “Oh Mother of God! Not you, too, Feodor! You who were too good to touch a German woman! Not you, too, Feodor!”
Feodor wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. Igor flung him to the ground, enraged, kicked his ribs, and jammed the heel of his boot into the pit of his back. “Get out of my sight!”
Feodor crawled off as Igor tried to hold back tears of rage and disgust. The woman thrashed and groaned. He went to her and knelt beside her.
“Are you all right?” he said abruptly in German.
She answered with a whimper. He helped her to her feet and braced her as they walked into the light. She stood swaying ... trying to hold together her ripped clothing. Igor took her face firmly in his hand, turned it to the best light, and examined the cuts and bruises. She was very young, and although quite dirty and bloody he could see that she was extremely pretty.
“You are just a child,” he said. “All right, stop your babbling. I am not going to hurt you.”
The girl began to regain her self-control, gulping great gobs of air and shuddering. “What the devil were you doing inside these gates?”
“I could smell the bread baking.”
“You are so hungry?”
“I haven’t eaten in three days.”
“That is quite unlikely. You could go to the soup lines.”
“I did. Two soldiers pulled me out of line and took me into the rubble. I did not go back.”
Igor reacted with a grunt of revulsion. “Very well, I’ll give you something to eat and have a car take you home.”
“I have no home. Your soldiers took it.”
“Parents?”
“They were both killed in an air raid by the Amis three months ago.”
“Friends? Relatives?”
“My relatives all live in Dresden. Friends are all scattered. It is not easy to get around these days. We stay off the streets. I don’t know where most of them are.”
Suddenly she toppled in a dead faint. Igor caught her, swooped her into his arms, and walked toward the house. The questioning eyes of Ivan Orlov met him at the front door. “Are you going to bring her in here?”
“What do you propose, Orlov?” He shoved past the captain harshly, then turned. “You have time enough to run to Azov and report this. As for now, have my orderly prepare something warm to eat and see if there is woman’s clothing in any of the closets.”
Feodor was waiting before the colonel’s door. “I am so ashamed,” he whispered.
Igor spat at the young officer’s feet, entered his bedroom, and laid the girl down. He wiped the back of her neck with a damp cloth, applied smelling salts, and as she came to, made her sit on the edge of the bed and put her head between her legs.
“Come along, child. You are all right.”
The girl’s hand trembled so badly Igor had to feed her at first. He made her sip slowly from the hot cabbage borsch filled with chunks of meat. Her shrunken stomach rebelled at the sudden onslaught of food.
“Don’t eat so quickly or you’ll throw it all up.”
She nodded, then ate until she thought she would burst. She pushed the dark rich bread around in the bottom of the bowl.
“What is your name, girl?”
“Lotte. Lotte Böhm.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“Well ... how do you feel now?”
“Better.”
Igor had his orderly clear the room. The soldier said he had found some woman’s clothing. Igor told him to unlock the adjoining bedroom and not disturb him further.
When the soldier left he considered the situation. The girl seemed to have recovered her senses and appeared none the worse for wear ... a few minor bruises. However, she might be too weak to go on out alone. Out to what, of course, was conjecture. All that appeared to wait for her, if her story could be believed, was another rapist. Naturally, he felt no obligation to protect her; nevertheless, one would have afforded the same courtesy to a beaten dog.
“Your story had better be completely true,” he said. “I intend to check it.”
“I wish it were not true. I wish I had a home and parents.”
He came to a sudden decision. “I shall allow you to sleep in the next bedroom tonight. You will not be disturbed. Help yourself to whatever clothing is in there. Tomorrow I will see what can be done about arranging a safe place for you.”
“You are very kind,” she said and began to cry.
Igor wanted to say that not all Russians were like those in the streets now ... even after a war that had taken his only child and his beloved Natasha. Yes, even after Natasha, mortal enemies must have some humanity left. He opened the door to the next bedroom.
Lotte Böhm wiped her tears. “Do you have water?” she blurted.
“Water?”
“To wash.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I have not washed decently in a month.”
“Well, help yourself.”
“Could ... could I ... bathe?”
She knocked timidly at the half-opened door. Igor turned from his desk. “Well now, let’s take a look at you. You look quite decent with your face scrubbed.”
Her youth had made possible a revival of body and spirit. She breathed deeply and happily and bounced about her bedroom pinning up her hair in long graceful rolls. She wore an oversized night coat, making her appear very tiny. “I was thinking about how nice you are all the time I was bathing. You must be someone very important.”
“Just a soldier.” He pointed to the bed. She slipped between the covers, stretched and purred with joy and felt the pillows and the satin spread as though she were in a wonderland. “I’ll die if I wake up and find this is a dream. I’ll die if I wake up in the cellar.”
Igor sat on the edge of the bed and smiled indulgently. She was so small and helpless. So like ... Natasha. Unconsciously, his hand reached out and touched her cheek, startling her. He drew his hand away quickly.
“I did not mean to frighten you.”
“You do not frighten me.” She rolled away so that her back was to him. “I have been living in a cellar alone for six months. I have been half starved all the time. The Amis came with their bombers every day and the British every night. And since the Russians ...”
“I know.”
“I am more grateful to you than I can say.”
“We are just people ...”
“I must show you how grateful I am. I want to please you.”
“It is not a condition for being human to one another.”
“But I want to thank you. I have no other way. The others took what they wanted from me. Once I was left for dead in the gutters when three of them had finished with me. At least let me give it once, willingly.”
“Go to sleep and shut up.”
“When I was out there, struggling on the ground, I ... I heard a voice singing ...”
He leaned over, bussed her cheek, touched her hair. “Good night, Natasha.”
“It was your voice, wasn’t it?”
He flicked off the light and walked to the door.
“Please don’t make the room dark,” she called out.
“I will be working at my desk in the next room. I will leave the door open.”
Igor usually liked the hours of night to work. In the complete quiet of night one’s thoughts could be immaculately clear, but ghosts of the day followed him into this night. Things ran together. Drab statistics and engineering problems were invaded by the haunting smile of Peter Egorov and the sharp voice of Hirsch—and now Natasha was with him!
From time to time he heard the girl thrash restlessly and heard moans of what seemed to be a continuous nightmare. He found himself standing in the doorway looking at her as though drawn by an uncontrollable force. The light from his room fell across her body. What a magnificent little creature! She is young ... I was young once. Where did it all go?
And, as though Lotte had been awaiting him, she awakened from her sleep and saw him. They looked at each other for a long time without movement or speech. She did not blink and barely breathed as she drew him toward the bed, slowly. He sat down on the edge.
Her little hand reached out, took his powerful hand, and led it beneath the comforter and placed it on her throbbing breast, and then she drew the covers aside for him.
Her body was deliciously young and firm and warm.
Softly, he kept repeating to himself, softly. Be very gentle with her. Handle her with delicacy and make up to her for all of those miserable brutes. Be tender and make her want me as Natasha wanted me.
He worked her up slowly until the nerve ends leaped from her skin. They taunted and teased each other, but the girl was being driven mad. She groaned with the joy and tried to draw him in and devour him. And then came a time when control and judgment fled and they burst into convulsions ... and now, at last, Lotte slept a deep, quiet, peaceful sleep.
Igor Karlovy remained awake. He lay on his back, the girl’s body curled up against him. His eyes were wide open.
... Now I am no better than the rest of them ... but then, have I ever been? Have I ever really been?
Chapter Seven
THE VILLAGE OF GLINKA on the Kuban River in southern Russia in the year 1921:
Igor finished his chores in the barn. He crossed through the chicken yard to the pump, took off his square, beaded cap and embroidered peasant’s shirt, drew a pail of water, and splashed it over his face and the back of his neck and hands.
He glanced pensively toward the cottage. Muffled, angry voices filtered out of it into the evening air. His father and his brother, Alexander, would be at it again. It was like this every night now, one heated argument after another. Last week his father had struck Alexander in a rage.
It was the same all over the village. Everyone walked about with long faces, curses on their lips, and suspicion in their eyes. Many of the younger villagers like Alexander had joined the Reds and fought with them. But there were others, mostly from the elders, who had been with the Whites.
Igor felt the presence of someone and turned to see Natasha inching toward him shyly. She smiled with obvious adoration of first love, for she was ten and he was twelve. She reached down and handed him his shirt.
Igor tolerated her as one tolerates a small sister. He had known Natasha from earliest memory. She lived three cottages down the road. Well, perhaps it was more than a toleration; she was a faithful friend. They even shared a secret hiding place near a bend in the river. Oftentimes they would meet there and discuss their most intimate thoughts.
“Please don’t be so sad, Igor,” she said.
“I don’t like to go into the house any more.”
“It is no better in my house.”
“Yes, I know. Alexander says the fighting is over. We all have to accept the new order. Only Poppa ...”
“Igor, come down to the river tomorrow and meet me?”
“I don’t know. We will be sacking grain most of the day. Besides, I have to study. You know how Alexander insists I learn how to read and write.”
“Please.”
“Very well. But only for a few minutes when the others are taking their midday rest.”
She ran off, climbed the rail fence, then ran down the road toward her cottage after a last look and a wave.
“Igor! Come in!” Momma’s voice called.
The crude room was held by an awesome silence. Igor’s father, Gregory Karlovy, a leathery, bearded giant sat at the rough-hewn table with his great hands folded, glowering at the floor. Opposite him, twenty-year-old Alexander sat with his face muscles twitching with tension. Igor slipped alongside his father as quietly as he could.
A great pot of chicken broth and dumplings was put on the center of the table. As Alexander reached for a chunk of bread his father raised his head and glared at him. Alexander retreated by dropping the bread, folding his hands, and mumbling a short prayer and crossing himself.
It was another of those silent meals, frequent of late, the only noise an occasional slurp. With each spoonful Igor saw the wrath building up in his father. Finally the old man brought a hamlike fist down on the table making the entire room rumble. “My own flesh and blood leaving the house and the land of his fathers!”
Alexander nearly choked trying to swallow past the lump in his throat. His father roared again. He dropped his spoon. “I’m telling you for the fiftieth time. I am going to Rostov at the invitation of the District Planning Committee. It is the greatest opportunity in my life. We will be reorganizing clear down to the Georgian border. Can’t you understand how important this is to me?”
“Nothing is more important than your own farm.”
“You’re wrong, Poppa. The revolution is more important.”
“It seems to me,” the father answered with a trembling voice, “that we have lived through enough years of bloodshed and sorrow. First the war took half our sons, then the revolution, and then the counterrevolution. Is there to be no peace? What kind of a revolution is it that turns a son against his own father and his own land.”
“The old ways are gone.”
“Gone, hell! Generations of Karlovys have been born, lived, and died on this land! Don’t you tell me they’re gone!”
“Poppa, for God’s name. The counterrevolution has failed. We’ve been bled dry for centuries. The people want a new life.”
“I will thank you not to repeat Red slogans under this roof.”
“This is not a slogan, Poppa. Glinka has stood here for three hundred years without a school or a hospital. Don’t you want to see Igor read and write. Don’t you want to see women like your own wife give birth without losing three or four children.”
The old man shook his head sadly. “Freedom is life, my son. We have heard all of the talk of reform before. Here ... this land ... this is freedom. You are a Kuban Cossack and that is freedom. If there is anything we have learned it is to smell out those who would take freedom from us.”
The young man pushed away from the table. “What the hell’s the use of talking.”
An impasse had been reached. A final impasse. The flame of revolution was destined to burn in the young man’s heart, alone. The father was lost to the son just as the old ways were gone. Alexander turned, shoved open the curtain across his alcove, and grabbed his carpetbag. His mother and his brother began weeping.
He went to her and kissed her and he tousled his brother’s hair. “Study Igor, study. The future will belong to those who study.”
The father and the son stood face to face. “Shall we shake hands, Father? Will you wish me a good journey?”
Gregory Karlovy arose, but his hands remained at his sides. He turned his back. “May God protect you,” he whispered after the door slammed shut.
Igor whistled their secret code, three times like a marsh swallow, then skittered down the bank through the tall grass to the clearing where Natasha waited for him. They were on the slightest of knolls on a point in the bend of the river; nearby stood a huge and ancient willow tree whose limbs draped to the water’s edge.
It was midday. The air hung still, the land aflame with oranges and reds and golds. A raftsman swirled past them, poking his long pole into the opposite bank to push him back midstream. Voices of song drifted to their hearing from over the fields.
Natasha’s great brown eyes were filled with fear and she was trembling. “I’m so glad you’re here, Igor ...”
“It wasn’t easy to come,” he said, mindful only of his own problems. “Alexander left home for good last night. He has gone to Rostov to join the Reds. I lay awake all night trying to think of what life will be like without Alexander. I could hear Momma crying and Poppa moaning in his sleep.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Never mind. Well, what is so important?”
Natasha drew a deep breath and tried to speak, not knowing if she could; and then he saw her anxiety.
“The Reds,” she quivered at last ‘They have talked to my brother, Sergei.”
“Where? When?”
“When we were at market three days ago in Armavir. Poppa went to the Jew’s quarters to trade with them and left Sergei to watch our stall. When I came he was gone. He didn’t tell me until this morning where he had been. The Reds had taken him away.”
“What did they want?”
“What they always want. They wanted to know where the village was hiding the grain.”
“He didn’t tell, of course.”
“Not at first. Then they told him we were all saboteurs and provocateurs ... whatever that means ... and that the people in the city were starving.”
“Damn them! You know what the Reds give us for our grain! A piece of paper no one can read.”
“They ... they promised to make Sergei a hero of the Soviet Union if he told.”
“A hero for telling on his own parents?”
“Sergei told.”
Igor bolted to his feet “You should have told me immediately.”
“I ... I only found out about it ... and I was afraid ...”
“I’ve got to warn the village!”
Igor raced across the fields yelling at the top of his voice. He ran all the way back to the village center, a muddy street, gasped dizzily, grabbed the rope of the alarm bell, and pulled for all his worth, bringing villagers on the run from fields in all directions.
Igor blurted out the story, and Sergei, his own age of twelve, was brought into the square and questioned until he broke down and confessed. His father dragged him off to their barn and thrashed him to within an inch of his life as Natasha screamed. The Cossacks frantically scrambled to remove their hidden grain to another place. In the middle of all this the Reds swooped in and caught them. Natasha’s home was burned to the ground and her father hung by the neck in the square.
When he was cut down and buried and the grieving was done and the shock settled, Natasha and her mother went off to live with relatives in the next village.
Sergei was carried off by the Reds to Armavir to a children’s home, which was soon renamed in his honor. He was extolled by the Reds as the first of the youth heroes of the Kuban Cossacks. Over a period of time sixteen villages, twenty factories, ten collective farms, eight tractor stations, and dozens of Children’s Homes and Pioneer Camps were named in his honor.
During the years that followed in the 1920s, Alexander Karlovy became an official of considerable influence in Rostov. The fact that he was a Cossack from the land and at the same time a dedicated Communist proved of great value. He was among the key planners to get greater production from the farmlands of southern Russia.
Fantastic changes were taking place all over the Soviet Union. This awakening giant trembled into a new century, having to pay in toil for past failures to educate her people and industrialize. Now the sweat of the workers and the farmers driven before the unrelenting Communist whip shoved them into this new world.
The Kuban Cossacks of Glinka clung to their land. These new ways remained strange to them; many of their sons were gone and the village wore unhealed wounds. The agitators sent in to enlighten them were treated with suspicion. Their beliefs were as simple and primitive as their lives. The Cossacks had been sent as border guards centuries before by the czars to outposts on the Don and Kuban in Siberia and on other borders. In times of emergency they had raised armies. In exchange, they were granted a status as free men. This, and nothing more, nothing less, was what they desired from the Reds.
Igor Karlovy reached young manhood with a basic faith in the old ways. He suppressed his personal desires to examine this great new world, for it would have created an untold hardship to follow Alexander from the family farm. Gregory Karlovy had grown very old. Despite his furious pride he could not deliver a full day’s work and so Igor subordinated his curiosity to family duty.
A fire for knowledge remained alive though, and each night he read and studied on his own until his eyes burned. When the school came to Glinka he begged for books and periodicals to feed the growing hunger to learn.
Although more and more writing became available, the books began to fall into a dull pattern. Everything had been rewritten so that it was ultimately a glorification of the Bolsheviks.
Igor taught himself both German and English in order to find new avenues of thought away from the repetition of the Communist books. He discovered that he could read great Russian writers of the past in foreign languages as many were no longer published in Russian. It was the same with Russian history, which seemed to begin, so far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, with the birth of Karl Marx.
In other ways, Igor was the son of his father. In true Cossack tradition he became a magnificent horseman, sang with the sweetness of the marsh swallow, and developed into a drinking man of no small accomplishment. His heart, frivolous at times, never truly strayed or really ever belonged to anyone but Natasha.
Days and sometimes weeks seemed endless until that glorious moment when she rode in from her village and they could go off together to a place known to them alone, away from all the world. But they had come to that time in the springtime of life when meetings brought frustration and partings became a thing of pain.
Natasha understood his yearning to seek the world, his predicament and imprisonment. She did not press him to the promise of marriage, for to have done so would have sealed him to Glinka forever.
And so, on a summer’s day when Igor was eighteen and she sixteen, they came to know each other’s bodies; it happened in their secret place by the Kuban River.
At the end of the 1920s a vast change swept the land. The order came from Moscow to collectivize the farmlands. The planners made an edict that farm production had to catch the march of industrialization. It was not an edict understood by the Kulaks, who were free farmers, or the Cossacks, who were free men.
The Kuban Cossacks armed and rode their horses out to defend their land and charged wildly into fusillades of Red Army guns which cut them down like stacks of wheat.
At last it became Glinka’s turn to collectivize. Alexander Karlovy returned to the place of his birth out of sentiment. A meeting was called. Alexander pleaded with the villagers to accept it peacefully for the good of Russia, and warned that only by quiet acquiescence could Glinka be spared the fate of hundreds of blood-soaked villages. It was beyond his power to do more.
The villagers of Glinka, led by old Gregory Karlovy, gave their answer. They burned their crops and slaughtered their livestock.
And so, it came to pass that the centuries-old tradition of free men ended. The people of Glinka were rounded up and deported for slave labor to Siberia, never to be heard from again. Only a single villager was spared. By trickery, Alexander had his young brother Igor come to Rostov to visit him at the exact moment of the deportation.
Igor, of course, sensed that something terrible had taken place, but travel permits were almost impossible in those days. Furthermore, Russian life had conditioned him not to inquire. In due time Alexander told him of what had happened and that their father and mother had chosen not to escape to Rostov.
The farm was gone forever, yet there were a number of compensations in living in Rostov with Alexander and his family. Mainly, new doors opened to learning in the great drive to educate the masses. As a Communist official Alexander had his own two-room cottage. He was able to fix up a shed outside so that Igor had his own six- by ten-foot room; this was a luxury for a single man.
Igor threw himself into that vast, faceless legion of toilers going to work in one of the new tractor factories and continued his studies by night.
It was impossible to bring Natasha to Rostov because of the travel papers. Even if he had been able, there was no way to support her or ask her to share the shed. She learned to read and write so there were letters to sustain them. Then, once each year, he was able to go off with her for a week to the Black Sea.
During the early 1930s he formulated his ideas about his future life. He hated the factory; away from the freedom of the land he thought of himself branded, like a cow, and expected to produce so many buckets of milk. He hated the four walls filled with slogans and portraits; he hated the charts and the pitting of his team against the other teams in a never-ending search to push production.
During the lunch breaks and two or three days a week after work they were compelled to attend lectures by the agitators and the Komsomol extolling their “way of life.” It was explained that life was temporarily difficult because of the backwardness of the country inherited from the Czar, the bloodshed, and mostly, the outside pressures of the imperialists to crush them.
The Action Squads made up of party and Komsomol members Igor detested the most. The Action Squads saw to it that the workers showed up 100 per cent for all lectures and activities. The Action Squads led them on “spontaneous demonstrations” for visiting dignitaries and holiday parades. The Action Squads saw to it 100 per cent of the vote was cast for the party in the “elections.” It was the Action Squads who visited lagging teams to induce them to “donate” free days of labor to increase quotas.
The pressure became so unbearable that workers desperately met in secret for the intention of organizing a strike. The Action Squads along with the secret police rounded up the leaders and shipped them east. Then the Agitators came in and explained that strikes in the Soviet Union were illegal because there was no need to strike. The workers owned the factories and therefore they would be striking against themselves.
The only way to gain recognition as a worker appeared to be to work one’s self to an early grave through donation of almost every free hour. For this, the worker’s reward was a medal, the Labor Order of the Red Banner, to wear on his shabby suit.
The farm had been primitive, but the words of Igor’s father were never forgotten ... “freedom is life.” He realized that the Communists were trying valiantly to make the Soviet Union a modern country and that harsh methods were called for. He also came to understand that the West was the true enemy of the masses. Nevertheless, he had to escape the factory.
His brother Alexander’s revolutionary fires had been dimmed. Alexander was now in a jungle for survival. The only way to prosper was to follow classical party lines. The early idealism was replaced by the never-ending terror. Alexander attempted time and again to have Igor join Komsomol. As a Komsomol member new opportunities would open. Igor was determined to escape the fanatical discipline and the distasteful duty as an agitator or member of an Action Squad.
He found his way through the study of science and set in a number of improvisations in the factory that won him the attention of the planners and finally a medal as a Hero of Soviet Labor. As an engineer Igor knew he had a chance for a better life because engineers were desperately needed.
He pressured Alexander to arrange for him to take entrance examinations for the great University of Moscow. It was a far-reaching dream. The university belonged to the Komsomol faithful and the sons and daughters of the new ruling class. A Cossack boy from Rostov simply did not have a chance. But Igor persisted, and won the dream.
Natasha wept on his last visit before his departure. Moscow was 1000 kilometers away. Igor would be gone for four years with little or no chance of seeing her and just as small a chance of getting papers for her to come to Moscow. Afterward he had to give two years of free service to the government to repay his education and would most likely be sent to Siberia to the virgin lands.
Igor tried to comfort her by promising that the years would fly by and they would still be young enough to make a life. His last words were a vow to return to her.
Igor Karlovy never went into Siberian service. Upon graduation from the University of Moscow he was commissioned into the Red Air Force and sent to Leningrad. The Army and Air Force were frantically reorganizing trying to recover from the purges and the fiasco of the Finnish campaign.
The eve of the Great Patriotic War found him designing and constructing bulwarks on the Karelian Isthmus for the defense of Leningrad. Natasha moved to Armavir to a war factory, but after a short while communication was cut off between them.
June, 1942
My Beloved Brother, Igor,
The war has kept contact from us for a full year. I have not heard from you in all this time, but I know from friends you are stationed in the same place as where you were assigned after you left the university.
The bearer of this letter, a colleague in the Party, is being transferred to your district and has agreed to try to get this message to you.
My family and I have been evacuated into the interior. We are settled, and now to the task of organizing food production. We are faring quite well.
I have terribly bad news. Natasha is dead. She was among the defenders of Armavir. Many survivors are now in my area so the accounts of her death are authentic. I fear to say the entire business is most distressing. She was wounded and captured by the Nazis, abused, and done away with in a most brutal manner.
My deepest pity is for you at this moment of grief. I beg you to be of stout heart and take vengeance on the Nazi monsters for what they have done to Natasha and our glorious Motherland.
Long live the Communist Party! Long live Stalin! Death to the enemy!
Your loving brother,
Alexander
The Russian lands are cold and morbid, and a long shadow of death and tragedy hovers over her people. The woeful cries of toil and grief and poverty fill her music and her poems; life is suffering, suffering is life. The winters are as brutal as life is brutal.
All that is tragic in Russian heritage struck down on Igor Karlovy where he lived among the freezing and the starving in the Siege of Leningrad. The letter was the most painful chapter in a pain-filled journey through life. The death of his beloved Natasha all but sucked the will to survive.
When is it that a man like Igor Karlovy seeks out a woman such as Olga Shiminov? Is it when his soul wallows in a bottomless pit of grief? Is it when he clings stubbornly to a thinning thread between hope and complete depression?
Or perhaps it was the warmth that first brought him back to life, the warmth of Olga Shiminov’s apartment. Outside the dead were stacked like frozen logs in the gutters; the starving walked about in trances; Finnish and German cannon beat upon them without respite. Was it something so simple as the cold and the rumble of hunger in his belly that drew him to Olga Shiminov?
She was one of the most important Komsomol leaders in Leningrad. As a deputy in charge of women’s labor battalions she came into frequent dealings with Igor in the numerous engineering problems in building fortifications, roads over the ice, demolishing dangerous buildings, clearing rubble.
It was on a night in December during one of their many conferences that they became unbearably cold in his heatless office and Olga suggested they finish their work in her flat, where it was warm. Warmth ... that is what one needed in the Leningrad winter. For the masses there was no fuel. Every wooden structure had been demolished and long consumed as firewood. Everyone was cold and hungry ... except important officials like Olga Shiminov.
She had her own room with a private bath and kitchen. It was a luxurious palace in that frozen tomb of a city. And her cupboards held tea and vodka and potatoes and bread and beef.
Did he sell himself for warmth or was it just a weariness of life that afforded him no resistance? In truth, Igor never looked at her as a man looks at a woman in all those months they had worked together. Olga kept herself drab and severe as befitting an official of the party.
She was entirely without Natasha’s female wiles, sensuous looks, soft touches, desirable body. Olga was a daughter of the revolution, the ultimate product of this new way of life. She carried her breasts with a sort of defiance, as though they constituted a challenge to her equality. Olga was a slogan, a dedicated heartless mold which functioned with the machinelike efficiency of the new breed of Russian. Nonetheless there was still something of her that was “woman” ... there was female flesh. No matter how well it was Sovietized, it still existed.
Igor was an attractive man. Despite her objections that he had no background as a Communist, there was a special wartime dispensation for heroes of the Red Air Force. He was of the new legend. Wounded by gunfire, a man of great ingenuity and great courage, a hard-drinking Cossack surrounded by loyal officers. Perhaps it was Igor’s total indifference to Olga that awakened a challenge in her. He took her because he had reached the depths ... and her apartment was warm.
The marriage was not made in heaven. It was a convenient bargain on both parts to make the best of a miserable life.
Neither Igor’s patience or tenderness was able to penetrate Olga’s obsessed dedication. Sex life, such as it was, was dispatched with mechanical efficiency. It was always arranged so as not to interfere with a committee meeting or a lecture to factory workers.
Igor Karlovy, now a decorated major in the Red Air Force, strayed from his warm nest when springtime came and the thaw set in. He sought out his old comrades to drink with and soft and tender women to love.
Olga Shiminov was not without recourse. Igor was hauled before the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Leningrad. He was roundly admonished for his wild Cossack ways and warned that the husband of a leading functionary could not treat her as if she were a peasant woman. If rank and career meant anything to him, he had better stay home evenings. Finally, he was informed there were climates he could be sent to even colder than Leningrad.
Olga became pregnant between speeches. From her immensely practical point of view it was no time to have a child. Aside from room and food, a child would be a damned nuisance and interfere with her work. She made out a standard application for an abortion, against Igor’s wishes.
On this occasion the Central Committee took Igor’s point of view. The comrades “suggested” to Olga that it would be good for the morale of the masses if one of their leaders gave symbolic birth in the middle of the siege. Never a deviationist, Olga adhered to their “suggestion.” She presented her husband and the people of Leningrad a boy. Igor wished to name his son for his father, but the comrades “suggested” that the child be named Yuri after a young boy who had a martyred death at the hands of the SS early in the invasion.
The birth of his son gave Igor a reason to renew his desire to live. Slowly, he began to emerge from the great darkness ... until one day the shell of a siege gun hit Children’s Home #25.
When Igor awoke, the German girl, Lotte Böhm, was staring at him. He had seen such an expression of fulfillment in a woman’s eyes a long time ago when Natasha used to look at him that way.
“Why do you look at me so?” he asked.
“I did not know it could be like this.”
He closed his eyes and pressed her young body against him. Tears filled his eyes and ran down his cheeks. Oh Virgin Mother, he whispered, let me have a few moments of her again.
He washed and dressed silently and returned to his work in the next room. Lotte watched him from the doorway, her eyes riveted on him. At last he snapped his pencil in half, walked to the French windows and flung them open as if choking, and breathed in deeply.
“I wish to make an arrangement with you,” he said. “I shall see to your protection and that you are properly housed and fed.”
“You will not be sorry. I will make you very happy.”
Chapter Eight
COMMISSAR VASALI VLADIMAROVITCH AZOV drank a glass of white chalky medicine to soothe his burning ulcers, wiped droplets from his thick black moustache, belched, and munched the second half of his meal, crackers. A portrait of Lenin “Speaking to the Workers” hung behind his desk; and a portrait of Stalin was over the fireplace opposite him. He held the new directive from Moscow in thick peasant hands and studied.
END VICTORY CELEBRATIONS IN BERLIN AND STABILIZE SITUATION
Azov was glad the directive finally came. As a man who lived largely by a sixth sense he felt the rising anger among the officer corps over the rape in Berlin’s streets.
The last time the fires erupted in his stomach was during the offensive in East Prussia. Tens of thousands of German troops had been enveloped and trapped in a pocket and attempted to surrender. Azov was ordered to “liquidate the pocket” on the grounds that the Germans were all suspected of being SS troops. For this task Azov brought in Siberian Cossacks, Mongols, and Tartars. The Germans were first disarmed, then slaughtered. During the ten days it took to complete the unpleasant mop-up Azov’s ulcers burned like the fires of hell.
He made a mock salute to the portrait of Stalin with a second glass of medicine and thought that he should switch portraits with Lenin’s so that he would not have to look at Stalin all day. However, in the Soviet life the ritual of taking down pictures had all sorts of connotations. Portraits that suddenly disappeared signified a person had fallen into disfavor; thus, the portrait switching could be reported by some member of political intelligence and used against him.
Azov had not made up his mind whether he liked or disliked his present exalted position. It was the most important of his illustrious but anonymous career. He would remain a mystery man, an enigma to most everyone in Germany; but as Chief Political Commissar and Advisor to German Affairs his “suggestions” to the Army and the Germans would be carried out to the letter. Indeed, this subdued mansion would be the true capital of the eastern parts of Germany.
Azov was painfully aware that the chance for a grave mistake, a miscalculation or error in judgment was much greater in his present post. He did not fathom the exposed position, had deftly avoided it all his life. His mind was like a delicate sail boat, able to react instantly to the slightest shift in the wind.
In the beginning, three decades ago, Azov had caught the eye of Lenin. In those days the Communists supported their illegal activities largely through hold-ups of banks and other robberies. Azov proved a perfect henchman in these operations; he was drab, but entirely dependable; he executed orders without deviation or regard for others.
After the new regime he worked with both the secret and political police as a liaison to Lenin, remaining on the fringe of the inner circle.
After Lenin’s death he stayed clear of involvement on either side of the power struggle that followed. Sensing ill winds, he shifted his sails toward Stalin without ever really expressing an opinion.
Azov was next sent to re-educate a large section of the Ukraine to the new way of life. There was great hope in the Five Year Plan to modernize industry and later collectivize agriculture of that backward land.
Kulaks, the independent farmers, abounded in his territory. This led to his first ulcer. The Ukrainians were always fired with a nationalistic spirit. The Kulaks wished to be Ukrainians first, had no desire to give up their land, and did not understand socialism. There was massive resistance by the burning of crops and destroying of livestock. Azov commanding Action Squads, Agitators, and the Red Army from Russia stamped down the resistance without mercy. The blood bath and deportations brought the economy to the brink of ruin.
He proved to be utterly merciless. Still a man without an opinion, he carried out the edicts to Sovietize the Ukraine with brutal efficiency. His personal hand sealed the fate of a quarter million people.
Once the resistance was crushed he set about building the secret police, military and Propaganda and political units so that they were controlled by Russians, not Ukrainians.
Azov did his job so well that he was recalled to Moscow as a top deputy of the NKVD. His specialty was obtaining confessions and his pride was that no one ever went to trial without first confessing.
This position brought him the usual rewards; he had his own three-room flat, a phone, a car at his disposal, a daughter in Komsomol, and a son in the University of Moscow.
In the beginning of the purges, Azov became one of the most dreaded of the inquisitors. Tens, hundreds, thousands broke before him; he found the weakness of each person. On some there was use of brutality, on others, starvation. Some broke from the lack of sleep, others quickly succumbed to terror. Eventually he got them all.
But as the purges wore on they began to turn on the hunters. More and more members of the NKVD and OGPU received their own fatal midnight summons. Each day brought another former colleague to Azov to confess.
During these years of the terror he slept with one eye open awaiting the knock for him. The knock often came between midnight and one in the morning. He would lurch up in panic, his heart thumping, and dress in a state of drowsy fear. He would try to recall what he had said wrong or to whom he had spoken. Perhaps it was his own son! They had argued!
By some miracle the summons for Azov always came from Stalin. He would be whisked through the empty Moscow streets in the middle of the night at terrifying speeds to the villa in the suburbs hidden in a pine forest. Here Stalin held his nightly court. Those people summoned arrived one by one in black cars. Each time the cast changed; only Molotov and a personal secretary were there every time.
Stalin, in plain proletarian tunic, looking much like the millions of his portraits, greeted them and led them into a banquet room. The table buckled beneath the weight of roast pig, steaks, caviar, champagne, vodka, borsch, and rare lamb dishes of his native Georgia.
During these nightly orgies of food and drink the business of the Soviet Union was conducted by despots. Molotov and the aides made quick notes of Stalin’s edicts and random ramblings. Sometimes a word or a nod meant moving a half-million persons, putting a thousand to death.
The nights Azov attended it was generally for the purpose of getting the list of new persons to liquidate in the purge for the charges of being a Trotskyite, Bukharanite, deviationist, saboteur, speculator, traitor, opportunist or anti-party. He was stunned to receive names of marshals of the Red Army, members of the Politburo, heroes of the revolution, and great Leninists.
At four or five each morning Stalin would become quite drunk and took pleasure in berating everyone in the room, making them the butt of crude jokes. He shredded their dignity with drunken boisterousness. But Comrade Stalin never got so drunk as to lose his astuteness or deadliness.
“Comrade Azov! I have proposed a toast in honor of our Chief Prosecutor for People’s Justice, Comrade Vishinsky. Why do you refuse to drink? Fill his glass!”
Stalin knew very well of Azov’s ulcers, but Azov drank and his insides turned to flame and his eyeballs rolled back in his head and he burst into an icy sweat. Once during each summons Stalin made him drink a whole glass of vodka. Azov dared not pass out until the meeting broke up at dawn and he was in the car on the way to his office to carry out the new liquidations.
The years of the nightmare waned slowly with the police arms devouring each other and their own members. It was, indeed, a delicate time for Azov.
The climactic Purge Trial ended with a bit of poetic justice when Yagoda, the head of NKVD, was brought to people’s justice. V. V. Azov’s supreme achievement was in obtaining Yagoda’s confession.
Because of his past experience in Sovietizing the reluctant Ukraine, Azov was assigned during the Great Patriotic War to form a German People’s Liberation Committee.
And now, here in Berlin, it was Azov’s turn to do the midnight summoning. His table was not so lavish as Stalin’s, but his rule in Germany was as absolute, and what was more, no one could force him to drink vodka at this table.
Azov peeked through the drapes. In the driveway below the cars began to arrive: Wohlman, Hirsch, the rest of the Liberation Committee, Red Army commanders, and military government officials.
Tonight would be special indeed. Tonight he would introduce a secret plan detailing The Harassment of the Western Allies in Berlin.
Part 3
The Linden Trees Will Never Bloom Again
Chapter One
July 1, 1945
DAYBREAK CAME AT 0548. SEAN O’Sullivan’s convoy assembled in the parade grounds of the former Wehrmacht barracks in the town of Halle where they had been gathered, and waited with growing restlessness to move up to Berlin among the first American echelons.
A curious mixture of vehicles took to the road, conventional military trucks and jeeps interspersed with a variety of confiscated German automobiles. Four armored troop carriers hauled a platoon of infantry to guard against attack by German Werewolves and straggler bands.
Sean rode in a Horsche sedan which had been unsuccessfully hidden by its former Nazi owner. Shenandoah Blessing and Bolinski, who spoke some Russian, shared the huge touring car. Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury and a photographer drove in a jeep directly behind Sean.
The convoy progressed north to Dessau, and crossed the Elbe River on a pontoon bridge built by American engineers, who left it to the Russians after they withdrew.
The first curious contact with their Russian allies was made when a Russian military policewoman of elephantine proportions signaled them to halt with a pair of traffic flags, then leaped ungracefully on the running board of Sean’s Horsche and pointed down the road. They slowed their speed as they passed beneath a flower-bedecked, newly erected archway which held portraits readily identified as comrades Lenin, Stalin, and Marx. A blaring red and white sign leaped out at them: WELCOME TO DEMOCRATIC GERMANY!
Just beyond the “welcome” arch they came to a vicious-looking barrier on the road flanked by barbed wire and concrete emplacements.
“This looks meaner than trying to run moonshine into Kentucky,” Blessing said.
“The dawn came up like thunder,” emoted Big Nellie.
The woman MP shouted at a pair of drowsy Russian soldiers who raised the barrier. Sean swung his car to the head of the convoy and drove through. The next point of contact was a farmhouse near the roadside. A half-dozen Russians kept reserved and suspicious distance from the arrivals as a slovenly dressed officer emerged from the house, leaned into the sedan, and snarled, “You are now under the protection of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I demand that your soldiers put their weapons away.”
Bolinski translated to Sean, then answered, “The weapons are for the purpose of protecting the convoy from German stragglers.”
“Not allowed,” the Russian answered. “Soviet territory.”
Sean recalled the specifics of his orders: Get the convoy to Berlin without incident. “Tell the admiral here,” he said to Bolinski, “that I will order my men to keep all weapons out of sight.”
The Russian figured that was compliance enough to suit him. He got into his own vehicle, a badly abused German auto, ordered the convoy to follow him, and turned off the four-lane autobahn.
“This isn’t the way to Berlin,” Big Nellie said to his photographer.
In a half hour they came to the town of Wittenberg and halted at the Rathaus, which now served as Russian Headquarters for the district. The Russian quickly disappeared into the confines leaving Sean’s convoy waiting. They were being observed by Russian soldiers from a cautious distance. It was a far cry from the pictures of the brotherhood of Russians and Americans embracing on meeting at the Elbe only two months earlier.
Sean appraised the Russians. These troops were neatly uniformed, well-armed, appeared to be under good discipline. He guessed they were NKVD, political troops.
Twenty minutes went by before a new officer, a Russian lieutenant, came from the building and introduced himself in broken English. “I demand,” he said, “that you and your men come inside for an official welcome.”
Sean’s troops followed him into the typical bulky German city-hall affair, down an oil-painting-lined corridor of heroes, to a foyer which would serve as a reception room, smack into a platoon of Cossacks, who were, to a man, tall, blond, spit and polish, and obviously show troops.
The Russian lieutenant whirled around, was handed a document by a subordinate, stood ramrod before Sean, and read:
“I am pleased to welcome this, the first convoy of Americans on this route. You are privileged to join us in Berlin after the Soviet Union’s glorious victory over the Nazi aggressor. Soviet victory was inevitable, but came sooner because of your aid. You are welcome to Democratic Germany as our guests.”
Sean faced his own astonished men and with an expression warned them to keep their mouths shut.
“I should like to see the commanding general of this district,” he said to the Russian.
“He is not available.”
“I should like his name and information on where, when, and how he can be reached.”
“That information is not available.”
“When you find out who and where he is, give him this medal from my government for being the first to reach the Elbe and join forces in this area.”
The Russian looked in his hand, puzzled. He studied the medal, confused, ordered the Cossacks to sing, and left the reception room quickly without excusing himself.
Two dozen bellowing Cossacks prevented too close a discussion of the situation.
“What are you going to do, Major?”
“Damned if I know.”
He drifted over to Bradbury. “Don’t take any notes and better tell Mac to keep his camera out of sight. It’s a cinch they’ll take the film.”
Nellie nodded.
A new song began with a bellowing opening verse, and stopped instantly as a heavily decorated Russian colonel entered the foyer.
“I am Antonov, the colonel general’s aide. I thank you for the decoration.”
“Now that we have warmly welcomed each other, Colonel, I should like to proceed to Berlin.”
“But!” Antonov said with an expression of shock, “we have many more songs prepared and we must have some toasts.”
Sean looked at his watch. “I’m sorry, Colonel.”
“A moment,” he said huffily, “and we will get your orders cleared.”
The moment stretched to ten and then twenty. Accordions and balalaikas continued a history of Russian folk song. The Americans stood around stiffly, embarrassed. Forty minutes later Antonov returned and took Sean into a side office.
“I am most regretful,” he said, “that you cannot proceed to Berlin with your present complement. It is in direct violation of the Brandenburg Agreement.”
“Colonel, I am impressed by the warmth of your welcome and I am moved by the magnificence of your artists. However, as one soldier to another, my orders are to bring my convoy to Berlin with all possible speed. I am unaware of the existence of the Brandenburg Agreement.”
“So? Well, I see. The agreement drawn up by your government and mine puts numerical limitations on all convoys moving through Democratic Germany. You are not permitted with a convoy of more than twenty vehicles, twenty officers, and forty enlisted men. The agreement specifically states that the men may not be combat troops, but I will overlook this technicality.”
“Just when was this Brandenburg Agreement drawn up?”
“Weeks ago. I cannot assume responsibility that your government has not informed you properly.”
“Colonel Antonov,” Sean pressed unruffled, “I want to see your copy of the agreement. I am certain your government informed you well enough to send you a copy.”
Antonov looked angrily at the American whom he now recognized as an opponent who would not be bullied. He smiled, threw his hands open. Unfortunately, Major, no copy in English.”
“Russian will be fine,” Sean said.
“I see.” Antonov excused himself.
His absence stretched. Sean knew no course under the restrictions of his order but to ride it out and keep firm. The harassment was obviously deliberate and well-planned. He had left Halle in the morning certain there would be no trouble on something so routine as a convoy of G-5 personnel.
He had discussed with his people the possibility of some red tape and the natural curiosity of two distant allies seeing each other for the first time. What was happening now was the creation of an incident out of thin air.
In the foyer he could hear the singing continue. He peeked out. Vodka and some food had been brought in. The Russians were toasting to peace and friendship.
Another half hour passed before a beefy, swarthy brigadier general returned in place of Colonel Antonov.
He looked at the American major with disdain. “You are a guest of the Soviet Union,” he said abruptly. “You are under our protection. You have offended us by bringing armed troops into this zone in direct defiance of the Brandenburg Agreement.”
Sean watched the game played out. The weight of rank was designed to wear him down. The whole damned thing was childish. He contained his anger. “I question the existence of a Brandenburg Agreement,” he said.
“That is a grave provocation,” the general answered sharply.
“Nonsense. Let me refresh the General’s memory on an agreement that does exist. The United States has ceded the provinces of Thuringia and Saxony in exchange for a sector of Berlin.”
“The provinces of Thuringia and Saxony have been given us out of historic justice. The Soviet Union alone is responsible for the death of Nazism.”
Sean smiled in a way that the Russian did not like. “I understand, General, that the Russians only cover their dead with six inches of dirt and leave them unmarked.”
“I do not understand ...”
“We Americans keep an accurate count of our dead. If you will look very hard over my shoulder you will see American crosses all the way back to North Africa.”
“The capitalistic press is known for its blatant lies.”
“Take it easy, General. Two of those crosses belong to my brothers.”
The Russian paled. “The Brandenburg Agreement limits convoys on this road to...”
“Twenty trucks, twenty officers, forty enlisted men. Okay, your round. I will return half my complement to Halle. Believe me, tomorrow will be another day.”
“What did you say your name was, Major?” the Russian asked threateningly.
“Gable. Clark Gable.”
Sean walked quickly into the foyer where the Cossacks were now leaping over tables and chairs. He bellowed, ordering his men outside.
As a precaution, Sean had big Nellie send the photographer back with the group going to Halle. A Russian major sat between Sean and Bradbury to “direct” the convoy to Berlin. Bo and Blessing sat in the back seat bitching about the Russians’ behavior.
As they now suspected, they were led away from the autobahn, plunging deeper into secondary roads in the countryside. Sean alerted his people to keep their eyes sharp. At least there might be some intelligence to be gained out of the zigzag detour.
To the men in the ranks, this first meeting with the Russians ended in a semishock. Their Russian counterparts had refused to do what any man does when meeting on a distant field. They did not show pictures of wives, sweethearts, children. They did not tell where they were from, what work they did. They kept asking why the Americans were trying to commit aggression.
“This is a lousy day, Sean,” Big Nellie said. “I wanted to believe this sort of thing couldn’t be true.”
“It’s only the beginning.”
The convoy passed through dead villages and untended fields. There seemed to be no sign of German life; it was eerie.
Russian road blocks continued to bisect the most remote countryside lanes. Unlike the disciplined NKVD troops at Wittenberg, the Russian soldiers in the countryside were a scrubby, filthy, ragged lot. As often as not they showed up drunk, bogged down under sacks of loot. A dozen times the convoy was stopped. The halting was followed by demands for American cigarettes and chocolate.
They plunged deeper into detours on tortuous dirt roads on the thin excuse that the main highways were closed due to “technical difficulties.”
At evening their winding course brought them to the southern approach to Berlin, where they were once again halted in the town of Werder before the rail crossing. The accompanying Russian major exchanged words with his people, then ordered Sean to have his convoy remain in their vehicles.
Big Nellie nudged Sean, pointing to the woods that ran alongside the rails. On close look one could see that the ground in the woods was pocked with thousands of holes dug out by human hands and covered with tree branches, corrugated metal, cardboard, and lumber scraps.
These holes were home for tens of thousands of liberated slave laborers and concentration-camp victims from eastern Europe. They had worked their way to Werder in an attempt to get back to Poland and Russia.
The trained eyes in the convoy sized it up quickly. There was no facility for registration, food, or medical help.
A train of some eighty open freight and cattle cars jiggled back and forth blocking the road crossing, and puffed to a stop. It was followed by an awesome sight of thousands of refugees suddenly pouring from their holes in the forest. Some held a single pack or suitcase. Some had nothing. A line of bayonet-bearing Russian soldiers held at bay this growing horde of the backwash of war.
A Russian officer blew a whistle; the guards opened their line. An insane scramble ensued as the mass of human misery swept up to the train. They shoved and kicked and clawed and screamed their way aboard. Old, young, and weak were hurled mercilessly down the rail bed. In but a moment the cars were crammed beyond capacity.
Another whistle and the line of soldiers re-formed and clubbed back with rifle butts those who did not make it. Pleas fell on deaf ears. The train chugged into motion with its bulge of misery.
The Russian in Sean’s car giggled. “See how anxious they are to get home.”
Sean and the others looked at him with revulsion. It was, in a moment, a ten-year indoctrination course.
Sean snapped on the ignition, fought to keep from shouting at the outrage. The convoy cleared the crossing, watching the unsuccessful refugees trudge back to their holes to wait for another train on another day.
Just beyond Werder they saw a now familiar sight. The bridge ahead was blocked by a pair of submachine-gun-toting Mongols who waved the convoy to halt.
Sean was blind with anger. He pressed his foot on the accelerator and beaded in on the bridge.
“That a boy, Major,” Blessing said, “frig ’em!”
The Russian began to yell, “Nyet! nyet!” He tried to shove his foot on the brakes. Sean jammed an elbow into his ribs and at the same moment Blessing and Big Nellie clamped him frozen.
The convoy closed up behind Sean and bore down on the bridge at seventy miles an hour!
The Mongols waved their guns threateningly! At the last split second they leaped over the bridge rail into the river and the convoy passed over.
At seven o’clock, thirteen hours after their departure, Sean’s convoy had traversed the German landscape endlessly for a mere forward gain of a hundred miles.
At last they pulled into the former SS Kaserne in Babelsberg, a suburb of Potsdam, across the Havel River from Berlin. Before coming to a proper halt, Sean was pounced on by A. J. Hansen’s gangly orderly who saluted, then grabbed his arm. “General says get up to his quarters before the Russkies get ahold of you.” The two trotted over the parade grounds as a half-dozen Russians descended on the convoy to liberate their man and to find a Major Clark Gable.
No smile greeted Sean from Andrew Jackson Hansen, First Deputy Military Governor of Germany. “Come in, Major Gable,” he scowled. “Goddammit, O’Sullivan, I friggin’ well told you to keep your ass out of trouble.”
“Sir, I have been the epitome of restraint ... only ...”
“Only what!”
Big Nellie came in. “Only we saw something at Werder.”
“The Russian refugee transfer point?”
“Yes, sir,” said Sean.
“That still didn’t give you license to run those bridge guards into the river. The next convoy will face concrete road blocks. Sean, you’ve got to learn to hold your water. This isn’t Rombaden and this isn’t your show.”
“Yes, sir.”
Big Nellie watched Sean try to digest the end of one war, the beginning of another. Again he would be the soldier without the gun ... patience, restraint, wisdom.
The journalist looked out of the window, down into the courtyard of the Kaserne. “Looks like a prison.”
“The Russians insist our presence is hypothetical until the Potsdam Conference signs a treaty,” Hansen said.
“Will I be able to get into Berlin and look around?” Big Nellie asked.
“Maybe. It would make our position more difficult if you were to write a column on what you saw today.”
Hansen could have invoked censorship, but preferred to put the matter to a reliable old friend in another way. Big Nellie nodded that he understood.
“Check in with the intelligence office and tell them what you saw today.”
Big Nellie said he would and left. Hansen took Sean to the next room, where Major General Hiram Stonebraker and Colonel Neal Hazzard waited.
Stonebraker was known in Air Corps circles as a salty, hard-shelled genius with the speciality of air transportation. He was considered the true creator of the Hump Airlift, which flew supplies from India to China. Transferred into Europe as the war ended, he was detached for advisory duty to the President for the forthcoming conference at Potsdam. This was to be his last mission for he was slated for retirement.
Colonel Neal Hazzard, commandant-elect for the American Sector of Berlin, had been an outspoken fighting soldier most of his career. A wound gave him the choice of discharge or military government. He was brash, direct, honest.
“Tune out Moscow,” Hansen said. Hazzard went to a half-dozen places in the room where the Russians had planted microphones. To counter it, a member of the staff had rigged up a two-cell battery connected to a buzzer, which set off a steady hum when connected. This noise, directed into the microphones, screened out the other voices from the Russian listening post in the basement.
“Okay, Sean,” Hansen said, “what happened today?”
He related the bizarre incidents. It tallied with reports of a half-dozen other American convoys which had come to Berlin on other routes. It added up to a plan of deliberate harassment. The “welcoming” officer was always below the rank of the American convoy leader. This was a deliberate belittlement. The negotiating officers were always above the rank of the American—Russian logic set to establish their people as superiors.
Sean looked squarely at the three men as he finished his story. “Had I been given freedom of action in my orders, I could have gotten the convoy through to Berlin on the autobahn.”
“That’s a rash statement,” Hansen said. “We are in no position to afford the luxury of an incident.”
“There would have been no incident,” Sean said firmly. “They were bluffing.”
“What makes you think so?” Stonebraker asked.
“Ask a pair of wet Russian soldiers.”
“That will be all,” Hansen cut in. “My orderly will show you to your quarters. There will be a guard on your door. Other than intelligence interrogation, talk to no one.”
“Yes, sir.”
When he left all that could be heard for a time was the steady buzz into the wire taps.
“We’re getting our pockets picked,” Neal Hazzard growled. “We should have captured Berlin. Now, we compound the original stupidity by giving the Russians two lush German provinces for a foothold in this rock pile.”
Hansen answered, “The Russians have been isolated from the West for three decades. Since the end of the war they’ve broken out of their cocoon. They are awed by their sudden new position of being a world power. But, they are suspicous. It’s going to take time for the strangeness to wear off, but we are going to have to learn to live with them.”
“That crap may go in a classroom, Chip,” Stonebraker said to Hansen, addressing him by a nickname used between generals. “Your young major is right. We’re playing their game and they’re going to con us out of our jock straps.”
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги