Lost Kin

by Anderson, Steve

  “Will they have to split up?” Harry said.

  “I’m afraid so, yes. It’s the only way to find them homes. I expect most will go to the US, others Canada, Australia, South America even. Others go it alone. Some leave camp on their own once they feel safe. Just walk out the front gate. It happens all the time, and no one’s stopping them. Rural Germany and Austria will make them their own eventually. And for some it’s probably best.”

  Harry thought about young Alex. He wondered if, by some amazing chance, the boy would someday meet Little Marta, the orphan refugee from Heimgau who made it over to San Francisco. He thought about Warren Joyner, who was probably in transit to a hospital ship home by now. He would like to think one of these Cossacks would end up in Joyner’s hometown, maybe with a job as a baker, making the pie his surviving son ate at the counter. Or doing hard work in Joyner’s wife’s front yard, since it was more than likely she was soon to be a widow.

  “What about you?” Sabine said. “Where are you heading?”

  Harry had told Max and Sabine that his tour of duty was ending, but he didn’t know what came next. Today was a Monday. He would have to be back in his office this afternoon. Transport papers would likely be sitting in his inbox. It was November 12. He had four days, tops. He was now in the redeployment pipeline, so they might well ship him somewhere else if he did put in for more duty. Above all, his parents would want to see him—they deserved that, and discharging out would get him home quickest. He should at least get stateside for a spell. Maybe he then could land something civilian back over here in Germany, or attached to the military. But he wondered how long it would take to find a way back over the water—back to Sabine.

  He played it light. “Maybe you’ll give me a job,” he said, stroking her ankle with his slipper under the desk.

  “Perhaps an apprenticeship,” Sabine said, grinning.

  “Ah, so happy to see me?” In came Max with arms out and a steady grin like the actor he once was coming out to greet photographers. He gave Sabine a little bow from the hip.

  “Well?” Harry said.

  Harry had lent Max his dark brown suit from America. The sleeves and legs were too short but who was counting in this busted city? No one worth a damn. Max pulled at the lapel of the jacket. “Such boring dress you have, Harry. The cut, fabric—like English clothes but without the flair.”

  “So you told me,” Harry said. “So tell me something new.” That morning, Max had registered his domicile with the police and reported his first week with the denazification bureau. Harry’s billet was the domicile. Harry was hoping Max could remain in the house for the next American living here. He could help Gerlinde with the chores. Harry’s recommendation would be glowing, of course. Max could call himself a butler if he wanted.

  “They treated me well enough. One clerk thought I looked familiar to him and I was going to ask him which of my movies he had seen—ah, but why bother? We move on.” Max’s grin had fallen away. “How about you, Harry? How did it go with Dietz’s wife?”

  Harry had gone looking for Frau Dietz twice over the weekend. She’d refused to see him. This morning he went back over, but this time he didn’t ring her bell or knock on doors. He stood out on the corner as Dietz had done so often, eyeing would-be strangers, casing the street and front doorway. After an hour of this, Frau Dietz yelled down at him from her window to quit plaguing her and just come the hell on up.

  Dietz’s wife had her bags packed, a pile of mismatched suitcases and carpetbags by the front door. She had sold the furniture. Her children watched from the hallway until she barked at them to disappear. She was wearing two overcoats, her arms crossed at her chest.

  “I’ve been lenient with you, so please be candid: Did he contact you?” Harry said.

  “No. I tell you the truth. But I’m leaving in any case.” Her face was pinched as if she needed to clear her throat and spit.

  “I’m sorry. I know that, whatever else he was, he loved you.”

  And she did spit, right against the wall. “I’ll tell you what he was …” She told Harry all she’d known about her secretive husband. During the war, the Wehrmacht Military Police had indeed kicked Dietz over to the Navy because he was too much trouble, but it was all much more than Dietz had let on. No doubt he was running a corrupt racket, Frau Dietz said, and who knew how many deaths he’d caused if not ordered—German and local, Jew, it didn’t matter, whoever might spill his secret. The records would show it. It was only a matter of time. Frau Dietz asked what the Soviets would do with her husband. Harry suggested that Dietz could make a go of it in the Soviet zone of Eastern Germany betraying fellow Germans there. Tears streamed down Frau Dietz’s face, and she rubbed them away with her coarse woolen lapels.

  “How could I ever go over there … and with my children?” she shrieked. “Hartmut, he’ll only end up in a Gulag just like all those German POWs, those repatriated Russians.”

  “At least he’s alive,” Harry said, not caring one way or the other.

  “Is he?” Frau Dietz said, showing about as much enthusiasm.

  Harry couldn’t do much for Frau Dietz. She was a German, not a Displaced Person—a German with nothing to offer. He could get her some food. Maybe she had relatives in the West. He told her, “I promised your husband I would help your children. He wanted to know that I would.”

  Frau Dietz had only glared at him. “Never mind him now. Do you have a jeep? You could give us a lift to the train station.”

  “And that was it,” Harry told Max. “I gave the woman and her children a ride to the station. We wished each other luck. She didn’t want to know what her husband did here.”

  “My guess?” Sabine said. “Dietz’s gone deep inside. Maybe changed his name. They might put him to use. But after what we saw with those Cossacks? Anyone who’s been touched by the West is a cancer to Stalin. I imagine you’ll read the news one day in their big paper.”

  “Pravda,” Max said.

  “Surely. Execution of one Hartmut Dietz—Fascist Criminal. Found in the Soviet zone of Germany. Or perhaps imprisoned in Moscow. That is how they operate.”

  Gerlinde brought them bread smeared with butter and green onions, coffee. As they ate, gathered around the desk, they joked about how Harry would extend his duty, but Max would step in to play him for an extended run. With so much weight lost, he probably even fit Harry’s uniform—all he had to do was let out the sleeves and inseams. After all he was an actor, and he had done impersonations before. Meanwhile, Harry would stay with Sabine and live like a local.

  The doorbell rang.

  The three of them froze, bread raised halfway to mouths. They lowered the bread and rose in unison. Max straightened up tall, shoulders squared, the closest to standing at attention that Harry had ever seen. They were expecting an undertaker to come for Irina in the cellar. The Optiker in the Seidlstrasse who made Harry’s horn rims had an undertaker friend eager to help—apparently the mortician business was slower than one would imagine, the optician told Harry, what with the conquering powers managing all matters of death for the foreseeable future.

  A sense of unease made Harry hesitate, a chill. He pulled on his Ike jacket and waved for Max and Sabine to stand back. The den door was open. He went over and peered down the hallway toward the foyer.

  A man stood before Gerlinde, erect, almost German or at least British in his bearing. He held a black pipe cupped in his hand. His balding, graying head was pink from the cold outside.

  Aubrey Slaipe.

  That dark overcoat draped over his shoulders so fine and yet so plain that it had to be part of his official dress. Gerlinde was holding his wide-brimmed hat.

  Slaipe turned Harry’s way. “Good afternoon, all,” he called down the hallway.

  Gerlinde ushered them all into the living room, her face turning pale seeing Harry so troubled.

  “My name is Slaipe. Aubrey. So very pleased to meet you, Frau Lieser,” he said to Sabine in adequate formal German.


  Sabine stole a glance at Harry as if to say, How does this man know my name? Harry nodded for her to continue. She faced Slaipe for a handshake.

  Slaipe raised his hand holding the pipe and, to their amazement, lifted his other arm from inside his overcoat and took the pipe in his other hand, which was now a hook. He was wearing a prosthesis.

  Sabine didn’t blink. She’d likely seen more artificial body parts than there was chewing gum in the PX. They shook hands.

  Max’s face had gone white. Now it was red.

  Slaipe declined Gerlinde’s offer to take his coat. “I won’t be long,” he said, his eyes fixed on Harry and Max.

  Gerlinde led Sabine away, Sabine eyeing Harry over her shoulder.

  Harry, Max, and Slaipe stood in a triangle near the fire. Max scowled, twitched, and rocked like popping corns ready to burst from heat.

  “Why didn’t you spring me from jail?” he barked at Slaipe.

  Slaipe held out his palm as if it were a clipboard to show Max. “I did not know,” he said.

  “That is a load of shit.”

  Slaipe made a tsk-tsk sound. “You made it quite clear that you did not require my help. As did your brother here.”

  Max turned away, muttering curses. Harry starting rocking on his own feet.

  “I am sorry about your Irina,” Slaipe said to Max. “Dearly. It took me by surprise as well. If I could have helped somehow, stepped in, I would have. Max? Please listen. It was not your fault.”

  Max said nothing.

  Slaipe turned to Harry. “And as for you—I’m not anything like Virgil Tercel, you know. You do understand this.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, come now. Alias Eugene Spanner. Called himself a colonel, ostensibly in the CIC. Except that he was not. The man was a criminal deserter as crooked as a corkscrew and far more dangerous.”

  Harry snorted at Slaipe. “Did you know about Dietz all along?”

  “No. Not until it was too late. By the by: You had to dispose of Tercel. If that is what you did. Because the man disappeared in the summer of 1945, last seen near Heimgau. You did the right thing.”

  Harry almost thanked him. He said, “Now your turn: Why the disappearing act? When we needed you. You tell me that.”

  Slaipe opened his mouth to speak. He turned back to Max instead and gestured with his hook for Max to venture a guess.

  Max understood. “You know why, brother. He wanted to see how we would do. Perform. It was just as he proposed to me in that Belgian villa. He wanted me to reenter Nazi Germany as his spy, or at least an actor’s facsimile of one.” Max’s face darkened and he stared at the carpet.

  “And perform well you did,” Slaipe said. “I could not have done better than your Colonel Partland in any case—Maddy Barton’s boyfriend, I should add.”

  “You should add. She made it happen.”

  “Indeed. Bravo.”

  “So he’s saying we passed some kind of test?” Harry asked Max.

  Max nodded, his eyes closing. “And well enough to make the grade, I’m afraid.”

  “A good operative doesn’t have to kill,” Slaipe offered.

  “Operative? Who you calling operative?”

  “I simply mean,” Slaipe said, “that there is much to be gained by allowing a certain malfeasant to live on and run. See where he’s drawn to. There’s one lesson right there.”

  Harry looked to Max, who only showed him a frown. “Now you listen to me,” Harry told Slaipe. “You can’t just march in here and—”

  “But, there’s nothing to reject,” Slaipe cut in, his tone sharper. “You’re already aboard, aren’t you? In point of fact, you’ve been working for me all along. In its way. And I would say that you passed the test damn well. Damn fine. Though there’s always room for improvement. One’s never satisfied with even their best performance. Wouldn’t you say that’s how it is in the theater, Max?”

  Max showed Harry another frown.

  Slaipe, smiling, turned to Harry. “Say, you ever hear the one about the man who had three hounds?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t.”

  Slaipe chuckled. “Well, the thing was he owned one, then two, and then three hounds … one for every ex-wife!”

  “Is that supposed to be funny? I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

  “We will, Harry,” Max said. “This is what the man is telling us.”

  “Very good, Max.” Slaipe nodded. “I won’t keep you two any longer. Just wanted to pay my respects. Oh, I almost forgot … There’s a man waiting outside, dark costume, looks like your proverbial undertaker. He reached your door before me, but I kindly insisted that he wait outside. Because, you see, I always come first.”

  Afterword

  THE FORCED REPATRIATIONS to the Soviet Union described in this book are historical fact. By early 1947, the United States, Great Britain, and allies had returned nearly two and a half million refugees, forced laborers, and prisoners of war to the Soviet Union as agreed in the Yalta Conference. These people were sent back forcibly, without consideration of their individual wishes and genuine fears. Moreover, thousands of émigrés who had fled Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War—well before WWII—were sent back to the Soviet Union that they had opposed. People of Russian descent who never set foot in Russia were forcibly sent east as well.

  The best overall history of the shameful repatriation efforts remains Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Secret Betrayal (1977; British Edition: The Victims of Yalta). It’s not easy reading. Many of the repatriated were tricked into going or outright lied to. When that didn’t work, they were forced at gunpoint. The bloody sellout was already set in motion by the unconditional surrender of May 1945, when the so-called Soviet Repatriation Commissions were roaming Western Europe operated by agents of the NKVD and SMERSH. Sometimes the Soviet officials promised those returning that Stalin would give them amnesty, appealing to a yearning to reunite with family and loved ones. Many others knew what would happen if Stalin’s agents got to them—they would land in a Gulag, if they were lucky. Some of these had fought with the Germans, the Ukrainian Cossacks fictionalized in this book among them. Roughly 50,000 Cossacks had ended up in British-occupied areas of Austria, some tribes that had fought with the Germans against the Soviets and, with their families, retreated westward as the Third Reich collapsed.

  Faced with overwhelming numbers to send back, the British resorted to subterfuge, then brute force. It has been called the “Betrayal of the Cossacks” and the “Massacre of Cossacks at Lienz.” Once the refugees understood their fate, they resisted with grim consequences. The horrific scenes that Irina describes happened. The Judenburg collection point in Austria existed—in just one incident over two days during the summer of 1945, the British handed over some 18,000 Cossacks to the Soviets at Judenburg, many of these reportedly Ukrainian Cossacks.

  The execution scene is fictional. Surely similar incidents existed.

  The Americans ran their own operations, most notably at the former concentration camps at Dachau and at Plattling where thousands of Russians were brutally repatriated by US troops obeying the McNarney-Clark Directive. The fictional savior Colonel Partland in this book had real-life counterparts in American soldiers who, as Tolstoy describes it, were left “visibly shamefaced” after one nighttime operation where they rousted the terrified Russians from their beds at gunpoint shouting and wielding nightsticks and herded them into trucks and, hours later, handed over their prisoners to Soviet trains inside Bavarian woods at the Czech border. The American death march was soon reaping suicide and murder: “Before their departure from the rendezvous in the forest, many [US soldiers] had seen rows of bodies already hanging from the branches of nearby trees. On their return, even the SS men in a neighboring compound lined the wire fence and railed at them for their behavior. The Americans were too ashamed to reply.”

  The crimes of diplomacy in this book are only a few among a vast, years-long and suppressed story of postwar t
reaty-dealing that sold out pawns and only created more death, more murder, more shame, and resentment. A sliver of hope in this sordid history was that some of the condemned civilians were able to escape like the group in this novel. No matter what the Cossacks did as soldiers, whether fighting to stay alive or even committing atrocities, it’s inexcusable that innocent woman and children should have had to suffer for it. If there’s a lesson in this, perhaps it’s that we should always keep a careful watch on the victors no matter what evil has been defeated. We see it repeatedly, even today: Peace alone does not spare the innocent.

  Lost Kin: A Novel is the third book in the Kaspar Brothers series. The story of Max Kaspar forced into a suicidal mission during WWII is told in the novel The Losing Role, while Harry Kaspar’s deadly postwar rite of passage follows in Liberated: A Novel of Germany, 1945.

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  Novels by Steve Anderson

  The Losing Role (Kaspar Brothers #1)

  Liberated: A Novel of Germany, 1945 (Kaspar Brothers #2)

  Under False Flags: A Novel

  The Other Oregon: A Thriller