The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII

by Marion Kummerow

  Ulya was too crushed to feel. Pain? Pity? Anything.

  Hammerer offered to pause for a smoke. She didn’t reject the cigarette and took some drags from it, willing herself to hide the shaking of her hand.

  Suddenly, a hoarse grunting from the prisoner came out.

  “What?” Hammerer motioned her to come closer.

  She leaned to Nathan and could distinguish him wheezing, “Save my daughter. Kommunisticheskay 11.”

  Ulya recoiled, her heart about to give out from the new revelation.

  “What did he say?” Impatience in Hammerer’s voice was unmistakable.

  “He said he will die like a Communist.”

  “These Russian zealots.” Hammerer’s Browning up and ready, his gaze fixed on the crumpled body, he smirked. “How stupid and bold these Communists are. And I don’t even hate them.” He aimed at the man in front of him then, and as though reconsidering, turned to Ulya and handed her his pistol. “You must hate them more than I.” His reaction showed that he caught her shocked look. “What, do you pity him?”

  She swallowed. “I don’t know how to shoot.”

  His mouth spread into a sardonic smile, he pressed the gun into her palm, guiding her forefinger to the trigger and, holding a firm hand atop of hers, put the pistol to Nathan’s forehead.

  “Make it end,” Nathan whispered with a half-opened mouth.

  It was his look of begging that made her pull the trigger. Sinew and brain sprayed across the floor. At least, they won’t torture him any longer.

  46

  Late spring, 1943

  Months must have passed before the shock of losing Nathan started to slacken. Still, the memory whispering onto her ear—you, you, you killed him—would come flooding back. The same evening Nathan died, Hammerer’s driver brought her to a brick-and-wood two-story building of which the stone part of the ground floor was blackened by smoke and the wooden part burnt out. He stepped out of the car to open the door for her and to carry her two light satchels to the entrance. She took only essentials, her father’s scarf among them—the most precious thing for her.

  Although the house looked lifeless, Ulya could not throw off the sensation she was being watched through the slats of the shutters.

  Five wide steps—a single flight—were off alignment and wobbly. The front door was ajar, and pushing it open, Ulya found herself on a landing with two doors. As Hammerer told her, hers was on the left side.

  The key screeched in the keyhole. Ulya stepped into a fire-rot smelling hallway with two doorways and set her satchels down on the unkempt floor. After a quick glance around, she entered a room of modest size with a torn tapestry carpet and soot-covered walls. Light impressions in the wall paint showed where perhaps pictures of different sizes had been once tacked. Odds were, it had been used as a bedroom, judging by a discolored, weathered old sofa. Pressed into the right corner at an angle, it blocked the way to the single window. She pushed the sofa aside, setting it parallel to the wall. On the floor, covered with dust, lay an envelope with the Oscar Baumgart photo atelier inscription. She picked it up and, pulling out photographs one by one, examined them. A family group posing for a camera: a man in yarmulke standing behind a pretty dark-haired woman with two little twin boys on her lap, dark-locked, the spitting image of their mother. There were more pictures of the boys together as babies, then a little older, and two of them as teenagers in a gymnasium uniform. Beautiful boys.

  In the other, even smaller room with a whiff of dead air, she found a kerosene lamp on a kitchen table and two backless chairs tucked in under it.

  Two months later, she was used to the surroundings, but the atmosphere of the house remained hostile. Maybe the memory of another event, which happened days after she moved in, contributed to it. Then, through her only window that faced the street, she saw a haggard woman of about forty, returning home with five girls, each one smaller than the next. On a whim, she’d decided to at last make her acquaintance with her neighbors and, putting on a plate six pieces of white bread covered with butter and marmalade, she knocked on the door across the hall. The woman opened, all her girls in tow. Their eyes widened and froze on the plate in Ulya’s hands.

  “Good evening, my name is—”

  “German—” the woman chopped her off, the last word hissed in Byelorussian, most likely a curse. The words and the fierce glare from her hushed Ulya into silence, and she never finished what she was about to say. The disgust written on the woman’s face produced a little shiver up Ulya’s spine. It was hard at times to close herself off from emotions, especially in cases like this, to keep to her role in the double game she played.

  It was a sinister feeling being in the wolf’s lair, her every step watched—as though being hunted while being a hunter as well. How could she describe the sensation? Exciting and terrifying at the same time. Terrifying because for weeks, she’d had no contact with the Underground. Her attempt to inform them of Nathan’s fate had proved futile. The day after his execution, she’d gone to the news kiosk with her message “Nathan killed in SD jail. Requesting a contact. Hunter” in invisible ink only to find the place in mangled pieces of metallic rubble, burned boards still smoldering.

  For months, she was left to her own devices. In any case, gathering information sitting in the same room with Hammerer’s adjutant, an unemotional and fanatical in terms of his duty, Unterscharführer Wulff proved complicated. Impossible. If she’d first thought her employment by SD would give her first-hand knowledge into the inner workings of the intelligence agency, she had been mistaken. All papers changed hands from Hammerer to his adjutant and back. Her days consisted mainly of translating some official directives to be passed on to the local civil administration but never information of intelligence or of military importance.

  What was her position? Not even a secretary: Hammerer’s adjutant prepared their superior’s day calendar so Ulya seldom knew where he was heading or when he’d be back to the quarters. Wulff even emptied Hammerer’s ashtray. Ulya had learnt to enter Hammerer’s office only with his permission and only when his adjutant was in the waiting room.

  Most talk with his colleagues Hammerer held behind the closed doors, yet sometimes, before it was shut, she would catch tidbits of phrases that would have provided useful clues for the Underground if she had contact. Nevertheless, back at her flat, she made notes of what she overheard and hid them in the many crevices under the kitchen windowsill.

  Her expectation that Nathan must have left some instructions in case of his arrest or death still did not materialize. She had to find a way to restore the connection and, after careful consideration, resolved to try the older place on Nikolskaya Street.

  One day, after Hammerer let her leave the office, she hastened to her apartment, slipped from her elegant working two-piece attire—a dark blue skirt and jacket with a starched long-sleeved white blouse, the clothing intended for her planned mission in Germany—and changed into pants and a baggy man’s jacket that made her look as drab as other civilians on the streets, sticking to the basic rule of reconnaissance: You see everything, but nobody sees you. As she examined herself in the mirror, she blinked. She must have been born a boy. Broad-shouldered and her hair under the cap—by this time short, her plaits long gone—no one would suspect there was not a boy underneath. She left the house and headed to the outskirts of the city.

  Hardly was she two blocks away, when a car honked and stopped meters ahead of her.

  “Fräulein Kriegshammer?” Hammerer’s voice brought a wave of terror to her chest. He waived his hand through the open window, inviting her into the car. “I’m not used to seeing you dressed like—”

  “A man,” she interjected. “It gives me a sense of security. You know what I mean.”

  He opened the car door and nodded in understanding. “Yet I would suggest you not walk around the city after curfew. Even with your Ausweis. As you probably know, the city is infested with partisans. Or maybe it’s what you want? To encounter th
em?” His lips twisted into a cynical smile.

  “Do they still roam the city streets?” She allowed herself a smirk.

  “And? Where were you heading, if I may ask?”

  “I thought I needed to update my wardrobe. And since I still have some things left in the house I occupied before you offered my move . . .” It was too late. She’d created a trap for herself. Why hadn’t she given him another explanation? To breathe fresh air, for instance. To—Stupid. What else could she do in the occupied city close to curfew hour?

  “In this case, I’ll be more than happy to drive you there.”

  “Oh, no, no, Herr Hammerer. I don’t dare to ask you for such a favor.”

  “You did not ask. I offered it myself. You are too valuable an employee for me to risk losing you to the members of the Underground or our own soldiers. Nikolskaya,” he said to the driver.

  After twenty minutes at most, the street came into view. More huts burnt to extinction. “That one on the hill,” Ulya addressed the driver.

  By the look of it, the padlock seemed intact, the house most likely saved from intrusion by her status of working for Germans.

  “It won’t take much time.” While in the car, she knew she wouldn’t have access to the hiding place, but at least she had an idea of how to divert Hammerer from his suspicions, if he had any.

  He climbed after her from the car and stretched, turning his head around, taking deep lungful breaths. “So peaceful. Just like around my cottage near Dresden.”

  As she unlocked the door and took a few steps into the house, she had a feeling as if somebody had disturbed it with their presence. Ulya glanced around and saw all the precautionary measures she had made before leaving last time still in place.

  From the racks in the wardrobe, she took the dresses she’d thought she’d never need, and after running her fingers along the silky fabric, and a brief deliberation, changed into the burgundy half-sleeved dress with V-neckline and natural waistline. She paused in front of the mirror. An ample A-line swing skirt billowed to knee length in soft pleats. The pair of black heeled shoes added to her elegant appearance, which pleased her, but taking a closer look at her face, she frowned at her own reflection: sharp bones, hollow cheeks and—in SHON they taught them to read faces—reticence that suggested strong will.

  When, after some effort, she brought a smile to her face, she opened the door and froze in the doorway, taken aback by Hammerer’s applause. “Bravo! You look smashing, Ursula.”

  Ursula? He had never called her by her name.

  “Your gorgeous look entices me to invite you to a restaurant.” He offered her his arm, bent at the elbow.

  “One moment, Herr Hammerer. I’ll just pick up my other things.”

  The officers’ restaurant was a place where war was talked about, but no other signs pointed to the fact that outside its walls a destroyed and brutally ruled city lay in shambles.

  To turned heads, Herr Hammerer took her to an unoccupied table. “Champagne? Cognac? Or maybe Russian vodka?”

  In the atmosphere of relaxed and intoxicated elation, he looked different, as though infected by the piano music and bright light, with gorgeous candelabras casting on the snow-white-clothed table loaded with unimaginable snacks and bottles of alcohol.

  “I’m not much for alcohol, Herr Hammerer.”

  “Please call me Wolfgang.”

  Wolfgang. The name of her childhood friend. In an instant, it brought memories colored with an inner pain about her Vati and Engels, her hometown.

  “At least in the unofficial atmosphere.” Hammerer’s voice returned her to the present. Taking her off guard, he reached for her hand across the table and, holding it a little too firmly, watched her. “We understand each other, don’t we, Fräulein Kriegshammer?”

  What did he mean? She stiffened inwardly.

  “Herr Demel!” Hammerer’s voice again jerked her from her thoughts, and she couldn’t recollect if she at least nodded to his question. “Allow me to make you acquainted.” He elaborated, softening his tone, “Herr Demel is the one who makes all these meals and drinks possible at our tables.”

  A man in the dark green uniform of the Major’s rank—she would think him in his middle-forties—stepped to their table. “Good evening,” he said, intriguing Ulya with the lack of Hitler salute. He lowered his head at Ulya. “An honor to be acquainted.” Accepting Hammerer’s invitation to take a seat, and after Hammerer filled the glasses with champagne, he lifted his glass.

  “To our inevitable victory!” Hammerer proposed.

  “To the victory,” Ulya echoed, adding mentally, over you, damned.

  Herr Demel tilted his head in a nod as though approving the toast and, after they clinked glasses and drank—Ulya had just a little taste—excused himself and headed to the group of officers who greeted him with a loud welcome.

  47

  Summer 1943

  Nathan’s plea to save his daughter had not gone from Ulya’s thoughts. It took time to make herself face the truth: she had killed the little girl’s mother, and, at that, she didn’t even have solid proof the young woman was guilty of treachery. She, Ulya, couldn’t bring the young woman back to life, but she could save her little girl from the threat of death by starvation.

  It was a dreary day when she wrapped in a piece of fabric a small tin box of butter and the other one of marmalade, a hunk of white bread and a sausage and, dressed in the man’s clothes, set off for Kommunisticheskaya 11. The way was familiar despite the newly collapsed buildings adding to the obstacles on her route. For some time, she surveyed the hut, one of the few left intact on the street. No light in the window, no movement. In the gathering dark, she saw the door open and a woman exit. She pushed a stone to the door and scurried away.

  When she disappeared behind one of the distant wreckage heaps, Ulya entered the house. What looked like a tiny kitchen with a small Russian stove was bare of anything except a table and a stool. In the other, a much bigger room, dimly lit by the new moon through an uncovered window, she noticed a light movement on the bed and squinted into the semidarkness. Pushed to a wall, lay a little creature wrapped in rags and sucking on something like a gag.

  Ulya stepped closer. The girl’s face was that of an old person and her eyes, though a unique green shade, were devoid of life and made Ulya recoil in disgust. Back in the kitchen, she dropped the bundle with her offerings on the table and felt relieved she could leave this dead house.

  From now on, once a week in the night, she would come and, seeing the woman heading away, open the door to drop the foodstuff on the little table by the window.

  48

  October 1943

  Working for the Germans earned Ulya a well-fed life. She could buy fresh eggs, milk, and occasionally a one hundred-gram piece of meat at the local market.

  On a windy day after the first cold rain in October, the unpaved streets turned into muddy pools. On her way to the Smolensky market for something to complement Nathan’s daughter’s diet, she saw her neighbor with the youngest daughter trudge by. Every so often, the little one used the sleeve of her wooly cardigan to wipe snot from her nose, clutching a lump of what looked like rye bread in her other hand.

  Ulya was about to pass them without greeting when a young man snatched the bread from the girl’s hand and darted away, disappearing into a passage. The woman slumped into the mud and started weeping, her body shaking, her face in her hands, the girl beside her with eyes half filling her little bony face, not moving. An immediate recognition struck Ulya—Stashock, the young man she’d helped to seize the day she arrived at Vitebsk, but now he was thinner than she remembered. Nasty scum.

  Ulya caught up with him just in time behind the half-demolished wall of a house. She reached into her pocket to withdraw her lock knife and flicked it open. “Stop!” she whisper-shouted.

  He swiveled and smirked, stuffing bread into his mouth with both hands. “What?” From parted lips, a piece dropped. He was about to pick it up when
from behind, Ulya pressed her left hand tight over his mouth and with one swift movement, the blade slid between his ribs. His body stiffened then sank into the muddy ground.

  Scum. She wiped the knife on his shoulder, then headed to the street, turned the corner, and continued walking.

  Despite the wind blasts, the adrenaline kept her warm. She took a shortcut down a side alley, navigating around some rubble, and stopped at a water pump to wash her hands—blood on them turned rusty—and only now noticed how violently they shook. It was perhaps a couple of heartbeats till she understood the full extent of what just happened. She’d killed a human being. Again. Was she better than—?

  Skunk, she repeated to herself as if to stop herself from the tidal wave of condemnation and, with inner trembling, caught herself on the understanding that for the first time in her life she couldn’t control her rage. But why? Her mind instantly prompted the explanation: leading a double life, balancing on a knife edge was taking its toll on her.

  49

  End of October-November 1943

  “What does it mean?” Ulya looked at a plate covered with an embroidered napkin then met Wulff’s gaze for only an instant.

  His usually flat, unspeaking eyes—a typical soldier—suddenly glinted with humor. “It looks like you have an admirer, Fräulein Kriegshammer.”

  Only Hammerer’s adjutant meters away saved her from a cry of joy as she lifted the napkin. Apfelstrudel!—apple strudel! Grated and sugar sweetened apples and cinnamon! A perfectly light brown crust thinly sprinkled with powdered sugar. The delicious smell tickled her nostrils. Who could the mysterious well-wisher be?

  Nine hours later, as she left the building, a male voice stopped her in her tracks. “Did you like it?” She had heard this voice before.