Sapphire Skies

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘There isn’t much I can do for you now,’ he said, lowering his voice so the operator couldn’t hear him. ‘I’ve requested for you to go to a prisoner-of-war camp where most of the inmates are British and American soldiers. They might be able to help you. I should warn you that Germany has a policy of starving Soviet prisoners to death. But even if the High Command obeyed the Geneva Convention, your own leader, Stalin, refuses to allow Red Cross assistance to any Soviets who are captured.’

  I didn’t need any more evidence to convince me that Stalin was a tyrant but I still couldn’t be sure how much of what the Black Diamond said was true. Perhaps he was trying to scare me into talking.

  ‘Why don’t you say something?’ he asked, sounding exasperated. ‘You don’t know how you’ve terrorised my pilots. When the radio operator reported that you were in the sky, it was hard to get the men to fly. Even senior pilots were scared of you. You are the only person to have shot me down.’ He stood and moved closer to me. ‘Listen, I’m not going to interrogate you if that’s what you’re thinking. Germany has made a mess of things and we’re not going to win this war. There’s nothing I can get from you that is going to save us. But there is one thing I would like to know. Why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance?’

  That, I didn’t understand myself. Apart from his resemblance to Alexander, perhaps I’d seen him as another human being. Or maybe I’d spared him because I admired his courage and skill.

  When I didn’t answer, the Black Diamond sighed. ‘What a pity that the war has put us on different sides,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘You are very beautiful … and determined. We could have married and run a flying school together.’

  Despite the horror of my situation, the Black Diamond’s ridiculous comment made me smile. He intrigued me. He was handsome, charismatic and spoke refined Russian. He came across as a decent human being. If he hadn’t killed Colonel Smirnov, I would not have regretted sparing his life.

  The radio operator called out to the Black Diamond: he seemed to have discovered something on the transmitter. The Black Diamond picked up the microphone on his desk and made an announcement that was carried to the airfield by loudspeakers. He moved to the door and called out to the guard who was waiting to take me back to the store room, then turned to me.

  ‘Listen, I’m going to order the guard to bring you a meal. I also want the medical orderly to look at your feet. Don’t refuse our help out of foolish pride. It might be the last assistance you get and the journey to Germany is a long one.’

  Germany! I wasn’t going to Germany. It was bad enough to be a prisoner, but to be taken away so far from Mama and Valentin was unthinkable.

  I cooperated with the medical orderly when he examined my feet, smothered them with a pungent balm and bound them tightly. I ate the black bread and potatoes the guard brought me. But I didn’t do those things because I was afraid or grateful; I did them because I was gathering my strength in order to escape.

  As I ate, memories of my last moments with Svetlana came back to me: her frightened face; the sound of her voice as she told me that she loved me; the jolt of the gun in my hand when I ended her life. But I had to push them away. I couldn’t think of Svetlana any more. I couldn’t even grieve for her. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her but that I had loved her so much. When I’d held the pistol to my head I had been prepared to die with her. But now that I’d survived, I no longer had that wish. I couldn’t think about her death and go on living. And I had made the decision to survive so I could return to Mama and Valentin.

  Escaping while I was still near my regiment was the most desirable scenario and the guards knew that. I spent several nights in the store room with them watching me like a hawk. They made no allowances for my sex when I used the toilet and kept their guns on me the whole time. Another woman might have tried flirtation but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Then one morning I was taken out of the store room and put on the back of a truck. The pain in my feet had lessened and I was sure that I could run if I had to. I scanned the landscape as we drove, memorising landmarks so I could find my way back once I’d got free. But the guard who travelled with me was also vigilant. The punishment for letting a prisoner escape must have been severe.

  The truck came to a stop at a railroad junction. A group of Red Army prisoners was sitting in the scorching sun, supervised by German soldiers. The guard pushed me from the truck and marched me towards the men. The prisoners looked dejected. Had they given up so easily? I was forced to sit down and one of the men glanced up at me. His face was bruised and he had a wound to his arm that needed attention. I stifled a cry when I recognised him. It was Filipp.

  A cattle train approached the junction. While the guards were distracted I moved closer to him.

  ‘What happened to you?’ he whispered. ‘I thought you were dead.’

  ‘I ran out of fuel and ammunition — I had to jump. You too?’

  He nodded. ‘I took a bad hit.’

  The train’s brakes squealed and it came to a stop. The engine pulled eight wagons, two of which had booths manned by soldiers clutching machine guns. My chances of escaping looked slimmer by the minute. A guard opened the door to one of the wagons and the prisoners were ordered inside. Filipp helped me up and we sat together near a small window. It was stifling inside the wagon and we hadn’t been given any water. My throat was parched and I was sweating as if I were in a sauna.

  After the guards slammed the door shut, I told Filipp about the Black Diamond and what he’d said about the way Germans treated Soviet prisoners of war.

  ‘We have to escape,’ I said. ‘But we’ll have to do it in the dark.’

  ‘The Black Diamond is dead,’ Filipp said as the train started to move. ‘Captain Orlov shot him down the day before yesterday.’

  The mention of Valentin made my heart ache. Svetlana had said he was searching for me. I hoped that he wouldn’t do anything foolish. He couldn’t save me now. All I wanted was for him to survive the war so that one day we could be together again. I remembered the joke the Black Diamond had made about he and I getting married and running a flying school. I was sorry he was dead. That brief coversation had made me like him. But if it were a choice between him and Valentin, I was glad my lover had been the victor.

  I peered at the landscape moving past the window. It was open farmland now and all of it in enemy territory. ‘How are we going to escape?’ I asked Filipp.

  One of the soldiers cleared his throat and held up a penknife. ‘We’ll cut a hole in the door and lift the bolt.’

  So the soldiers hadn’t given up at all. They’d merely been acting that way to fool the Germans.

  The soldier used the penknife to pierce the door, then filed the metal to create a larger hole so he could slip his hand through. I told the others not to watch him in case our anxiety made the penknife break, but the screech of the metal set my teeth on edge. The tension made the air in the car even hotter. I could barely breathe. When the blisters on the soldier’s hands started to bleed, he passed the knife to another man.

  We all took turns filing the door until the train slowed and came to a stop. We heard the guards shouting and other harsh voices answering. We glanced at each other: had someone noticed us cutting the door? I squinted through the window. A group of German soldiers stood outside the car talking. If they saw the cut in the door we were finished.

  I heard more voices but they were those of women and children. I craned my neck and saw that hundreds of people carrying suitcases and bundles of belongings, were being loaded onto the train. There were only eight cars. How were they going to fit?

  ‘They’ve stopped to pick up more passengers,’ I whispered to the others.

  ‘Passengers?’ echoed one of the prisoners. ‘This isn’t a passenger train.’

  ‘They must be forced labourers,’ said Filipp.

  The train began to move and we resumed filing the hole. Our only chance to escape would be at night and we had to work quickly.
The train was travelling rapidly for wartime and I was terrified we’d be in Poland before we got out.

  ‘Listen,’ I told Filipp, ‘don’t wait for me. Save yourself. I hurt my feet when I jumped from my plane and I don’t know how fast I’ll be able to run.’

  He frowned at me.

  ‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘You’re not my wingman any more. If you survive and I don’t, find Valentin and my mother and tell them what happened to me. Tell them that I never stopped thinking of them.’

  Filipp nodded then looked away. ‘You’ll survive,’ he said. ‘You are the bravest woman I’ve ever known. After the war, Comrade Stalin will personally name you Hero of the Soviet Union twice over.’

  After what Valentin had told me, I doubted that.

  Late that night, we succeeded in cutting the hole in the door. One of the soldiers snapped through the wire that held the bolt shut.

  ‘We’ll go in order of rank,’ he said. ‘You first, Comrade Lieutenant Azarova.’

  I gaped at him. How did he know who I was?

  ‘Your picture hung on the wall of my bunker,’ he said with a sheepish grin.

  He opened the door and the night air rushed inside. I peered into the darkness, petrified. Trees flashed by. We were passing through a forest. Jumping from a moving train was more frightening than parachuting from a plane. If we waited for the train to slow down there was a greater chance of the guards seeing us. But if I hit a tree or went over a ravine I’d be killed. Yet there was no other option: I leaped into the night.

  Pain jolted through my feet when I hit the ground. The momentum carried me onto my side and I rolled down a slope and crashed into a tree. The impact winded me and I gasped. I didn’t see the other men jump but there was shouting and the train squealed to a stop. Machine-gun fire split the air. The Germans had reacted faster than we had anticipated.

  I dragged myself behind the trees and kept my head low. Spotlights shone around the area. Guard dogs barked. Then there were more shouts and gunfire. I pushed myself as flat against the ground as I could. Someone ran past me. A light caught him. Filipp! There was a rattle of machine-gun fire and he was shot full of holes.

  The air went silent. I heard the wagon door slam shut and wondered if the soldiers had given up searching and were getting back on the train. Then I felt a weight on my back. A boot. Someone dragged me to my feet by my collar and pushed me back up the slope. A German guard. When we reached the track, he boxed me around the ears and punched me in the stomach. I collapsed to my knees, sure that he was going to shoot me, but instead he wrenched me up again and dragged me towards another wagon.

  A soldier standing by the door tugged it open and a foul stench rolled out. A mix of urine, sweat and fear. In the flash of the soldier’s torchlight I glimpsed terrified faces: women, children, old people. I was shoved inside the crowded car and the door was slammed shut. A few moments later the train moved again. I could no longer see the people around me but I could sense their wretchedness. Who were they and where were we going?

  The journey took four days, which we endured without food or water. I learned that the people in the carriage were Ukrainian Jews on their way to a work camp. On the third day a child died. The guards had to prise the child’s corpse from the mother’s hands. Her wails pierced my heart. The only way I could cope was to rest my head on my knees and think of nothing.

  The day after, we passed through a station. My heart sank when I saw the sign: Kraków. My worst fears were realised: we were in Poland. A while later, the train came to a halt with a long, low whistle. The doors were slid open and German soldiers ordered everyone out. I waited for the others to leave before lowering myself from the wagon to the ground. I searched the sea of faces for any of the Red Army soldiers I had been with before our escape, but there was no one. I was the only survivor.

  ‘Poor Filipp,’ I muttered. An SS officer in a neatly fitting uniform and polished boots glared at me. Something seemed to irritate him and he indicated that I should stand to the side while the other passengers were divided according to their sex. As I was the only prisoner of war in the group, I wondered if that was what had annoyed him. Perhaps I was supposed to have been taken to a transit camp in Germany instead of here.

  I spotted men and women in striped uniforms working in a field beyond the barbed-wire fence. There were watchtowers at regular intervals manned by guards with machine guns. Other guards patrolled the fence line with dogs. They must be determined to keep these people imprisoned, I thought. An odour that made my stomach heave reached my nostrils: the stench of burning flesh and hair. I’d smelled it many times over the battlefield but it was much stronger here. I glanced around for the source of the smell and noticed a redbrick building behind some trees. Smoke was drifting from its chimney. A sense of foreboding washed over me.

  One of the guards indicated that I should join the women who didn’t have small children. Women with young children and those who were pregnant were ordered to the left, along with the elderly. The rest of us were told to line up in single file.

  Arbeit macht frei: work makes you free. I had no idea what those German words meant when I entered Auschwitz-Birkenau that day, nor that I had passed into a living hell run by monsters. I was selected to work in the storage area, sorting the goods that had been stolen from the Jews and other prisoners when they were brought to the camp. Every day I picked through muslin-wrapped cheeses, jars of preserved vegetables, canned fruit and sweets. The depot was nicknamed ‘Canada’ because of all the riches that were stored there — jewellery, clothes, shoes, household goods, as well as food; it was considered one of the preferable jobs in the camp. The women who worked there were permitted to grow their hair, unlike women in other areas of the camp who were shorn from head to foot. Our uniforms were better and so were our barracks.

  ‘You can eat some of the food,’ said the kapo who supervised me and the other women in the section. ‘The guards will turn a blind eye. Just don’t take anything back to the barracks. That will earn you a beating.’

  ‘Why do we get treated better here?’ I asked Dora, who worked with me and was teaching me basic German.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The mental torment might be enough.’

  I didn’t understand what she meant until one day a train arrived from Czechoslovakia. When the passengers had disembarked, I saw that the pregnant women, young children and old people were being herded towards the redbrick building that I had glimpsed on my arrival. I carried on with my work but kept returning to the window to see what was happening. Then I heard screams and cries. I felt sick to my stomach. Were the people being beaten?

  Sometime later I heard motors start up, like those on ventilators in factories. Smoke rose from the chimney. When the kapo saw the smoke he ordered us to shut the windows, even though it was hot inside the storehouse. I obeyed his order but as I did so I saw through the glass two prisoners pushing a cart with naked corpses on it. One of the dead was a woman. An umbilical cord dangled from between her legs with a fully developed baby attached to it. I dropped to my knees.

  ‘You’ll learn not to look next time,’ Dora said when she found me vomiting into a piece of cloth.

  Even the horrors I had seen in Stalingrad did not compare to what was going on in Auschwitz. Innocent people were being gassed to death. I thought incessantly of escape after that, but soon realised it was futile for someone who worked inside the camp. The Forbidden Zone was wide and vigilantly patrolled and I’d be shot before I could reach the wire.

  ‘Listen,’ Dora told me one day, ‘stay strong and don’t risk your good fortune in being allocated this work. Most of us ended up here because we have relatives in the work-assignment office who arranged it for us. It’s awful, but the guards here don’t starve us and they don’t send us to the gas chamber if we do what we’re told. According to you, the Russians are pushing the Germans back. Well, hold on until they get here.’

  I saw that Dora was right. It was a Soviet pilot’s duty t
o try to escape if captured, but I also had a duty to my mother — I was all she had now — and a duty to Valentin because he loved me and would be waiting for me. Working in the storehouse section was the reason I survived two winters at Auschwitz while other prisoners, reduced to living skeletons by a lack of food and from overwork, died in their thousands.

  ‘Are you noticing the changes?’ Dora whispered to me one day.

  I was. The number of trains arriving each week was decreasing and the selections had stopped. Food rations began to improve in quality and quantity. Fewer people were being killed randomly or for minor offences.

  ‘They’re getting desperate,’ Dora said. ‘They need our labour now.’

  I dared to allow myself the hope that the changes meant the front was drawing closer.

  In late autumn, some of the crematoriums were dismantled; and then one night in early January, when I lay in my bunk shivering from the cold, I heard a sound that made me sit bolt upright. Planes! I knew from the pitch of the engines that they were Ilyushins: Russian bombers. Had I imagined it? I looked around. Other women were sitting up; they’d heard them too. After the planes came the boom of artillery and the crackle of rifle fire.

  ‘The Russians are close,’ one woman whispered.

  The following day, dozens of German armoured vehicles rumbled past the camp. The Nazis were fleeing.

  Dora and I were transferred from sorting food to packing clothes, suitcases, shoes, spectacles and other stolen goods for dispatch to Berlin. The guards ordered us to hurry but the snow hampered the speed at which we could push the wheelbarrows and carts from the bunkers to the trucks. My feet were wet and frozen, and the last thing I wanted, now that the Red Army was approaching, was to die of pneumonia.

  An explosion ripped through the air as another crematorium was blown up. On one of my runs a prisoner stopped me and whispered that she’d seen SS officers throwing hundreds of documents and registration books onto bonfires.

  ‘They’re destroying the evidence,’ she said. ‘They know what they’ve been doing is abhorrent.’