Casca 4: Panzer Soldier (13 page)

"No, I'm not a Hebrew, though I did spend some time in Judea a long time ago."

The ice was broken; curiosity overcame some of her caution. She looked at the square-built figure as he took his coat off; the room was warming. True, he looked the part of a German, the close-cropped hair and scarred face, and there was something brutal about him, but it wasn't that insane cruelty of the SS or NKVD. His was that of a hunting animal who kills only for survival, not pleasure. There was something else too. She looked deep into the gray-blue eyes; behind them lay a great sadness, a feeling of terrible isolation and weariness. She shook her head to clear these feelings, as if she had almost been hypnotized. Taking a bite from his own chunk of bread, he chewed slowly, thinking. He caught her looking at the medals he wore, the fear and suspicion coming back. He leaned, back in his chair and spoke softly, but in a direct way, to her. "Don't let the uniform influence you. Most men are no different, no matter what color the uniform they wear. Most Germans are the same as men everywhere, with families that they love, but they, like the Russians, are victims of a few ambitious men, men gone insane seeking their immortality; and insanity is contagious, it can drive those about them mad with the same sickness of mind and spirit.

"Those who fight this war, the soldiers, are caught up in that madness. It's too big to resist, and now they're committed to see it through to the end; it's gone too far to back away. I believed in the war in the beginning for reasons of my own. I felt that Russia had to be stopped before she grew so strong that no power would ever be able to resist her. The Communists are no better than the Nazis, they both feed on fear and power, but as wrong as the war was to start with, it has to go on a while longer. I know Germany is losing; the Allies have landed back on the European continent. Italy is almost gone, and every day we have fewer men to face the hordes of Russians that come at us."

Deborah watched him closely; there was no doubt in her mind that he was telling the truth as he saw it. "But why then do you continue to fight, don't you want the war to end?"

He nodded. "Yes, it's about time for this one to come to a halt, but not yet." He lit up another cigarette. "You see, the job now, though it will cost thousands of lives, is to bleed the Soviets as dry as we can every day, and hold them back long enough to give the British and Americans time to advance further into Europe and give more civilians time to escape to the West, ahead of the Russians. If we stopped now, there would be no stopping
them, they would overrun all of Europe. In his own mind, Stalin is the Genghis Khan of this century and he wants to achieve what every conqueror has always wanted, to be master of the world and all that's in it. Hitler is no different, perhaps only a little madder."

She still didn't understand fully; consternation showed in her facial expressions. "If that's true, why did you fight to start with?"

He sucked on his smoke and blew the residue out of his nostrils. "In the beginning, as I told you, I believed the great lie, too. I have fought the hordes before. I believed, as did most of the other Germans, that war was inevitable between the West and Asia.

"It was felt that the Soviets would someday advance with all the hordes of Asia at their command, to loot and destroy the Western nations. They had to be stopped by a united Europe if civilization was to survive, and not drop back into the dark ages. I couldn't believe that the Germans I knew were capable of the horrors that they later inflicted on the world, but by then, it was too late to stop. You just had to go on and hope for the best, and there was some indication that Hitler would not outlast the assassination attempt by members of the general staff, but somehow the madman survived. So now I wait, and do what I can. One man can never really do a great deal; everything is too big, you're lost among the rules and regulations, the habits of training and survival take over; you're just too small to fight insanity on a scale the size of this, so I go on. But recently a friend of mine died to prove something, and now I think it's time for me to try another way, to separate myself from the masses of this holocaust, although what I will do will have little, if any, real effect on the outcome."

Rising, he stretched his arms and put another log on the fire, turning his back to the flames. The heat felt good against the back of his legs. "And you! What about you, Deborah Sapir?"

Deborah thought carefully before answering; what difference did it make if he were lying, the SS were going to kill her anyway. "I was at Auschwitz for six months; the officers liked my looks so they let me live. I was being taken to entertain at a party for one of them when the car was ambushed by partisans.

Since that time I have been with different organizations trying to do what we could to save the Jews remaining; there are very few left now."

Langer moved a little bit away from the fire; it was growing too warm on the back of his legs. "Tell me what it was like there, I have to know." He moved to the table and sat opposite her again.

Her eyes took on a vacant expression; the words came by themselves. She became an instrument for the sake of the pain and suffering that poured out; she had been a whore for the SS, not because she was afraid to die, but because they paid her off with her life and food, some of which she gave to the children in the camp.

Through her eyes, he was drawn into the hell that was Auschwitz. Watching children torn from their mothers' arms and herded together to pass under a horizontal rod; those tall enough to touch it would live, for a while longer at least. Those too small were sent to the gas chambers immediately. Through the tears, he saw the young ones trying to stretch their necks, standing on tiptoe; anything to make them a little taller. The children knew somehow that something terrible awaited those who failed to touch that horrible high marker.
The cries and screams, the stench of the ovens burning the waste that had once been people, while in the background the prison band played overtures from Schubert and Paganini. The tears running down her face, dropping on the table, made pools of sorrow for all mankind.

He saw it all, the dark clouds that hung constantly over the camp.
The ashes from the ovens that fell, even into what little food they had. But it was the faces of the children that tore at his mind. The children, always it is the children; the innocents stand out the most. They danced for the amusement of the SS officers and sang sweet songs of the fields and valleys. Then they were gassed. The Panzer Soldier cried. From within, his life source, came a groan that transcended anything he had ever felt. Great choking sobs tore at him as the children spoke to him from Deborah's tears; the Old One cried.

The creaking of the door hinges swung him around; the SS
Hauptsturmführer
stepped inside shaking his shoulders loose from the snow. His two henchmen followed. The officer stepped forward to where Deborah sat, his face full of anticipation; he grabbed her by the hair.

"Well, Jew bitch, it's time to go. Your three friends didn't take long to tell us all they knew. They're down the road a little ways waiting for your arrival." He laughed, enjoying himself. "They won't go anywhere for a while, though, so we have time to entertain you a bit first. You know the fat one? Well, he's at least four inches taller now than before. I suppose the extra weight made his neck stretch further than the others."

Not looking, he asked the Panzerman, "Did you enjoy yourself, comrade?"

He barely had time to notice the tanker's movement before the steel body of the
Schmeisser crushed into his face, spreading his grin into a bloody smile as the bone crunched under the blow and the jawbone splintered.

The two SS men froze for a second,
then the taller of the two started to swing his weapon up to fire, only to feel cold burning pain as Langer's bayonet sunk into his stomach. He gave one weak whimper for his mother and fell. The other raised his above his head wanting to surrender.

But Langer was beyond any act of mercy. The pleading was cut off as scarred strong hands went around his throat and raised him from the floor, shaking him like a dog.

Tears ran in rivers as Langer shook until the SS man was no more than a crooked-necked broken doll waiting to be picked up and thrown away.

The
Haupsturmführer
gurgled through his broken face as he tried to raise himself up from the floor on to his hands and knees. Turning, Langer gave him one solid kick under the chin, snapping the man's head back until the vertebrae crushed in on each other.

The force of the kick flipped him over on his back. The grinning
Deathshead insignia on his collar tab leered happily at another victim. Langer stood there empty-handed, stoop-shouldered and drained.

The touch of a gentle hand on his shoulder brought him back to his senses. Deborah stood watching, her face torn with sorrow. "We have to go now," she spoke as she would have to a child. "We have to go before anyone else comes."

Nodding weakly, he picked up the weapons from the floor and took the officer's pistol and stuck it into his own belt. He gave her one of the MP-40s and slung another over his shoulder. He knew they would need them before long. He had another war to fight now.

Deborah led him by the hand out of the hut into the snow, leaving the SS men to be found later. Their feet crunched on the frozen surface layer and then sunk down to ankle deep. They moved into the darkness of the woods; their tracks would soon be covered by the gently falling large clean flakes. As they walked, Langer ripped the patches from his uniform and threw them along with his
paybook and orders into the snow. Last to go was the Knight's Cross from around his neck. He let it fall from limp fingers and sink into the softness, the silver edges gleaming until it too was covered.

By the end of January the German forces had withdrawn to the western banks of the Oder River.
Pursued not only by the Russians but also by a man and a woman who made their prey the
Einsatzgrüppen
of the SS. Like wolves they hunted the straggling units of the Totenkopf or SD.

From Langer, Deborah learned more than she would have dreamed of about the fine art of killing.
How to place a mine or strangle a man larger than yourself with a fine piece of wire. Time and again they had eliminated parties of SS herding their helpless prisoners back to the loading pens for shipment to the concentration camps.

Langer grew
wolflike in appearance, face lean and hard with no trace of pity for the butchers he relentlessly hunted and killed.

In this battle, mercy was a commodity they had not earned. Though many asked for it, no one received it. The bayonet and
garrote snuffed out the life of the hunted silently, or the single crack of a well-placed shot, taking out the leader of a party escorting prisoners. Langer and Deborah lived off the land, taking whatever they could scavenge or steel. This was their crusade, their "Jihad," Holy War, and with the dedication of a religious zealot they spared none, not even themselves. They pushed on.

The SS in charge of the final-solution program began to get nervous about venturing too far from the safety of their headquarters. Several high-ranking officers had gone on inspection trips to make sure the Fuhrer's orders were being obeyed, never to return, or if they were found, to be silent testimony that someone was carefully and selectively eliminating them as they did the Jews. The feeling was definitely unpleasant.

The memory of how many times they had struck vanished from their minds. There was no limit, no thought of doing just so much and no more. They continued to live in burned-out buildings or holes in the ground, trying to keep up with the retreating Germans and ahead of the Russians, who would suffer the same fate as the SS if they happened to get too close. As for Deborah and Langer, there was little difference in them, but their chosen prey were those in the black uniforms and swastika armbands. At night they would hold each other for warmth, and what comfort they had came from each other. They loved in a special kind of way that made them twins or extensions of each other. There was tenderness for Deborah in the arms of the scar-faced man, a gentleness she would not have believed when she first saw him. She knew that he had suffered great pain in his life that made him different in a thousand small ways from the men she had known. He was timeless in his patience with her, taking hours to explain a small detail that could mean her survival. About his own survival, he really didn't seem to be very interested, as long as he could accomplish what he set out to do. Each mission, each ambush, was a thing unto itself, which might end everything for them. Every act itself was a complete statement.

The greatest difficulty they had was choosing a good target area in order to kill the SS before they could kill the prisoners with them. He taught Deborah the use of selective terror tactics and to use lies, false hope and illusion.
A single truck with eight Jews and four guards; one beside the driver and two in the back with their cargo. A shot to blow a tire, another to kill the driver; a burst of machine-gun fire from Deborah on the opposite side to convince them that they were surrounded, and promise the SS their lives, if they freed the prisoners. If they did, once the prisoners were well away, they'd kill the guards. Honor meant nothing to the SS, and a man or woman would be a fool to trust their word. Also, to let them live would condemn still more innocents to the slaughter. This was total war as Hitler wanted it. Death, the final solution.