Ogpu Prison

by Sven Hassel

  ‘In the morning they ordered us up in a long row, single file, and marched us further into the woods. In a clearing, where there was a couple of wrecked guns, they called a halt. I felt a cold pistol muzzle on the back of my neck.

  ‘ “Dassvidánja, Fritz,” the bloke behind me shouted, happy as a pig in shit.

  ‘Then everything disappeared in a roar an’ a bright light. But I must’ve turned my head, somehow, the very second the gun went off. Anyway I wasn’t killed by it and woke up a bit later when somebody started pulling me about. It was one of our follow-up units who’d found us, but only me’n my mate over there had got out of it alive. All the others’d had their heads blowed off. A Nagan ain’t no lady’s gun. Well, as you can see, I stayed alive, but my eyes were gone.’

  ‘Might’ve been better they’d killed you dead, then,’ says Porta, looking at the bandaged head.

  ‘Might indeed,’ nods Barcelona, and sighs deeply.

  The long corridors are packed with wounded, moaning and calling for a doctor or an orderly. Nobody attends to them. They must wait their turn.

  A constant stream of dead bodies comes from the operating theatre. After a while we begin to think that most of the wounded die on the operating table.

  ‘The Party bosses are going to have a busy time in the next few weeks,’ says Porta, his eyes following five bodies which are being carried away by Russian prisoners. ‘Heil Hitler, Frau Müller, the Party feels with you in your proud sorrow. Your son has fallen for Führer and Fatherland! The Führer thanks you! Heil Hitler, Frau Müller!’

  ‘Cut it out, sod it!’ The Old Man swears angrily. ‘Isn’t this enough, don’t you think?’

  Young doctors, in blood-stained gowns, bend over us and discuss with professional interest: Angles of penetration, lung perforations, broken jaws, smashed-in faces, shot-away eyes, gut wounds, crushed ankles, burns of various degree, and countless other mutilations. As if we were objects of study to them. When they are in agreement they share out points like examination results. Those who get over five are put to one side and a red label is attached to one of their ankles. They are the ones who are not worth operating on.

  Where I am there seem to be nothing but red labels, all around me.

  Porta waves to me as they carry him into the nauseous operating room. Gregor follows him. He manages a brief glance in my direction. Tiny tries to push his stretcher closer to mine, but before he can manage it they come for him and carry him into the big room where busy doctors are ceaselessly amputating legs and arms, opening stomachs, cutting into craniums. A constant whirl of activity.

  Orderlies, covered in long rubber aprons, race excitedly to and fro in a continuous fight against busy death. This is a room in which there are no differences of rank. Officers and other ranks lie together. A heap of human debris. Harsh Prussian faces have long since fallen into the folds of men pleading for survival. Those who have anything to pay with: currency, jewels, watches, spirits, tobacco, almost anything, attempt to buy their way to a green label. Prices go up and up continually. The exchange is in a panic. Green tickets give a man the right to transport, far, far away from the shelling, and from Ilya Ehren-burg’s fanatical, victory-inflamed Siberians.

  I feel like a tiny boat in a raging sea. Everything is moving up and down. Now it is not only pain which is maddening me, but also thirst. A burning thirst, which makes me long for ice-cold water. A face looms mistily above me.

  ‘Take this one,’ says a voice.

  I feel the stretcher lifted up. Want to protest, but cannot.

  I am tipped over a plank wall, and fall with a bump, onto a heap of frozen bodies.

  Another body lands on top of me. An unspeakable stench of rotting flesh fills my nostrils. To my horror I realise that they have thrown me onto a heap of corpses in the belief that I am dead.

  An amputated leg flies through the air, and hits the wall on the far side with a soggy thud. A naked, blood-stained body follows it. There is a huge hole in its back, from which the lungs dangle like a pair of perforated bladders.

  I attempt to scream, but no sound crosses my lips. I must get out of here, I think desperately. They’ll bury me, together with all these bodies. The Russian prisoners, who make up the burial squad, certainly cannot be bothered to see if there might be anyone alive amongst all these dead. Like all prisoners of war they do what they are ordered to do, apathetically. I clutch at my chest, get hold of my identity tab. Half of it is missing. There is no doubt of it. I am already registered as dead. Desperately I feel for something I can use to pull myself up out of the heap of corpses. I get hold of an icy hand. It comes loose as I pull on it.

  Shivering I throw it from me, and fumble around in the darkness, but my hands touch only the stiff features of the dead. I push and pull myself up through the mass of torn and twisted bodies. I am on top and can see light above me. My fingers push into an open mouth. I feel as if I am sliding down a chute. Far, far, far away from this hellish slaughterhouse.

  I remember no more, until I feel a pair of strong hands grip me and pull me up and out into a brilliant white light.

  A man’s voice shouts, in guttural Russian. He pulls me further out of the pile. Somebody laughs, noisily. German voices mix with the Russian jabbering.

  ‘Well, now I’ve seen it all! The man’s still alive!’ A Russian, in a tall fur hat, lifts me, and carries me back into the warm corridor, where a Sanitäts-Feldwebel is waiting.

  ‘Hell, man!’ he shouts. ‘You must be more careful! It’s a bad show, putting people in the lime-pit before they’re dead. I will not permit that kind of slackness!’

  ‘Da gasspadin’, answers the Russian, with complete indifference.

  ‘Put him in the queue with the others,’ orders the Feld-webel, impatiently. ‘Things are easing off a bit in operating. They ought to be able to look after a stubborn fellow like this, who flatly refuses to die!’

  They drop me on a straw mattress, and go on their way. I throw up, and almost choke on the bitter gall. The pain seems to be tearing me to pieces.

  The medical station shakes and trembles. A long roar of artillery fire commences. When I turn my face towards the window I see the flash of an explosion. Whether Russian or German I cannot tell.

  A yellow hand appears from beneath a dirty blanket. I put out my own hand but cannot reach it:

  Morgenrot, morgenrot,

  leuchtest mir zum frühen Tod5

  cackles the man on the stretcher next to me, blue lips stretching wide in an animal grin. He gets half up, and stares at me, with strange, dead eyes. He falls back with a sigh. His head hangs over the side of the stretcher, lolling helplessly on the far too long, thin neck.

  A fat M.O. with tired, burnt-out eyes, and a white death’s head of a face, looks down at me. He seems to be counting points, wondering what to do with me.

  ‘You’re the fellow who refused to let himself die, eh!’ he says, taking a shiny instrument from an orderly standing waiting at his side.

  A needle jabs into my chest. My arms are pulled back. I feel as if they are tearing my body apart, crushing my bones, pressing my insides out through my back.

  ‘Shut up,’ snarls the surgeon. They press something down over my face.

  When I wake up, a long time afterwards, I find myself lying in a room in which there are a great many other wounded. Down the whitewashed walls lice are marching in columns. They veer to the left and fall on the three patients alongside me. They do not seem to find me attractive. It is a bad sign. I am freezingly cold. My stomach burns. The whole room seems to swim about me.

  A fat, bald-headed rat is sitting, nibbling at something, a little way out on the floor. A steel helmet comes flying through the air and hits the corpse-rat. Squeaking, it disappears in the direction of the mortuary.

  A medical orderly, in white drill, asks me how I feel.

  ‘Like hell,’ I answer, weakly.

  ‘We’ll give you an injection,’ he says, taking a green label from his pocket. ‘You
’re a lucky fellow. The Staff M.O. was in a good humour today. When we fished you out of the corpse pile, you were wearing a red label. Where are your things? You owe me something. But for me you’d have been buried in quicklime now. Believe you me, buddy!’

  ‘I haven’t a thing,’ I answer, in a tired voice.

  ‘Useless sod,’ he snarls, angrily. ‘Trouble, that’s all you pigs are, to anybody.’ He goes through my pockets and finds my watch. An antique timepiece, given to me by my grandfather.

  ‘I’ll take this,’ he says, coldly. ‘Your lousy life’s worth an old watch, I suppose?’

  He opens it and puts it to his ear. ‘Funny watch,’ he goes on. ‘I’ll look after it well for you. Now don’t create problems. You’re not on the train yet. We can easily forget you here, and Ivan’s T-34’s are on the way, with the neck-shot specialists riding on their backs.’

  I let him take the watch. When a Sanitäts-Feldwebel turns up, he vanishes, as rapidly as the corpse-rat disappeared earlier.

  ‘They’ve done you up all right,’ says the Feldwebel, an elderly, white-haired man, with many years of active service behind him. I’ll see you get an injection before you leave for the train,’ he promises.

  I thank him, and wonder what he will want for that.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ he smiles, in friendly fashion. ‘It’s only what Army Medical Regulations allow you. But I’ll give you a bit of advice. Don’t groan. Grit your teeth, and don’t make a noise. Look as if you feel fine. If you don’t, they won’t take you, even if you’re wearing ten green labels. The ones who make noise, make work!’

  I doze off, wondering where the others are. Dream about Porta, sitting in a steamy kitchen preparing the ‘Soup of all Russians’.

  ‘Will you sell your green ticket?’ asks a fat Quartermaster, in the bed next to me. He shows a handful of glittering stones. ‘Diamonds’, he says, in a tempting tone of voice.

  I stare at him. He must be mad. Nobody would sell his chance of leaving here when the Russians are almost knocking on the door.

  ‘Hope you choke in your own shit,’ he hisses, furiously, turning to try some of the others. Soon he is offering them his block of flats in Hamburg. ‘It’s a big building,’ he says, stretching out his arms to show how big. ‘Forty-eight flats, with good, solid tenants who pay on the nail. Nine shop premises at top rentals!’

  ‘Stick your building, and your tenants straight up your arse,’ they laugh, jeering at him. ‘Try doin’ a deal with Ivan when he turns up. There’s sure to be some Russian who’d like to own a block of flats in Hamburg.’

  ‘I don’t think you realise what I’m offering you,’ he continues, stubbornly. ‘A block like this, in a central part of Hamburg, is a fine thing to have when the war is over. People who own land and buildings, will always get by. Money you can wipe your backside on, when your country’s lost a war.’

  ‘That’s all right then,’ laughs an engineer over against the wall, ‘you’re a lucky shit, man! All I’ve got is a bicycle without any tyres, if it hasn’t been pinched. But I do have a green ticket!’

  The house-owner with the diamonds begins to weep. He suddenly realises how poor he is.

  ‘I want to get away from here,’ he shouts, hysterically.

  ‘You will, too,’ a mousey-looking Gefreiter promises him. ‘But it’ll be in the other direction. To Siberia!’

  Everybody with a green ticket laughs maliciously. They make as much noise as if they were sitting drinking in a beer-parlour.

  A party of medical orderlies, with full packs, rush excitedly up and down the corridors.

  ‘Come on, speed it up,’ an aged Staff M.O. brays, hysterically. ‘The Russians may get here any moment!’

  The orderly, who stole my watch, comes over to me and jabs a needle into my arm.

  ‘Come on, buddy-buddy,’ he grins, straightening the straps of the bulging knapsack on his back. He puts his arm around my shoulders and helps me up.

  ‘Can you stand on your legs?’ he asks.

  ‘I believe so,’ I answer, biting my lip.

  ‘You’d better believe it,’ he growls. ‘It’s the only chance you’ve got. If you can’t stay on your pins, they’ll leave you behind. Even if there’s fifty green tickets tied to your prick!’

  I hang on to him, and try to make myself as light as possible. If he feels I’m too much trouble he’ll drop me, as carelessly as if I were an empty cigarette packet.

  The street is one mass of filthy slush. Abandoned stretchers and equipment lie everywhere. Groaning wounded, in blood-soaked bandages, crawl, like half-dead lizards, along the ground. In the distance a heavy roar of engines, and the thudding noise of ‘coffee-grinders’ can be heard.

  In the middle of the road a P-4 is burning. The charred bodies of the crew hang from open hatches. Their empty eye-sockets glare at us.

  ‘Time to get out of here’ grins “my” orderly, nastily, kicking a crawling patient, both of whose legs have been amputated, out of his way. ‘Why can’t these dopes stay in bed?’ he snarls, irritably. ‘They won’t let ’em get on board the trains. All he’ll get out of it’s he’ll get himself squashed flat by some tank or other!’

  Great, greasy, mushrooms of smoke hang over the railway station. A blast of hot air meets us. Earth, asphalt, tiles, corrugated iron, and steel splinters, hail down on us. A complete carpenter’s shop comes sailing through the air and smashes to pieces amongst the ruins of the houses. A huge boiler falls, with a scream of torn metal, straight down on to a party of wounded. Twisted human forms hang on the lamp-posts. Bodies without heads. Bodies without backs. The blast removes them, and replaces them with other bodies.

  ‘We’ve made it,’ says the orderly. He pushes me up into a packed goods waggon.

  ‘Here’s your buddies, buddy,’ he grins, patting me cheerily on the back. He disappears into the crowd with his bulging pack.

  They are all there. Albert embraces me. Tiny waves from the far corner. Porta is, of course, sitting close to the glowing stove, baking potatoes.

  ‘You were hard to find,’ says Gregor, ‘but we got the orderly who brought you to help us. He cost a pretty penny.’

  ‘That lad’s worse than all the sharks in Germany put together,’ says Porta. ‘A real body-snatcher!’

  ‘I pray to the God of the black peoples, that that pig doesn’t manage to get away before Ivan drops his heavy hand on his shoulder,’ says Albert, vengefully. He folds his hands, and elevates his eyes piously towards the dirty roof of the cattle-waggon. As if he expected the African God to be enthroned up there.

  The long train jerks violently. The two heavy engines, which are to pull it, give out long, shrill whistles.

  At the back of the waggon somebody begins to sing:

  Zu mir zu kommen ist nicht leicht für dich,

  und bis zum Tod sind es bloss vier Schritt... .6

  Porta pulls a thick, black notebook from his knapsack, licks a stump of pencil and writes for a while in silence.

  ‘What is it you keep on writing in that book?’ asks the Old Man inquisitively.

  To come to me is not easy for you,

  when death has only four steps to go. . . .

  Totting up who hasn’t paid his 80% while I’ve been off fighting the world war. Looks as if I’m going to be busy when I get to Berlin! There’s one or two boys who may get their balls shot off!’

  ‘Are you sure we’re going to Berlin?’ asks Gregor, disbeliev-ingly.

  ‘Sure I’m sure. I’ve bought a ticket for Berlin for our lot. A Staff Grefreiter, who’s Chief Clerk at the RTO here’s a good friend of mine. I let him off an 80% man’s loan. That’s guarantee enough for us getting to Berlin!’

  ‘He’ll twist you,’ decides the Old Man, quietly, leaning tiredly against die frost-coated side of the waggon.

  ‘Not him!’ says Porta. ‘He’s a swine all right, but not a rotten swine!’

  For nineteen days the hospital train zig-zags through the Ukraine and Poland. Then into Czech
oslovakia. A trip around Eger and Hof, and then northwards with the remaining wounded. Late one evening the train stops, with a screech of brakes, at Berlin/Anhalter Bahnhof.

  ‘Damn my eyes,’ cries the Old Man. He shakes his head in silent admiration. ‘You’re the king of ’em all, Porta! The eight wonder of the world, you are!’

  ‘Didn’t I say we were going to Berlin?’ answers Porta. He makes himself appear to be far more sick and suffering than he really is, as the doors slide open and a party of medical orderlies enters the waggon to off-load us.

  ‘Where you from?’ asks a Hauptfeldwebel, in a stern barrack-square voice.

  ‘The arsehole of the universe,’ answers Porta, with a broad grin.

  ‘Don’t you be cheeky with me, Obergefreiter,’ barks the Hauptfeldwebel, nastily, straightening his offensively clean tailor-made uniform.

  ‘Berlin, Berlin so sehen zoir uns dock wieder. . .7

  hums Porta, as two assistant nurses, breathing heavily, carry him along the platform to the waiting ambulance.