The Kirilov Star (18 page)

He turned towards her, his grey eyes so bleak they made her shudder. She ran to him and knelt at his feet, taking the brooch from him and laying it on the desk before wiping the blood from his hand with her handkerchief. ‘Oh, Papa, I don’t know what to say.’

‘We didn’t even have time to say goodbye,’ he said. ‘It was so sudden. One minute she was there, coming along the road towards me, smiling and waving and then … and then … Oh God, it was terrible. A whistle, a bang and I was thrown in a heap in the road. It winded me and for a moment I couldn’t get up, but when I did, I saw half the street had gone. Bodies everywhere. I ran looking for her. I kept hoping it hadn’t been her I had seen, that it was a stranger coming towards me, someone who looked like her. But then I found her. She was unmarked, not a scratch on her. I thought she had been knocked out by the blast and tried to rouse her. A warden came along and stopped me, took my hands away from her. Then an ambulance came and took her away … Oh, Lidushka, how am I going to live without her?’

She had never seen him cry; he had always been so strong, so in control, the one to whom she turned in distress. When they heard Alex was dead it was she that had collapsed and could not function, while he, who must have been mourning himself, was her comfort and gave her
the strength to continue. Now it was her turn to comfort him. She made more tea and made him drink it. She made sandwiches for them both and sat on the sofa beside him the whole night while he talked. He seemed to want to talk, on and on he went, hardly drawing breath. It was as if he was afraid to stop for fear of being overwhelmed.

He spoke of his love for Margaret and how beautiful she was, how he had courted her, how she had resisted at first but then agreed to marry him. He described their wedding day, how happy they had been and how disappointed they were when they found she could not have children, and his joy when Lydia had come into their lives. The pace slowed in the early hours of the morning and at dawn he slept from sheer exhaustion. She covered him with a blanket and left him to prepare breakfast. Only then did she weep herself, a paroxysm of tears which ran down her face as she boiled a kettle and made tea. She found some bread and some dried egg in the pantry. The only way dried egg could be successfully cooked was by scrambling it. By the time it was done and the bread toasted, her tears had dried on her face and she was ready to continue being the strong one.

They took Margaret’s body home to Upstone Hall for burial. Most of the village turned up for the funeral, for she had been much loved. Life went on but Edward was bowed down with grief. He seemed to become old overnight, stooped and silver-haired. Lydia did her best to help him over it and sometimes she thought she had succeeded, and then he would say something about Margaret as if he had forgotten she was no longer with them, and when she gently pointed this out to him, he would say, ‘But Lidushka, she is still with us. She will always be with us.’ To which there was no answer.

And sometimes she wondered if it was the same with Alex. Even in death, was he still with her? Did he, in some way, watch over her as he had done in life? That did not mean she was unhappy with Robert; quite the contrary, their marriage was happier than she had any right to expect and she thanked God for it. It looked as though the war would soon be over and they could settle down in peace. After the turbulence that had gone before, it was all she asked.

The rumours were running round the camp like wildfire. Where they had come from, when no newspapers or radio were allowed to the prisoners and possessing either was punishable by death, Alex did not know. But the whispers passed from mouth to mouth, were whispered in the bleak shower rooms as they stood naked under a trickle of cold water, muttered on the seats of the rows of toilets, sung as a kind of ditty as they waited in line every morning during roll call. ‘The Russians are coming. Didn’t you hear the guns?’

He had certainly heard gunfire, no one could be unaware of it when they were in camp, which was only at night if they were on the day shift and during the day if they worked nights. The overcrowded huts shook and it felt as if they would tumble about their ears. When they were in the factory which had been built alongside the camp, they could hear nothing of the outside world. The windows and doors were tight shut and blacked out against air raids, and
the noise of the machinery drowned out every other sound, even their voices. The work was hard and unremitting and the shifts, which had begun as ten hours at a time, soon lengthened to eleven and then twelve as the need to supply the German army with weapons became more acute. Quotas had to be reached; the punishment for failure was a beating and a spell in the punishment block in total darkness on bread and water, and little enough of that. For many of the inmates, already on starvation rations, it meant almost certain death.

Alex had no illusions about what would happen to him if the Russians arrived. He would be executed, probably without the refinement of a trial. His alias as Major Alexei Petrovich Simenov would not save him. In fact, he doubted if any of the Russian prisoners would be sent back to their homes. He had learnt enough of Soviet ways to know they would almost all be accused of collaboration, simply for allowing themselves to be captured and made to work in German factories. If not put in front of a firing squad, they would be sent to prison camps in Siberia, from where few would ever return. As for what the Soviets did to spies, he dare not think of that. It would have been better to have died in that field outside Minsk. By all the laws of nature he should have died. According to Iosef Ilyievich who saw what happened, no one ought to have survived the barrage of gunfire that rained down on him.

He had been in the area, trying to keep his promise to Lydia to try and find Yuri. In spite of telling Lydia he thought all the babies must have been evacuated to safety, he had decided to resume the search back at the beginning and that meant returning to the hospital where Olga and Yuri had been taken. Someone who had not been on duty
the day they visited might remember something others had missed. Sticking to his military disguise had been easier than he expected; officers were often sent from the high-ups in the Kremlin to find out what was really happening on the ground. Communications were chaotic, and provided he kept out of the way of officialdom, he felt reasonably safe, though always on his guard. At the hospital, he had been surprised to learn that Olga Denisovna Nahmova had not died but had been evacuated with hundreds of other badly injured patients to a Moscow hospital.

Remembering what Lydia had said about how Olga idolised Yuri, he felt sure the woman would not give him up and would set about looking for him as soon as she was discharged. If he found Olga, he might find Yuri. But the boy was a Russian citizen, he reminded himself; even if he found him, he would not be allowed to take him out of the country legally. He would cross that bridge when he came to it. It might be that all he would be able to tell Lydia was that her son was safe and well. Even this slight feeling of optimism was dashed when Minsk came under attack from the invading Germans with thousands of troops, tanks and big guns.

He had found himself watching a field gun firing on what had once been a convent but which had become a home for orphan children and, for all he knew, might contain Yuri. It had incensed him. Without thinking of the possible consequences he had taken a couple of hand grenades and crawled round to encircle the bunker from which the gun had been firing. He had managed to get below the gun’s trajectory without being seen and approached it from the side, but hand grenades were puny weapons against the gun and so he had crept closer than it was safe for him to
do so. He was right on top of it when he pulled out the pin of the first grenade and flung it in the bunker. It did not disable the gun but it caused enough injury and confusion among the crew for him to toss the other down the barrel, a satisfyingly accurate lob. For what happened after that, he had only the word of Iosef, who had been hiding in a nearby ditch.

‘There was a great explosion,’ he said, when Alex recovered consciousness several days later. ‘There were bits of gun, limbs and flesh flying everywhere. You were flung ten metres into the air like a rag doll. And then it all went quiet. I crept out to look. I did not expect to find you breathing, but you were. All the gun crew were dead. Such heroism could not be allowed to perish. I carried you home.’

Iosef was a peasant who lived with his aged mother in an
izba
a few
versts
outside Minsk. He was big and strong but lacking in wit and that had somehow saved him from conscription into the Red Army. How they lived Alex had no idea, being only half-conscious at the time and unable to walk on account of a broken leg, not to mention a lump the size of a chicken’s egg on the back of his head. The Russians’ scorched-earth policy meant that nothing was left for them to live on. When the Germans threatened to overrun the area, he had carried his mother and then Alex into the nearby forest where they met other Russians, civilians and troops who were determined not to fall into German hands. It was an area of mixed forests and swamps, often hidden in mist and fog, an ideal habitat for partisans. Iosef, who was not as simple as he appeared, told him they stole food, rifles and ammunition from the Germans. ‘We are causing them no
end of inconvenience,’ he had said with a chuckle.

It was inevitable that they would be rounded up in the end. Many of the partisans had been shot on the spot; the injured were left to die by the roadside, while those who were able to walk had been herded like cattle along the road to Germany. They were given no food, no shelter and very little rest. Alex, hobbling painfully, had been supported by Iosef and another of their number. ‘We saved you before, we are not going to let you die now,’ he had said. His mother had died a few weeks before and he clung to keeping Alex alive as a sort of compensation. The fact that he had never been a soldier and could not truthfully be termed a prisoner of war was not taken into consideration; he was between fifteen and sixty-five and therefore of military age.

That first camp had been nothing but a field surrounded by barbed wire. There were no huts and they were left to try and make themselves what shelter they could with whatever materials came to hand: brushwood, old posts, bits of clothing and ragged blankets. As for food, that was so minimal it consisted of onion skins boiled in water and little else. The prisoners ate the grass until the field became a desert. They gnawed the bones of dead animals who had strayed into the camp and been killed; dogs, cats, rats, pigeons brought down with catapults, it didn’t matter what they were as long as they had a little flesh on them. Fighting over scraps was rife, though the weakness of the combatants meant they were half-hearted affairs. When winter came they died in their thousands and were flung into mass graves. How he had survived Alex did not know.

The Germans needed workers to feed their great war machine and who better to supply them than their
prisoners? Towards the end of 1942, they were taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It was triangular in layout, with a three-metre-high perimeter wall within which was a path patrolled by guards and dogs and inside that an electric fence. Barrack huts lay beyond the roll-call area and these had tiered bunk beds, though they were so overcrowded, the beds were pushed together so that three and sometimes four shared beds intended for two. A factory had been built just outside the camp, in which the prisoners were expected to work for the German war effort. Refusing to work was not an option, but few would have done so because workers were fed – not generously, but enough to keep them working and alive. But for some it was too late. Friendships made were often broken by death.

Iosef had been singled out for the gas chamber almost as soon as they arrived. He was mentally deficient and therefore even more reviled than the ordinary Russians, who, as Slavs, were considered like the Jews to be
Untermensch
: subhuman. Alex, who could do nothing to save him, had mourned his passing.

Because he spoke excellent German, he was often asked to translate the official pronouncements of the camp commandant, and as few Germans knew any Russian, he was able to put whatever interpretation he liked on his words, warning his listeners of new edicts and suggesting ways that the sick could be saved from being carted off. If you were not well enough to work, you were not worth your rations.

Although skeletal, he did not quite become the numbed, unthinking automaton that many of them did and would often lie in his bunk listening to the quarrelsome words of his fellow prisoners and dream of better times. It was then
he would conjure up a picture of Lydia in his mind’s eye. His filthy unsanitary surroundings faded and he was in an orchard with apple blossom all around him and a blue sky above. The voices of those around him faded and he heard laughter. Lydia’s laughter – light, carefree, mischievous.

Had she got safely back to England? Had she been given a hard time by the Foreign Office? Had she gone back to work? Was she in London or at Upstone Hall? Sometimes he liked to imagine her in a printed cotton frock, sitting on the swing Sir Edward had made for her in the garden at Upstone, with the sun shining on her hair and daffodils in the grass at her feet. Sometimes she would be in a lavish ball gown, dancing with him on the terrace to the music of a waltz, the Kirilov Star glittering at her throat. He had hated having to send her away without her child. Her misery over the loss of Yuri had torn his heart to shreds. He had done his best to be cheerful and optimistic for her sake, but as soon as he was alone, his despair had overtaken him and he had wept, knowing, as he handed her over to Robert Conway, that he would almost certainly lose her. Now, weakened and unsure if he was meant to survive, he tried only to think of the happier times and wish her well.

The rumours they were hearing reminded him of the previous year when they had told of the Western Allies’ invasion of France. Not even their captors, who refused to admit defeat was possible, had been able to go on denying the truth for long and they had maintained the enemy would soon be driven back into the sea. How long would they take to come clean about this latest piece of news? Hearing the whispers, they instructed Alex to tell the prisoners that what they were hearing were German guns firing on Allied bombers and the flames they could see
in the distance were planes that had been shot down and exploded. Some believed it, some didn’t.

Your category as a prisoner influenced your reaction. Dressed in the rough striped uniform of a prisoner, each wore a patch which indicated their group: yellow for Jews, red for Communists, black for Gypsies and anti-social elements, green for common criminals, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, who called themselves ‘Bible Students’, and pink for homosexuals. Alex’s patch was red. It had afforded him some wry amusement in the beginning, but he knew it would be a death sentence if the Russians reached them first.

Now, four years after being taken captive, his thoughts were turning to freedom. But how to obtain it? How near were the Russians? How far away were the Western Allies? What plans had their captors made should they come under attack? Would they resist or retreat? What would they do with the prisoners? At the far end of the camp they had built a crematorium to dispose of the thousands who died, but no one was in any doubt that it also contained gas chambers where those who were too weak to work were disposed of. Would they all be herded in there? His questions were echoed by everyone else and no amount of shouting and beating could stop the prisoners talking.

Alex began to make plans to escape, which he told no one. It would have to be done on the march from the camp to the factory, the only time they went outside the gates. Being spring, they went in daylight, but when they returned at the end of the day’s shift it was growing dark. He decided to make the attempt on the return journey at a particular spot where there was a hedge overhanging a ditch. If he could roll into that without being seen by the guards who
accompanied them, he might not be missed until roll-call when the column arrived in the camp. It would give him a few minutes, no more, to get away. He began to hoard a little of his food each day.

His plans were thwarted because production in the factory suddenly stopped and they ceased to be taken out of the camp. It was a sure sign the Germans were expecting the worst. Lorries drove up and down the roads, taking the machinery and the German workers further west, and clouds of smoke in the factory yard indicated papers being burnt. No one told the prisoners what was to become of them. And their already starvation rations were cut.

The Jews had been rounded up some time before and driven away in trucks, no one knew where. Towards the end of April, the criminals, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the homosexuals were marched out escorted by guards. Alex learnt later that as soon as they were a few miles from the camp, their guards had returned to camp, leaving the prisoners to fend for themselves. How many of them survived, Alex never knew. It left only the political prisoners and the Russian POWs still in camp. This caused more than a little consternation. They were going to be handed over to the advancing Russians. A few saw it as a good thing, their belief in Bolshevism so firm they could not envisage anything but joy and a return to their homes and loved ones. Most, including Alex, were more realistic.