Armageddon (33 page)

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

H
EINRICH
H
IRSCH 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.