Armageddon (34 page)

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.