Unlikely Warrior (30 page)

That left only the gabby storeroom superintendent from the Dresden opera who, in his simplicity, had told us more about his uninteresting life than anyone cared to know. He was absolutely not a party member.

And that was everyone except for Oskar and me. And he—Oskar? Recently he had told me proudly about his two sons. They held high ranks in the Hitler Youth, and one of them had received a medal for exceptional leadership of his group at premilitary exercises on skis in the Austrian Alps. It also occurred to me that he had once made a remark that the still-awaited German wonder weapons would certainly play a role in the final outcome of the war.

Now that I really considered him, yes, he could very likely be a Nazi. Because he had been a guest of my Jewish grandmother thirty years ago and now massaged my legs, I must have become deaf and blind to any evidence of his political convictions. But I still couldn’t be certain.

“Oskar,” I said, “how long have you been a soldier?”

“Since October 1941.”

“They overlooked you during the first two years of the war?”

“I was director of a music school in Berlin. That seemed to be more important to them. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. It just seemed to me from your stories that you hadn’t been in the war from the beginning.”

In order to be the director of a school during Hitler’s thousand-year reign, one had to be a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Such a position, with influence over young people, wouldn’t have been handed over to someone whose political views were not incontestably clear and pro-Hitler. Oskar was a party member.

Would he have voted to let my grandmother disappear, if she had still been alive? I couldn’t understand how a man so obviously intelligent and highly cultivated, in addition to being a sensitive artist, could be a Nazi. How could he justify simply occupying European countries in order to push down their throats the German idea of pure and impure races?

I recalled a recent conversation during which I had said, “Our countryman Hitler certainly did some heavy speculating with this war.”

“Just wait a while,” Oskar had answered. “Everything could still turn out differently. The Allies can’t just spread around large pieces of German-speaking countries, giving them away to the winners the way they did last time in the Treaty of Versailles, without those countries eventually wanting to be reunited. It’s just a matter of time.”

At that point I still wasn’t strong enough to carry on an involved political discussion. I was also aware of a number of factors that could have been considered in Hitler’s favor at the time of his takeover, factors that partially explained the general enthusiasm for him. It wouldn’t have been a crime to reunite all the German-speaking territories, had he attempted to achieve this through negotiation and a good foreign policy. To lead a country out of a depression like that of the thirties, basically just through hard work—by building the autobahns and numerous new factories and by encouraging everyone to believe that they had a right to a Volkswagen and a radio—wasn’t necessarily bad either.

Of course, as it turned out, the autobahns had been built for military-strategic purposes and the factories were intended for producing the biggest stockpile of weapons in Europe. The radio for everyone had provided the perfect means of continually showering the entire German nation with previously unknown levels of propaganda. No, all of that hadn’t looked or sounded so good after all. At that point, many who had leaned toward the idea of being Nazis turned away, but Oskar, evidently, had not been one of those.

I began to feel a horror of my duties as a spy. I felt miserable. When I had been given this first task, I had secretly hoped that I would never discover a party member. And now I was faced with the decision of whether to turn in the one prisoner who had done the most for me.

What if I didn’t turn him in but they found out later by themselves? Or perhaps they already knew he was with the party and had put him in close contact with me on purpose, to test me. His injury had never really been serious at all.

I didn’t want to think about it anymore. My pulse was very high, as it often had been recently. I could feel it in my neck and in my feet. If I really paid attention, I could actually feel it in my whole body. Now that my general condition had improved, I had begun to detect all the “little” pains and problems. For instance, when blowing my nose, I could blow right through my left ear. That was from the time when a grenade had exploded so close to me.

There were certain light twinges in my chest whenever I took a deep breath or turned over in bed. At night, when I wasn’t well covered, I also felt pains in my lower back, in the general region of my kidneys.

“But I’m alive,” I said to myself, “with or without high pulse and whatever else may turn up.” With that I decided to fall asleep in order not to have to think anymore about Oskar or the mysterious man who would someday turn up and address me as Flussman.

At the beginning of May, Captain Pushkin came and sat down with me under the tree. I had just finished my two rounds of the barracks, without having to lean on Oskar or a cane.

“The colonel would like to have a report from you concerning your political views,” he said. “Could you have it ready in a week?”

“How should I do that?” I asked

“Sorry, I can’t help you there,” he replied. “You’ll just have to figure that out for yourself,” and after a few more words about my improving state of health, he left. I sat there, completely at a loss, with a blank sheet of paper that he had handed me.

At two o’clock that same afternoon, a wild racket of shooting and yelling broke out in the area where the Russian guards were quartered. The noise kept building higher and higher to an unbelievable pitch. I couldn’t imagine what might be happening until an orderly called over from inside the building, “The war is over! Capitulation of the Germans.”

“Thank God,” I said out loud to myself. I rolled from my mattress onto the ground and buried my face in the juicy spring grass. I filled my lungs with the wonderful smell of damp earth and young plants, stretched my arms and legs out wide, and gave myself up to a deep feeling of thankfulness. If everyone at home had managed to survive the bombs and the Gestapo, perhaps we could be together again in peace after all.

I’d been told a joke in Vienna during the first years of the war and had carried it around inside of me ever since. The recollection had helped me many times to hang in there just a little bit longer:

Two well-known Austrian folk figures, Count Rudy and Count Bobby, are standing in front of a globe, and Rudy asks, “What are all these pink spots?”

Bobby replies, “Those are England with all her colonies.”

“And what about the purple spots?”

“Those are France and her colonies.”

“Well, then,” Rudy asks, “what is that great big green area over there?”

“Oh, that’s the United States of America.”

“And how about the enormous orange one?”

“That’s Russia.”

“Do you happen to know what this little, teeny-tiny brown spot is?”

“That’s Germany.”

At this point Rudy becomes quite pensive, and then very quietly he asks the question of the century, “Do you think Hitler knows that?”

On May 7, 1945, I thought,
Finally, he has learned it!

The next morning, just before sunrise and without any prior notification, a great number of military vehicles arrived and began to load and drive away the prisoners from the connecting camp. Immediately the rumors began to circulate.

“The prisoners are being taken to the train station and sent home.”

“No, they are being taken to a different camp.”

“I heard they are being sent to Siberia.”

By afternoon it was the turn of the hospital inmates. A few of the sick men became hysterical with joyful anticipation. By the time they came for me the word was official. This camp, including the hospital, was being dissolved and the inmates distributed to other camps in the Kiev area.

Some of us were loaded into an open truck and taken back to the main hospital, where I had been so ill the previous winter. Oskar was in a different car. I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye.

THE GERMAN PLOT

I spent my first week in the main Kiev hospital in a hall, on a long row of mattresses, pressed closely together with many other prisoners. My diet was identical to everyone else’s, and no one seemed to be aware of the special treatment I had been given during my last visit. I said nothing, asked for nothing unusual.

Perhaps the whole espionage business had burst overnight, like a soap bubble.
The war is over,
I thought,
so what do they still need spies for?
And if they no longer needed me as a spy, it was also clear they no longer needed to keep me in better health than anyone else.

I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. The only suspicious item was my cloth bag, which I hid under the mattress. Finally I was assigned a bed, and life fell into a routine. My physical condition didn’t seem to change any longer. My pulse remained just under a high 120, my legs continued to be weak and swollen, and I had pains in various parts of my body, but since I didn’t suffer a relapse or worsen drastically, I was more or less content.

About the end of June, the head doctor came into my room. When she saw me, she seemed at first surprised, but then she smiled and greeted me. “Rauch, how are you coming along?”

“Thanks, I’m doing all right.”

“Do you want to work? The dentist needs an assistant.”

“Of course, if I’m strong enough.”

“Come with me, then.”

We went up to the third floor and entered a room where a blond and robust Russian woman was just in the process of drilling a prisoner’s tooth. She was using a foot-powered machine that would have been considered an antique in Vienna thirty years earlier.

The head doctor spoke awhile with the dentist and then said to me, “You may begin here tomorrow morning at ten. I will arrange for you to receive double rations.”

I thanked her and left. This new arrangement seemed further proof that I no longer had to worry about my job as a spy. After all, the head doctor knew about my previous status. She obviously also remembered that I had almost died because she had taken the key to the medicine chest with her on holiday. Evidently it was her slightly guilty conscience that was prompting her to do me this special favor. She had offered me the easiest job in the entire hospital for which one could receive double rations.

Nobody will ever approach me now and address me as Flussman, and Oskar, wherever he is, can continue to live in peace,
I thought.

The job with the dentist brought about an additional small change in my status that would later have much greater ramifications. Bureaucracy in the camps was minimal, and one possible reason was simply a lack of paper. Whatever was written in camp by doctors or officials, whether medical reports, official notices, or memos, usually consisted of dark purple scribbles on old newspapers.

But there was one bureaucratic detail to which the Russians strictly adhered. Each prisoner was assigned two classification numbers. The first was based on his ability to work. A
0
signified that one was completely unfit for work, a
1
denoted an ability to do light tasks, and a
3
indicated that the man was completely able-bodied.

The second classification number dealt with the undernourishment/dystrophy factor: the number
1
represented the lightest degree of infirmity, and
3
the highest. I had originally been assigned fitness-for-work number
0
and dystrophy number
3
until I received the job with the dentist. That change automatically promoted me to work group
1
without any further physical examinations or particular improvement in my overall condition.

The job with the dentist was easy enough, requiring only four hours a day, four days a week. In the morning I had to dust the drilling machine and the two wooden cupboards where the pliers and drill bits were kept. Then I called in the patients one by one and handed the dentist her tools as she worked.

The most indispensable ingredient for our work was vodka. The pliers were first dipped in vodka to be cleaned, and then they were held over the burner (also filled with vodka) to be disinfected. The dentist dunked the cotton balls in vodka before rubbing the patients’ teeth or gums, and now and then she took a hefty swig herself.

One afternoon she said, “Take this bottle and come with me.”

We left the building and crossed the courtyard to the ground floor of another building, which was functioning as a warehouse. The supervisor came to meet us and greeted the dentist in a friendly fashion. We entered a huge room where piles of military blankets, uniforms, and underwear (the type worn by all the hospital prisoners) were stacked onto shelves, and mountains of mattresses and collapsible iron beds leaned against the walls. The warehouse supervisor went over to one corner and filled the two bottles we had brought from enormous glass containers of vodka. Then he and the dentist disappeared and left me waiting for an hour. I had a pretty good idea what they were doing during that time, and the manner in which they later took leave of each other confirmed my suspicions.

The following week it was quite cold when we left at the same hour for another visit to the warehouse, so I borrowed an overcoat and fitted my own two glass containers inside. When I was left to cool my heels once again, I had plenty of time in which to fill my private bottles. Thus a pleasant routine developed that lasted all summer. They had their stolen hour together, and I my stolen vodka that I was able to exchange in the kitchen for fried fish, hard-cooked eggs, and bacon.

The summer passed. My pulse remained high, and the pains in my kidneys returned whenever I didn’t keep my back at a steady temperature. Except for this, no further complications developed.