by Dave Brockie
In my defense I must say that I was not really aware that rape was wrong. I had learned about sex from the whores in Stalingrad. They liked getting raped.
Alexandra Faber was the first unwilling sexual victim I had ever encountered, and it was when I heard her crying beneath me that I realized I had done what some would call a “bad thing.” I equated crying with soldiers weeping over their dead friends. I didn’t do it or understand it. But now it filled me with panic and remorse.
So I break her neck with a twist that kills her in a split-second. Dragging her corpse under the surface of the water, I weigh it down with rocks. Still her arms rise, wraith-like, from the deep, as if she were still seeking my murderous embrace. So I pile her bicycle on top of the corpse and sneak back into the hospital, getting some new pajamas and putting the dead man back in his bed. As usual, I don’t sleep.
***
The truck arrived at dawn. It was cold, March 1943. I was still fumbling with my feelings about the whole Alex thing. I had never felt bad about killing someone before.
The truck trundled up, piloted by a couple of soldiers. The inmates picked by the Obersturmbannführer stood there by the side of the road. I noted with relief the driver and his companion were members of the SS Totenkopf Division, the Death’s Head Division. Even through the dust they had a superior air, as they climbed down from their vehicle and approached the wretched mass of wounded men. Their guns were leveled towards us, and for a moment I thought they were going to open fire.
“Get in!” one screams.
I fairly leap in, followed by the shuffling others. A Wehrmacht man with a crutch starts asking questions.
“What’s this, Corporal? You notice I outrank you,” he says to the young SS man. “Several of these men are under my command. And we will not mount until we report to our Division.”
“Yes Sergeant, I see . . .” replies the driver, expertly driving his boot into the Sergeant’s balls, who doubles over and receives a kick to the temple. As he collapses in the road, the other SS man quickly walks up, produces a pistol and holds it to the man’s bleeding head. He turns back to us.
“Get in!” he screams.
We bounce along, my usual cheery demeanor restored. The other men don’t talk to me, but they can’t help but look. They can’t help but notice how quickly my flesh is restoring itself, like worms weaving into each other to form a living tapestry of meat. Rude masses of scabby tissue form into the beginnings of a face, and my hands begin to thicken. But I need a good feed.
I peered through a flap at the passing land. It was a place I’d only just been exposed to, rolling, wooded country, not like the steppe lands I wandered, and nothing like Stalingrad. I wasn’t sure if I liked it. It smelt clean—and I’d never known clean. But then the blackened buildings and empty towns appear, and the far-off and skeletal remains of Rostov jutting out of the horizon denote a return to the war-zone.
Suddenly we pull up in the middle of a German army supply dump. There is a lot of activity around us but we don’t have time to observe as we are chased into a large tent. Here, we are given new boots! We also get a greatcoat, helmet, a belt and some rations.
“Listen!” yells the driver, whose name was Kranz. “You will be returned to your units. But in the meantime, you are indentured to the SS Totenkopf Division, owing us the sum of 58 marks for your new coat and boots. You will follow my orders, and the orders of any member of the Division, to the point of death. Fail to do so and you will be shot. Say nothing of what your duties are to anyone. Fail to do so and you and your family will be shot.”
“We will make you,” says the other one, Wotten, in an almost singsong whisper. .” . . shoot . . . your own family.”
We load the truck with rifle and machine-gun ammo. I can see tanks at a welding shop and great piles of supplies covered with vast camouflage nets. The soldiers watch and smoke. I work and listen.
“We must get up there quickly.” says Kranz. “We’ll miss all the fun . . .”
“To have them in your sights, at your mercy, cowering and crying, yet you are unable to carry out the task . . . the Obersturmbannführer will be very upset,” says Wotten in that same cooing tone.
Kranz shoots him an ashen look. “That won’t happen,” he says stiffly, fingering his throat. “Work faster, you sons of whores!”
The men tie all the flaps of the truck down and tell us not to look out, as we crowd in behind the crates. Soon we are flying down the road, bouncing down a degrading scale of rutted passages until I can hear the unmistakable ripping sounds of German MG’s. My companions begin to exchange nervous glances. The fire is constant, heavy, and unanswered. There are occasional pauses and during one of these we pull up very close to where the guns are.
Suddenly, a wave of pleasure washes over me, jerking my back straight and causing my head to begin burning. My flesh crawls with ravenous delight.
The guns spit again, a long vicious lashing, and I feel a great death near. I grab several cases of ammo and push through the back flap, depositing them and leaping back for more. I stay up in the gate, shoveling out crates and staring wildly into the woods that surround us. The air is thick with cordite smoke, but there is no burning, no shellholes, no dead cows lying wasted in the field. Then the guns crash silent again, and I feel men sink to earth, feel souls spent. There, through that belt of trees, that is where it is happening.
Kranz walks up.
“No need to worry. Just killing Jews,” he says.
Other soldiers begin to move the ammo off through the woods, towards the killing zone. I make a move to follow but Kranz interdicts. It takes all my self-control not to tear his throat out as I reel back towards the truck, staring madly at the dark spaces between the trees. Machine-guns bark again and the guards snap their heads towards the sound, startled. I see this and leap straight up into a tree, not stopping until my head pierces the canopy, and for one moment I behold the clearing beyond the thicket. One moment to hold forever, one titanic feeding I am denied as others glut. I drop back to the ground in full view of one the men of my squad, jumping back into the truck before his stupefied face can ask a question.
A Kubelwagen occupied by a Hauptsturmführer and two soldiers pulls alongside and orders our truck to follow him to the dump. They joke a little about all the Jews they have killed, and then we drive off. The men stare morosely at the floorboards, contemplating what they had been party to.
In the field there had been a great ditch, filled with corpses. Close to the ditch, which was easily 100 meters long, was a stockade filled with victims. Parties of what they had called “Jews” were driven, nude, from the stockade into the ditch, where they made to stand atop the freshly slain. Then they were shot. Other ditches were being dug and still others were being sealed over. All this I took in with a glance.
We had brought over 30,000 rounds to the scene, where they were running out of bullets. It was vast, a new form of killing, different than combat in that there was no energy wasted in conflict, just power gained by unhampered feeding.
The beast I served apparently was not sated by mere war—it craved genocide.
The mere brushings of the power fringe had refreshed and charged me—now I yearned for the embrace of lustful violence—an embrace I would now receive.
As we roar across a wooden bridge a sudden explosion kicks the truck into the air. A huge mine ignites the span beneath us as the truck dances atop the fireball, poised yet failing, slipping through space made cruel by flame and splintered wood, which enters our abode, rending and burning. Men fly out the back or sprawl into the burning canvas. All scream.
I burst through the tarp, kicking away from the flying juggernaut as it plummets to the bottom of a bleak ravine, crumpling with impact as it is showered by falling timbers. The men are tossed about like toys—some burn in the wreck while others thud into the ground with audible splinterings. All of them die—Kranz, Wotten, and the man who saw me jump. I relax and mostly absorb my fall, though ribs
crack and my breath is knocked out of me. I’m still aware enough to keep moving, avoiding the landslide of rubble even as I look for dying men on which to feed. I stand, and my broken thighbone rudely juts out of leg. I dully regard its snapped end as a great cloud of smoke rushes upon me, as does my pain. I slump, gasping, feeling the burnt souls sluice past me but lacking the focus to absorb them.
I lie there, watching the bridge burn. I can’t see the Kubelwagen but as it was ahead of us there was a good chance they made it. Then to confirm my suspicions I hear the cough of a Russian MG from above the far lip of the ravine, answered by the submachine guns of the officer’s guard.
Even far behind the front, Russian partisan groups conducted operations. It seems obvious we had just been operated on. I begin to drag myself to the far wall but freeze in a patch of smoldering grass as I see figures attempting to stealthily make their way towards me and the wreck. Four figures clad in scraps of camouflage and civilian clothing, holding obsolete weapons as they came to loot or capture or kill. Partisans. I lie motionless, close to a pair of other bodies as they approach, gaining courage as they scan the scene and see only death.
From above, the firing continues. They move quickly, these three men, one old, and one woman, just a girl. A family operation. Maybe that’s Mom on the machine-gun.
“Quick, check those bodies—we must get back to Gregor,” spits the old man. “The evil ones will come soon!”
With a blood-curdling howl I leap to my feet, paralyzing the group with shock, jumping at and grabbing one man by the coat, hoisting him aloft and tearing into his face. Hot blood jets forth as I ram my tongue into his eye socket, holding him close like a shield. His companions scream as I madly hop with his struggling body, clawing out until I scoop the girl into my death-dance. I grasp both of them by the skulls, my nails digging into their scalps. I bring them together with a brain-dashing wallop, shedding the “ism” of their beings, which gurgles down my arms and into my hide. I hold my victims aloft, cackling insanely.
The old man runs forward, crying, raising an ancient Wembly pistol, which misfires and explodes in his face, sending lead into his brain and him to a deserved rest.
The remaining son, who has now seen his entire family die at one time or another, throws his gun down and runs for the opposite wall. I release the bodies, which drop in bloody heaps at my feet, still emitting the fume, which begins to mutate my form, cracking my mouth at the corners as pus spews down my molten face. Bones are becoming spines, spines are becoming talons, which pursue the sobbing lad, slicing his coat and the flesh beneath into flapping chasms of scarlet ichor, releasing energy which I devour and in doing so become whole. Then I’m up the wall in a series of bounds, my leg holding in place through sheer strength of muscle as my bone re-knits. Atop the slope a grassy plain stretches away, a road bisecting its expanse. In the ditch beside this road sits the Kubelwagen, a squat gray bug behind which two men cower from the partisan MG, which is projecting death from the low-rise 300 meters away. It fires again, tracers lashing, tearing the hood off the buggy and kicking up dirt around a corpse in the road. There is a muffled thud and the vehicle begins to burn, as I begin my patented “crab-scuttle,” moving towards the enemy through the waist-high grass that renders me invisible. My joints become elastic, adapting to the movement as I move towards the rise. I don’t have to look, I can hear and smell them. They are packing up the MG, satisfied with their work and desiring safety—two of them.
About 20 meters away I rapidly accelerate and start to rise up. I hit full speed and leap into the air, flying over a patch of brush and sighting my prey right in front of me—two brown clad men crouched over a half-disassembled Maxim gun. They look up and perfectly expose their throats as I flash between them, trailing two fingernails and landing ten feet away, turning to compare the identical qualities of the two wounds I have delivered, running to them to admire the fact they both die at once. I slobber at the wounds, now glutting myself.
“Gregor . . .” I croak, sucking and questing for the magic juice.
Finally, I am satiated, no longer hungering and fused with power. The bodies I search and I take a flask of liquor, powerful peasant stuff. I smash their heavy weapon and jog to the Kubelwagen. The vehicle has been charred and still emits lazy sweeps of flame. The man in the road is dead, shot through the chest. I see the grinning skull on his tunic and know he is a member of the Totenkopf SS. A large amount of blood has come out of him and he has assumed a deflated look. Behind the vehicles there are two more bodies, another soldier and the SS Haupsturmfuhrer. The soldier’s jaw has been knocked off and his legs set afire. The officer seems to be sleeping, with his cap knocked off, and only a small wound to his forehead. He has the look of a staff officer, with a brown leather attaché case clutched in a gloved hand. I look more closely at him, into him, and detect life still within his frame, life lurking at the edges of his being, unsure of where to go.
Quickly I bandage his head wound, which is small but producing lots of blood. I sense metal in his head, but manage to stop the bleeding. I grab some clips and a SMG, then gently swing the Haupsturmfuhrer onto my shoulder, tucking his case into my coat and making my way back towards the depot, loping along like an ape, moving beside the road through the brush. I cover a lot of ground until I see the approaching dust cloud of a panzer recon column—two armored cars and a half-track sent undoubtedly to investigate that explosion that was heard as far away as Lyosk. But the first thing they find is me, covered in blood, in the middle of the road. I’m holding the Haupsturmfuhrer, and I wave them down.
A head appears above the armor plate and removes its goggles. It talks.
“What happened? Is that Haupsturmfuhrer Frederick?”
“Back at the bridge . . . ambush.” I slowly wave back where I had come from, and then turn back to them.
“All dead . . .” I say.
I return the attaché case (filled with stuff about me) as they load up the officer and take off. He’ll live. An armored car takes me to the ambush site. I show them the bodies and tell them the story in as few words as possible. The leader, a short, dark man with a puzzled and suspicious face, listens in silence. I show them the wounds I made with my hands. They seem impressed, even fearful. We retrieve the SS dead, strapping them to the hull.
“Well, it all makes sense except for you,” says the leader as he draws himself up before me, lighting a cigarette. He seems brave.
I slowly turn to him and then find his eyes. My own are dead smudges, lumps of coal that smolder with an interior heat, all pupil. He tries to hold my gaze, but looks away. I look at the driver and bore into his head with them. I speak slowly, towering over all, dominating.
“I was wounded.” I say louder. “ They said I’d lost my memory. I don’t know my name or my unit, but they said that I had walked out of Stalingrad.”
The crew stares at each other and me incredulously. I tilt my head back and rasp out a long breath to the sky. Far-off thunder rumbles, artillery.
“I know I am German. I know I want to kill . . .” I search for the word, “Jews. I know I want to join the SS.”
My eyes turn to the nervous commander, as I spread my stained hand towards him in a pained yet eloquent gesture.
“What else must I know?” I say.
***
I became a servant of Death’s Head. My condition was judged fit, if unusual. The accepted report was that I was a German soldier still suffering from the effects of acute amnesia, caused by wounds inflicted during the retreat from Stalingrad. I had been burned badly, to the point of deformity, but I was otherwise totally recovered. Indeed, my appearance enhanced my performance. All that remained in me was an unswerving desire to kill. Knowing what I did, I displayed considerable aptitude. They needed me, and I ended up in “Das Reich” SS Panzer Division.
I was sullen and resolute, wearing the “speckled egg” camouflage of the SS trooper. Too big for tanks, it was my job to give them support, and I rode atop them from
place to place, destroying all. Using cover, I would engage enemy infantry with flame-throwers and demo charges, moving beyond the Panzers who would sit in a dominant position and deal with the enemy armor at long range. Our success would signal the next advance of the tanks behind us, and we would shelter in the debris of our making, gasping our thanks. At such times we would smoke, and find great comfort sprawled out in the mud, observing the approach of our friends, the tanks, becoming ever larger, sounding as if they were about to shake themselves apart at any moment. Dragons. They roared by and we followed.
Of course, the Russians continually strove to upset our plans. The space of earth had been altered in that towns, rivers, and woods had been suffused with new, sinister purposes. This fine road that had taken much produce to market now became the perfect enfilade to send blazing shot into advancing ranks.