Scheisshaus Luck (32 page)

We kept our distance from the bands of Soviet soldiers who would come and sleep for a couple hours in the house or barn, then leave with whatever they could carry. I never saw an organized PART VI | WUSTROW

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regiment, battalion, or platoon that one would expect from a victorious army. The soldiers seemed to be no more than marauders, and many were surprisingly ignorant. They were expert marksmen who could shoot sparrows on the wing, but they behaved like children on Christmas morning when they had their hands on a bicycle or a discarded toy. They were mystified by the simplest household items. With one Georgian, I swapped a dented old alarm clock for a superb gold chronograph. They would discard their uniforms whenever they found something better to wear, even if it was an article from a German uniform. A Red Army truck driver discovered a tuxedo in the armoire that tickled his fancy, even though the coat wouldn’t button over his potbelly. With his helmet on his head, the strap buckled under his chin, and the tails tucked into his pants, he left ready for the ball.

These soldiers were also not particular about what they drank.

As soon as they saw that a liquid might contain alcohol, it went happily down the hatch. I had discovered a suitcase full of perfumes and eau de colognes in one of the bedrooms. At gunpoint, a female soldier liberated them from me and enjoyed a few sips. She offered me a drink from a heart-shaped bottle, but I respectfully declined.

Shortly thereafter, a burly sergeant joined her. Once they had polished off the larger bottles, they drained the small-necked ones into a goblet. I guess that was their dessert cocktail. Later I found the couple asleep in the stable, nestled naked on a bale of hay.

On the heels of the Red Army came Russian peasants, traveling in canvas-topped wagons drawn by horses or oxen. These
muzhiks
, whose ancestors had been the serfs of Russian aristocrats, had received parcels of farmland after the Russian Revolution, but Stalin took their lands and bunched them into large communes. When the Nazis invaded Russia, the retreating Red Army scorched the earth, forcing the
muzhiks
to roam like nomads for four years. Now they hoped to settle down again, no matter how or where. With their tools and kitchen utensils hanging from their wagons, they looked like the American pioneers I had seen in movies grabbing up Indian land. Their manner and their way of life, though, spoke 230

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more of medieval times. They took possession of German farms; and if the properties weren’t abandoned, they would run off the owners or kill them.

On the third day of our liberation, Germany still hadn’t con-ceded defeat. From the kitchen I heard explosions. German teens were making craters in my asparagus field with a discarded Panzerfaust. It made me uneasy, and I wished I hadn’t left the submachine gun buried under the straw in the barn’s loft. A little later, as I was smoking my last cigar, a Russian tank rumbled into the courtyard.

Four young women with open shirts popped out and cooled themselves at the pump. I greeted them in broken Russian, which brought surprised smiles to their faces. Watching them climb back into their tank, I thought, if Russian women make a habit of pranc-ing around in open blouses, then Moscow is the perfect summer vacation spot for me.

As the tank proceeded toward the village, one of the German teens emerged from a manhole and fired the bazooka at the rear of the tank. The base of the turret exploded and the tank shuddered and died. I couldn’t believe that the punk had disabled the tank, and neither could he, standing like a statue next to the manhole with the Panzerfaust still saddled on his shoulder. The turret hatch opened, but only one soldier jumped out, and she slid into a growing pond of fuel spewing out from underneath the tank. As she tried to pick herself up for the second time, there came a sound like a thousand gas stoves being turned on and fire sprang from the fuel. She yelled only once as the flames swept over her. The radiating heat told me there was nothing I could do. The teen disappeared back into the manhole as heavy, black smoke began obscuring the tank.

A half-track came racing to the scene, but there was nothing they could do to save their comrades. I whistled at the driver and pointed at the manhole. He nodded, raised the manhole cover, and dropped in a hand grenade. He ducked as the cover flew up in the air, then glanced into the shaft and dropped another one. The ham-burger must not have been ground fine enough for him.

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feeling that I had witnessed a pure waste of young lives on both sides. It was disheartening, and I questioned whether, as a society, we had the fortitude to ever overcome the bestiality so deeply em-bedded in our fabric. I went back into the kitchen and started cooking dinner. I had no stomach to ponder philosophical questions or watch those soldiers scrape the women out of that tank.

That night I was awakened by the cackle of chickens. First, I thought that a fox or porcupine had entered the hen house, which was located on the side of the barn adjacent to the manor house.

The noise abated, then I heard someone shoveling. I woke Michel and Jean, and the three of us climbed down to investigate. A lantern was lighting up the hen house. Inside, a Russian tank driver stood watch with a tommy gun strapped to his chest as a German civilian dug up a box. The German ordered us to leave and to forget what we saw. The Russian threw us cold stares, but never uttered a word.

We climbed back into the loft and watched the pair walk off with a bulging gunnysack and a couple dead chickens.

Naturally we went back to the hen house. The ground was littered with empty velvet jewelry boxes of all shapes and sizes. By the number of boxes I could tell those two had dug up a fortune. The store names on the cases left no doubt that they were all confiscated from Jewish jewelry stores during the Nazis’ occupation of Holland.

In their haste, the two had dropped a few spoons made of bent gold coins and twisted gold wire.

‘‘Tomorrow we move,’’ I told my friends.

‘‘Why?’’ Michel asked.

‘‘When there’s no logic I get worried.’’

‘‘No logic to what?’’

‘‘I heard the civilian speak only German to the Russian.’’

‘‘So?’’ Michel said. ‘‘The Russian speaks German.’’

‘‘Why would that German lead a Russian tank driver armed with a gun to such loot in such an isolated location?’’

My buddies were silent.

‘‘And why would the Russian split the jewels with a
boche
when he could easily keep it all for himself by pulling the trigger?’’

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‘‘Because we surprised them,’’ Jean guessed.

‘‘Doesn’t it seem strange that the German did all the talking?

That it was he who told us to forget what we saw.’’

‘‘What are you getting at?’’ Jean demanded.

‘‘I think the Russian was a Nazi in disguise. He looked a lot like the SS officer in that photo on the dresser upstairs.’’

‘‘You’re crazy,’’ Jean laughed.

‘‘Fine, but tomorrow we might not fare as well if they return for the silverware,’’ I said, nodding toward the splayed trunk, ‘‘or some other buried loot.’’

Jean and Michel agreed with me on that point.

With my Nazi submachine gun in my lap I kept watch until morning, then we loaded a wheelbarrow with all the goodies we had ‘‘organized’’ from the house and headed for the lake. Michel and Jean had discovered a vacant cottage there during an attempt at fishing. It had been ransacked, but there were still mattresses on the three beds. We couldn’t ask for more and made it our home.

While cleaning the cottage we found a couple of shotguns and a box of shells under one of the beds, and Jean and Michel made plans for a hunting trip in the nearby woods. I told them it was foolish to be trekking around with guns when there was a lake stocked with bass, perch, smelt, eels, crawfish, and northern pike.

They complained that they didn’t have much to show for the hours that they had spent ‘‘dipping a line.’’

‘‘That’s because you guys don’t have any experience. You have to think like a fish to catch a fish.’’

‘‘Well, you do smell like one,’’ Jean shot back.

I did know a thing or two about angling. Every day since kindergarten I had fished the Mediterranean before going off to school, and I ‘‘dipped a line’’ every summer morning during my family’s annual vacation in the Alps. When I fished in Lake Geneva, the hotel where we stayed would put fish on its menu because the cooks knew that I would bring them a gunnysack full. I gave Jean and Michel a crash course, and they returned that evening with enough bass and pike to feed us for a week.

C H A P T E R 2 2

We were in the town of Wustrow, which was more a village than a town. You needed a powerful magnifying glass to find Wustrow on any map. There were three hundred inhabitants, and a fair number of them were relatives who had escaped Berlin and other German cities the Allied bombers had targeted. Most of the homes were collected along the main road, which ran from Ravensbru¨ck to the city of Reinsberg. There were ten cottages on the lake; two or three seemed like permanent residences, and the rest were summer homes for well-to-do Berliners. Most of Wustrow’s residents made their living from the land, but because of the war most of the fields were untilled that spring. Only two men seemed to be making their livelihood from the lake. Not knowing who had been card-carrying Nazis, I kept my distance from most of the residents, and they made no effort to associate with a
Ha¨ftling
. I would see other ‘‘pajamas’’

pass through Wustrow, but I think Jean, Michel, and I were the only ones bedding down there.

Our cottage gave us a solitude and safety that the estate could never have provided. It was encircled by pine and oaks, which kept us out of view from the Soviets and assorted riffraff traveling the main road. The serenity of our new home was a stark contrast to 233

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what I had become accustomed to since Drancy, and I realized that I would have to consciously teach myself how to relax. How to go about that was beyond me. What I did know, especially when my sciatic nerve made me limp, was that before I could truly relax I had to take care of some unfinished business that was eating at me.

The day we were evacuated from Ravensbru¨ck we marched by a farmhouse that had a huge pile of potatoes near the cellar chute. A few of us dashed to ‘‘organize’’ some of the earth apples. A bulldog-faced farmer jumped off his porch and kicked me with his heavy boots. It felt as if he had cracked my tailbone. I fell and dropped my stash. Limping back into line, I heard an awful scream. The
boche
had plunged his pitchfork into the thigh of one of the other
Ha¨ftlinge
. So, as Michel and Jean plied their newfound fishing skills, I headed back toward Ravensbra¨ck to kill that farmer. Stuffed under my coat was a German hand grenade that I had found in the asparagus field.

At a bend in the main road, I was met by a familiar stench, but being on a crusade I had no time to investigate. I passed a mill with a spectacular water wheel turning in a canal choked with plump smelts. I made a mental note to come back with a net. Passing the spot where we had taken the trail into the woods, I began to nervously fondle the bulge under my coat. My hand fell limp when I arrived at my destination. The farm was now a heap of ashes and blackened walls.

‘‘A direct hit?’’ I asked a neighbor.

‘‘No, the Red Army torched it. You see, Kurt lost his mind when some Russian soldiers backed up a truck and took his damn potatoes. The idiot charged them with his pitchfork. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The soldiers shot him, threw him into the house, then burned it down.’’ Heading back, I tossed my weapon into the woods. I had to admit I was relieved that the Soviets had done the dirty work.

When I arrived again at the bend in the road, I followed my nose and discovered an arm sticking out of the ground with a swollen, blackened hand crawling with maggots. The markings on the PART VI | WUSTROW

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green sleeve were that of an Italian uniform. It was peculiar that there would be Italian soldiers this deep into Germany. My attention was drawn to something under a nearby bush reflecting the setting sun. It was the chrome buckle of a knapsack stuffed with Austrian cigarettes. German money was worthless, but cigarettes were gold, and that knapsack would make the trip back home much easier. What a splendid day it turned out to be.

We received news of ‘‘the god with the moustache’s’’ death and the end of the war days later, possibly even two weeks later. In Auschwitz, I had dreamt that the day he died would be a joyously drunken day, but it turned out to be anticlimatic. Possibly I had anticipated it too much. Maybe it was anticlimatic because there was no dancing in the streets. But what kind of celebrations could I expect in the country of the defeated enemy? Maybe it was because I knew I still had a hell of a long way to go before I would be home.

More than likely, it was because his death didn’t erase what I had endured and seen in the last eighteen months. The one thing that I did rejoice, and I quietly celebrated it every day, was the fact that my German submachine gun would prevent any
boche
from ever ordering me around again.