Of Another Time and Place

by Brad Schaeffer

  From inside the house I heard the now familiar screams of “Raus! Raus!” which told me that my band of refugees had been discovered. Keitel looked at me with a haughty expression. “I guess we’ve found your Jewish rats in another hole.”

  A few seconds later the Krupinski family and Amelia emerged from the darkened interior with their hands up, squinting in the sun.

  Not even in the aftermath of the destruction of Stauffenberg had I seen Leo look so defeated. His family followed him in single file as they were muscled by the SS men, who’d enacted this scene many times in the past few years, over to Keitel and me. Anger burst through me as I saw the pathetic figure of little Elsa being roughly ushered through the door at gunpoint, her face awash in confusion and fear and innocence, her frail arms up in the air in a pathetic gesture of bewildered submission.

  Amelia trailed behind them separately. As she stumbled along with a stormtrooper’s grip firmly clamped over her bicep, she looked to me as if by summoning divine inspiration I could devise an escape plan for us all. I gave her a dejected look, and she knew. I was powerless. It was all up to Johann Keitel now.

  Keitel, in fact, ordered the men to herd us past him and around to the back of the house near the blasted-out barn. He aimed a finger at me. “Him too,” he said to Mats, and I was roughly shoved along behind them.

  We weaved through the cluster of liberated chickens clucking mindlessly. When we got to the barn, Keitel ordered the men to line the Krupinskis up against the only intact wall. He ordered one man to stand about twenty yards off to the side to keep an eye out on the road. The rest formed into a single rank and stepped several paces back, and I immediately knew what was happening. They’d formed a firing squad.

  Amelia stood on the other side of Keitel, still in the firm grasp of the SS man. Panic showed on her young face. After the years of hiding, the constant, chronic fear and tension, the helpless pleas of friends who so completely trusted her to stand between them and the Nazis, that it should end like this. That her charges were to be machine-gunned down behind a barn of a bombed-out farm in a corner of far-western Germany amidst a brood of clucking hens.

  “Johann,” she pleaded in desperation. “I know that you have admirable qualities. My father saw them in you as well.”

  Keitel snorted. “Your father saw a handsome fortune, Amelia. Nothing more.”

  “I saw something.”

  “You saw him,” he sneered, pointing his gun at me, not taking aim but merely extending his hand gesture.

  “It never meant I disliked you,” she offered. Keep it up, Amelia, I thought. He may just go for it. “And I know even now, with all you’ve seen in this war, that you do know right from wrong. That’s why I couldn’t get myself to pull the trigger yesterday.” She let that thought float in the air between them. “Please, Johann,” she said. “Don’t do this.”

  Keitel turned to face her. He stepped forward until their noses practically touched. But she didn’t turn away. She poured affection into his eyes. And he managed to even break into a soft smile. He still loved her, no doubt. For some reason, even as I looked on while an innocent family was about to be murdered by him, I felt a tiny flutter of guilt over the pain I’d caused him in stealing Amelia away.

  Keitel exhaled and nodded his head. He took Amelia by the waist and kissed her, this time with gentle sweetness. A symbolic show of affection between a man and the woman he loved. I thought, She’s reached him! Even Johann Keitel had a shred of humanity left. My eyes darted to the Krupinskis, who were watching the theater with their heads bowed but eyes raised. Perhaps we may live yet.

  Johann released Amelia from his clutches and turned to one of the SS men taking this all in with a quizzical gaze. “Her too,” he snapped.

  An electric shock ran through me. “No!” I blurted out in reflex as one of the soldiers shoved Amelia roughly up against the wall to stand alongside with the rest. She turned and looked at me. “Harmon?” Terror showed in her wide eyes.

  Keitel laughed. “You think I’m an imbecile? I was going to maybe let you live, you slut. For a while longer at least. But that was before you tried to play me like one of Harmon’s saloon pianos. To hell with you all. You left me to die by fire. And yet here I am. You should always make sure your enemies are actually dead before moving on.” He laughed mockingly. “Hell, I suffered far worse blows in Russia.”

  “Let them go, Johann,” I finally said, clearing my dry throat. “It’s me you want, isn’t it? Well here I am.”

  “You, Harmon,” he began dispassionately, while surveying the scene, “will accompany me to Berlin, where you will face public trial for both desertion of your post and treason to the Fatherland for harboring Jews. No matter, either one is a hanging offense.”

  I shuddered to think of myself suspended lifeless at the end of a rope. And I felt abject panic start to rise in me. But then I realized that my friends were in more immediate peril. So I persevered.

  “Then take me to Berlin,” I said. “Hang me for all I care. Kick out the stool yourself if it pleases you. Just let them go. What does Germany want with a wretched family of Jews and their stupid girl shepherd? They’ll leave the country and never come back. You’ll be rid of them just as if you’d killed them yourself. And if God is watching, he’ll remember your mercy.” In one last spasm of false hope, I thought I might have gotten to him.

  Then he turned to me. “Please don’t try piety on me, Becker. You think I give a rat’s ass about these Untermenschen living or dying? This one, that one, I couldn’t care less. Does a rat catcher care about the individual rats he kills?” Johann stepped over to Amelia, who was standing with her eyes to her feet. He cupped her quavering chin in his hand and tilted her head up to look him in the eyes. “And as for this whore, I’ll be doing myself a service. Killing her will rid me of an open sore. You’re already a dead man, Becker. If I didn’t think I could profit by delivering you up to the Führer, I’d shoot you right here and now. Suffice it to say, I will enjoy watching you suffer their deaths until your meeting with the hangman.”

  That was that. We’d just been condemned to die. For everyone but me it would all be over in a few minutes. Keitel marched back over to me and then pivoted to face his men.

  “Achtung!” he shouted, and the seven men in line drew themselves to attention like machines. Constanze clutched Elsa, who was now weeping at what she didn’t even fully understand. Krup and Jakob put their arms around each other in a last gesture of love from across a generation. Amelia simply closed her eyes and softly recited the Lord’s Prayer.

  “Ready!” I heard the metallic sliding of rounds being loaded into their chambers.

  “Aim!” Keitel raised his hand and glanced at me to savor my expression. I gritted my teeth and shut my eyes. If my hands weren’t bound behind me, I’d have placed them over my ears in a vain attempt to block it out completely.

  Then I heard the command. “F—”

  RAT-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TAT!

  The unmistakable sound of a submachine gun being sprayed back and forth split through the humid air, and I cried out in anguish without even hearing my own voice above the rattling din of the gunfire.

  Then the firing stopped, and the echo was carried away with the summer breeze. I couldn’t bear to open my eyes and look upon so heartbreaking an image as my friends and my lover lying strewn across the ground in a pool of their own blood. Silence still. Now it was almost too long of a pause.

  Then I felt Keitel’s hand on my shoulder. But it was not forceful; rather it was as if he were using me to support him from falling over, as a drunkard might. Then I opened my eyes and was utterly astounded by what I saw.

  53

  Before even giving Keitel my full attention, my eyes opened to reveal a row of bodies lying in grotesque poses on the blood-soaked grass. But they were the bodies of SS men…not Amelia and the Krupinskis. My eyes then darted
to the barn wall, where my group of refugees was crouched down clinging to each other and crying. But they were completely unharmed! How could this be?

  Keitel’s grip on my shoulder weakened, and when I turned to face him, a look of astonishment and pain was plastered on the pasty gray pallor of his face. Blood spurted from the corner of his mouth, and his legs buckled. He tried to speak but he just gurgled, making an awful slurping sound. In a last vain gesture he made a dreamy motion to reach for his pistol, but he had no strength left. His arm went limp to his side, and the Luger dropped harmlessly to the grass. I noticed a deep purple stain spreading across his uniform’s mid-section and realized he’d been nearly sawed in half by a hail of bullets. His eyes glazed over, and I knew he was about to die.

  I shoved him off me, like casting a boat away from a pier, and he fell back onto the grass. He was dead before he hit the ground with a dull thud. All of the SS men were dead, in fact. At first I thought it might have been the Maquis, but the aim was too precise to have come from any of the distant woods, and the grass was too low to hide anyone closer in. And besides, we were still on German soil. And then I saw the lone SS soldier whom Keitel had ordered to watch the road standing with his smoking submachine gun lowered to his hip and aimed squarely in the dead men’s direction.

  At first I didn’t know who this guardian angel was. As my condemned fugitives were first coming to realize that they were still alive and their executioners dead, I stared at the rogue stormtrooper. I didn’t even bother to watch them all hug or come running over to me whooping and crying for joy. They must have thought I somehow did this, as they embraced me and even Jakob ruffled my hair. But I focused on the odd soldier. Then he removed his steel helmet and I recognized our savior immediately.

  “Loos?”

  Oberschütze Emil Loos stepped over to the bloody heap of dead men lying facedown in the grass shoulder to shoulder as if still in their rank. The boy was hyperventilating as he gazed down at his former comrades. He raised his head and I could see that he was overwhelmed by what he’d done. As if he didn’t understand himself what had just happened. My friends went silent as the enormity of their luck sank in. But I wasn’t ready to declare us out of danger yet.

  “Captain Becker,” Loos said to me wanly. “I…”

  “Put the gun down, Oberschütze,” was the first thing I could say. He still could have killed us with the pull of a trigger. The teenage private obediently dropped the smoking weapon to the ground and walked over to me.

  “Are you okay, sir?” he asked while he produced a knife. He came around behind me and cut the leather bands, freeing my arms and bringing a merciful relief to my burning shoulders. I rubbed my wrists and gawked at him. What could I say? He’d just wiped out his entire squad to save us all. These were those very same men, including his paternal sergeant, who’d so clearly shown playful affection for him when we rode together in the truck just six months before. But why?

  “You should get out of here,” he warned. He sounded more in control now. “The rest are only two miles behind.”

  Still in mild shock, I managed to ask him: “What about you?”

  He just shook his head forlornly. “I don’t know.”

  I turned to Amelia. “Get everyone into that truck,” I ordered, gesturing to the larger Opel. She didn’t say a word. No one did. They just filed around the house to the idling vehicles on the road. Only Jakob stayed back for a second. He went from dead soldier to dead soldier, collecting their canteens. He was thinking ahead. He didn’t take a weapon, though. Jakob, for all his piss and vinegar, was a peaceful boy. I found myself admiring him even more. I hadn’t been so grounded at his age. But, of course, I didn’t have an entire nation out to kill me. I also had no delusions over what lay ahead, so I grabbed Keitel’s Luger that lay in the grass at my feet and slid it into my holster.

  “Loos,” I then said. “You’re coming with us.”

  “Why? And to where?” he asked.

  “We’re going to make a run for the Allied lines.”

  “No, sir,” he said deadpan. “I’m done for.”

  I took him by the shoulders. “Look, boy,” I said. “I haven’t the vaguest clue what just happened here, but we’re getting out of the country, and right now that looks like your only option short of suicide.” He looked at the ground and kicked some grass mindlessly. I knew what he was thinking. “No, Loos. I won’t let you do it. You’re coming with us.”

  “You’ll never get through,” he said. He made a gesture in the general direction of France. “It’s hell up there.”

  “We have to try, dammit!” I snapped. I knew he was probably right, but I didn’t need to hear it said aloud. “Get in the truck, Loos. That’s an order.”

  He looked up with resigned despair. “Jawohl,” he answered quietly. I patted him on the shoulder, and we made our way to the truck. I figured that he’d tell us why he did what he did when the time was right. But for now we had to get the hell out of here before the rest of the SS column arrived.

  As we walked briskly around to the front of the home, I glanced back at the body of Johann Keitel lying on his back in the grass. Although the man seemed to reincarnate at will, I knew that this time our paths had intersected for the last time. His lifeless black eyes, shark’s eyes, stared unseeing into the sky and the face of an angry God. I could only think that as I believe there is a heaven, so must there be a hell, as balance is one of the great truths of the universe. I think I have a good idea of where Keitel ended up. But what of a pilot who fought, as Krup observed bitterly, to prolong the horrors perpetrated by the thousands of other Keitels throughout the Third Reich? I can only hope and pray that my actions of these most desperate days of my life somehow will be my redemption.

  54

  We were back on the road. This time in the larger Opel, as the SS men had no more use for it. I was driving again, since I was the only one who even had the remotest idea of where we were. A sheet of high, colorless clouds had drawn across the sky, giving my eyes a welcome relief from the glaring sun. Again, the going was slow, as now more than ever I made sure we stuck to the backroads through whatever forest cover could be provided. My serpentine route probably added at least fifteen miles to our journey, but I had images of bands of SS men hot on our trail, hell-bent on revenge for the deaths of their comrades. I had one consolation: that Loos’s massacre had taken place on German and not occupied soil. The retributions in France or Belgium would have been horrific.

  So far no one had bothered us. The few civilians we saw along the roadside didn’t even give our truck a second look. To them, we were just another supply truck passing through on our way to the fighting in Normandy. In a way this felt more like a Sunday drive in the country than a desperate flight from the war. Much of this pastoral area, lacking any targets of opportunity, was unscathed.

  It wasn’t long before Loos climbed from the back of the truck over the seat to plant himself in the cabin to my right. He continued to display that long stare into oblivion.

  “Is everyone okay back there?” I asked.

  “They’re all asleep.”

  “But you couldn’t sleep,” I observed.

  “No.” After a prolonged silence he asked: “Do you know where we are, sir?”

  “I reckon about thirty miles from my base,” I said, while maintaining a fix on the narrow dirt road in my windshield. “I know we’re in Belgium.”

  “How can you tell?” he asked. “It all looks the same to me.”

  I called his attention to one of the wooden road signs at a dusty crossroads. “They’re in French.”

  “Oh.” He seemed satisfied with that. Then he retreated back into his shell.

  “It’s Emil, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Emil,” I finally said to him. “I want to thank you for what you did.”

  He shrugged, barely acknowledging my
gratitude. I could tell his actions had deeper meaning than merely helping out a family of Jews and traitors.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked.

  He leaned his head back in the seat. He didn’t look at me but rather stared blankly out the window, not even registering the beauty of the passing greenery. At first he said nothing, and I took that to mean he wished to remain silent about what he’d done. I was just about to change the subject when he began to speak in a hushed, remorseful tone of one offering a confession.

  “About a month before he took his leave for home, Keitel ordered us to move into a little French village near Nancy. I don’t remember the name. Doesn’t matter now. We were there to pacify the town. You know what we mean by ‘pacify,’ don’t you, sir? Much the same as when you and I first met. But the crime of this place was not that they supported partisans but rather that it was a haven for Jews. None of us could figure out how Keitel knew this. We just assumed that an informer had squealed or a partisan had broken under interrogation. So, we rounded up all the villagers and drove them into a field. All the men were handed shovels and forced to dig a long pit. You could tell they realized what this meant by that look I’ve come to know. It’s seared in my memory. Some of the condemned stare at the ground, as if by not making eye contact with reality it will pass them over. Some look around, soaking in their final images of this world. Others weep openly.”

  He swallowed hard, and his already high-pitched voice piped up a semi-tone.

  “Then the men were all lined up along the edge of the pit, and before their families we shot them all. We went methodically down the line, one by one. Very efficient. They fell nice and neatly into the hole, lying like cordwood. Then we did the same with the women.”

  “And what of the children?” I asked in a whisper.