Without hesitating she said, ‘‘I have a driver making a round trip to the provost in Reinsberg. You can catch a ride. They might have some information.’’
‘‘Can’t you call?’’ I was in no hurry to leave. Gazing at Sonia was too enjoyable.
She shook her head. ‘‘The telephone lines are still down.’’
Sonia went to an open window, barked in Russian, then handed me some paperwork for the driver. She touched my arm. ‘‘I’m sure your friends are fine.’’
The driver was a gray-haired reservist in his fifties who had worked the oil fields in the Caucasus. His deeply creased face complemented the battle-scarred Nazi amphibious car he was steering.
He drove slowly because he feared the cracked windshield might shatter in our faces. Avoiding the numerous holes left by tank and mortar shells seemed to be wearing him thin. I handed him one of my Austrian cigarettes.
‘‘ Danke Scho¨n.’’
He parked the clunker to the side of the road so he could light his smoke. ‘‘I, too, was a prisoner in Germany,’’ he said in halting German, ‘‘but in the First World War.’’
Exhaling smoke, he released the clutch. The gears groaned and the car jerked forward. He waved his cigarette at the surrounding meadows. ‘‘This is nice country when you’re on the right side.’’
At the Red Army headquarters in Reinsberg, a plump major, his chest covered with hardware, deigned me a few moments of his precious time. Through his interpreter, who looked like a farm servant and stuttered incomprehensible German, I deciphered that the major hadn’t received a report of two Frenchmen hunting in the woods. I wanted to ask more questions, but the major turned his back to me. My time was up.
I hoped that Jean and Michel were in some Russian prison, but it was more than likely their swollen bodies were floating down the PART VI | WUSTROW
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river. Either way, I was now alone, and my urgency to leave dissipated. I wanted my parents to know that I was alive, that I had survived, but the road home had excessive perils—too many unknowns to go it alone. If I was patient, the right traveling companions would eventually come along. So I took the whining farmer up on his offer and gave him back his horses for the smoked ham hanging in his chimney.
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C H A P T E R 2 3
I had become friendly with a plain-spoken former truck driver whose property I crossed every time I went into town. Arthur Novak was a stocky man in his fifties. The Nazis had thrown him into Oranienburg Penitentiary, a massive prison on the outskirts of Berlin, in 1935 because of his membership in the Communist Party.
Our conversations were short but never frivolous, always touching on politics and the events of the last twelve years. When he learned of Jean and Michel’s disappearance, he invited me to stay with him.
Since I knew his political leanings, and that we had a mutual hatred for ‘‘the god with a moustache,’’ I accepted without hesitation.
Arthur owned a small lakefront cottage that he shared with his wife and seventeen-year-old niece, Trautchen, whose parents had been killed during one of the bombing raids on Berlin. I slept in the guesthouse, a converted greenhouse situated between the house and the main road. Under the bed I stored my only possessions: two knapsacks, one with my cigarettes and the other stuffed with the silverware from the loft. Although Arthur didn’t ask anything of me, I kept his table stocked with fish and asparagus.
A couple days after I moved in, the Soviets appointed Arthur the mayor of Wustrow because he was the only obvious anti-fascist 243
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in the area. Proud as a peacock, Arthur strolled through the village wearing a red armband that Mrs. Novak made. Sarosta, the Russian word for ‘‘mayor,’’ was stitched across it. He was the liaison between the residents and the garrison, but his title didn’t impress the drunken gangs of Red Army looters who tore through Wustrow night and day. Not being able to speak their language, he would show them his armband when they stumbled and banged through his house.
‘‘ Sarosta! Sarosta!’’ he would scream.
The thieves would answer with dismissive laughs.
When helping Arthur and Mrs. Novak clean up after such a visit, I asked him, ‘‘When you paraded through the streets of Berlin with your fist in the air, didn’t you yell ‘All for one and one for all’?
Wasn’t that your motto?’’
‘‘Yes, but pretty soon I won’t have anything left.’’
‘‘You’re only a bourgeois trying to protect your property. When you have only one ragged shirt on your back, when you have nothing more to lose, then you’ll be a good communist again,’’ I teased.
‘‘You snotty brat. You sure think you know a lot about politics.’’
‘‘That’s right, and most of it I learned the hard way.’’ To steer the conversation away from me, I asked Arthur why he became a communist. ‘‘You owned property and you were self-employed.’’
‘‘Anyone who had their eyes open could see the Nazis were thugs and Bavarian beer-swilling hoodlums. The communists were the only ones willing to take the brown shirts head on, fist to fist, gun barrel to gun barrel. But when the army backed Hitler, we were done for. Who knows how many of us they locked up or killed.’’
He paused. ‘‘I don’t think a real peace will ever be possible on this planet. There’s just an overabundance of hate and greed.’’
‘‘You know, the one thing I realized in the last eighteen months is that we should take handfuls of healthy kids from every country, raise them with one language, no religion, and sterilize the rest of the world.’’
Arthur eyed me incredulously. ‘‘Are you saying you want to create a master race?’’
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‘‘No master race, no race at all—just mongrels. Beautiful mongrels with plenty of Lebensraum’’ (space to live).
Arthur sucked air through pursed lips. ‘‘You’ve been quite mute about your time in that camp, Pierre.’’
I shrugged. ‘‘I don’t want to sound like a cry baby.’’
I was hesitant to utter a word about Auschwitz or Dora. I had no desire to revisit the brutality and death I had barely survived.
The moments I did want to relive I fought to keep the furthest from my memory because I knew I would never get another chance to press my lips against Stella’s red hair. And although he had been locked up in Oranienburg, Arthur had no idea of the extent of the mass murder in Auschwitz and the other extermination camps. Because a few wealthy Jews had been released from Oranienburg after obtaining visas, he thought that all German Jews had safely left the country. I was flabbergasted when he asked if I had seen any Jews in Auschwitz.
‘‘Yes, mostly going up in smoke.’’ The unsettled look in his eyes when I explained myself made me wish I had kept my mouth shut.
I should have wished harder, because at dinner the next night my conversation with Mrs. Novak got my tongue wagging on the maladies Ha¨ftlinge had to endure. ‘‘We had all kinds of abscesses, cysts, and tumors in the camp and we were always operating on one another. We only went to the infirmary for grave emergencies and then reluctantly because of the ‘selections.’ ’’
‘‘What’s a ‘selection’?’’ she asked.
I cringed. I had unwittingly dropped Pandora’s box onto the dinner table. I kept silent. Mrs. Novak repeated her question. I looked over to Arthur, who nodded his consent.
‘‘A ‘selection’ is when they picked a whole bunch of us to be executed.’’
‘‘Why?’’
‘‘Because they were judged too weak and worthless to do any more good for the Reich.’’
‘‘ Diese Biester sind mit Menschenhaut u¨berzogen!’’ (Those beasts coated with human skin!) Mrs. Novak spit. Yet it was the look in 246
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her eyes that made me feel like an interloper who had proved that her God was dead.
While I was getting ready to go to sleep, Mrs. Novak came out to the greenhouse with a glass of Danziger Goldwasser liqueur.
Sitting on my bed, I reluctantly accepted it, bracing myself for more questions about Auschwitz. She would get no answers. No more stories, no more recollections. I had learned my lesson. Perplexed, she just stood over me, silent. I took a sip, then watched the gold flakes swirl about the clear liqueur. She laid her hand on my head.
‘‘You brave boy,’’ she whispered.
I looked up at her. Mrs. Novak had tears in her eyes. She bowed her head and quickly left. Don’t pity me, I thought, I’m still alive.
As the liqueur brought on its desired effects, I couldn’t help but question what bothered her more—the realization that it was our bodies, Ha¨ftlinge bodies, that fueled the Nazi war machine, or the embarrassment that it was her countrymen who ground our bones into that fuel. When I woke up the next morning I still didn’t have the answer. What did it matter, though? Wasn’t Mrs. Novak a victim of the Nazis, too?
Since the only boat dock was on Arthur’s property, the underfed Soviet soldiers were constantly using his boat for fishing expedi-tions. They would row to the middle of the lake, toss hand grenades, then calmly wait until the stunned fish floated to the surface. They netted all the fish they could, from the largest carp to the smallest minnows. Arthur was in despair. The lake would soon be empty, and fish was the staple food of Wustrow since the Soviets had taken all the cattle. When a drunk Kalmuck soldier blew himself and Arthur’s boat into guts and splinters, the Red Army declared a ceasefire on the fish.
Arthur was greatly relieved when the Soviets finally set up a mayor’s office for him. Since his appointment, a multitude of women had been knocking at his door at all hours. Not only were they looting, the Soviet soldiers were raping any female they could get their hands on. The Soviet officers shrugged their shoulders at Arthur’s reports, saying that the Nazis did it to their women first; PART VI | WUSTROW
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but it was former female Ha¨ftlinge and non-German refugees who were also being sexually molested. So Arthur kept a record of all the victims in a leather-bound ledger.
Many German women were in hiding, in the woods, attics, haylofts, and cellars. Since the Soviets’ arrival, Arthur’s niece had barely left the attic. I would see Trautchen once in a while in the kitchen, but our conversations never got past hello. One stormy night, the soldiers discovered the attic door, forcing Trautchen to climb out a window and hide in the woods. She returned the next morning wet, pale, and coughing badly.
‘‘The girl can’t stay up there any longer,’’ Mrs. Novak declared.
Arthur decided that she would stay with me.
Nestled in an overstuffed armchair, Trautchen fell off to sleep at once, worn out from her adventure the previous night. I looked at her for a long time in the thin moonlight filtering through the dusty glass roof. It had been a long, long time since I had been alone with a woman in a bedroom. Trautchen would breathe heavily for a while, then stop suddenly to move or mutter a few incoherent words, her golden hair shimmering against the red velvet of the chair.
On the third night I was awakened by the grinding of truck brakes and drunken singing. With one leap, Trautchen jumped into my bed and hid underneath the quilt. She was just in time. A Russian began kicking at the greenhouse door, which wasn’t even bolted. The door flew open and the soldier fell flat on his face, his gun crashing down next to him. Petrified, I sat up in the bed as Trautchen flattened herself against the mattress. I brought my knees to my chest to tent the quilt. If the rest were as inebriated as the one lying motionless on the floor, then I was going to be spared witnessing Trautchen’s rape. The soldiers that filed in burst into roars of laughter when they saw their comrade. Every one of them must have bathed in a trough of vodka. The beam of a flashlight played on the wall, then struck me full in the face.
‘‘ Nix Panienka’’ (No girl), one of them slurred.
Thankfully I wasn’t a good enough substitute, and leaning 248
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against each other, they slithered off. When the drunken shouts stopped and the truck’s diesel motor clattered to life, I assured Trautchen that the danger was over. She was trembling, so I doubt she noticed that I was, too. I lay back down and she brought her head out from under the covers. She pressed herself against my body and kissed me on the mouth. A soft warmth overtook me.
We remained locked in an embrace for a few moments, then she ran her hand over my body. I held my breath. In the darkness I was sure she was turning expectant eyes toward me. My time in the camps had rendered me impotent, but I was hoping that her caresses would cure me. I began to panic. Nothing was happening down there. It would be unbearably embarrassing to tell her the truth. She wouldn’t understand, since everyone in Wustrow seemed so ignorant about the camps. Where the hell is Arthur? Why hasn’t he checked to see if everything is all right? Was he that sure I could keep his niece safe or was he playing the sly matchmaker?
‘‘ Dass kann ich deinem Onkel nicht antun’’ (I can’t do that to your uncle), I lied.
She untangled herself from me and dropped into the chair, sobbing convulsively. I couldn’t stand it. Embarrassed and feeling guilty, I slinked out of the greenhouse and spent the rest of the night on the dock. When Trautchen announced the next morning that she would feel safer hiding at a neighbor’s house, Arthur gave me a strange look but never asked any questions.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Soviets had requisitioned the front room of a small house by the marketplace for the mayor’s office. The room was empty except for a wobbly table and two mismatched chairs.
‘‘Will you help me as long as you’re here?’’ Arthur asked.
‘‘As your secretary?’’
‘‘No. You’ll be the putz. The two of us might be able to put some order to this mess.’’
Putz was German slang for ‘‘cop.’’ Me a flic, in Germany?
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‘‘Why not,’’ I said.
‘‘If the Fu¨hrer could only see us now,’’ Arthur laughed as he dragged one of the chairs behind the table and completed his first mayoral duty, making himself comfortable.
Mrs. Novak made me an armband with Polizei stitched on it.
My main function was to take reports from the rape victims. In Arthur’s ledger I would write the woman’s name, put little crosses for each occurrence, and then lie that I would notify the Soviet commandant. The ledger was filled in no time, and I wondered how many bastard Russian children were now on their way. The biggest problem, though, was that venereal diseases of all kinds were spreading like wildfire through the countryside, and there was no medicine to treat them.
My knowledge of languages was Arthur’s greatest asset. Displaced people trying to make their way home came to the office every day, and it was my job to decipher their needs. When a group of Greek Jews came looking for help, we conversed in Spanish, a language that had been handed down to them when their ancestors fled the Spanish Inquisition. English was the only way I could com-municate with a Serbian professor. With Jews who had been rounded up during Rommel’s campaign in Libya and Tunisia, I spoke French. Unfortunately, on matters of repatriation, the most I could do was point them in the direction of the Soviet garrison, but few dared to seek them out. Rumors were rampant that the Red Army was rounding up able-bodied refugees to rebuild the devastated USSR.
Arthur and I were able to provide short-term shelter to some of these errant souls, leading them to the still-vacant country manor.
I would ask any female I even suspected of spending time in a camp if she had crossed paths with a young French girl with red hair who had been in Auschwitz. The answer was always the same.
During dinner one night I made the mistake of talking about all the crosses in the ledger. Mrs. Novak was devastated. Feeling guilty, I tried to lighten the mood. ‘‘It’s ironic. There’s no happy medium
.
Here are all these women, many of them now widows, who during 250
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the war dreamed of tender, romantic companionship. The Russians are only helping them catch up on lost time.’’
I thought it was funny, but Mrs. Novak was incensed and stormed out of the dining room. Arthur shrugged. ‘‘You shouldn’t have joked about that. My wife has no sense of humor about those types of things. She was raised by a stern Lutheran mother who believed sex was dirty.’’
Oh, you poor man, I thought.
Mrs. Novak gave me the cold shoulder for days, which made staying under their roof unbearable. On reflection, I realized I had messed up, but I didn’t think my off-color humor was crude enough for an apology. To my surprise, the following Sunday Mrs. Novak invited me to go to church with her.
‘‘No disrespect, but four horses couldn’t drag me there. The clergy of all religions make a good living selling you a hereafter that they have no proof exists.’’
‘‘Well, I read the Bible every night,’’ she shot back.
‘‘The people who wrote the Bible all those years ago would be writing romance novels now.’’
‘‘Your soul will burn in hell.’’
Mrs. Novak was spitting mad. I thought she might even slap me, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. ‘‘Mrs. Novak, the Bible says God created man in his own image, right? Well, I have seen men at their worst, and if there is a God he had better get off his ass and find a new blueprint.’’
She never asked me to church again.
♦ ♦ ♦
One morning a Cossack colonel, wearing a Persian lamb hat and black uniform weighted down with medals, rode into Wustrow on a white stallion. I watched from the window as he tied his horse to a lamppost next to ‘‘city hall.’’ With a cartridge belt slung across his torso, saber, and polished black boots, it was as if he had charged straight off the pages of War and Peace. As a child I attended a PART VI | WUSTROW
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performance of the Don Cossacks with my parents, but none of those men cut such an impressive figure. Arthur and I froze when the colonel stepped inside our office. It seemed extraordinary that a man dressed for a ball at the Summer Palace would want to speak with us.
Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora Page 24