The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  “They’re flying low,” Jerczek said. He looked into the sky. They heard bombs and shelling. “We need to get into the trees.”

  He tried to help Jakub stand. “You can do it,” Jerczek said. “Walk on the sides of your feet. Only a few hundred meters.”

  Jakub tried to stand but the pain overwhelmed him.

  “I can’t move,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  “You can do it. Can you crawl?”

  “My hands won’t bear it.”

  “Then I’ll drag you.”

  “Leave me. Go without me.”

  “I won’t do that,” Jerczek said. “We don’t know who they are.”

  The planes came in low in the distance.

  “Go on—get out of here.”

  Jerczek went behind Jakub.

  “I’m going to lift you under the shoulders and pull. You kick with your heels. Can you do that?”

  “You need to go,” Jakub said. “I’ll be okay.”

  “We have to get into the trees,” Jerczek said. “If it snows hard, we’ll have shelter, too.” Jerczek lifted Jakub under his shoulders. “Push while I pull.”

  Together the men moved toward the trees. They rested twice. They were in the woods in about ten minutes. Jerczek went back for the blankets. He could hear the airplanes in the field. He returned with as much as he could carry.

  “How far do you think those planes are?”

  “I don’t know,” Jakub said. “Maybe a couple kilometers.”

  “Russians—or looking for Russians?” Jerczek looked through the woods. “Maybe foot soldiers are near. I could make a few kilometers today. Maybe find them.”

  “If you wait, I’ll go with you.”

  “We don’t have time. They may be gone by then and we may be frozen.” Jerczek looked at the ground before him, covered with pine needles. He took Jakub’s hand. “Pray for me,” he said. He bundled himself and stood and headed into the woods.

  THE GRAY SKY BECAME BLACK WITHOUT MOONLIGHT. Jakub fell asleep in the cold under blankets and pants. Late in the night, a light in his face awakened him. Then he heard voices in a language he had heard before but didn’t understand.

  “He’s alive.”

  The lights separated and he saw two lanterns and a flashlight. A man squatted down to him. The man tried speaking German first.

  “Hey. Wake up!”

  Jakub could make out the man’s uniform. It was not German. “You’re safe,” the man said.

  “You’re safe now,” said another man who was standing.

  Their voices were clear and calm.

  “Did Jerczek bring you?” Jakub asked. “Is he with you?”

  One of the Russian soldiers recognized Polish and he came forward and spoke in that language.

  “Jerczek?”

  “Did Jerczek bring you? He left here to get help.”

  “There’s no one but us,” the soldier said.

  “What about the other marchers?” Jakub said. “We heard planes. There were bombs.”

  “You mean the bodies in the field?”

  “They were part of our group,” Jakub said. “The rest went on, toward the river.”

  “We’re armored,” the Polish-speaking soldier said. “There have been air strikes around here, but that’s not our group. We’re reconnaissance.”

  The soldier saw blood on Jakub’s hand and on the edge of the blanket by Jakub’s feet. “Are you injured?” he asked.

  “Not from bullets,” Jakub said.

  “Can you walk?” Two Red Army soldiers came forward to help Jakub stand. He brought his legs up and pressed down on his hands. The pain was gone. Jakub stood.

  “The rest of us are across the field,” a soldier said.

  Jakub put on his clogs. They threw a heavy wool shawl around him and the four men walked out of the trees. “Be careful where you step,” another soldier said.

  Jakub heard them talking in their language. He followed the light cast on the ground from the lanterns. They came to the first body. He watched light pass over the man’s face. They walked between other men. Some lay naked. Jakub could see their bones in their cheeks and chests. He could see their legs, like sticks. Then he tripped and one of the soldiers grabbed him and he stopped and gasped. He stood over a fully-clothed man who lay dead with the rest. Jakub felt a terrible urgency. He tightened his grip on the soldier.

  “We have to go back,” he said. “We have to go back now!”

  The Russian didn’t understand him. He whistled for his mates, who had walked ahead. They ran back.

  “What’s wrong?” said the Polish speaker.

  Jakub looked at him. “We have to go back,” he said.

  “Back where?”

  “Melinka. To Melinka.”

  “That’s a day from here. Why?”

  “That’s where we came from.”

  “Who?”

  “All of us. All of us here.” Jakub looked at the man on the ground. “All of us came from Melinka.”

  “There’s nothing in Melinka,” one of the soldiers said in Russian. “It’s just a village.”

  “Why were you in Melinka?” the Polish speaker said.

  “There’s a camp,” Jakub said.

  The Polish speaker translated. “He says there’s a camp.”

  The other soldier scoffed. “There’s no camp there.”

  “The closest resettlement camp is at Oswiecim.”

  “We were being evacuated from there,” Jakub said. “From the camp at Melinka.”

  “There’s no camp at Melinka. We would know.”

  “Not necessarily,” the Polish speaker said. “There may be camps around we would not know about.”

  “We have orders,” said the third soldier.

  “We’re reconnoitering,” said the Polish speaker. “We have some latitude.”

  “Not that much.”

  “Who’s to say? No one’s here to say different except me.”

  Jakub knelt before the dead man and looked at him. A spotlight shined on the four men from the woods on the other side of the field. One of the soldiers shaded his eyes and looked in the direction of the light. Jakub looked up and he heard “it’s okay,” in Polish.

  Toward the light, they heard a diesel engine roar up. Caps on exhaust pipes clanged. They heard creaking and screeching and the ground vibrated under their feet and a large thing came through the trees. One of the soldiers motioned with his lantern and the tank followed the light like a trained beast and came alongside them, away from the bodies. The engine idled and the soldier at the turret looked down at them. They spoke in Russian. They raised their voices and Jakub knew they were arguing and he stood up and grabbed the one who spoke Polish.

  “We have to go to Melinka,” Jakub said. “There are more like us and they are still alive.” He looked down at the stiff, cold body of Janusz Jerzcek, whose face looked up with open eyes. “We have to go back to Melinka.”

  THE RUSSIAN PLATOON TRAVELED IN TWO TANKS and three trucks during the night and the men slept two hours. The Polish speaker was the platoon commander—a Red Army lieutenant named Kirlinovsky. The platoon was a reconnaissance arm of a western-moving division traveling across the extreme southern part of Poland.

  Jakub rode in the back of a canvas-covered truck. One of the soldiers handed him a bar of chocolate but before he could take it, Kirlinovsky grabbed it away.

  “You could kill him with that,” the lieutenant said. He looked around the group in the truck. “You men—don’t give anyone food.”

  “Not even the Krauts?”

  The men laughed.

  “How can chocolate kill me if nothing else has?” Jakub said.

  Kirlinovsky smiled. “Maybe it wouldn’t, but I’ve seen this before. Here.” Kirlinosky broke off a small piece of the bar and handed it to Jakub. “That’s enough for now.”

  They joined a Red Army squadron rooting out German installations and bunkers, but no one in the squadron knew about the camp at Melinka. The two group
s of Red Army soldiers came down roads and through trees. They crossed streams and fields where the soil was hard enough for the armor. A few miles outside Melinka, the trucks stopped and soldiers stepped off and spread out.

  “Do you have masks?” Jakub asked Kirlinovsky.

  “You think they’ll use gas?”

  “No. For the smell.”

  “If we need them.”

  “You will.”

  Fifty Seven

  A voice from a bullhorn roused Shosha. She lay beneath as many blankets as she could salvage. She didn’t sleep but stayed on the verge of sleep and tried to fight bad thoughts.

  “Niederbrennen! Niederbrennen!”

  She had heard this word before but she did not know it. She knew conversational German but this word was not conversational.

  “Niederbrennen!”

  Major Petersdorf walked between the buildings with the bullhorn. His face was dirty. He had not ironed or starched his uniform for two weeks. He had not shaved in days. He shouted the command.

  “Niederbrennen!”

  Petersdorf earlier ordered Hehl to open the warehouses and when Hehl refused, the major ordered him held at gunpoint while the guards opened the stores.

  “I don’t know what you hope to accomplish except to get us all hung,” Petersdorf said to Hehl.

  Under Corporal Walkenburg’s watch, the guards hauled out all the cloth. They soaked shirts and pants, skirts and socks, long johns and soft hats in gasoline and piled it on flatbeds with wheels. Now they walked from building to building, splashing wooden walls with fuel. They lit rags and threw them against the walls. They stripped the crematoria and left brick shells behind.

  When Shosha smelled smoke, she remembered where she had heard the word Niederbrennen. In Warsaw, during the Uprising, SS officers yelled it to the men on the carts who went from building to building with flamethrowers and burning dross.

  Shosha raised her head. She looked around the hospital block. She heard the wood creak and saw bat guano trickle from the rafters. The bats had come in through knotholes in the pine as the weather cooled. Shosha saw an empty bird’s nest teetering overhead. A mama had raised her babies there and left the spring before. The bats left every night, but it was cold now and she hadn’t seen them.

  She smelled smoke but it was outside, in other buildings.

  IN THE LOW LIGHT OF FLAMES FROM A SMALL FIREPLACE in his bedroom, Franz Strauss unbuttoned his uniform jacket and looked out the window. He slipped off the jacket and set it on the bed with the cover. He untied the necktie and laid it on the jacket. He slipped off the shirt and undid the belt and placed them both on the bed. He slipped off the pants. He went to the fire and stoked the flames. He slipped off his socks and underwear and gathered the uniform and the cover and his underclothes and pulled the grate away from the fire. He threw everything into the flames but belt and boots, leather that would stink if it burned.

  He was naked and he watched the fire consume it all and he heard yelling and gunshots in the yard. He looked out the window and saw mud on the ground. He looked at the fire and saw metal things in the ash.

  Strauss walked to the bathroom. He filled a glass of water and took Amidon and Pethidine. He didn’t empty the bottles. He didn’t take enough to overdose, only dull the pain. He went to the bathtub and turned on the spigots and tested the water with his hands. He put the stopper in the drain and went back to the mirror, where he shaved his face and nicked himself twice.

  PETERSDORF WOKE SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN. He combed his hair, shaved, and washed his face and hands. He went outside. He saw smoldering barracks. He turned and in the early morning shadows, saw the upstairs light through the second story window of Strauss’ quarters.

  “Stürmbannführer!” Dr. Fiddler saluted him. “The men need rest.”

  “We can’t rest,” Petersdorf said.

  “Some deserted.”

  “What?”

  “Walked away in the night.”

  “What time? Why weren’t they caught?”

  “No one cares.”

  “You will care when you’re staring through a noose.”

  “Hehl left too.”

  “Fuck him. That’s no loss. Who’s caring for the Kommandant’s wife?”

  “Kommandant.”

  “How do you know? I haven’t heard this.”

  “Hehl said you knew.”

  Petersdorf ran his hand through his hair. “How many men are still here?”

  “There’s a few.”

  “Get Höfstaller and burn the other buildings today,” Petersdorf said. He looked up at the Commandant’s window. “I will shoot any man who tries to desert.”

  The major walked away from the doctor. He ran up the stairs to the Commandant’s house. The guard there saluted him.

  “When did you get here?” Petersdorf asked.

  “I relieved Beckar at five.”

  “Did either of you see the Kommandant?”

  “I haven’t,” the guard said. “I didn’t ask Beckar.”

  Petersdorf went into the house. The front office was empty. “Franz.” He went into the library. He looked in the study. He went into the drawing room and the kitchen and back to the greenhouse. “We’re evak-ing.” He went upstairs. The bed in the master was neatly made. He saw embers glowing in the fireplace. He saw the Commandant’s polished shoes, together on the floor. He saw a typewritten note on a writing desk. He picked it up and recognized Hemingway again, writing about how the world kills the good, the gentle, the brave, and the courageous, and how if you are “none of these,” it will kill you, too, but with “no special hurry.”

  None of these was underlined.

  Petersdorf felt his mouth go dry. He went out of the room and down the hall. He saw the closed door to the bathroom. The door was not locked. He opened it.

  “Franz?”

  Strauss lay in the bathtub. His eyes were open, toward the window. The water was red. Petersdorf went to his friend and lifted his wrist. He set down the lifeless hand and saw blood on his fingers. He turned the wrist over. Strauss had cut himself, but he didn’t penetrate the artery. He bled, but not enough to die. His other hand lay in the water.

  Petersdorf shook. He lifted Strauss’ hand to his quivering lips where a high-pitched sigh escaped. He saw the razor blade and the empty pill bottles. He heard commotion in the yard. The burning had started for another day.

  THE RED ARMY TROOPS PASSED THROUGH Melinka village. Curious villagers followed them. Father Waleska stood at his gate and watched the tanks creeping and trucks rolling and the soldiers walking in the cold. In the last truck, he thought he saw a familiar face in the early light peaking over the mountains. He opened the gate.

  The smell hit the soldiers. “What is it?” They winced and gagged. “What is that?” Several troops bent over and heaved. They covered their faces with their gas masks. “I haven’t ever smelled anything like this. Ever!”

  Jakub looked at the men through his mask. They halted, then moved again. A rumbling, persistent, slow-treaded slog moved toward the camp. Bullhorns demanded surrender. Guards left their posts. The Russians pressed down the gate. The stragglers watched safely from behind.

  Corpses lay piled and scattered and Muselmänner stood dying. Some prisoners had escaped the boxcars, except those who were too weak. Guards lay down their arms and raised their hands.

  “Stop the fires,” Kirlinovsky ordered.

  His troops fanned out. They drew water in buckets and threw it on the burning buildings. They went to the infirmary and kicked in the door to Greta Strauss’ room and found her where and how her husband had left her.

  The Russian troops came to one building that wasn’t burning—the Commandant’s quarters. The entrance guard had left his post and out of respect for the Commandant and in the hope that he would turn the camp over with no violence, Kirlinovsky didn’t storm the house but stood in front of it with his troops, demanding surrender through a bullhorn.

  Major Petersdorf walked
out the front door into the sunlight. He was tall and stiff but disheveled. His uniform was wrinkled. Father Waleska walked up behind the troops. One of them gave the priest a gas mask.

  “Herr Kommandant,” Kirlinovsky said through the bullhorn. “We are asking for you to surrender.”

  “This priest has something to say,” one of the men told Kirlinovsky.

  “That’s not the Commandant,” the Father said. “I know him.”

  “Where is your commandant?” Kirlinovsky said to the major.

  Petersdorf stared. Father Waleska took the bullhorn. “Heinrich,” he said. “It’s time to lay down your arms.”

  The major’s hands trembled. He didn’t speak or move.

  “You protected our village,” Waleska told him. “The allies will know of this, I assure you.”

  With his shaking right hand, Petersdorf blessed himself—in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. He lowered his hand toward his sidearm. Kirlinovksy’s men raised their rifles.

  “Take it out and put it on the ground,” Kirlinovsky said.

  Major Petersdorf lifted the gun from its holster. Then he turned it toward himself and raised it and the soldiers fired. He fell on the steps.

  ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CAMP, the hospital block burned. Shosha saw flames and heard voices outside. She had crawled away from the walls. She reached up to one of the bunks. She pulled herself up, along jagged boards, slipping her frail fingers between nails and knots. She pulled and her feet slipped in the mess but she kept her grip and tightened her fingers and with the emaciated muscles in her wrists and arms, pulled herself to her feet.

  She stood on her legs for the first time in days. She breathed and coughed through the smoke. In front of her, she did not see fire and she moved. She moved and shook. She was unsteady but she kept moving, toward foreign voices that seemed close and the sound of water sizzling on fire. She saw sunlight and steam. She kept moving.

  The Russian troops used a hose from a camp truck to douse the fire. They didn’t at first see the emaciated figure who stepped around the falling walls and away from the flames. Her eyes were so used to dark that Shosha raised her hand to block the sun. On her trembling, skinny legs, she walked awkwardly forward, placing her sore-covered feet one in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, until she stood, away from the building. Shosha breathed as deeply as she could. Her knees shook. She looked beyond the smoke and called out in her native tongue.