Winds of War (101 page)

Molotov’s surprise at the invasion was not unique. Stalin was surprised. Since his was the only word or attitude in Russia that mattered, the Red Army and the entire nation were surprised. The attack was an unprecedented tactical success, on a scale never approached before or since. Three and a half million armed men surprised four and a half million armed men. The Pearl Harbor surprise attack six months later involved, by contrast, only some thousands of combatants on each side.

Communist historians use events to prove their dogmas. This makes for good propaganda but bad record-keeping. Facts that are hard to fit into the party theories tend to slide into oblivion. Many facts of this most gigantic of land wars, which the Russians call
Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina
, “The Great Patriotic War,” – “Second World War” is not a phrase they favor - may never be known. The Communist historians assert that Stalin was to blame for neglecting intelligence warnings, and that is why the German surprise attack was successful. It is a very simple way to look at the amazing occurrence. So far as it goes, it is true.

* * *

Sunlight touched the red Kremlin towers, visible from the windows of Leslie Slote’s flat, and fell on an opened letter from Natalie Henry in Rome, lying on his desk by the window.

Slote had gone to bed very late and he was still asleep. Natalie had sent him a joyous screed - for suddenly Aaron Jastrow had received his passport! He actually had it in his hand and they were getting ready to leave on a Finnish freighter sailing early in July; and going by ship would even enable Aaron to retrieve much of his library. Knowing nothing of Byron’s action at the White House, Natalie had written to thank Slote in effervescent pages. The astonished Foreign Service man, for in Italy he had felt he was encountering the cotton-padded stone wall that was a State Department specialty. In his answer, which lay unfinished beside her letter, he took modest credit for the success, and then explained at length why he thought the rumored impending invasion of Russia was a false alarm, and why he was sure the Red Army would crush a German attack if by chance one came. Trying to find gracious words about Natalie’s pregnancy, he had given up and gone to bed. By the time his alarm clock woke him, his letter was out of date; but he did not yet know it.

Peering out of the window, he saw the usual morning lights of Moscow: a hazy blue sky, men in caps and young women in shawls walking to work, a crowded rusty bus wobbling up a hill, old women standing in line at the milk store, more old women queueing at a bread store. The Kremlin loomed across the river, huge, massive, still, the walls dark red in the morning sun, the multiple gold domes gleaming on the cathedrals. There were no air raid alarms. There were as yet no loudspeaker or radio reports. It was a scene of tranquil peace. Stalin and Molotov were waiting a while before sharing their astonishment with the people they had led into this catastrophe. But at the front, several million Red Army men were already sharing it and trying to recover from it before the Germans could kill them all.

Knowing nothing of this, Slote went to the embassy with a light heart, hoping to dispose of some overdue work on this quiet Sunday. He found the building in a most unsabbathlike turmoil; and there he learned, with a qualm in his gut, that once again the Germans were coming.

The sunrise slid westward to Minsk. Its first rays along a broad silent street fell on a clean-shaven workingman in a cloth cap and a loose worn suit dusted all over with flour. Had Natalie Henry been walking this street, she could not possibly have recognized her relative, Berel Jastrow. Shorn of a beard, the broad flat Slavic face with its knobby peasant nose gave him a nondescript East European look, as did the shoddy clothing. He might have been a Pole, a Hungarian, or a Russian, and he knew the three languages well enough to pass as any of these. Though over fifty, Berel always walked fast, and this morning he walked faster. At the bakery, on a German shortwave radio he kept behind flour sacks, he had heard Dr. Goebbels from Berlin announce the attack, and in the distance, just after leaving work, he had heard a familiar noise: the thump of bombs. He was concerned, but not frightened.

Natalie Henry had encountered Berel as a devout prosperous merchant, the happy father of a bridegroom. Berel had another side. He had served on the eastern front in the Austrian army in the last war. He had been captured by the Russians, had escaped from a prison camp, and he made his way back through the forests to Austrian lines. In the turmoils of 1916 he had landed in a mixed German and Austrian unit. Early in his army service he had learned to bake and to cook, so as to avoid eating forbidden food. He had lived for months on bread, or roasted potatoes, or boiled cabbage, while cooking savory soups and stews which he would not touch. He knew army life, he could survive in a forest, and he knew how to get along with Germans, Russians, and a dozen minor Danubian nationalities. Anti-Semitism was the normal state of things to Berel Jastrow. It frightened him no more than war and he was just as practiced in dealing with it.

He turned off the main paved avenue, and walked a crooked way through dirt streets and alleys, past one-story wooden houses, to a courtyard where chickens strutted clucking in the mire, amid smells of breakfast, woodsmoke, and barnyard.

“You’ve finished work early,” said his daughter-in-law, stirring a pot on a wood-burning oven while holding a crying baby on one arm. She was visibly pregnant again; and with a kerchief on her cropped hair, and her face pinched and irritable, the bride of a year and a half looked fifteen years older. In a corner, her husband in a cap and sheepskin jacket murmured over a battered Talmud volume. His beard too was gone, and his hair cut short. Three beds, a table, three chairs, and a crib filled the tiny hot room. All four dwelled there. Berel’s wife and daughter had died in the winter of 1939 of the spotted fever that had swept bombed–out Warsaw. At that time the Germans had not gotten around to walling up the Jews; and using much of his stored money for bribes, Berel Jastrow had bought himself, his son, and his daughter-in-law out of the city, and had joined the trickle of refugees heading eastward to the Soviet Union through back roads and forests. The Russians were taking in these people and treating them better than the Germans had, though most had to go to lonely camps beyond the Urals. With this remnant of his family Berel had made his way to Minsk, where some relatives lived. Nearly all of the city’s bakers were off in the army, so the Minsk bureau for aliens had let him stay.

“I’m home early because the Germans are coming again.” Accepting a cup of tea from the daughter-in-law, Berel sank into a chair and smiled sadly at her stricken expression. “Didn’t you hear the bombs?”

“Bombs? What bombs?” His son closed the book and looked up with fright on his pale bony face. “We heard nothing. You mean they’re fighting the Russians now?”

“It just started. I heard it on the radio. The bombs must have come from airplanes. I suppose the Germans were bombing the railroad. The front is very far away.”

The woman said wearily, shushing the wailing baby as it pounded her with a little fist, “They won’t beat the Red Army so fast.”

The son stood. “Let’s leave in the clothes we’re wearing.”

“And go where?” his father said.

“East.”

Berel said, “Once we do, we may not be able to stop till we’re in Siberia.”

“Then let it be Siberia.”

“
Siberia!
God Almighty, Mendel, I don’t want to go to Siberia,” said the wife, patting the peevish baby.

“Do you remember how the Germans acted in Warsaw?” Mendel said. “They’re wild animals.”

“That was the first few weeks. They calmed down. We kept out of the way and we were all right, weren’t we?” the father said calmly. “Give me more tea, please. Everybody expected to be murdered. So? The typhus and the cold were worse than the Germans.”

“They killed a lot of people.”

“People who didn’t follow the rules. With the Germans, you have to follow the rules. And keep out of their sight.”

“Let’s leave today.”

“Let’s wait a week,” said the father. “They’re three hundred kilometers away. Maybe the Red Army will give them a good slap in the face. I know the manager in the railroad ticket office. If we want to, we can get out in a few hours. Siberia is far off, and it’s no place for a Jew.”

“You don’t think we should leave today?” said the son.

“No.”

“All right.” Mendel sat down and opened his book.

“I’m putting food on the table,” said his wife.

“Give me a cup of tea,” said her husband. “I’m not hungry. And make that baby stop crying, please.”

Clever though he was, Berel Jastrow was making a serious mistake. The Germans were jumping off nearer Minsk than any other Soviet city, bringing another surprise, compared with which even their invasion of Russia has since paled in the judgment of men.

Bright morning sunshine bathed the columns of soldiers that crawled like long gray worms on the broad green, earth of Soviet-occupied Poland. Behind the advancing soldiers, out of range of the fire flashes and smoke of the cannonading, certain small squads travelled, in different uniforms and under different orders. They were called
Einsatzgruppen
, Special Action Units, and they were something unparalleled in the experience of the human race. To place and understand the Special Action Units, one needs a brief clear picture of the invasion.

Much of the European continent in that area is a low-lying, soggy saucer almost like everglades, spreading over thousands of square miles. This big swamp, the Pripet Marshes, has always confronted western invaders of Russia. They have had to go south or north of it. Adolf Hitler’s generals, intending to break the Soviet state with one sharp blow in a few summer weeks, were hitting north and south of the great swamp at the same time.

But the Special Action Units had no military purpose. Their mission concerned the Jews. From the time of Catherine the Great, Russia had compelled its millions of Jews to live in the “Pale,” a borderland to the west, made up of districts taken in war from Poland and Turkey. The revolution had ended the Pale, but most of the Jews, impoverished and used to their towns and villages, had stayed where they were.

The border defense belt held by the Red Army, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, was therefore precisely where most of the Soviet Union’s Jews lived. The Special Action Units were travelling executioners, and their orders were to kill Russia’s Jews without warning and without regard to age or sex. These orders were unwritten; they came down from Adolf Hitler through Göring and Heydrich to the “Security Service,” Germany’s federal police, which organized the units. These squads had collateral orders to shoot summarily all commissars - political officers - of the Red Army. But these later orders were on paper.

There were four Special Action Units in all, placed to follow close on the three giant prongs of the German assault.

Army Group South, composed of Germans and Rumanians, was striking into the Ukraine, south of the marshes and along the Black Sea into the Crimea. With them came two Special Action Units, for here the Jewish settlement was dense.

Army Group Center was setting forth on the straight short road Napoleon took - Minsk, Smolensk, Vyazma, Borodino, Moscow. This road points north of the great swamp like an arrow for the capital. It passes between the headwaters of two rivers, one flowing north and the other south, the Dvina and the Dnieper. Military men call it the dry route and greatly favor it. With this main central thrust travelled another Special Action Unit.

Army Group North was driving up along the Baltic toward Leningrad, and a Special Action Unit followed close behind.

Counting officers and men, there were about three thousand of these travelling executioners all told in the four units. They were setting out to kill between three and four million people, which figured out to more than ten thousand murders for each man. It was clearly beyond them. The plan was to start the process, and then recruit native anti-Semites and German soldiers to complete the gruesome, unheard-of, but entirely real job they were setting out to do.

The Germans in the ranks of the Special Action Units were recruited mainly from the civil services: policemen, detectives, clerks, and the like. There were no lunatics or criminals among them. The officers were mostly lawyers, doctors, or businessmen, who through age or disability could not fight in the army. Many had high university degrees; one officer had been a theologian. Officers and men alike were good Germans, the sort of men who did not drive past red traffic lights, who liked opera and concerts, who read books, who wore ties and jackets, who had wives and children, who for the most part went to church and sang hymns, and who worked in little weekend gardens. Obedience was a German virtue. They had been recruited and ordered to kill these people. They had been told that the Jews were Germany’s enemies, and that the only way to deal with them was to kill every last one of them, down to the babes in arms and their mothers. This word came from above. A prime German virtue was to accept such words from above and carry them out.

Strangely, the Jews already in German hands, in the territories stretching west from the invasion line to the Atlantic Ocean, were not yet being killed en masse. Nor was a program even under way to kill them. A mistaken idea exists that the Germans began killing Jews as soon as Hitler took power in 1933. That is untrue. They robbed the Jews, as they later robbed all the peoples they conquered, but the extortion was usually done under expropriation rules. Jews were often insulted, sometimes beaten, sometimes tortured, sometimes done to death or worked to death. But as late as June 22, 1941, only a few concentration camps existed, and most of the inmates were German opponents of Hitler. The existence of camps filled the Jews with terror, but the Germans themselves were terrorized, too.

By June 1941 the European Jews were living a vile life and were yielding the last scraps of their property to the squeeze of German law. But they were living. “One can live under any law,” a German Jewish newspaper put it.