Armageddon (32 page)

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

T
HE 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 ...”