“Walking, breathing ghosts,” my mother called the children and people of Leningrad. “The flesh is gone from our bodies and all that is left is a little bit of our soul. When we give up the spirit, we don’t even get to go to heaven because we’re Communists.”
She hadn’t always talked like that, critical of the regime. In the old days, before war clouds gathered over Europe, the three of us—my mother, father and me—would sit together in our warm little apartment. For a Leningrader, I had an unusual pedigree—a Russian Jewish mother and a father who was Anglican and British.
We lived on the third floor of a walkup and had two rooms—a kitchen-living room combination and a bedroom. There would be hot food on the stove and bread in the oven. We’d laugh and talk about books and movies and my day at school, but the two of them were careful not to discuss their feelings about work or the government in front of me. From a child’s point of view, such parental secrecy was the reason someone invented the keyhole.
Sometimes I shut my eyes and tried to remember every detail of those days before the war, hearing in my mind once again the sound of their laughter, the smell of my mother’s cooking, the warmth and comfort and security we shared before the minds of men were afflicted by the madness of death and conquest—before the insane dreams of Hitler and Stalin turned day into night and human lives became the color of blood.
We were entitled to three ounces of bread as our ration. It looked like less than three ounces was being torn off for each of us, but I said nothing and neither did anyone else. To speak up might result in no ration. None of us had any extra fat on our bodies to keep us going if we were not given at least a little food.
Even with many night convoys getting through, only a fraction of the food necessary to support the city was brought in. And no fuel for heat came in at all. Hundreds of thousands of people who were not killed by the bombardments froze and starved.
After he handed out the ration of bread, the driver passed out letters that had been sent to the station in the city where we children had been assembled to await our turn to be evacuated. He shouted, “Nicholaus Pedrovich Cutter.”
I went forward and got a small sheet of paper bearing the letterhead of Gorky Hospital. A smudged scribble read, “Happy birthday, my son, mother loves you.”
I was eleven years old today.
It was not my mother’s handwriting, nor was the simple signature, Mother, in her hand.
Lena stared at the note in my hand.
“It’s not my mother’s handwriting,” I said. “She’s too weak to write it, or even sign it. An attendant in the hospital must have wrote it.”
“My mother is dead,” she said in a fragile voice. “I don’t know where my father is. He was sent to fight the Hun.”
Her eyes were blank. She wasn’t talking to me. I think she was remembering, perhaps the warm arms of her mother, her father’s strong hug, a big pot of hot soup on the stove.
I stared at the note. The simple message created dread in me. If my mother was too weak to even sign the note, she would die soon. The dead and the dying were things I knew about, things all the children in the city had firsthand knowledge of.
“She’s going to die,” I told Lena.
She stared at me with blank eyes. She was going to die, too, I thought. She had given up hope.
I climbed off the back and went to the truck cab. I grabbed the door handle and used the running board to step up and knock on the window.
The driver was chewing on a piece of meat. A loaf of bread lay across his lap. It was a week’s ration. And he got it by chiseling a little off from each of us. If he was caught, he would be summarily shot. If he was caught plunging a knife into someone’s heart, he would get a trial and imprisonment. But to take bread from another’s mouth earned the death penalty without a trial.
He saw me looking at the big chunk of bread. He rolled down the window, his expression ugly.
“I have to return to the city,” I told him.
He stared at me as if I’d just told him that I needed to go to Mars.
“Fuck your mother, what are you talking about?”
The expression he used was not a slight to my mother, but the standard street expletive for anger and exasperation. Before the war, I had heard it once at school. Now it was almost a common salutation.
“Get back on the truck,” he said, “before I take you to the Haymarket, you little bastard.”
I jumped down from the cab and went back and crawled under the canvas next to Lena. No one had moved or even shifted position.
The driver didn’t have to explain his threat. The Haymarket was the place in the city where a black market in food and other things was conducted. People brought family heirlooms to the market—jewels and art and fine furs left from before the revolution twenty-five years ago—to sell them for a little meat or a few ounces of grain stolen by gangs of food thieves. Physical possessions, heirlooms, fine watches, gems, wads of rubles—none of it had the value of food. On good days, the meat was horsemeat. Dogs, cats and rats had been devoured early. Work horses weren’t slaughtered until they fell.
Like the Stone Age, where fire, shelter and the day’s kill meant survival, the siege of Leningrad had taken the city back to the most basic fundamentals of human survival.
A common joke was that a Fabergé egg worth a king’s ransom wouldn’t buy a dozen hen eggs. People said that there was trade in a stranger foodstuff than eggs, and that the tender meat of children was preferred over other cuts.
* * *
The driver left the cab and joined a group of other truckers who had gathered at a fire started in a metal barrel. They talked as they heated snow for hot water to drink. A few had tea.
I listened to their conversations from the back of the truck.
“Half the city is dead already,” our driver said. He spit, and the spittle turned to ice before it hit the frozen ground. “It’s good people are dying, it leaves more food for the living. Besides, those not strong enough to live need to make way for the rest of us.”
I didn’t think it would be good if my mother died. In some small way I understood that she had been so battered and abused by cold and hunger that death would take her beyond sorrow. But that did not help the ache of loneliness and despair in my heart as I realized that I was the only family she had. I didn’t want her to die alone. I needed to get to her, be at her side, tell her that I didn’t want her to die.
After he finished drinking hot water with the other truckers, our driver climbed back into the cab, no doubt covering himself with a fur blanket.
The children huddled together in the back of the truck, shivering under the oiled canvas tarp as light snow fell. There was no laughter, no jokes, no talking. We were all too cold, too numb from months of shock and hunger to do little more than sit quietly. My mother said that the children of Leningrad no longer laughed or even smiled. But I saw hopelessness in the eyes and on the faces of everyone on the streets, not just the young. Hopelessness, helplessness, even surrender. So many horrors confronted us each day that our minds balked at accepting any more. There was a time early in the siege when people cried and complained, but no one had the energy anymore for anger or grief. There were neither tears nor smiles. The deprivations had created not just a grim gravity in everyone, but in some people, like our driver and the black marketeers who specialized in exotic meats, it had brought out a cruel streak.
Or maybe the driver’s attitude was just a human survival instinct. Perhaps if I had been the biggest and strongest, I would have cut the rations of the others to make sure my belly was full. Hunger was a strange new sensation for all of us. At first it was an urgent growling in my stomach, then a feeling of light-headedness and even increased energy. But the shot of energy lasted only a short time. In its stead came the sickness of starvation, a lack of strength that made getting out of bed and walking across a room a chore. The final stage was weakness and a dull ache that engulfed my whole body, a vague pain grippi
ng my entire body that never went away, that made even thinking difficult.
I saw the starvation disease all around me, at first in the very old and very young, and then slowly infecting everyone—they became confused, dull-witted, lethargic. People collapsed in the streets, some convulsing in seizures, others just sitting down to quietly die. An old woman who lived in our apartment building just sat down on the front steps and never got up again, passing into a coma and then to the sanctuary of death.
My mother said that God was on the side of the Germans because He sent icy storms to make our hunger more miserable.
It was strange to hear her talk of God. Officially, God did not exist in the Soviet Union.
At the evacuation station where we were held before being placed in the back of the truck for the lake crossing, we were given an ounce of bread and a cup of hot water with salt for breakfast. At lunchtime, we received two ounces of bread, a spoon of butter, a bowl of soup made from frozen beets and a little linseed-oil cake. Many of us who still had parents or siblings poured half of the soup into a jam jar and threw in other scraps and took the food back to them because they were starving. I took my jar each day to the hospital where my mother lay on the floor on a mattress. There was no more food in the hospital than other places in the city, each patient getting only the starvation ration of three ounces of bread a day. I helped her into a sitting position and made her drink the liquid.
Now I felt the jar beneath my coat. I had put half of my soup and bread in the jar, intending to take it to my mother at the hospital, but hadn’t gotten the chance because we were suddenly locked up. The supervisor at the evaluation station realized that some of us would run away to return to our parents rather than be shipped out. He was right about me. Had I known I would be transported from the city, I would have run away to be with my mother. As soon as lunch was over, he locked us in a room, held prisoner until night fell and we were loaded into the truck.
I shut my eyes and tried to sleep. The stronger children pushed their way back in the truck to get more heat from the surrounding bodies, but I deliberately stayed on the outer edge and curled into a fetal position to keep as much body heat as I could.
When the first crack of light arrived, I slipped off the back of the truck.
I was driven not only by my own need for my mother, but to save her after what she had done for me. I overheard a nurse at the hospital say my mother was weak because she had slipped me a little of her own bread ration each day. To help me survive, she had sacrificed herself.
As I walked down the frozen road I realized that if my mother died, I would be all alone in the world.
3
Peter Cutter, Munich, 1930
“He spiels all that morality stuff, but he’s fucking his young niece.”
Peter and the man who spoke to him, Josef Krausner, were on the outer edge of the crowd with their backs to the wall of a building. Peter took his eyes off the man who was powerfully haranguing the crowd from the flatbed of a truck. Prudently, neither he nor Krausner wore a red star on their lapel that would identify them as the Communists they were. A large crowd packed the square to hear the man on the truck speak, and neither the speaker nor the crowd were friendly to the followers of Karl Marx and the Bolsheviks. Nazis is what the orator and his followers called their organization.
“How do you know?” Peter asked.
“A man named Otto Strasser has broken off from him and started his own political party. He and his brother have been close friends with this man. He says incest is only one of his sex crimes, the least of them. He’s not married, is said to be shy around women in public, but in private does very outlandish things with them.”
“Like what?”
Krausner grinned. “We’re all perverts, aren’t we? There’s nothing like some sexual scandal to pique our interest. He likes to have women beat on him, even whip him, while he’s naked. Then he lies down and he eats their cunts and lets them piss on him. He doesn’t like to use his cock. Maybe he doesn’t have one. I heard he lost one of his nuts in the war, but maybe he got the whole set of tools whacked off.”
“And he wants to be leader of a master race,” Peter said.
Peter Cutter was British, but he spoke German to Krausner with hardly a hint of accent. Twenty-six years old, Peter had graduated from Cambridge with advanced degrees in Central and Eastern European language and cultural studies. Besides his native tongue, he was fluent in high and low German, Polish, Russian, Czech and Hungarian. A middle-class “intellectual Marxist” whose political views were born and nurtured from collegian discussions and philosophical treatises, he had come to Germany to live with a coal-mining family to experience the poverty and suffering of the masses under the capitalistic system he believed enslaved workers.
It was a particularly appalling time economically all over the world. After the First World War ended eleven years before, most of war-ravaged Europe had fallen into a terrible economic collapse. The war had brought the demise of the Russian Empire and the rise of the Bolsheviks, the German and Austro-Hungarian empires disintegrated and the countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria and Yugoslavia erupted out of the turmoil. In the wake of the governmental paralysis came unemployment and spiraling inflation that spawned political chaos. Much of Europe was a boiling cauldron of conflicting “isms” as Fascism, Nazism, Socialism and Communism battled in the streets for control of governments and the minds of people.
It was a world of political violence and political confusion—the speaker on the truck called his political party National Socialism, Nazism for short, despite the fact the party was antisocialistic, while his Fascist pal in Italy, Mussolini, got his start in politics by founding a “socialist” newspaper. Now both men had private armies and engaged in terrorist campaigns against liberals, “left-wingers,” socialists and communists, burning down their opponents’ headquarters and terrorizing their supporters with humiliation, beatings and even murder.
Peter had not come to Munich to see the man on the truck speak, but to participate in a march by German Communists. He felt both excitement and fear—with anticommunists convening in large numbers for the Nazi rally, there was danger of violent confrontation. Although he thought of himself as a soldier for Communism, just as some missionaries think of themselves as soldiers for Christ, he was not a man of action, but a thin, medium-build young man with a friendly face, unruly short blond hair, kindly gray eyes and scholarly gold-rimmed eyeglasses.
The last—and only—fight he had been in had resulted in a black eye in the fourth grade. His opponent had nary a scratch.
The man on the truck, an Austrian named Adolf Hitler, was not well known to the general public outside of Germany, but had gathered an impressive 18 percent of the national vote in a recent election. It was not enough to place him at the head of the government, but it was shocking considering that any rational person would question the man’s insane views.
Hitler thundered to the crowd, “There are two great evils in this world that keep the German people oppressed and the German nation from taking its rightful place as the leader of all nations. Jews and Marxism are the destroyers of our Aryan culture, are the filthy, diseased parasites that infect our culture and keep us from our greatness!”
As he listened to the man haranguing the crowd and studied the faces of those around him, Peter was stunned by the impression that the man was making on the people. The audience was buying into the ridiculous tirade.
“Look at their faces,” he whispered to Krausner. “They love him and they accept his lies with the awe and reverence of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. Besides his powerful voice and dramatic gestures, he’s telling these people that they are the greatest on earth, that they should rule the world. He gives them Jews as scapegoats to blame for their own failures and the terrible economy, and Communist conspiracies to make them fearful.”
“Brilliant. Devilish. Insane,” Krausner said. “We offer them a society in which there
will always be full employment, bread on the table, and an equal share of all the fruits of labor, and they listen to this maniac who calls people ‘parasites’ and instills in them that Jews and communists are infecting them with a disease that is keeping them from ruling the world.”
“Look at the joy and veneration on their faces,” Peter said. “His voice is reaching inside them and touching something, the type of preternatural emotion that you see on people enraptured by religious ceremonies. He makes Jews the incarnation of evil, responsible for all their troubles, like a witch doctor telling the tribe one of its members has to be killed because he’s responsible for the tribe’s failure in the hunt. And these people believe every word, every lie. Look at the bliss and nervous energy of these sheep suckling on these lies. What fools!”
Peter shook his head. “I’m dumbfounded that the common man can be so completely stupid and naïve. And I don’t think the rest of the world has any inkling about what this man is talking about, what danger he can be. I heard he wrote a book filled with these crazy ideas. I’m going to read it.”
“There is a social disease,” Krausner said, disgusted. “It’s National Socialism. It’s a killer disease with pogroms against the Jews and the murder of our comrades in communism. That’s the true illness spreading throughout Germany as a pandemic. And it’s not just a contagion among people out of work, not just among bakers and clerks who fear for their jobs and for bread on the table. The big bankers and industrialists running this country see this madman as a wedge against the Communist Revolution that would tear down the pillars of privilege they reside upon.”
“Maybe the incest with the niece and his sexual perversions should be well publicized.”
The Betrayers Page 2