by Heinz Kohler
Somehow, on that fateful Monday afternoon of May 7, 1945, we all went into the cellar at the same time: My mother, Helmut, and I, and the Albrechts, and the three families from Cologne–the Ebners, the Hollands, and the Gronostalskis–except for Mr. Albrecht, women and children all.
I didn’t like it. I thought of Berlin and looked with disdain at the ceiling, lacking, as it did, even the most rudimentary type of support. Should they decide to shoot artillery at us, we could easily be buried again, I knew. But I felt nothing; no pounding of the heart, no dizziness, no choking at the throat. I felt calmer than I had in years.
“If the Russians just knew us,” I thought, “they wouldn’t want to kill us. We might even become friends.”
Still, sometimes and ever so briefly, my mind kept drifting into places I had forbidden it to go. It wandered on the edge of dreams, allowing vague images to pass across it, images of blood and fire, of blackened ruins and charred bodies, of pitiful refugee columns and soldiers moaning in pain. But then a clock struck three and all of it was gone.
I climbed a chair and waited at the cellar window, merely a hole in the cement wall without glass, and I stared into the street. It was so quiet; the village seemed paralyzed. I could hear the clacking of the storks’ bills on top of the castle and the flapping noises made by the large white flag at the tower of the church. Someone had put it there anyway!
I thought of the warning issued by the Brandenburg Werewolf earlier that day: “All that matters is perseverance and a remorseless will to achieve victory! We warn you! Villages that betray us and show the white flag will experience total destruction!” Others around me must surely have had similar thoughts. The tension in that cellar was unbelievable, as if we were all standing in the middle of a newly frozen pond, waiting for the ice to break and drown us all. And then I saw him: A solitary rider in the center of Breite Weg, followed by a cloud of dust much larger than a single horse could make. His horse was white, its gait was slow. He sat up straight and proud, his chest covered with medals. He rode past the bakery, the shoe store, the grocery store; he moved past the pharmacy, past us, and on towards the gallows at the Town Hall, just out of my view.
And a phalanx of chariots came onto Breite Weg out of the dust, three abreast, and reached from wall to wall across the street. I saw little horses, pulling giant wheels, and single riders crouched on seats of straw between the wheels. I heard the heavy breathing of the little beasts, the clatter of their hoofs, the rumbling of the wheels.
I thought of the newsreels from Paris Mr. Eisler had shown and noticed the contrast between the scene unfolding here and that other scene, not so many years ago, of the German Army, goose-stepping along the Champs Elysées.
I heard voices then; the single rider had returned; I saw his khaki uniform; I saw his face: a Mongol Khan! He stopped and pointed to the house across the street. The sun made sparkles on his crescent sword.
“Mongols, my God, Mongols,” Mrs. Albrecht wailed, “they’re going to burn us alive.”
“Shut up,” Mrs. Gronostalski said.
Then there were voices again and someone banged on our front door. I saw Mr. Furtwängler and Mrs. Furtwängler and their boys coming from their tobacco store across the street.
“Open up, open up,” they yelled. “Hurry, hurry!”
Mr. Albrecht took the iron pipe he was clutching and went up to let them in. He locked the front door after them.
“They are taking our house,” Mr. Furtwängler said. “They just pointed those guns at us and waved us out the door. But the fellow on the white horse, he has a sword.”
“Mongols, my God, Mongols,” Mrs. Albrecht wailed.
“I told you to shut up,” Mrs. Gronostalski said.
That’s when my mother decided to take us back up to our room.
-----
From behind our curtains, we saw waves of chariots pass our house that afternoon, pulled by tiny horses with wooden yokes around their necks, nodding their heads and snorting, pawing at the road whenever they came to a stop, then passing on.
Later, we learned the names of those ubiquitous wagons filled with straw and pulled by those shaggy little ponies. Panje wagons, they called them. Later, we also learned the names of other vehicles that moved past our house: the Studebaker trucks filled with soldiers in brown uniforms, the Dodges towing light guns, the Chevrolets with mortars in back, and the Deere farm tractors hauling howitzers. And we also saw the tank troops in their padded black helmets, guiding their famous T-34’s.
That night, of course, nobody slept. And one of the tanks moved around outside, making a racket. Again and again, it came out of the side street, churning up the earth and pushing a huge pile of wooden beams in front of it, tearing up the cobblestones in its wake. A pyre of wood grew in the middle of the street, right in front of our house, shaped like a pyramid, three meters high. The wood looked like the railroad ties we had planted in the fields to keep the tanks from getting into town, and Mrs. Albrecht carried on something awful downstairs. We could hear every word upstairs.
“They’re going to burn us alive,” she yelled.
“Shut up your goddamn mouth,” Mr. Albrecht said.
Outside, the Mongols poured gasoline on the railroad ties. We could smell the pungent odor through our open windows. A lot of soldiers appeared and formed a circle. The chariots and horses made a circle, too. We saw them fire their pistols and rifles and submachine guns into the air. And then something exploded, and a fire burned in the middle of the street. I held on to Helmut, and thought of the stories the Chain Hounds had told. My mother stood close behind us. Soon, we felt the heat of the fire, even though it was in the middle of the road and the road was wide and our curtains were mostly drawn. None of us dared breathe.
The fire reached for the sky.
And we heard a voice, a single, beautiful voice, nearly imperceptible at first, but intense; softly, growing louder; slowly at first, but moving faster, and faster. “Kalinka, Kalinka, Kalinka moya,” and a hundred voices joining the first, bodies joining arms, and a hundred faces burning with fire. We heard feet jump in the fiery night, and saw a circle of men and swords whirl around the flames. And a whirlwind filled the street. Then silence.
The fire reached for the sky. Again, that single, beautiful voice; soft, growing louder; slow, moving faster. “Kalinka, Kalinka, Kalinka moya,” and a hundred swords sparkled in the night.
When the fire died down, they threw branches on it and a new shower of sparks swirled skyward, making the fire roar again and drive away the shadows of the night. And then, too, we could read the message across the street:
NOT ANOTHER FOOT OF SOIL TO OUR ENEMIES!
The Nazi view of the Red Army:
Not another Foot of Soil to Our Enemies!
29. Rampage
[May 1945]
Everyone was relieved that the Mongols preferred to burn railroad ties rather than people. By morning the day after their arrival, even Mrs. Albrecht had calmed down. She kept saying how cute all those “ponies” were out there in the street. And in the light of day, Helmut and I noted something else that was cute: Many of the panje wagons were decorated with carpets and many of their Mongol inhabitants were sleeping on feather beds hidden in the midst of all that straw! Moreover, down to the left, near the grocery store–we could hardly believe our eyes–we spotted camels in front of some of the wagons parked there. Equally interesting, a bunch of Mongols were busily roasting an entire pig on a spit, right in the middle of the street! But my mother wouldn’t let us go down to investigate.
“You are not to leave this house!” she said firmly.
“But we need water and I have to go to the toilet,” I said. “May I go to the backyard?”
“The backyard only,” my mother said, “and only if Mr. Albrecht is there.”
-----
Before long, the Mongols figured out that Mr. Albrecht had a butcher shop; the big pig’s head hanging over the door, and just below our windows, made it pr
etty obvious. Mr. Albrecht had his hands full from then on. They brought over some of the pigs from a farm down the street, and gestured wildly. They wanted sausages, long strings of sausages. Then they brought over a huge brown ox and, later, a goat. I watched Mr. Albrecht tie up the pigs. He pulled them up to a hook on the ceiling, hind legs first, and then cut their throats. He gathered the blood in buckets to make blood sausage later. He numbed the ox with a single blow of the sledgehammer, then picked up a metal cylinder and fired a shot into the ox’s head. He also made big funny eyes at the Mongols who were standing around to watch. He held the cylinder to his own head, but didn’t pull the trigger. Everyone laughed. He went up to the Mongol captain, who was watering his horse, and held the cylinder to his head. The captain pretended to be dead and fell to the ground. Everyone laughed some more.
And everyone just died laughing when I decided to try out the only Russian words I knew–the ones I had learned during my People’s Storm training.
“Ruki vverch! [Hands Up!],” I said to the captain, and he gladly obliged.
Just then, Mrs. Albrecht came running into the backyard, gesturing almost hysterically.
“There are savages, there are savages out there!” she screamed.
Mr. Albrecht calmly rolled up the skin of the ox, heavily sprinkled with salt, lit the coals at the bottom of the smoking chamber, and then followed her into the street. Everyone else went along, too, still laughing. I stopped at the front door, as my mother had commanded, but I could still see what was going on. A tank stood in front of the pharmacy next door. The tank was decorated with red banners and flowers and three black soldiers sat on top of it. They were laughing, too. They watched a fourth soldier, also black, trying to catch a chicken in the middle of the street. He wasn’t succeeding. I ran upstairs to tell Helmut to look out the window. Like me, he had never seen black people before, either. That’s when we also saw the new sign above the Furtwänglers’ tobacco shop.
“Kommandatura” it said.
And when we looked down the street, right or left, we saw red flags hanging from lots of windows. Each flag had a circle in the middle, made of a darker red than the surrounding area. That was the spot where the white circle with the swastika had been.
“I don't believe it,” my mother said. “I guess it’s ‘Heil Stalin’ now.”
-----
Just then, there was an incredible bang and another and another still, and the earth shook. We saw blinding flashes, even though the sun stood high in the sky. The air filled with rockets exploding and bombs whistling. Showers of sparks rained down, and the noise grew louder and came faster. A house down the street began to burn, and all the Mongol soldiers got on their chariots and drove away. The tank made a terrible noise as well, and I thought of Mt. Vesuvius burying the people of Pompeii. I had seen it all in my grandmother’s Liebig books.
A man came running from the railroad tracks. He said a munitions train had blown up.
“Must have been the sparks from the locomotive,” he said.
But just then Dr. Dietrich raced by on a bicycle. He wasn’t wearing his SA uniform and his face was red. His face was white the next morning when we were all marched to the Town Hall to see him hanging from the gallows, along with the Chief of Police. The two werewolves, it turned out, had used a Panzerfaust on a munitions train.
By morning, tanks and trucks ringed the village, and the Mongols with their cute ponies and camels were definitely gone. Cossack cavalry men, sitting on regular horses with swords strapped to their saddles, had taken up positions every hundred meters along the street, as far as we could see. And White-Russian soldiers, half of them women, were just then pouring out of trucks parked in the center of Breite Weg. With submachine guns slung across their chests, they went into every house, and they looked into every room. One soldier came up to our place. On entering, he fired a short burst onto the ceiling, bringing down a shower of plaster and one of the flypaper things. Helmut had been sleeping in his crib and started to cry; my mother covered her mouth with her hands. I stood by the window, very quietly, doing nothing. The soldier looked around, opened the wall closet, and stabbed into it with his sword. My mother’s housecoat was slashed. Another soldier came in and took my mother’s wedding ring. He scared her with a knife when she couldn’t get it off fast enough.
“Davai! Davai!” he yelled.
He also took the porcelain fish which my mother used as a mold when she made pudding.
Other soldiers went through the backyard and the Albrechts’ garden and put their swords into the ground. In no time at all, they found the big chest that was buried there. I guess it was pretty obvious with the freshly turned earth. I watched them open the lid. They laughed when they saw Mr. Albrecht’s wine bottles, but they were angry about all the other things. They dangled the air raid helmets and war medals in front of Mr. Albrecht’s nose.
"Fashist! Fashist!” they yelled.
They discovered my Hitler stamps, too, and threw them on the ground. Then they leafed through my book about the Olympic Games of 1936. Each picture was printed twice, and when one looked at it through a special set of glasses, as I have said before, one could see everything in three dimensions, but the Russians didn’t figure it out. Still, Adolf Hitler was visible in almost every scene, three-dimensional or not, and the Russian soldiers didn’t like it at all.
“Gitler, Gitler!” they said and trampled the book underfoot.
That’s when a group of former POWs came into the yard. I could tell, because they were filthy and bearded and still had the R on the back of their jackets. They also wore shabby uniforms that were stained and ripped, and their boots were falling to pieces. One of the men was particularly scary. He had bloodshot eyes and held a bayonet in his hand, but without the rifle. He went through Mr. Albrecht’s apartment to find himself a new wardrobe. He also took a bunch of cans from Mrs. Albrecht’s kitchen. He opened one of them with the bayonet; I ran away and hid upstairs.
-----
Later, a company of soldiers with fixed bayonets marched past our house. They were singing. With the accent on the last syllable of each word, their song sounded exactly like “Liverwurst! Liverwurst!” I never figured out what it meant, not even in later years when I spoke Russian. Meanwhile, down the street, at the shoe store, a group of women soldiers had discovered a cache of silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. Before long, they were walking on high heels among the cobblestones, their boots under one arm, their submachine guns under the other. Some of their male comrades, meanwhile, were trying to ride their newly plundered bicycles, wobbling dangerously from one side of the street to the other. People watched them from behind their curtains and laughed. But they didn’t laugh for long.
-----
Mrs. Holland came back from the baker’s, just four houses down the street from us, and told everyone that soldiers were holding Gisela Senf in the barn.
“Mr. Senf was lying in the yard behind the bakery shop,” she said, her voice quivering and almost giving out. “Like dead, but he was alive. He said he went berserk when he saw them holding the muzzle of a pistol in Gisela’s mouth to ensure her compliance. They must have knocked him out.”
Mrs. Ebner came back from the pharmacy next door and told everyone how Erna Diehl had been raped by dozens of soldiers, one after the other, and her mother had been raped as well when she tried to interfere.
“Imagine,” she said, with tears streaming down her face, “a seventeen year old child!”
Mrs. Gronostalski came back from across the street, where she had just gotten a new job as interpreter–none of us had known before that she spoke Russian fluently–and her news wasn’t any better.
“A woman just brought in her daughter to the commandant,” she said. “Black bruises on her face and neck, her eyes swollen shut, cuts on her hands, she is a mess. They’ve been raping her all night, wouldn’t even give her a break to breast-feed her baby!”
“And the commandant, calmly smoking his makhorka, greete
d them with total indifference, almost amusement,” she continued, “and you should see what he says to the Russian girls!”
“Russian girls?” Mrs. Albrecht asked.
“Oh yeah,” Mrs. Gronostalski said, “the liberated ones from the POW camp. They have been raping them, too, even in sight of the officers. And you know what he says, the Commandant? ‘You are here’ he says, ‘it can’t have done you any harm’ he says. The trouble is, they think these girls have collaborated with the Nazis; otherwise, they would have fought to the death or joined the partisans! He even has a sign above his desk, the Commandant has. ‘Be ruthless to all turncoats and traitors to the motherland,’ it says.”
There was that big silence in the room, and one could hear the birds in the backyard. But I hadn’t understood anything that had just been told.
“What’s rape?” I whispered to my mother.
She promised she would explain that very night, and then my mother and Mrs. Albrecht and all the others whispered a lot as well, just as my mother and Mrs. Meyer and Mrs. Nussbaum had in Berlin, and then Mr. Albrecht got the big key and locked up all the doors.
By nightfall, red light illuminated the skyline, just as it had in Berlin. It was eerie, as the fires set off by the explosions reflected off low-hanging clouds. Something else was eerie, too. By then, all the houses on the other side of the street, on both sides of the Kommandatura, were occupied by Russian soldiers and we were mighty scared.
All the women in our house met in Mrs. Albrecht’s living room, while I had to watch Helmut upstairs. They did a lot of redecorating in a hurry, because Helmut and I didn’t recognize the place later when we went downstairs. The couch was gone and so were the overstuffed chairs and all the animal pictures. In their place was an altar, covered with a white cloth and lots of candles burning. A large, wooden cross, with Jesus hanging from it, stood on the altar and pictures of Mary, the Mother of God, hung on the wall. Rows of folding chairs faced the cross, and a house organ stood in the corner. The smell of incense was in the air. The Albrechts, it seemed, had become Catholic!