Group Portrait with Lady (41 page)

“So we went from Tarnovka to Uman, from Uman to Ivan-Gora, from Ivan-Gora to Gaizin, and from there to Vinnitsa,
then to Shmerinka on the sixth day and on to Rakovo, that was near Prokurov; twice a day some thin pea soup—they just set the soup kettles down among the crowd, and the crowd consisted of twenty to thirty thousand men; then came the rush to the kettles—we used our bare hands to scoop the soup out of the pot and we lapped it up like dogs, if we got any—sometimes there were half-cooked sugar beets, cabbage or potatoes, and if you ate any of that stuff you got stomach cramps, diarrhea—and you kicked off at the roadside. We stayed there till almost March ’42; and sometimes there’d be eight or nine hundred dead a day—and at intervals beatings and taunts, taunts and beatings, and now and again they’d fire into the crowd—and even if they had nothing for us to eat, or claimed they hadn’t, why didn’t they let the peaceful local inhabitants get near us, the ones who wanted to bring us things?

“Then I worked at Krupp’s in Königsberg, in a plant that made caterpillar treads—you worked eleven hours night shift and twelve day—and slept in the urinals, and if you were lucky you managed to get a dog kennel, it was cramped but at least you were alone for once. The worst thing was to get sick, or for them to think you were loafing—the loafers were handed over to the SS, and when you got sick and couldn’t work any more there were only the mass hospitals, which actually were nothing more than extermination camps, death camps, disguised as hospitals, crowded to four times their capacity, run down and filthy, and the daily ration consisted of 9 ounces of substitute bread and two quarts of Balanda soup: the substitute bread consisted mostly of substitute flour, and the substitute flour was nothing more than coarsely chopped straw, chaff, and even wood fibers—the chaff, the husks, irritated your guts, and it wasn’t nourishment, it was systematic undernourishment—and then the constant beatings and taunts, and the constant swinging of the club. Eventually even the chaff must have been considered too good for us, and there was sawdust in
the bread, up to two thirds, and the Balanda soup consisted of rotten potatoes mixed with every conceivable kind of kitchen garbage flavored with rat droppings—sometimes a hundred men would die in one day.

“It was virtually impossible to get out of there alive, you really had to be one of Fortune’s favorites, and I guess that’s what I was: I simply stopped eating the stuff, I was hungry, but at least I wasn’t sick, I realized right off that it was poisonous—and it was better to spend another twelve hours assembling caterpillar treads for Mr. Krupp. Now you see what a bit of luck it was to be sent into a city to collect corpses and clear ruins, and how Boris seemed to us like a fairy-tale prince who ends up by becoming king after all. He was allowed to make wreaths at a nursery without even having learned how to be a gardener, a special guard came to pick him up in the morning and brought him back in the evening, he didn’t get beaten, he even got things given to him, and—something really nobody knew but me—he even had a girl he loved and who loved him. He was a prince all right! And the rest of us, while we weren’t exactly princes, we were certainly favored by Fortune. Not that we were worthy, mind you, of handling and removing German bodies, oh no, but we were allowed to shovel rubble into trucks and repair railroad tracks, and sometimes while we were digging into the rubble the inevitable happened: some Russian hand, a shovel directed by a Russian, would come upon a body and that always meant a break, an undeserved bit of luck—till the bodies had been removed, bodies for which Boris was making wreaths somewhere and arranging flowers and choosing ribbons. And sometimes there’d be smashed kitchen cabinets and buffets in among the ruins, and there might be something in there that you could use, and of course there would be times when by some lucky coincidence the guard happened not to be looking
when
you found something to eat, and days when you got a triple break: you found something, the guard wasn’t
looking, and you didn’t get searched. If a fellow got caught, he had a bad time: not even the Germans were allowed to take anything, and if you as a Russian slipped something into your pocket, well, you suffered the same fate as Gavril Ossipovich and Alexei Ivanovich, they were handed over to the SS for punishment, and the next thing was rat-a-tat rat-a-tat. Your best bet, when you found something, was to eat it then and there, and you had to take care how you chewed, for though it wasn’t forbidden to eat while on the job for the simple reason that there was no need to forbid it—the question was, how could the likes of us ever get hold of anything to eat? You had to have stolen it.

“I must say we were lucky with our camp commandant, he’d have us locked up when we were reported, and only if the sergeant insisted on handing one of us over to the SS would he do it, anyway he insisted that we at least get our rations properly. Once when I was being searched I listened in while he was on the phone to some higher-up and arguing about whether or not the work we were doing was to be classified as
of any significance;
for work of
some
significance, you see, we got roughly 11 ounces of bread, three quarters of an ounce of meat, half an ounce of fat, and an ounce and a quarter of sugar a day, for work of no significance the rations were only 8 ounces of bread, a third of an ounce of fat and meat, and not quite three quarters of an ounce of sugar—he was arguing away with someone in Berlin or Düsseldorf about having our work classified as of some significance; after all, my friend, after all—it meant a difference of 3 ounces of bread, an eighth of an ounce of fat, a quarter of an ounce of meat, and half an ounce of sugar more or less—he was a pretty forceful fellow, that major of ours, he had an arm, a leg, and an eye less than a complete man should have. He was roaring away there while I was being searched, and later on he really did save our lives, the lives of the twelve camp survivors. Thirty had already got
away, during the heavy air raids, they’d crawled away into the ruins or made off to the west in the direction of the Americans, led by our tireless Viktor Genrikhovich—that was the last we heard of them, and the rest of us, including Boris, who was cheerfully waiting to be taken off to his nursery garden, woke up one morning to find that all our guards had deserted as one man and in a body; no sentry, the guardroom open, the gates open, only the barbed wire was still there—and the view we had was exactly the same as the one from here, from the terrace: railway tracks, allotments, gravel pit, scrap yard—and so there we were with our freedom, and believe me, it was a lousy feeling. What were we to do with this freedom and where were we to go in it? It wasn’t the safest thing in the world, simply to roam the countryside as a released Soviet prisoner of war—and that action of the guards had been their personal end to the war, not the official one, and most likely some of them were picked up too, and strung up or stood against a wall.

“We went into a huddle and decided to inform the camp authorities on the state of affairs; if that major hadn’t deserted, he would help us to get rid of this freedom which, just at the moment, was highly inopportune and dangerous—there was no sense in simply running off into the arms of the next patrol, the cops; for there’s one very simple method of getting rid of people whom it’s too much trouble to watch, lock up, and sentence: you shoot them and, as I’m sure you’ll understand, we weren’t too keen on that.

“Now we could already hear the artillery at times, and it did sound like a bit of genuine freedom—but just to be set free like that was too risky for our taste. Viktor Genrikhovich’s action had been carefully planned, with maps and provisions and a few addresses he’d got hold of through his satellites or his mail drops; they went off in groups, arranging to meet in Heinsberg on the Dutch border and to go on to Arnhem, good
enough. But we fellows, we were totally taken aback by this freedom that had been presented to us overnight. Five had the guts to make use of it, they scraped up some old duds, changed a bit, and off they went across the railway tracks, disguised as a work gang with shovels and pickaxes, not a bad idea. But the seven of us who were left were scared, and naturally Boris didn’t want to leave Leni. And naturally he couldn’t go and see her alone without his nursemaid Kolb, so Boris went straight to the phone, managed to reach the nursery garden, gave the alarm, and half an hour later the girl was waiting with her bike down there at the corner of Näggerath and Wildersdorfer Strasse. Next, Boris phoned the camp and informed them we had no guards, and in less than half an hour the one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed major turned up with a few soldiers in his car and first marched through the hut without a word; he had a very well-fitting marvelous artificial leg, he could even ride a bike with it—then he went into the guardroom, came out again, summoned Boris and thanked him, with a proper handshake, man-to-man and all that. Proper German behavior, and not so ridiculous as it may sound. Damn it all, that was two weeks before the Americans reached the city, and what did he do, that major, he sent us off in their direction! To the Erft front, which they’d already reached. And to Boris he said: ‘Koltovsky, I regret to say that I am obliged to regard your gardening duties as hereby terminated.’ But I saw the girl talking to the major’s driver, and it must have been from him that she found out where we were going, and it was plain as could be that she was pregnant, like a sunflower when the seeds are just ready to burst, and I drew my own conclusions.

“So twenty minutes later we followed in a truck, first to Grossbüllesheim, then to Grossvernich, then on again at night to Balkhausen, and by the time we’d been taken as far as Frechen, again at night, Boris and I were the only ones left, the others had cottoned on to the major’s hint and had crawled
across the sugar beet fields at night to the Americans, and our prince was dressed up by his princess in a German uniform, bandaged with gauze, smeared with chicken blood, and transported to the cemetery.

“As for me, I did something utterly crazy: I went back to town, alone, at night, at the end of February, to that ruined, devastated city where I’d spent a whole year shoveling rubble and uncovering bodies, where I’d been insulted and taunted but also where some passerby had now and then tossed a butt or a whole cigarette and sometimes an apple or a slice of bread at my feet, when the guard wasn’t looking or chose not to look—I went back into town and hid in a bombed-out villa, in the cellar, which had half collapsed so that the ceiling formed a sloping roof for me, and there in that sheltered corner I waited. I’d pinched some bread and eggs from the farmers and I drank rainwater from a puddle in the laundry room, during the day I collected wood, hardwood flooring, that burns so well, and I rummaged around among the splintered furniture till I finally found something to smoke: six fat expensive cigars in a proper capitalist-type leather cigar case, imprinted with the words: Lucerne 1919, I still have it, I can show it to you—and six expensive fat cigars, if you’re not too extravagant that makes thirty-six quite passable cigarettes, and if you have matches as well it’s a fortune, and not only matches but cigarette paper, in the form of a prayer book from Grossvernich, printed on India paper, five hundred pages and the name on the flyleaf was: Katharina Wermelskirchen, First Communion 1878—and naturally before rolling my cigarettes I’d read what was on each page: ‘Examine thy conscience and see wherein thou hast offended God in thought, word, or deed. I have sinned, O Father, mightily have I sinned against Heaven and against Thee. I have strayed like a lost lamb, I am not worthy to be called Thy child.’ I owed the poor old paper at least that much before it went up in smoke.

“So there I was, bundled up in whatever bits of stuff, rags or otherwise, I found lying around: drapes and remains of tablecloths, women’s slips and bits of rug, and at night my little fire of hardwood flooring—that’s where I was on ‘the Second,’ that thunder from Heaven, that Hell, that Last Judgment, and now I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone, I haven’t even told myself yet, I fell in love with this city, with its dust that I had eaten, with its earth that had rocked and with the church spires that collapsed, and with the women I crawled in with afterwards during those cold, cold winters when there was nothing to warm you up but the nearest woman you could crawl in with. By that time there was no way I could leave this city, may Lavrik and Larissa forgive me, and may she forgive what I read in that prayer book: ‘Hast thou conducted thyself in the holy state of matrimony according to thy duty? Hast thou sinned against it in thought, word, or deed? Hast thou deliberately or consentingly—even if in fact no act took place—desired to sin with the spouse of another or with a single person?’ Questions put to Katharina Wermelskirchen that I am obliged to answer in the affirmative but which she, let’s hope, could answer in the negative, and perhaps this is the best way of approaching prayer, using prayer books as cigarette paper and promising yourself to read each page carefully before rolling your cigarette. And now leave your hand in mine and say nothing” (which the deeply disturbed Au. did, noting that Bogakov gave evidence of T. and W., also of P. and, with a probability bordering on certainty, of S.).

At this juncture, as a modest supplement to Bogakov’s factual information and for purposes of illustration, the Au. takes the liberty of quoting a brief selection of documented quotations, some directly from the lips of certain high-placed personages, some from depositions and reports of such personages.

“
ALFRED ROSENBERG:
Some of them seem to imagine that being sent to Germany is something like being sent to Siberia.

“I am aware that when 3½ million people are brought here it is impossible to provide them with luxury accommodation. For thousands of people to be badly accommodated or badly treated is only to be expected. There is no need for us to lose sleep over that. But it is a very down-to-earth question—and I assume that Gauleiter Sauckel has already discussed it or intends to do so later: these people from the East [Eastern Europe] are being brought to Germany to work and to achieve the utmost in productivity. This is a perfectly natural state of affairs. In order to achieve high productivity it is obvious that they must not be brought here three-quarters frozen or allowed to stand for ten hours; on the contrary, they must be given enough to eat so they may have reserves of energy.…