DER MEISTERSCHÜTZE
When he hit them, they slid into the rubble, stained but not shattered. A 6.5-millimetre killed with velocity, not impact; it drilled them and, failing deflection at bone or spine, flew on. Repp was even convinced they felt no pain from the way they relaxed. He didn’t even have to move the rifle very much, he could just leave it where it was, they were swarming so thickly. He’d fired five magazines now, twenty-five rounds. He’d killed twenty-five men. Some looked stupefied when he took them; others angry; still others oblivious. Repp shot for the chest. He took no chances. Nothing fancy.
They had spotted him of course. Their bullets thunked and cracked around him, chipping at the bricks, filling the air with fine dust or snow, but he felt magical. He kept dropping them. The white bodies were piling up….
Books by Stephen Hunter
FICTION
Pale Horse Coming
Hot Springs
Time to Hunt
Black Light
Dirty White Boys
Point of Impact
The Day Before Midnight
Tapestry of Spies
The Second Saladin
The Master Sniper
NONFICTION
Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem
For Jake Hunter and Tolka Zhitomir
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A good many friends and colleagues assisted the author in the preparation of this manuscript, though they are in no way responsible for its excesses. But they should be thanked nevertheless. They are James H. Bready, Curtis Carroll Davis, Gerri Kobren, Henry J. Knoch, Frederic N. Rasmussen, Michael Hill, Binnie Syril Braunstein, Bill Auerbach, Joseph Fanzone, Jr., Richard C. Hageman, Lenne P. Miller, Bruce Bortz, Carleton Jones and Dr. John D. Bullock. Two special friends deserve their own sentence: Brian Hayes and Wayne J. Henkel. Lastly, the author would like to pay tribute to two extraordinary people: his wife, Lucy, and his editor, Maria Guarnaschelli, of William Morrow, without whom all this would not have happened.
Marksmen are not limited to the location of their unit and are free to move anywhere they can see a valuable target….
—Instructions for use of S.m.K. cartridges and rifles with telescopic sights, 1915
Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue
he hits you with leaden bullets his aim is true
—PAUL CELAN, “A Death Fugue”
PART ONE
Schützenhaus
(Shooting Gallery)
January-April 1945
1
The guards in the new camp were kinder.
No, Shmuel thought, not kinder. Be precise. Even after many years of rough treatment he took pride in the exactness of his insights. The guards were not kinder, they were merely indifferent. Unlike the pigs in the East, these fellows were blank and efficient. They wore their uniforms with more pride and stood straighter and were cleaner. Scum, but proud scum; a higher form of scum.
In the East, the guards had been grotesque. It was a death factory, lurid, unbelievable, even now eroding into fantastic nightmare. It manufactured extermination, the sky above it blazed orange in the night for the burning of corpses in the thousands. You breathed your brothers. And if not selected out in the first minutes, you were kept caked in your own filth. You were Untermensch, subhuman. He had survived in that place for over a year and a half and if a large part of his survival was luck, a large part also was not.
Shmuel came by the skills of survival naturally, without prior training. He had not lived a hardy physical life in the time he thought of as Before. He had in fact been a literary type, full of words and ideas, a poet, and believed someday he would write a novel. He had written bold commentaries for Nasz Przeglad, Warsaw’s most influential Yiddish newspaper. He’d been the friend of some real dazzlers too, Mendl Elkin, Peretz Hirschbein, the radical Zionist poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, Melekn Ravitch, to name but a few. They were great fellows, talkers, laughers, great lovers of women, and they were probably all dead now.
Shmuel had not thought of literature since 1939. He rarely thought at all of Before, knowing it the first sign of surrender. There was only now, today. Perhaps tomorrow as well, but one could never be too sure. But he persisted in his literary habits in just one way: he insisted on looking into the center of things. And he’d been puzzling over this strange new place for days now, ever since he’d arrived.
They’d been trucked in; that in itself was an astonishment, for the German way was to herd Jews through forests and if some—or many—died along the way, well, that was too bad. But a truck had bounced them in cold darkness for hours, and Shmuel and the others had sat, huddled and patient, until it halted and the canvas blanketing its back was ripped off.
“Out, Jews, out! Fast, fast, boys!”
They spilled into snowy glare. Shmuel, blinking in the whiteness of it, saw immediately he was at no Konzentrationslager. He knew no German word for what he saw: a desolate forest setting, walls of pine and fir, sheathed in snow, looming beyond the wire; and within the compound just three or four low wooden buildings around a larger one of concrete. There were no dogs or watchtowers either, just laconic SS boys dressed in some kind of forester’s outfit, dappled in the patterns and shadows of deep trees, with automatic guns.
More curiosities became evident shortly and if the other prisoners cared merely for the ample bread, the soup, the occasional piece of sausage that it had become their incredible good fortune to enjoy, Shmuel at least would keep track.
In fact he and his comrades, he quickly came to realize, were still another oddity of the place. Why had the Germans bothered to gather such a shabby crew of victims? What do we have in common, Shmuel often wondered, we Jews and Russians and Slavic types? There were twenty-five others and in looking at them he saw only the outer aspects of himself in reflection: small, wiry men, youngsters many of them, with that furtive look that living on the edge of extinction seems to confer. Though now it was a fact they lived as well as any German soldier. Besides the food, the barrack was warm. Other small privileges were granted: they were allowed to wash, to use latrines. They were given the field gray flannels of old Wehrmacht uniforms to wear and even issued the great woolen field coats from the Russian front. Here Shmuel experienced his first setback. He had the bad fortune to receive one that had been hacked with a bayonet. Its lining was ripped out. Until he solved this problem, he’d be cold.
And then the labor. Shmuel had had the SS for an employer before at the I. G. Farben synthetic fuel factory—the rule was double-time or die. Here, by contrast, the work was mostly listless digging of defensive positions and the excavation of foundations for concrete blockhouses under the less-than-attentive eye of a pipe-smoking SS sergeant, an amiable sort who didn’t seem to care if they progressed or not, just as long as he had his tobacco and a warm coat and no officers yelling at him. Once a prisoner had dropped his shovel in a fit of coughing. The sergeant looked at him, bent over and picked it up. He didn’t even shoot him.
One day, as the group fussed in the snow, a young corporal came out to the detail.
“Got two strong ones for me? Some heavy business in Shed Four,” Shmuel heard the young man ask. “Hans the Kike.”
The sergeant sucked reflectively on his pipe, belched out an aromatic cloud of smoke, and said, “Take the two on the end. The Russian works like a horse and the little Jew keeps moving to stay warm.” And he laughed.
Shmuel was surprised to discover himself “the little Jew.”
They were taken over to some kind of warehouse or supply shed just beyond the main building. Boxes were everywhere, vials, cans. A laboratory? wondered Shmuel uneasily. A small man in civilian clothes was already there. He did not glance at them
at all, but turned to the corporal and said, “Here, those, have them load them up and get them over to the Main Center at once.”
“Yes, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” said the corporal, and when the civilian fellow left, the corporal turned to Shmuel and said quite conversationally, “Another Jew, you know. They’ll come for him one day.” Then he took them to the corner of the room, where two wooden crates were stacked, and with a wave of the hand indicated to the prisoners to load them onto a dolly.
Each crate weighed around seventy-five kilos and the prisoners strained to get them down and across the room to the dolly. Shmuel had the impression of liquid sloshing weightily as he and the Russian crab-walked the first one over, yet there was nothing loose about the contents. The twin runes of the SS flashed melodramatically in stencil across the lid, and next to them, also stamped, was the mighty German eagle, clutching a swastika. The designation WVHA also stood out on the wood and Shmuel wondered what it could mean, but he should not have been wondering, he should have been carrying, for the heel of his boot slipped and he felt the crate begin to tear loose from his fingers. He groped in panic, but it really got away from him and his eyes met the Russian’s in terror as the box fell.
It hit the cement floor with a thud and broke apart. The Russian dropped to his knees and began to weep piteously. Shmuel stood in fear. The room blurred in the urgency of his situation. Askew on the cement, a great fluffy pile of excelsior spewing out of it like guts, the box lay broken on the floor. An evil-smelling fluid spread smoothly into a puddle.
The civilian returned swiftly.
“You idiots,” he said to them. “And where were you while these fools were destroying valuable chemicals? Snoozing in the corner?”
“No, sir, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” lied the young corporal. “I was watching closely. But these Eastern Jews are shifty. I just wasn’t fast enough to prevent—”
The civilian cut him off with a laugh. “That’s all I get from the Waffen SS is excuses. Have them clean it up and try not to drop the other crates, all right?”
“Yes, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor. My apologies for failing at—”
“All right, all right,” said the civilian disgustedly, turning.
When the civilian left, the SS corporal hit Shmuel across the neck, just above the shoulder, with his fist, a downward blow. It drove him to the floor. The boy kicked him, hard, in the ribs. He knew he was in a desperately dangerous situation. He’d seen a KZ guard in ’44 knock down an elderly rabbi in much the same way. The man, baffled, glasses twisted, raised his hands to ward off other blows; this insolence so enraged the stupid young soldier that he snatched out his pistol and shot the man through the forehead. The body lay in the square for three days, head split apart, until they’d removed it with tongs.
“You stinking kike pig,” screamed the boy. He kicked Shmuel again. He was almost out of control. “You piece of Jew shit.” Shmuel could hear him sobbing in anger. He bent over and grabbed Shmuel by the throat, twisting him upward so that their faces were inches apart.
“Surprises ahead for you, Jew-shit. Der Meisterschuster, the Master Shoemaker, has a nice candy delight for you.” His face livid and contorted, he drew back. “That’s right, Jew-shit, a real surprise for you.” He spoke in a clipped Prussian accent hard and quick, that Shmuel, whose basic Yiddish was a derivation of the more languid Bavarian German, had difficulty understanding when spoken so quickly.
The corporal backed off, color returning to his face.
“All right, up! Up!” he shouted.
Shmuel climbed up quickly. He was trembling badly.
“Now get this mess cleaned up.”
Shmuel and the Russian gathered the excelsior into a wad of newspaper and mopped the floor dry. They also retrieved the broken glass and then, carefully, finished loading the cart.
“Bravo! Fine! What heroes!” said the boy sarcastically. “Now get your asses out of here before I kick them again!”
Shmuel had been playing for this second for quite some time. He’d seen it from the very first moments. He’d thought about how he’d do it and resolved to act quickly and with courage. He took a deep breath, reached down and picked up the wad of newspaper and stuffed it into his coat.
With the bundle pressing against his stomach, he stepped into the cold. He waited for a call to return; it didn’t come. Keeping his eyes straight ahead, he rejoined the labor detail.
Not until late that night did Shmuel risk examining his treasure. He could hear steady, heavy breathing; at last he felt safe. You never knew who’d sell you for a cigarette, a sliver of cheese. In the darkness, he opened the paper carefully, trying to keep it from rattling. Inside, now matted and balled, the clump of excelsior was still damp from the fluid. The stuff was like mattress ticking, or horsehair, thick and knotted. Eagerly, his fingers pulled tufts out and kneaded them, until he could feel the individual strands.
There was no question of knitting; he had no loom and no skill. But he spread it out and, working quietly and quickly in the dark, began to thread it into the lining of the greatcoat. He kept at it until nearly dawn, inserting the bunches of packing into the coat. When at last there was no more, he examined what he had made. It was lumpy and uneven, no masterpiece; but what did that matter? It was, he knew, significantly warmer.
Shmuel lay back and felt a curious thing move through his body, a feeling long dead to his bones. At first he thought he might be coming down with a sickness and the feeling might be fever spreading through his body. But then he recognized it: pleasure.
For the first time in years he began to think he might beat them. But when he slept, his nightmares had a new demon in them: a master shoemaker, driving hobnails into his flesh.
A week or so later, he was in the trench, digging, when he heard voices above him. Obeying an exceedingly stupid impulse, he looked up.
Standing on the edge, their features blanked out by the winter sun, two officers chatted. A younger one was familiar, a somewhat older one not. Or was he? Shmuel had been dreaming all these nights of the Master Shoemaker and his candy delight. This man? No, ridiculous, not this bland fellow standing easily with a cigarette, discussing technical matters. He wore the same faded camouflage jackets they all had, and baggy green trousers, boots with leggings and a squashed cap with a skull on it. Quickly Shmuel turned back to his shovel, but as he dropped his face, he felt the man’s eyes snap onto him.
“Einer Jud?” Shmuel heard the man ask.
The younger fellow called to the sergeant. The sergeant answered Yes.
Now I’m in for it, Shmuel thought.
“Bring him up,” said the officer.
Strong hands clapped onto Shmuel instantly. He was dragged out of the trench and made to stand before the officer. He grabbed his hat and looked at his feet, waiting for the worst.
“Look at me,” said the officer.
Shmuel looked up. He had the impression of pale eyes in a weathered face which, beneath the imprint of great strain, was far younger than he expected.
“You are one of the chosen people?”
“Y-yes, sir, your excellency.”
“From out East?”
“Warsaw, your excellency.”
“You are an intellectual. A lawyer, a teacher?”
“A writer, most honored sir.”
“Well, you’ll have plenty to write about after the war, won’t you?” The other Germans laughed.
“Yes, sir. Y-yes, sir.”
“But for now, you’re not used to this hard work?”
“N-no, sir,” he replied. He could not stop stuttering. His heart pounded in his chest. He’d never been so close to a German big shot before.
“Everybody must work here. That is the German way.” He had lightless eyes. He didn’t look as if he’d ever cried.
“Yes, most honored sir.”
“All right,” the officer said. “Put him back. I just wanted the novel experience of taking one of them out of a pit.”
After the l
aughter, the sergeant said, “Yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” and he knocked Shmuel sprawling into the trench. “Back to work, Jew. Hurry, hurry.”
The officer was gone quickly, moving off with the younger chap. Shmuel stole a glimpse of the man striding off, calm and full of decisiveness. Could this simple soldier be the Master Shoemaker? The face: not remotely unusual, a trifle long, the eyes quick but drab, the nose bony, the lips thin. The overall aspect perfunctorily military. Not, Shmuel concluded, an unusual fellow to find in the middle of a war.
And yet because he seemed so easily in command and it was so clear that the others deferred to him, Shmuel took to thinking of the man as the Shoemaker.
Then a day came when the Germans did not fetch them for work. Shmuel awoke at his leisure, in light. As he blinked in it, he was filled with dread. The prisoners lived so much by routine that a single variation terrified them. The others felt it too.
Finally the sergeant came by.
“Stay inside today, boys, take a holiday. The Reich is rewarding you for your loyal service.” He grinned at his joke. “Important people crawling about today.” And then he was gone.
Late in the afternoon, two heavy trucks pulled into the yard. They halted next to the concrete building and hard-looking men with automatic guns dismounted and deployed around the entrance. Shmuel caught a glimpse and stepped away from the window. He’d seen their type before: police commandos who shot Jews in pits.
“Look,” said a Pole, in wonder. “A big boss.”
Shmuel looked again, and saw a large black sedan parked next to the truck; pennants hung off it limply; it was spotted with mud, yet shiny and huge.
A prisoner said, “I heard who it is. I heard them talking. They were very nervous, very excited.”
“Hitler himself?”
“Not that big. But a big one still.”
“Who, damn you? Tell.”
“The Man of Oak.”
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