n the moon was mostly obscured by clouds and there were absolutely no stars. Yet the snow was oddly luminescent, as if it had its own source of light--like, Helmut thought, those fish that supposedly lived in the sunless depths of the ocean--and the birch trees were eerily skeletal. Helmut found the cold air more bracing than uncomfortable. There were few families on the road, but he did pass some. And they all told him the same thing: He was going the wrong way. A fellow soldier, his head bandaged beneath a wool cap, warned him that the Russians had pierced their lines everywhere-- that, in fact, there was no line left. An old couple pulling two small, sleeping grandchildren on a sled said they had seen a Russian tank on the outskirts of the village.
When he reached the final stretch of road before his uncle's, the sky was lightening to the east, though it was clear there was going to be no sun again today. He was almost out of petrol, but he was so close it really wouldn't have mattered if the car had come to a dead stop right here. He knew from his visit yesterday with his father that he would be unable to drive all the way to the manor house anyway. Still, he coasted whenever he could.
He was just stepping down from the BMW when he heard the metallic rumble approaching. He climbed back on to the vehicle's running board to see, hoping to God it was German tanks or, perhaps, some long antitank guns on trailers. It wasn't. There, no more than half a kilometer distant, were three massive Russian tanks lumbering across one of the fields where his uncle grew rutabagas and carrots. They were moving parallel to the road and clearly didn't give a damn about him or his family's BMW. Because clearly they saw him. If the commander inside any one of the tanks wanted, he needed only to spin his tank's turret and obliterate the car with a single shell.
He jumped back into the driver's seat and raced as far up the driveway as he could, stopping only when he reached the fallen oak where he and his father had parked yesterday. Then he ran to the house, aware even as he churned his legs in the snow that something was different. Something had changed. He couldn't have said precisely how he knew this, and he told himself that his foreboding had been triggered, naturally enough, by the sight of three Russian tanks cavalierly driving westward behind him. Soon, however, he understood his premonition was well founded: He saw that the estate's high and wide front doors had been shattered, the wood slivered and the hinges bent like old playing cards. He stepped over what now were little more than sharp pieces of kindling and called for his uncle. He called for Jutta. A crow flew past him, swooping toward him down the stairs and then darting outside through the hole where the front doors once had stood. The heavy tapestries of hunters and herds of elk that usually adorned the eastern wall of the entrance hall had been slashed with bayonets, and each bulb on the great chandelier--all of them encased in globes with the faces of wood nymphs--had been exploded.
He tried to convince himself that Karl had come to his senses and left with his family, but he didn't believe this. He walked gingerly across the broken glass from the light fixture, saw that the kitchen and the pantry had been ransacked--the doors ripped from the cupboards, the jars of pickles and cabbage and jam smashed onto the floor--and then across the shattered remnants of the mahogany dining room table into his uncle's study. Which was where he saw them. All four of them. The boy with the beautiful, cherubic smile had been hung as if he were a small pig by his ankles from one of the acorn finials atop the high cherry bookcases, his throat slashed so deeply that his head was dangling by twinelike shreds of muscle and skin. The women, including poor, frightened Jutta, had been tied facedown to Uncle Karl's broad desk, their legs naked, their dresses pulled up over their hips. There was dried blood caked like icing along the insides of their legs, and--almost hypnotized--he stared for a moment at the eggplant-colored bruises that marked their buttocks. After they had been violated (or before, for all Helmut knew), each woman had been shot once in the back of the head.
And on the floor nearby, still in his dressing gown, was Uncle Karl. Even in death the man's eyes were wide. The body was on its side, almost curled into a fetal position, and there was something causing the back of the dressing gown to tent. He knelt, pulled the silk aside, and saw that someone had taken the man's crystal decanter full of schnapps and thrust the bottleneck as far into the man's anus as it would fit.
helmut wandered stunned, almost somnambulant, to his uncle's garage, where he found a can of petrol that the Russians must not have noticed. There he filled the BMW. Then he left and joined the throng traveling west. Although he was moving in the same direction as the stream, the trip home still took him nearly two and a half hours. When he passed a woman with five children and all of their suitcases and cartons trudging along on foot, he packed them into the car with him and brought them as far as the entrance to Kaminheim. The only traffic he encountered moving east was two trucks pulling antitank guns, the weapons' long barrels painted white for the winter.
His parents were furious when he got home. His mother, he saw, had actually cleaned the kitchen with the cook in his absence and was draping the furniture in the ballroom with white sheets when he arrived. Their anger dissipated quickly, however, when he told them what he had seen at Uncle Karl's. He didn't share with them all the details, especially after Mutti lowered her head and grew silent. He could tell that it was the death of the boy that first had shocked and then dispirited her. For a long moment she simply allowed herself to be rocked in her husband's arms, her face buried in his chest. She said nothing, though occasionally her body shuddered as she tried to suppress her sobs. She was struggling to maintain a semblance of composure, to prevent her grief and her panic from overwhelming her, but he knew her well enough to know that she would succeed. Then she would resume packing with her usual efficiency and organizing his sister and brother for their departure.
Finally he heard his father murmuring--his voice soft but firm--that it was important they were on the road well before lunchtime. And, sure enough, Mutti stood up a little straighter, pulled away from her husband, and wiped at her eyes.
"Helmut," she said, just the smallest quaver in her voice. "Please check on your brother. See if he needs any help."
anna went outside into the chill morning air when she heard what had happened to Uncle Karl and Jutta and the others, and listened to the firing to the east. She had known people who had died--mostly men, of course, including her cousin at Stalingrad, but some women, too--and she had even known people who had died in their apartments or town houses when RAF and American bombers had incinerated whole city blocks. A girl from a BDM camp in one case, friends of her parents in another. But this was a first: the deaths of people she was related to who had been violated--tortured--before they had been slaughtered. She wasn't completely sure why Helmut had insisted on telling her so much more than he had told their parents, but she sensed by the way his forehead was furrowed and his eyes were glassy that he felt a powerful need to unburden himself to someone.
Callum appeared beside her now and dropped at his feet the trunk he was carrying. She recognized it as Theo's, though she knew that most of what had been wedged into it was either provisions for the trek or valuables that her parents thought they might barter as they made their way west. She and her mother had sewn small, secret pockets into some of their dresses and skirts in which they would hide jewelry, since it was possible that diamonds and gold might be the only currency with any value someday soon. Like her, Theo was taking a single suitcase.
"I'm sorry," Callum said to her simply. "The people who did that to your family . . . well, they weren't soldiers, you know. They were just criminals."
She thought about this, but the idea offered little comfort. What difference did it make? "I'm scared," she said simply. She realized that she really hadn't been before. She had been agitated and apprehensive, she had felt a deep and nagging unease. But until now she hadn't been frightened.
"I can't say I blame you."
"I tell myself it was all my uncle's fault. You know, he did this to himself. To his fami
ly. Because he wouldn't listen, he wouldn't leave. If he had, they'd all be alive today. All of them. You realize that, don't you?"
"I do, yes."
"Still: I'm scared."
"Because of the Russians . . ."
"And because it's all over! Everything!" she said, raising her voice more than she'd meant to. "I've never lived anyplace but Kam- inheim. Now I don't even know where I'll be sleeping tonight!"
Though her father or mother or Helmut might appear at any moment, he put his arms around her and pulled her against him. She was wearing only a sweater and so she was shivering. He stroked her hair, careful not to disturb the long braid that ran down her back. She murmured something into his chest, but he couldn't make it out and so he gently lifted her chin with his thumb.
"They . . ." she began again. Her eyes were moist, but she wasn't crying and it might have been the cold alone that was causing them to water.
"Your uncle's family?" he asked.
"The Russians," she said, her voice almost bewildered. "They must have been very mad."
A gust of wind whipped the snow on the walkway into a series of small, tornado-like swirls, and the noise momentarily drowned out the cannonade.
"Apparently. But that sort of behavior is always inexcusable," he said, wishing he had found a word that suggested the gravity of the Russians' atrocities. He was parroting, he suspected, something his own priggish uncle once must have said. "Even in the worst moments of a war, it's intolerable. No British soldier would have done such a thing. You know that, don't you?"
"I know you believe that."
"It's a fact," he said, instantly regretting how curt he had sounded.
"I wouldn't have thought German soldiers would, either. But from what you've told me--from what your radio people claim--they did, and that's probably why the Bolsheviks are so barbaric now."
He considered this and wondered, as he did often, what sort of soldier he would have been if he hadn't fallen from the sky into a bog and been taken prisoner so quickly. He didn't fear he would ever have done anything cowardly: He was twenty and still had the remorseless confidence of late adolescence. And he knew that he had handled himself well enough when he was helping his fellow paratroopers survive their first moments in the marsh after that disastrous drop. Rather, what made him curious was how capricious his captors had been before he was sent here to Kaminheim to help with the harvest. The guards, he had observed, might dispense a completely unwarranted kindness upon one POW because there was something they liked about the particular Brit's or American's attitude. He was quiet, perhaps. Or he would smile once in a while. Meanwhile, they would beat another prisoner senseless with their rifle butts because they were annoyed with the fellow's sluggishness or the way he wore his overcoat, or they simply didn't like the shape of his jaw or the color of his eyes.
And, Callum presumed, it was a thousand times worse on the battlefield. Those Germans who captured him: Sure, they wanted prisoners they could interrogate. But had they had a less seasoned commander, they probably would have just opened fire and machine-gunned the paratroopers as they struggled from the swamp. And that would have been absolutely fair and reasonable. Hell, if he'd seen a group of German paratroopers in some bog near Elgin in the midst of an invasion, he wouldn't have asked a whole lot of questions before opening fire.
Still, he would never have killed a civilian. Never. Nor would he have raped some poor girl because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was certain that none of his mates would have, either.
Likewise, he couldn't see Helmut doing such things.
Yet Helmut's peers very well might. And Werner's probably had. For all he knew, they had done far worse, if that was possible. And if they hadn't actually raped the girls they had come across in Russia, it was only because they didn't rape dogs and pigs, either. It was beneath them.
What the Russians were doing wasn't forgivable. But it was, he feared, understandable. In their minds, they were just taking an eye for an eye.
And so he had to admit that he was a little relieved, too, that he was going west with the Emmerichs and not staying behind to greet the Russian army. It wasn't just that he wanted to protect Anna. It wasn't just that he wanted to be with her. It was, he thought, his best shot at surviving this nightmare.
they left well before lunchtime, just as Father had insisted. They left on foot, six more people and four more horses, joining the river of refugees planning, if necessary, to walk the width of Germany in the winter. They left as the snow flurries once more began to coat the road and the roof of the manor house, as behind them the chimneys grew cold. They were a solemn, largely silent procession, their thoughts punctuated always by the sound of the cannons, because by this point there was nothing to say. Anna glanced once at Theo and saw the poor boy had a face that was resolute: He was striving to be as grown-up as his older brothers, soldiers both, as sure and as steadfast as Callum. He was also, she imagined, simply too scared to cry now. Didn't dare. She guessed they all felt that way on some level.
As they passed between the imposing stone columns that marked the entrance to Kaminheim, she noticed that neither of her parents ever looked back.
*
PART ii
Winter 1945
Chapter 9
the refugees in the columns moved at Different speeds once they were west of the Vistula, not unlike the runners in the middle stages of a marathon. The Emmerichs on occasion were passed and on occasion passed others. During their first afternoon without Helmut or Rolf, they spoke to almost no one, and when they bedded down for the night at the estate of a family they knew in Klinger--abandoned, too, they found when they arrived, and already occupied by a half-dozen other families trekking west-- they were so exhausted that they barely opened their mouths. Even Callum was largely silent as he and Anna fed the horses and watched the animals sniff at the strange stalls. Mutti opened some of the canned meats they had brought, and selflessly shared the food--as well as some apples and beets--with the families there, since all of them were traveling on foot and hadn't been able to bring anywhere near the provisions that the Emmerichs had. She had, by her own rough calculations, given away about a day and a half's worth of their food. But it would have been indecent not to share what they had.
Anna had presumed that they would all sleep in bedrooms, on clean, crisp sheets that her parents' friends or servants would place on the guest beds, but other groups who, it was clear, hadn't even known the people who had once lived at this house had already commandeered those quarters. There were elderly married couples who seemed far too frail to be out on their own in the cold, and women (like Mutti) with children, and three female auxiliaries from the navy who were perhaps a year or two older than Anna. The auxiliaries claimed to have been on their way to Konitz on official business when their jeep was destroyed in an air attack, but there was an air of vagueness about their story and a decided restiveness in their eyes. Both Mutti and Anna had the sense they were lying, and hoped for the girls' sake that they would not be spotted by some doctrinaire Nazi who thought the war could be saved if he turned in these possible deserters. The girls had seized the couches and the divan in the den, but insisted on turning them over to the Emmerichs and slept instead on the thick carpet on the floor. Meanwhile, Callum slept beneath their comforters in the barn with the horses, because Mutti decided that there were too many refugees in the house to risk bringing him indoors. The next morning, he said the barn hadn't been too bad because of the amount of heat that was given off by the horses.
On the second night, the Emmerichs were forced to join Callum in a barn, because there was absolutely no more room in either of the two farmhouses where they stopped. At the first home, Anna peered through the windows while Mutti tried to negotiate their way inside, and she saw people packed so tightly in the living room that it looked like the young mothers were sleeping on their feet with their infants in their arms, while old women were asleep both on the dining room table and benea
th it. The second house, four kilometers farther, was just as crowded, and Theo--despite his best efforts to transcend his age--was starting to grow a little hysterical with fatigue. And so Mutti had them camp that evening in the barn with, by the time the moon had risen, two other families of trekkers. They were still weeks from Stettin, and as they spread out their blankets and quilts on the hay, Anna guessed that if this trend continued they would be sleeping in the snow by the time they arrived there.
Nevertheless, she didn't complain. Even Theo didn't complain once he was off his feet and buffered by barn board from the chill winds, and they had all eaten apples and beets and the last of the bread they had brought. As they had the day before, they shared their bounty with the families with whom, suddenly, they were sleeping in unexpectedly close quarters.
But it was clear there was no alternative to spending the night with strangers. Besides, Anna reminded herself, how could she even consider whining when her father and Helmut were off fighting at the Kulm bridgehead and Werner was God alone knew where? At least, she reminded herself, they all had their winter boots and their parkas and their furs, and for the moment it had stopped snowing. And the presence of the moon high above had given everyone in the line trekking west the hope that tomorrow there might even be sun.
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