by Noel Hynd
The Bar Rosa was dark and clammy. There was a busy bar on one side, illuminated by several candles, many protruding from empty liquor bottles and scattered around the bar. Candles also flickered in several makeshift sconces on the walls. If a drinking hole couldn’t depend on electricity, candlepower was to be reckoned with.
Cochrane arrived early so that he could survey the room. He bought a one-liter mug of beer at the bar and settled into the first empty table that he could find. He could hear other customers moving about better than he could see them. There was an ongoing racket of voices in English, German, and Russian, and a shifting-squeaking of wooden chairs on the cement floor. Everywhere at the end of the workday, there was a clinking of glasses and steins. Several tables sounded as if they were packed with embassy staffers.
As he settled into one of the few empty tables for two, his eyes adjusted and he saw many uniforms, police and military, in the glow from the candles. A thin old woman in the corner was doing a credible job with a miniature accordion. She sat on a stool. The accordion case was at her feet and open for tips. There were a few coins within.
There were some abandoned international newspapers on a side table near Cochrane. prowled through them, looking for coverage of the airlift. World opinion was ambivalent. There was plenty of Yankee-go-home stuff – he was in the Soviet Zone, after all — and a small amount of positive feedback to standing up to Stalin.
One commentator in an Italian socialist paper asserted that the Americans were trying to provoke a world war by remaining in Germany. Cochrane voiced his dissenting opinion by tearing the rag to shreds and dumping it in a trash can by the bar. Cochrane resettled at his table and saw a man whom he guessed was Zimmerman come in alone.
The man stopped at the bar and talked to the bartender. The latter set up a shot glass in front of the new arrival, poured a shot of whiskey for him, and the customer quaffed it. One shot, down the hatch. Then the ritual repeated with a second belt of booze. When that business was accomplished, the man secured his own liter-sized mug of beer and turned. Cochrane raised a hand to flag him.
Cochrane was dead center to the man’s view. The man came to Cochrane’s table and sat.
“I’m Kurt,” Zimmerman said as he sat. “Crazy of me to walk through the darkness to get here,” he grumbled. “I could have had my throat cut by one of the hundred thousand Russian deserters wandering around the city,” Zimmerman said.
“I’m told this district isn’t too bad,” Cochrane said.
“Who told you that?” Zimmerman asked with an edge.
From a gold case that bore the monogram KMZ, Zimmerman offered Cochrane a cigarette, which Cochrane declined.
“Everyone I asked. Are they wrong?” Cochrane replied.
Zimmerman sipped and smoked. “Depends how lucky you are. Or how streetwise. Make one mistake, walk past one wrong doorway, and pfffft!”
Zimmerman made a slashing gesture with his finger across his throat.
The man was jumpy this evening, Cochrane noticed. A cynic, Major Pickford had warned. So far, everything held together.
“I assume you’re carrying some artillery,” Cochrane said. “Just in case.”
“Sure. Isn’t everybody?” he patted his coat on the right side by his belt. “Colt police special. The type they carry in Chicago. Between you and me?” he asked, drawing a long swallow of beer. “Want to know something?”
“Sure,” Cochrane said. “Tell me anything you like.”
“I can’t wait to get out of Berlin,” Zimmerman said. “I’ve been in Germany since 1944. War’s over and there’s nothing but death and destruction, anyway. We no sooner end one war than another one starts. I’ve damned well had enough of it, myself. Haven’t you?”
“More than enough,” Cochrane said. “Of course. Who hasn’t?”
“The fucking Russians for one,” Zimmerman said. “They’re looking to start something.”
“Maybe,” said Cochrane.
“How long have you been here?” Zimmerman asked.
“In Berlin? This visit? Not long,” Cochrane said. “Just arrived back.”
“I mean, it never ends.” Zimmerman said. He paused. Through the shadows and the candles from the bar he spotted two WACs in tight khaki skirts and gave them a heavily lecherous eyeballing. To Cochrane’s keen eye, the women recognized Zimmerman and ignored him. Meanwhile, the voices, the rattle of glasses and plates and the woman with the accordion formed a soundtrack for the Bar Rosa.
“What rank you holding, Mr. Lewis? Tell me again.” Zimmerman asked.
“I’m a major.”
“U.S. Army? Intelligence?”
“Correct,” Cochrane said.
“Ah. Right-o.” A stillness came over Zimmerman. “Sorry. It never ends,” he said, “and this old soldier’s nerves are shot. I’m out of here in another two weeks. Finally going home.”
“Good for you. Sudden decision?”
“No.”
“That’s odd,” Cochrane said. “When I was in Major Pickford’s office, I looked at the security officers’ duty sheets and you were assigned as one of the liaisons with the East German police till the end of August.”
“Those lists are always out of date. I’m long overdue to rotate back to stateside.” He sipped his beer. “What did you want to talk about, Major Lewis?” Zimmerman asked.
“I’m told you’ve been a liaison officer between the army and the German Police, East and West since 1945. Is that correct?”
“Maybe. Depends what you want to know.”
“If you’ve been in your position for three years, that would mean you have a few contacts with the local police. Or more than a few. Still correct?”
“Cut the bullshit, man. What are you after?”
“I’m looking for a woman who disappeared sometime after 1943. Or at least that’s the initial reason I’m here,” Cochrane said.
“Fat chance with that,” Zimmerman said. “Finding anyone who’s been missing for five years is impossible. It’s tough enough after five minutes. Want a rule of thumb? If the woman survived the war, she’s either in a labor camp or was raped and murdered. If she was lucky, she got killed in an American air raid before the Russians rolled in. Blown to bits most likely. Those were the lucky ones. Cheers.”
“That’s what Major Pickford says, also. But I need to persist.” This is someone who helped me and to whom I owe a favor or two. I’d like to help her.”
“Romantic thing?” Zimmerman asked.
“No. I was on an assignment. She was a contact behind enemy lines.”
“So? A professional debt of gratitude?”
“Call it that if you wish.”
“Good intentions don’t change anything. She’d be just as dead. Hate to tell you that, Major, but dead is dead.” He sipped. “You checked her last-known address?”
“The block is rubble. I was hoping you might have a contact or two.”
“Honestly? You’re wasting your time.” Zimmerman sighed. He set down his stein with annoyance. “What exactly are you asking me for?”
“I told you. Contacts with the German police.”
“East or West?”
“Either. Or both.”
Zimmerman shook his head. “I don’t have anything,” he said. “And if I did, I’m not sure I’d give you any names. People are disappearing, being replaced by ‘Germans’ with Soviet faces and Ukrainian accents. Shills for a new battalion of secret police. If you think the Nazis were a bunch of venal bastards, wait till the world gets a load of this new crew here in the Fatherland.”
“There has to be some way around it.”
“The Easterners are uncooperative bastards,” Zimmerman said. “They’ve raised it to an art form. Be prepared to bribe people, trust no one, and don’t expect much.”
“Another question. People don’t just disappear into thin air. Buildings collapse and are blown apart. But people don’t just vanish. Do you know of any official records that were kept?”
&n
bsp; “Of what?”
“Casualties at the end of the war. People were in those buildings. They had to go somewhere. Or their remains did.”
“I suspect there were ledgers. But when hell was breaking out at the end, there was no one to keep records. For one reason or another, everyone was running for their lives.”
“What about the clean-up squads when the war ended?” Cochrane pressed.
“Persistent, aren’t you? Here’s a phrase to remember: Gebäude zerstört. Alle Insassen gelten als tot. That means -”
“Building destroyed. All within presumed dead. My German’s good.”
“Better than your common sense,” Zimmerman said with a wink. “The Soviets went through with some local functionaries in the summer of 1945 and early 1946,” Zimmerman said. “Block after block. If a building was rubble, they assumed everyone was dead. The German and Russian squads came through after the peace and wrote down if a building was destroyed. If there was a list of who resided there, the residents were marked dead. The bodies and pieces of bodies went to mass graves, some to crematoriums first, some straight into the ground. Ugly as hell. Then came the Bulgarian and Ukrainian bulldozers and they leveled everything or dynamited it. People who were left standing, walking wounded, stunned, dazed, and mutilated, either died in makeshift hospitals or got shipped out to labor camps. Either way, they disappeared. Look, there may have been some records kept, some sporadic attempts by Berliners, but I never saw any and I never knew of any. None, okay?”
“Ever had a reason to search?”
“No. Poking around in a lot of the East German Zone and East Berlin stuff isn’t a good idea. It’s corrupt. Violent. Here’s a secret: the Red Army still has some snipers posted for curious folks who poke around in some sensitive places. Sometimes they shoot kids looking for food just for sport. Never any payback. It’s how the world turns.”
“Would there be a list of deportees somewhere?” Cochrane pressed. “The people who the Russians hauled off to work in factories?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then how do they know where someone went?”
“They don’t, from what I know. In the case of deportees, Russians assigned a gender, a name, and a number. Then they packed them off to labor camps in Czechoslovakia and Poland if not into Russian territory. The women, if they don’t work them to death or use them in brothels for the soldiers, or shoot them, die from diseases of infections from abortions or miscarriages. Then they burn the body and that’s that.”
“What are your sources?”
“Beggars. Whores. Unrepentant Nazis who have gone out an bought a Red Star for their cap and put the swastika in hiding until Germany rises for a fourth time. People who unload the dumpsters and people who work at the municipal incinerators. I’ve got my teams out on the street. I assume you will, too, eventually, unless we both get sniped first.”
Cochrane absorbed it as Zimmerman dished it out.
“Hell, your lists. Who knows?” Zimmerman continued. “Maybe some of the Germans on the clean-up squads did some paperwork. They would have kept such things away from the Soviets, though. It would have been a way to be without exactly being complicit.”
“That’s what I was hypothesizing,” Cochrane said.
“Some of the missing don’t even leave Berlin,” Zimmerman said. “Take a walk out into the woods east of here. Smell the funny stuff burning. Smells like pork, but its human flesh. Then if you poke your nose through the trees, you’ll see the crematoriums and barrels of ashes being spread into fields that used to have apple trees. Bodies of the newly murdered, bodies that have been in cellars, bodies that were covered in rubble for three years. Bodies and parts of bodies. I don’t know where you spent the war, Major Lewis, but let me politely inform you that you’re not going to succeed. You’re muddying up water that was already dark as black coffee. My advice, brother: leave it alone.”
Zimmerman set down his stein with a thud. He glanced at his watch. Cochrane wasn’t finished with the conversation, but Zimmerman was. There were no napkins, so he wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“Hey, pal. Got to run! I got a Veronika this evening. A few more pops before I have to go back to the U.S.A. and be a devout Methodist. Hear me?”
“I hear you,” Cochrane said.
Zimmerman was on his feet and pushing through the crowd almost before Cochrane could answer. Cochrane might have persisted and thrown more questions at him, but he knew it would have been useless. He finished his beer, stopped by the old woman playing the accordion, dropped two American dollar bills in her music case and proceeded back to Tempelhof.
Chapter 37
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – April - May 1945
Fritz Schroeder’s only was for his wife and daughters. The Soviet tank blocked the road ahead. Fritz slowed their car, eased it to a parked position at an angle, turned in a way that allowed the girls to open a back door without being seen.
“God bless my three lovely ladies,” their father said. “Get to the woods!”
The Soviet tank stopped. A swaggering Russian officer emerged from it, carrying an automatic rifle as well as a sidearm. From behind the tank, several Russian foot soldiers appeared. They looked like a Red Army rifle squad.
Fritz reached to the box of smoke grenades at his side. He picked up four. “Now! Go!” Fritz said. “Go!” he ordered.
He emerged from the driver’s side of the Citroen, cradling the four grenades in his left arm as he moved away from the car. He suddenly pitched one grenade forward. It landed several meters in front of the Soviet tank and officer. The grenade exploded, throwing a billow of white smoke low across the road. Fritz moved as quickly as his legs would carry him, drawing attention away from the three women.
Gunfire began as the rifle squad tried to find him through the low cloud of smoke. He threw two more grenades, creating cover for his daughters who ran for the woods. Frau Schroeder made a decision. She lagged behind her daughters. Her final wish was to die with her husband and match his heroism.
Under cover of the smoke, which now made a low cloud fifty meters across, she returned to the car. Her husband, thirty meters from the Citroen, threw his final grenade, then opened fire with his police pistol in the direction of the rifle squads. Frau Schroeder found a gun on the front seat, stood behind the car door to protect herself, and opened fire through the smoke.
The Russians returned the fire. Fritz was hit first, several times in the chest and upper body. He whirled, spun, and was dead before he hit the ground. His wife screamed and ran toward him. She came to within a few meters of where Fritz had fallen when the Russian officer emerged coughing from the smoke, followed by two of his riflemen. The officer fired a volley of bullets at the German woman. The impact of several shots sent her sprawling. She came to rest a few meters from her husband’s side.
The gunfight was over within twenty seconds. But by this time, the girls had vanished into the woods, Lena first then Anna. They found a clump of trees and looked back. Anna started to scream, but her sister covered her mouth. Anna raised her hand to fire her pistol at the Russians, but Lena stopped her. She shook her head and jerked a fist with a thumb in the opposite direction.
In the distance, the Russian troops stood over the bodies of their parents. The Soviet officer fired a final shot into the head of each of the girls’ parents.
The sisters stifled their emotions and looked away, holding each other. Their parents had died to secure their escape. They both knew that they owed it to their family to run, to continue to safety if they could find it.
They proceeded farther into the woods, stopped for a moment, and looked back, taking cover in the heavy shrubbery. They saw the Russian officer. He came to the edge of the woods with two riflemen, looking for them. They could see his face and his features. They could see the three stars on his silver shoulder straps. He was a colonel or lieutenant colonel, they guessed. They could now hear the Russians talking. The two riflemen addressed him as Comrade K
ovalyov. The sisters took mental pictures of him. If they ever escaped these woods, they would never forget him. Nor would they forget his name: Comrade Kovalyov.
Anna raised her pistol again with the intention of firing. She had a shot at the upper half of the Soviet commander’s head from about twenty meters through brush and branches. But her hand trembled. If she sprayed the area where he stood, there was a fair chance that she might hit him. Then he moved. Her chance was gone.
Anna glanced at Lena. With tearful terrified eyes, the girls looked deeply into each other’s souls. Lena put her hand on his sister’s gun and pushed it downward. She raised a finger of caution to her lips. They watched the Russians for a full minute. They crouched in ambush for several seconds, barely breathing.
The sisters entertained the same thoughts. If the Soviet soldiers pursued them and came within a better range, they would fire on them. But they knew the shots would attract the remaining members of the rifle squad. There were at least twenty other Russian soldiers. They knew they would die, even if they avenged their parents’ death.
The two riflemen with the Soviet officer looked to the latter for a command. Words were spoken. Now one of the riflemen addressed him as Colonel Kovalyov. The commander surveyed the situation, then signaled that they should return to the area of their tank. Then a second tank rumbled into position and joined the first.
Then a third. The tanks had effected a pincer movement around Demmin and were there to eradicate those trying to flee. Both sides knew the protocol: kill the men and boys, rape the women.
The Soviet officer and his two riflemen had a brief conversation which Anna and Lena could not hear. One of the rifle bearers, responding to his officer’s command, raised his weapon and sprayed the woods with a dozen rounds, scattering several flocks of birds.
One shot hit a tree near Anna, but no other bullet came close. The soldiers laughed, turned, lowered their weapons, and walked back to their squads. Kovalyov drew his sidearm, a Tokarev TT-33. Gingerly, he took two paces into the woods and stopped again, his pistol raised. He was no more than twenty meters from where Anna and Lena remained hidden. Again, they had a shot at him if they wished to take it and get themselves killed at the same time.