Fleeing the Children's Crusade

CHAPTER ONE

I just wanted to run away, it would have been easier, but I was stuck with what came to most boys who made it past sixteen: gray uniforms, steel helmets, an obligation to fulfill. Still I ran for another purpose and under orders, not the same as running away. For away lay an unknown place, a fleeing from manhood, leaving everything behind to do a thing no one had done before. I knew the fallibility of our Führer, and the futility of being better than everyone else, but was afraid to act upon my longing to escape. I could not deny that the Führer was my father, a forebear demanding obedience. I soon became disheartened with the same doors everyone took to enter into quarters overseen by him. I knew what an open window late at night meant if I could just leap out of it fast enough before being caught. The outside did smell much sweeter.
It was Germany in 1944, and autumn, although it seemed too muddy and wet to give hint upon this worse of deadening seasons. The muck lay frozen everywhere: upon rocks, blanketing bases of pines like slops from an overflowing latrine. Its stench rose with a stinky and asphyxiating nature, made worse from festering under the sun, and as we ran upon it, our sergeant, Lessing, worsened our travails by forcing us to take it in haste.
"Garbage! You’re all garbage!" he shouted as he ran ahead. "I am not your youth instructor, you bastards. Some of you think your youth instructor is still here to clean your dirty shoes, but he’s not. Stop your childish games. No more, I tell you. Enough nonsense!"
I did not listen to much of what he said, being an ignorant soldier who had just passed my seventeenth birthday. Besides, Hitlerjugend, joining the Waffen SS, were not meant to think but to do, and I was busy obeying instinct. We wore gray tunics and trousers of such coarse fibers charges sprang amongst hairs on my legs. Each shift of a pant leg sent a bolt of lightning up from the ground into my crotch, the pain made even worse by the weight of boots, kept at a cant above my head, their laces dangling, but the soles at such a tilt towards the sky they proved abidance to Lessing’s punishment.
"Come on you bastards!" Lessing cried.
"Ja Oberscharführer!" we replied.
"Der Führer raises soldiers, not gasping swine.” He thrust himself into a thicket, bending branches in his charge, and like a whip, they lashed back at soldiers behind him.
Of course, Hermann ran behind us, beaten by shame for his failure to spit shine boots. He could not help himself, could not even put up a fight against a child. He looked small and frail, except for his hearty ears. Some of the boys taunted him with cries of, “untermenschen”, or underman, for his impudence and physical fallacies, others made a dash next to him to flick his lobes. He screamed in agony after each flick.
"Come on, Hermann. Schnell! Schnell! Schnell!" Lessing yelled.
Lessing’s bulging arms swung for a tree limb. He tore off a branch. Below the bill of his steel helmet, his blue eyes darted about above cheeks of tight pink skin.
"Don’t fall behind, Hermann!" he shouted. "Or you’ll have me at your heels!"
"Come on, Hermann," I blurted, in an attempt to show sympathy for him. "Come on."
"Do you need help?" asked another boy. Hermann gasped, yet, in response to my chants of encouragement, he never gave a sign of faltering his pace.
“Hermann you can do this, just keep up with me,” I said to him.
Still, he fell back, slowed down by exhaustion. Lessing saw him lag and a smile curled from his lips. We knew it was not good to see that smile.
"Achtung!" he ordered.
We snapped to attention on the muddy trail under shade of a spruce. Our mouths agape, we savored each quick breath.
"Shut your panting faces!” Lessing snarled. "You sicken me. All of you. You're not the select few we need against Ivan. You’re just a bunch of babies who still need a stick to your behinds. Run in place, damn you! Run in place, you swines of muck! And, Hermann…"
Our noses snorted out clouds, powerful puffs, as the legs below went up and down in place, quick to match each other's stomp against the mud. Filth thrown by the movement of our numb feet sent clods of earth into the air; flung high, they hit the bottoms of boots hanging above in our aching hands.
"Hermann,” Lessing roared. "They gave me a reason to come here. And it's not to slow down." He gave him a menacing look. "You hear me, Hermann? Do you want to give up or run?"
"Run, Oberscharführer," he choked out and his squat legs struck the ground more quickly as he strove to run in place.
"Then show a worthy effort."
"Ja Oberscharführer," Hermann wheezed.
"Run. Don't talk…just run. Save your breath."
The poor boy ran in place. His nostrils flared, breaths became a wheeze, but his legs kept at a sprint, knee up, knee down, going ever faster, or face a foul retort from Lessing.
"Aaaah!" Hermann cried as fatigue deadened his shanks. His cheeks suffused with blood while sweat descended from under his helmet to drown his eyes. He did put up a struggle.
“Don't think of giving up,” Lessing shouted.
"Relief, Oberscharführer!" Hermann squealed.
"Don’t talk."
Pain in my calves sprang into my lower limbs as we marked time with our bursting lungs.
" Schnell! Schnell! Schnell! Faster, Hermann! Faster!"
"Ja Oberscharführer," the small boy wheezed. He ran to the point of exhaustion, his lungs desperately inhaling oxygen to keep him on his feet.
The sergeant’s face turned ugly, wrinkles in his forehead becoming furrows, his eyes swelling out belligerently below blond brows.
"Hop! Hop! Hop! Hop!" he shouted.
I rapidly thrust my feet in and out of the mud to keep pace with the others, my arms sagging from weight of the boots. I could only imagine the pain Hermann felt as his body strained to endure merciless demands.
When Hermann could take no more punishment, his legs buckled and he fell flat into the mud. He dove into the slop headfirst. He lay there whining in long gasps of misery. I thought he would cry, but he looked up at our sergeant and got to his feet. Hermann’s standing did not impress Lessing.
"So you want to give up, eh? Do you want to know what happens to those who give up? They get killed or kill themselves."
"Nein, Oberscharführer!"
"No?"
"Nein, Oberscharführer," he gasped.
"You run,” Lessing ordered. "I don't care if you can't breathe. Run! Get up front of the herd! You’re going to lead us the whole sprint."
Hermann, broken by Lessing’s physical tortures, found it too hard to rush in front of us. When he got to the head of the pack at a limp and made a vain attempt to run, the boys in the lead kicked his heels. They would neither go around him nor did they slow down. When we got to the clearing, Hermann struggled in muddy trousers and shirt. The sergeant ran aside to let the soldiers charge forth at their physical limits.
A trance set into my mind. I saw only the horizon with its tall blades of grass and the sun overhead. What was it all for? I thought of children too young to join the ranks. Instead of being forced to run, eat a strict diet, and keep awake all night to do watches, they were given drink and rest. Every morning we awakened not to the ring of clocks or the affectionate touch of a mother’s hand, but to shouts and chants similar to those yelled down on miscreant dogs, and then sent to run the same windy trails and mountains only to return into camp hoping for relief.
Out beyond edges of the wood amongst gray offshoots of the clearing our trail led to canvas tents. Two men in black watchcoats and of respectable rank stood by them and laughed as we sprinted by.
"Go to your tents,” Lessing ordered when he also saw the officers in camp.
When I caught up with Hermann, his face was flushed. He breathed hard through his mouth, almost unable to speak.
"Let's get into the tent," I said to him.
"Can't," the boy wailed. "Please. . ."
Hermann sank to his knees in the grass. I got him back up by hugging his armpits.
"Come on, we’ve got to get over there," I said.
"Can't."
"Yes, you can. It's only right there." I pointed at the tent. The wind made ripples in the cover cloth and the wooden poles bulged from behind the canvas.
"My feet… they hurt," he said.
"But we’ve got to," I said.
Hermann worked up enough strength to stand, so I let go of him. He put his hand on my shoulder to steady his balance as we lumbered toward the camp.
"You know, you shouldn't have done that," I said.
"Otto!" he gasped. "I've got my lesson for not shining my boots."
"You're going to get more than a lesson," I said, watching a grasshopper glide past, fluttering its leaden wings over the waist-high grass. "That Lessing, you know, he's a sergeant who won't let a thing die."
"Don't," he muttered, and I saw he was about to cry.
"None of that…none of the crying. It won't do."
"But… it's so hard.” He bent his head down, so I would not see him pout under the steel helmet.
"It’s tough, I know," I said. "But you don't see me crying over it."

CHAPTER TWO

We limped into camp. Lessing, a barrier of haughtiness made even more impenetrable by his accompaniment amongst officers, burst by, his essence pushing me to the ground, while tried as I might, I could not get back up, until he vanished into a tent tucked beyond reaches of our encampment. A sensation of relief came upon me with his absence and in response to it, I sprang up, brushed off dirt that had clung to my shirt like powder from snow, and made an approach for the washbasin, hoping to quench my thirst.
At this washbasin, both a social center and means of survival for our always-thirsting ranks, I dipped my canteen into the water and then took it out. As it rose from the pool, it made ripples and I saw the red face under bill of my steel helmet in its reflection. How I cherished the nose mother gave me at birth! It was a woman’s nose. The tuck and smooth bridge of the skin was not manly and it gave my cheeks and eyes a touch of her beauty.
Hermann followed the canteen with his eyes. His nose stuck out pink from a sunburned face. He licked his lips.
“Please, Otto. May I have some?” he asked.
“Ja, that’s why I got it,” I said. “It’s for you.”
He took the canteen and gulped it down. The ball in his throat bulged then sunk with every swallow.
“Come on, hurry,” I whispered. “I want to get some for myself.”
He drank all of its contents without pausing to take a breath. A gurgle arose from his throat. He threw his hands to his lips. I took a step back before a milky fluid spilt through his fingers to drip onto his uniform.
“You’re spitting all over yourself,” I said.
He bent over the side of the basin and blew out a mess of white grog.
“Nein,” I cried to him. “Don’t do it there.” But it was too late. A chalky cloud blossomed in the water. I took hold of his collar to wring his neck.
“Don’t do that,” I whispered. “I don’t care if you’re sick, you’ll make us run again.”
“I tried,” he coughed. “But can’t help when it…when it goes in the water.”
Suddenly somebody came out of a tent. I did not look, for I feared it would be one of the officers. On the earth a shadow crept toward us, a black panther’s paw stretching over the ground to strike us down. Nothing would get me to look up, and still the ears under my steel helmet were open to the stomping of heavy boots, thunderous steps from a giant.
“What you two ape-dicks doing out here?” rang a baritone voice.
“Achtung!” I shouted, and Hermann and I went rigid, our arms flat at our sides with hands open and against the seams of our trousers.
“Look at me when I speak to you, schütze!”
It was a game, I thought. He would not hurt me if I looked at him.
“Oberscharführer, we came out to get water!” I shouted. When my gaze rose to examine his chest, gray in its flawless tunic of medals and shiny buttons, I felt fearful.
“What? A drink of water?”
“Ja Oberscharführer,” I said.
On Lessing’s shirt pocket, at a perfect center below the button flap, shined the Iron Cross First Class. The black of that cross, cold and sinister, gave me only more fear for this beast of a man. I thought of Jesus and the cross from which He had hung on nails struck into His palms. Then I saw a portrait in my mind of Lessing in a suit of brass Roman armor, a tall wooden spear close to his side with a sponge soaked in red wine atop it. He knelt below the Savior hanging in His final throes, with a grin on his tight visage, a smirk of glorification for this man being crucified. I really did believe he wore the Iron Cross to show us how he gave honor to men who could die more horrible deaths than any of us, men with enough courage to be put on crosses even though given chances to live a fruitful life.
“A drink of water, eh?” Lessing growled. “Hermann doesn’t deserve any drink. Did you give him any?”
“Ja Oberscharführer,” I said.
“You gave him water?”
“Ja Oberscharführer, but I only did it for he was about to…”
“No excuses!” Lessing cut in. “You disobeyed a direct order to go to your tents.”
“Ja Oberscharführer,” both of us replied.
“Now somersault back to your tent! Schnell!”
I fell quickly over into a somersault, the top of my steel helmet taking the brunt of my thrown weight. “Flip now! Flip!” he shouted.
I threw my body into another somersault and at the end of the turn, my legs fell hard on the ground, and my head felt dizzy. We did this all the way to our tent, where it was I did not know, but the yells from our sergeant told us, if I went astray. Hermann, sick at every turn, spat out a foul brew all over himself. The stink arose from his clothes.
“Hermann,” laughed Lessing. “You’re going the wrong way. Do you need a guiding hand?”
“Nein, Oberscharführer,” Hermann groaned.
Finally, in one of my ground flips, I saw the flap door of a tent ripple in the breeze, fleeing from vision when two dirty feet struck out at the sky as my body came out of another toss. When I landed inside the shelter after a dizzying somersault, laughter broke all around and fists were thrown at my helmet and back. I rolled into a canvas lining and got the toe of a boot in the mouth. The boot hung on laces thrown around my shoulders, and the dirty taste of it got on my tongue. I do not know why, but the bitterness of the mud made me think back to Mother’s vegetable sausages and how she used to overcook them. She was such a bad cook, and those sausages, although I ate them, were no better than the filth on the toe of my boot.
I stood, or tried to stand, for the earth swung above me in a wild spin. Shadows passed by, and in my dizziness, these black forms danced around me in laughter. I grabbed for one and caught only air.
“Lost, are you?” a spinning outline cried. A kick was thrown at my groin for being obliged to smile at this remark.
“You bastards!” I shouted in pain, trying to keep a firm balance on the ground, as everything flew into a maelstrom. I rubbed my crotch to take away the soreness, but the pain sent me down hard on the dirt. A boy knelt over to whisper into my ear, but I could not hear what he spoke for he did not mean to say anything -- he only did it to show off to the others.
“It’s been three months now we’ve been in this rot hole,” he said aloud. “And still he gets himself licked for the lousy swine.”
“He’s a scoundrel. Throw him to Ivan and let him be a good boy to them. He can run around kissing their cheeks and pull daisies to sniff,” another boy said behind me. When my head had stopped spinning, I saw two youths at the corner of the tent lying on bedspreads pricking thorns out from their feet. Three others, muddy boots at wear, stood over these bruise pickers. Behind them all, the sun shone indigo through the gray lining, giving a shade of blue to everything. In this dim light, they embodied a murky appearance.
A little to my left four rifles leaned against their own stocks in a pyramid stack, muzzles stuck out similar to four wooden poles of a teepee. They were never loaded, for Lessing did not trust any of us. When the call for formation rang into our tent, carbines were taken outside quicker than Lessing could utter the last word. If one carbine got out late, say, two seconds, we would have to run our legs weak with sprints through the forest.
For a moment, I had forgotten about Hermann, and when he made a somersault into the tent, his uniform reeked with thrown up food.
“Look, he’s almost dead!” I heard someone shout.
Hermann did have the bleak look of a corpse. His skin shone an eggnog color and the bruise on his forehead, split with a blister, made a messy blot on his countenance. I crawled to him and smelt waste rise from his clothes. He breathed heavily, and boys who laughed all around did not assist in his struggle to get air into the lungs.
“Don’t help him, Otto,” one boy said. He made a pull at my trousers and dragged me until he ran back into a canvas wall. “He don’t belong with us.”
“No,” I said. “He’s tough! You just don’t see. But he’s tough.”
“Tough? Tough for the mules,” said a blond-haired boy who lay on a bedspread picking at thorns stuck in his foot. This boy, Heinrich, stood as the wise fellow of our ranks. He held all the titles, first to master rifles, quickest to strap on a gas mask, and first to grow scratch hairs above his top lip, but he stood cocky in a tight gray uniform, and only made friends with the elitists of our Kompanie. “With the big ears he’s got,” he said, “we could tie his lobes around the tail. Watch him spin around when mule runs. Spin he goes on his ears. Then he falls, splat, right under Ivan’s tank!”
“Let him quit, you know he’s no good,” said the youth who had grabbed onto my trousers. “You’ve seen what he’s done to us, Otto. He’s no good.” He let go of me and went over to the knapsacks.
“No, no,” I said. “It’s not him who get us in all the trouble. He tries hard, so hard to be a schütze.”
“A mule try hard to be a horse,” Heinrich said as he grinned at me. “But he’ll always have big ears and be dumber than a partisan.”
The group behind him laughed heartily at this remark. Even Hermann, the boy made fun of by Heinrich’s witticism gave a nervous giggle.
“Get him up,” Heinrich said. “He’s a fake. He’s just fine.”
“Your Feldflasche,” I pleaded, pointing at the felt covered canteen kept near his toes. “Throw me it.”
If the canteen had been close to my side, I would have certainly chanced a reach, but Heinrich’s eyes fell on it. He wrapped a foot over the shell and dragged it away from me.
“Come on give it to me.”
“Why?” I heard the anger rise in his voice.
It was impossible to ask help from Heinrich. His eighteen years and grandeur as a Hitlerjugend toughened his blond head with selfishness.
“It’s for Hermann,” I said, uncomfortable talking to a soldier who refused to listen.
Hermann turned to look at them. “Don’t, don’t,” he muttered weakly. His chest rose under the tunic as he drew in a breath. “I don’t want any. I’ll do good with no water.”
“See Otto,” Heinrich said. He sat up cross-legged on the bedspread. “He’s so useless, water can’t save him.”
“He just doesn’t give up easily. He’s more a schütze than you’ll ever be.”
“More of a schütze?” Heinrich shot to his feet. “You think the swine is better than me?”
“Ja.”
“He can’t, he’s too young to be better. If it wasn’t for him knowing Slavic, he’d never have been let in. He’d be sucking up them foolish words in grammar school. He’s only here ‘cause his mother was an Ivan. After the war, boys like him will just be sent to the gutters. They’re too weak Otto, we don’t need them here.”
Another boy, Wernøe, thin in the waist and tall as his Viking ancestors, a height he was not proud of when it came to hiding behind a bush in concealment exercises, strode over to Heinrich to steal the canteen. Till that moment, I had not seen him in the tent, though one could not miss a soldier of such stature in small boots. He had remained at a distance from the whole scuffle that erupted at entrance into our tent. His curling blond hair sat messy on a sweaty scalp and a fly clung onto a knot of strands, fanning its wings. After a quick shrug from his shoulders, as if the motion would pester the fly to buzz away from him, he scooped up the Feldflasche and threw it at me. I caught it just before it hit the ground. “I’ve got so many thorns in my foot, verdammt this place,” Wernøe complained and almost stumbled over a bedspread before sitting next to Heinrich. “I should have enlisted in the regular ranks of the Waffen SS, not this hell.”
“Another Hermann are you?” Heinrich said.
“I think you have started a bunch of foolishness,” Wernøe continued, picking at a pimple under the bridge of his nose. “No one’s got it harder than us soldiers.”
“You’re just as weak as Hermann, with rocks in your boots and a need for Mother. He gives it to us hard so we give Ivan what he deserves. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember when Lessing said he does it all the brute way so we can give Ivan a cheek of the devil’s arse?”
“Brute, Ja. But we’re Germans,” Wernøe said.
“He just does his things so we fight strong,” Heinrich said. “Ivan treats his soldiers like rats.”
The bully, although right, had too often repeated his claims for the fairness of Lessing’s training throughout months of torture. Following the end of combat basics, I knew we were destined to enter the ranks of a division fighting somewhere on the Eastern Front. Ivan showed no hospitality towards his soldiers. Broken limbs, unsettled stomachs, and the cut Hermann received from quick somersaults, were all lessons taught by an instructor who understood the savageness that could arise out of Bolsheviks. He gave us harsh treatment for our own good.
A wind picked up from outside and blew into the lining of our tent. A large bubble of cloth stretched out from the wall, filled with pressing air, and one of the soldiers lying on a bedspread closest to it, got up and punched the thing until it fell flat again.
“I wish I had a cigarette,” Wernøe complained, lost in thought, probably not knowing he spoke aloud. “I would kill someone for a cigarette. But no, I think we’ll never see a smoke. Not so long as we’re here in training. Those Offiziers who come into the camp, I think there were three, weren’t there?”
“Two,” I muttered, and then gave Hermann the canteen. The boy grabbed it in earnest, raised a weak chest, and with great strain struck an elbow out against the earth to support his upper trunk as he took quick sips at the canteen.
“I hope them Offiziers, I hope they have cigarettes,” Wernøe stated. “If they don’t, I’ll go crazy.”
Heinrich giggled at this, flashing a set of clean white teeth. He laughed not from any humor found in Wernøe’s words --the tone was too pathetic and came out in a gasp. We could all relate to these sudden outbursts of false merriment that masked our inner misery.
“Why do you worry?” I asked.
“Huh,” Wernøe said.
“Ja, why you worry so much on smokes? We got only a week and we’re out.”
“Easy for you to say, kamerad ,” Heinrich shouted. “You don’t smoke.”
“But there’s…”
“Shut your mouth Otto,” Heinrich cut in. “I hate hearing you, you sound like a sissy girl when you talk.”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“You should hear yourself, you sound so much like my sister,” he laughed. Then he made guttural utterances just to start me off. “Blaah! Blaah! Blooh!” and he came right in front of my face opened his mouth to spit out his tongue before he made a last and very pathetic murmur which sounded much like a pout from a monkey who never gets the chance to grab onto a banana stuck into its cage.
Suddenly there came a long quiet after Heinrich performed this foolish stunt. We sat silent, listening to the tent cloth flap against the breeze. Some of the boys pouted while taking stickers out of their feet. In this quiet solace, a strange image materialized in my thoughts. I saw the frail figure of a woman in a white bodice, youth swelling from her tan skin. She sang a melody my mother used to sing when tucking me into bed. I had forgotten the words but the humming of her voice rang true and I remembered my childhood. There was the sun outside the window casting a bright glow on the panes and when my fingers crept to it, they shone white in the light. She had always kept the bed near the window so I could see everything and not feel lonely. Then came months before joining the camps, moments filled with great happiness, where many times I skipped school to play with a boy named Franz. We would run in the groves growing out of the expanses of our backyard, a cool breeze blowing at our backs. The sun, high in the sky, touched its rays on branches, the leaves allowing only spangles of yellow to fall in messy patterns on the grass. The green went soft against my skin as I rolled in it for hours on end, Franz giggling as he sped down a hill doing cartwheels. Those were such different times, days lost to becoming a Hitlerjugend, and I longed to see Franz once more, scratching his curly crown of black strands, always smiling, for he never looked sad being blessed with a jester’s face. He was one of those boys born out of some spirit crop that captured all the souls of king’s entertainers and made them alive in the deep carving of his cheeks, and the smile went wide all the time.
Where was Franz now, I wondered, did we scare him away? I never meant to shout at him, no, I never meant to call him names. Those rocks, the fists, and Franz in the middle, his shirt torn to ribbons, his face still smiling, no it was not my fault. Boys in black shorts with wisps of Franz’s hair clinched in their fingers dragged him along the road cut through trees, and called him “Dirty filth.” Yet all I could do was stare and follow them.

CHAPTER THREE

“Raustreten!”
The shout cut through the tent and awoke me from a trance. I looked around in a blur, seeing only gray flashes of uniforms. It took a hit on the back to make me realize it was time to leave. I leaped for a carbine.
“No rifles!” shouted a soldier about to run out. He grabbed onto my firearm and flung it to the side.
Battle cries arose from soldiers outside. The others under cover of canvas leaped out the slit door into the sunlight, yet I still had to put on my boots. My dirty feet kicked into the soles of a pair resting on a bedspread but my toes would not push through under taut laces.
“Ficken!” I shouted. This was not a moment to be late for a formation. I could only imagine the abrupt smirks on the officer’s faces at seeing me late. Lessing would call the formation to attention, look me over with a devilish smile, and then send the Kompanie on a three-mile run.
The laces were so tight that my toes felt like they pushed into brick. It would take too long to untie them. So in an effort to forge a hole in the small cave without wasting time, I made frantic stomps against the soles. The leather at first did not allow a budge, but then gave way to repeated thumps and let the feet slip through for a stubborn fit.
I sprinted out of the tent, yelling. With every swift pound against the earth, the loose shoelaces bounced yet did not threaten to entangle. Drowsiness kept my thoughts in a cloud. I rubbed my eyes against the bright glare from the sun, and then looked at the sky to see a flock of chattering bird fly over.
Comrades pressed themselves together in a square beside the basin breaking the air with their war cries. They bustled about to form a straight line centered on the first boy who took his place at the right. I had just made it in time, amidst the bustle, and fell into the ranks at a spot between two burly youths. Occupying my right flank stood a conspicuous youth of nineteen years, who attracted attention to his pencil thin eyebrows. These strips of hair gave him a false appearance of evil and caused me to feel uneasy in his presence. I knew him as Schroeder, a waiter who left his occupation when an officer seated at one of his tables found him incapable of pouring beer into a glass without it spilling over with foam. With these difficulties put aside, he had an impeccable knowledge of Slavic, and this skill gave him admittance into our Kompanie. He coughed now, too exhausted to scream, and did not look at me. For a moment, he glanced at the ditch near the brush line, his wet hands squeezing at his crotch. “Ah, it hurts,” he whispered with a cringe. I knew he was in a bind and could not leave.
I touched his shoulder, scooting backward until my whole body stood center to his ailing form, and in response to this change, the train of soldiers on my left, made short precise movements to maintain a perfect line.
Schroeder hissed through his teeth, trying hard to brave the pain from his bladder. I was afraid for him.
“I don’t think I can make it,” he whispered.
“Just go in your pants,” I said to him under my breath.
“Why don’t you go in your pants, you dog?”
More worried that one of the officers might see my shabby boots with their untied laces than that they should take notice of my suffering companion, I knelt down, tucked the laces under the shoe tongue, and then got right back up. It was done with such swiftness that most of the boys in formation never knew I moved.
“It will burst,” Schroeder cringed. “When will this be over, I can’t stand it. I just might go in my pants.” He gave one last vicious grab at his crotch. I thought he would tear out his bladder with the effort he threw into calming his bodily fluids.
Propped large and white in front of us, Lessing’s tent hinted of no emergence from its occupants. Voices and laughter erupted inside, sometimes an occasional cough, but other than these murmurs, it was no more than an ordinary henhouse with its over talkative roosters and conversing chickens. I thought it a good time to tell Schroeder to make a break for the latrine. If he was quick about it, he could defecate before Lessing came out, but I feared retribution if the plan were to fail and decided not to tell him.
A hand thrust out of the tent and grasped the slit door. The knuckles grew like mountain peaks as the hand formed into a fist. Our formation held its breath, the tent was thrown open, and Lessing’s gray body strode out in a steel helmet, the muscles twitching in his red cheeks. The air was heavy over him as he knitted his brows. He must have known how powerfully his authority and strong figure were charged in our presence. He looked unwilling, even among superiors, to show a weakness.
"Kompanie, Stillgestanden!" he shouted, with shrill points in his voice.
I snapped to attention, as did the entire formation, with a slight bend in my knees, hands flat against trouser sides. He gazed over our square of helmeted heads, his attention distracted by the bird making a loud racket in the pines.
“Damned ravens,” Lessing spat. “They’re all tongue but no fight.” He made a gesture with his fist at the bird as if challenging it to a brawl. "Augen rechts!"
Our heads swung in unison to stare over our right shoulders. I saw the back of Schroeder’s helmet and the sun made a bright gleam on its metal. The formation was already a solid mass, with the boys standing in even lines, but Lessing, keen on exactness, always made sure there were no gaps. He took care of a formation like a librarian takes care of his bookshelves, making sure no one stood in the wrong place or leaned a little too far ahead or behind the comrade at his right. Had he noticed the officers who came out through the slit door he probably would have uttered the next order with a harsher note.
“Augen gerade aus.”
A swift crank of the neck sent my eyes staring forward at the tent. Two officers appeared in front of me. They wore tight gray uniforms, but in place of helmets on their heads, sharp caps of the same shade gave their hard-boned faces an appearance betokening Roman generals. It was our duty now to follow them with our gaze.
The overseeing commander of our Kompanie scratched the red skin where his razor had cut too close at a sideburn. He stood as young as Lessing with a large jaw that seemed hard as iron. Two gashes spread over his brow, making his squinting eyes appear fierce under cover of cap. This man became the first to grab my attention since his first words came to me as a surprise.
“Fine soldiers, very fine!” His jaw fell like a drawbridge as he said those words, and the grin disturbed me, for his teeth shone a brilliant white.
He walked across our front rank with careful strides. “You are the finest soldiers found in Germany,” he said in delight. “I see now what your Oberscharführer was talking about. I see quite clearly now…” he stopped short in front of a member of the forward rank to give him a close inspection. The boy stood nervous in response to the officer’s sudden attentiveness and sweat trickled down his pale cheek. At last, the officer turned from him, with a relaxed expression, and went on to say, “I know some of you have wondered why you are being treated unfairly. Believe me, I do feel for your pain,” and he frowned as if to show us his repugnance to our ill treatment. “But think of how much worse Ivan has it. Your drill sergeant has been picked out of hundreds to lead you into a special battle against these Bolshevik monsters. It is not hate he has for you. Believe me when I tell you, if he carried any vice he would not be here leading you through training, but sulking in prison for renegades against our government.”
Lessing, who stood side by side with the iron-jawed commander, smirked at this assumption.
“Your Oberscharführer has trained you well. You are the only soldiers of the Waffen SS to have experienced such hard training as you have seen these last three months.” He stopped to chew on something in his mouth and then stood silent as if waiting for words to come to him. “Yes, he has given you a personal courage, a strength to surmount any hardships thrown at you in your fight against these Bolshevik infidels. I have known Ivan for a long time. He is a barbarian and I have seen with my own eyes, and I’m telling you this to prepare you for what lies ahead. I have seen Bolsheviks who had strangled a mother with a baby still in her womb. Strangled her with a rope,” he made a sweep with his hand to the back of his neck then yanked his fist skyward to show us how she choked. “Until they knocked out her breath and her life was no more. A body of limp flesh. This was done not before they performed such vile acts of debauchery on her that if she had survived and was still living today she would not look at a man again without hate in her heart. Such barbarism is expected from the enemy, and they do these things to our mothers and sisters.”
The rising song of the raven broke over his frightful speech. The bird laughed at him, as though mocking the news of the dead woman.
“Not one of us is safe until Bolshevism is brought to an end,” he said with a louder voice. “They have put up a great fight, but they will never break down our walls of defense, for we have you, brave soldiers, to stop these monsters.”
The other officer, whose physical hardness made me believe him to be an avid athlete, drew himself nearer the tent. He rubbed a runny nose and tried to stay out of the way of the orating Hauptsturmführer.
“Oberscharführer,” the commander said with a declaring tone. “You told me you conceived of some peculiar task or endeavor. A match to test their wits. I would like to see this display of their ferocity.”
“Ja, Hauptsturmführer,” Lessing said with a twisted smile. He passed the heavy-jawed commander and vanished behind the tent.
The raven sent out a stutter call on its branch. I wanted to answer with whistles, so nervous was I now, but knew such a thing would turn ugly for me.
A sigh came from our commander. I felt he knew something the others could not fathom.
“You soldier,” he pointed at me. “What is wrong with you?”
His question hit with the force of a hammer slamming down on my toe.
“Me, Hauptsturmführer?” I stuttered out.
“No, not you. Your comrade to the right of you.”
“Oh, Schroeder, sir,” I said, and my voice was so deep it almost made me choke with embarrassment.
“Yes, Schroeder,” the officer said. “What’s wrong with you that you can’t keep still at attention?”
“Sir,” Schroeder half yelped. “Permission to fall out.”
“For what?”
“To use the latrine, sir,” and he started to slur his words. “Sir, err.”
““Fall out of ranks, but it will be your duty, for showing discomposure in ranks, to clean the latrines.”
“Ja, Hauptsturmführer,” Schroeder cried and he waddled out of ranks. He took a painful passage to the latrine, all the while, walking like a duck over every disturbance of ground he had to push himself over.
“Anyone else feel they need to relieve themselves?” asked our commander.
No one answered.
“Well then,” and the officer paced about while conversing with his second officer.
Lessing came out from behind the tent. He led a black goat by the leash. It trudged along the dirt very near his leg and let out snorts from its pudgy nose.
“Baa!” Lessing shouted. “You are all Rotten. It’s time to kick the hams out of you.”
I wondered what had driven Lessing to throw in such a stunt. He regarded murder as entertainment. The Oberscharführer, slipped his other hand into the neck of his shirt, took up a shiny whistle hung by thread, and put it to his lips. We all knew what to do when he blew into this instrument.
“Rotten, I say! All of you are rotten swine!” Lessing proclaimed, reddening in the face. He blew the whistle.
I broke into a scream that almost ripped out my vocal chords. Everyone followed in succession. Soon nothing could be heard over our loud chorus and we became a formation of rancorous barbarians.
“Rotten, I say,” Lessing kept on shouting, but he was deafened by our shrieks. In my mind, I conceived that even a hunter could hear us from a mile’s distance. There were a few days amongst our training, when our sergeant would order a soldier to steal a goat from a local farm, then forced us to chase it for our evening meal. Lessing began the cruel game to encourage our ferocity, now I knew he did it to show off. The goal was to end the pursuit before the goat made passage into the wood. We were forbidden to advance beyond the stretch of clearing for our Oberscharführer knew of its invitation to weak boys who wanted to run away from camp. If we let the dinner escape, our stomachs were left growling until breakfast, and that was far worse then murdering an animal born with a death sentence.
“You sound like a bunch of lousy chickens!” Lessing screamed, both of the officers behind him laughed at the spectacle. “You’re a pitiful sight.” He let the whistle drop. “Silence!”
We went quiet in unison. My throat burned from the loud outbursts.
“There were a few, “Lessing began. “So very few among you soldiers who performed mightily in their fight for everything, but some of you will have to give more than others to prove yourself.” The goat cried at his heels, suffering great agony from the tautness of the rope around its neck. “You all fight in the end, fight for your safety, fight for the Fatherland, fight for the air you breathe, it’s all a fight, this challenge called life. Now you fight to prove yourselves over your comrades, to prove your might over the herd. To live, you must live to surpass others, to rise up as leaders.”
I wanted him to stop talking. His speech only lengthened the anguish of knowing what physical hells awaited us in the chase for the goat. Besides, my ears were deaf to such speeches from the Oberscharführer, I only listened when he gave orders.
“A soldier should never be afraid to die. Oh, no . . . for dying is the easy way out. He should be afraid of giving up,” Lessing said, affably. “Or what good is he?”
He blew the whistle to get us started. Once again, the wild chorus began, our voices breaking the stillness that hung over the clearing. We screamed as if ready to charge into a pack of lions and give them a good fight.
Lessing knelt near the goat, gripped its rope collar and took it off. He threw a kick against the animal’s hams. The goat screamed and ran for the forest.
“Angriff!” the Oberscharführer commanded.
We went on the hunt. Our prey made quick bounds over the gravel paths, making great progress, almost losing us in the confines of the camp. I spun around at Lessing’s command and ran to get in with the pack. Steel helmets in front of me bobbed as the wearers took fast leaps over furrows in the gravel. Others to the left screamed confident they would win the prize. I had hardly crossed the last row of tents when pain surged up from my feet. The feet scraped against knots in the inside leather. I wanted to stop, to tie the shoelaces, but after a quick glance over my shoulder, and seeing the officers and sergeant staring at me, I knew the pain had to be endured.
“I’ll get in front of the brush line. We’ll grab it there!” said Heinrich, who ran at the head of the pack, throwing his legs out in front of him with fantastic strides.
The beast split through grass like a rapid scythe. I was frightened it would get away. This goat became a bullet and did not halt for anything. I put my faith in the smart movements of Heinrich’s band of hunters, forerunners in the charge, who had proven before the Kompanie their expertise in delivering miraculous kills.
The line of gray uniforms in front of me broke into groups. Heinrich’s clan remained on the left, rushing far ahead of the others. The slower pursuers struggled to keep step in the center. I ran behind the cream of the center force, a position responsible for smashing the beast under weight of numbers. To quicken the pace I swung my arms against the air and took longer strides.
These movements made me feel as if leaping over clouds. I quickly drove through the front-runners and came out into the open. My lungs scooped up breaths in short mouthfuls. The strain of the muscles pushing to their limits welcomed an end to the pain in my feet. The goat was not far off and I could smell it.
Boys from behind followed my example. They came close, legs dashing over the grass in flashes, faces a beet red, and a smirk of confidence across their sweaty lips. I tried in vain to keep ahead but they passed without notice of my presence and kept up a ferocious pace. One runner lost his footing and fell on his stomach.
Heinrich’s boys reached the brush line, a stretch of soil bordering the forest, yet discovered they had come up too late. The goat was already beyond their grasp, just now leaping over a ditch and into the safety of shadowy pines. A weight sunk into my stomach. I slowed to a walk, hungry, defeated, and aware there would be no hope of a meal. It was unlike any other: I had never seen such a devil breed of goat. I could only guess that it blew fire out of its arse to fuel its brisk retreat.
A baaing erupted from the forest, followed by loud thumps as if fists beat into tree stumps.
“I’ve got him!” A shout resounded not far away.
I took up the chase again. I was eager to discover if my predictions were correct. Had the prize not been lost? But how could it have been otherwise? We had all seen the beast defeat even the finest runners’ attempts with its resilient speed.
Where the grass ended, the ground fell into a thin furrow of mud, then rose into the brown pine-needled floor. I leaped over the ditch and found Schroeder wrestling with the beast before a copse. The boy who minutes ago left our formation to relieve his bladder had now become the hero in our chase. He threw himself atop the goat’s backside and locked his arms around the neck. There was still a lot of fight in the goat, it threw out its forward hoofs in a struggle to get free, sent out ear-piercing baas, and shoveled with hindquarters into the moist earth.
Heinrich was first to come to Schroeder’s aid. He lifted the goat’s rear legs and held them tight together. He told others meandering about to lie over the chest. Gray mobs swarmed the beast, some sat on its stomach to catch breath, others walked around or bent low with hands on knees to watch. I went in and swung my arm over the place of the neck shown to me by Schroeder. As I lay near the goat, the firm skin on its side shook and I heard the vicious breathing within its recesses. How close our prey had come to freedom, I thought, so near to running away, and now all hope of it seeing another day had been shattered in an instant.
“It stinks,” a boy said who sat on the goat’s belly.
“What stinks, you?” Heinrich asked.
“No this goat smells. Smells like dirty drawers.”
“Well, it’s not that bad,” said Wernøe . “The smell of dirty drawers. One could get used to the smell of such things when there’s no cigarettes around.”
“You’re a sick bastard, shut your mouth,” Heinrich said.
“Now we know who digs in our shit and comes not hungry for breakfast,” said another boy.
“Ja, Wernøe you’re the sickest dog in camp. Why don’t you come wipe our arses when we go sit at the latrines?”
“Shush,” Wernøe said. “Get the hell off it.”
Then the goat went crazy. I almost let go after a violent jolt sent my legs flying. It rose to its haunches, dragging us over to a tree. We managed to pin it against tree bark.
“Get a hold of it!” Heinrich cried. “Don’t let it run.”
I dug my fingernails into its rough skin. They went so deep I thought they would draw blood. The goat bayed in terror and pain.
“With everyone’s permission I think we should kill it now,” someone suggested.
“Who’s going to kill it?” another boy asked.
“Don’t let Heinrich do it again! He’s always done it. Let’s get one of the weaker ones,” said Wernøe .
It was not hard to guess who would be chosen as the butcher.
“Hermann,” Heinrich proclaimed.
I caught sight of my innocent companion among the crowd of gray tunics. He was solemn and standing in a way that seemed to say, “I am here, but I don’t want to be.” When Heinrich called to him, he hesitated. He sent a circling gaze at all the faces around him. They looked back with malicious grins.
“Come on Hermann, pick up that rock over there and take its life,” Heinrich said.
They made savage jerks at his tunic. Some called him an Ivan. One boy did all the initial work for him by lifting up a boulder at the base of a trunk and putting it into the youth’s hands. I knew he would not do it. He had too much heart to hurt a defenseless animal.
“What are you a coward?” asked Heinrich. “Come on.”
And to my amazement, Hermann did come up to the large goat’s head with his boulder. He let out a few animal-like proclamations as if to surprise those who doubted his ferocity and looked ready to smash the helpless thing without further encouragement.
“Take its life!” the mob chanted. “Kill it before it sees you!”
I wanted to turn away and run, something the goat would have done without a second thought, but the others kept staring at me. From their malicious glances, I figured they knew we were the two anchors holding the Kompanie back from meeting Lessing’s standards. It would have been silly to go against their expectations.
The goat’s head flipped over and stared at me with bloodshot eyes. Just seeing the beast made my soul cripple under the weight of a passion to spare its life. Soon the suffering this animal felt would be gone with the arrival of death, but the wait for the end to come, the last minutes and seconds before the stroke, terrified my afflicted mind. “Why do living things have to die?” I thought. I saw my father in the beast’s black face. There was the tan pallor of his cheeks and chestnut hair upon his scalp. I could not remember what he had told my mother before he left, but it was evident from his battle dress, and the steel helmet he had put on his head with so much care, that father had left to go into a hellish battle. He gave me the same stare of suffering as the goat gave now, the eyes crying for an escape from an inevitable future. Words spoke through his powerful look. They said, “Run away, run away,” in repetitive slurs. He knew after stepping outside the door he would never return.
“Could you hurry it up?” Heinrich said, and stabbed Hermann with a stick to quicken him. “Lessing won’t let us stay here longer than a few minutes.”
“I will,” Hermann said. He waited for a moment, and then swung his rock over his helmet with a grunt. The weight of it almost sent him falling backwards.
A flap of wings broke branches in a tree above me. I thought nothing of it until the bird cawed. I looked up and it cawed again. A raven with night feathers clung to a limb, yet I could have sworn my father sat there, for I heard the same entreaty in its chirp. “Run away, run away,” the hidden voice said, but running away was impossible, it could not be done, and I felt hopeless.
The rock fell in one mighty swing from Hermann’s arms. It cracked the goat’s skull, spraying blood at the onlookers. The hind legs shot up for one last kick and then sank dead to the earth. Hermann stood over the beast, wiping off blood that had splashed onto his neck. It was his first kill. He gave me a questioning gaze that seemed to ask forgiveness for what he had done and then a false grin came over his lips as the others began to laugh.
“Good job, Hermann,” Heinrich said. “Now you got to drink this.” Heinrich went to him with hands cupped around a pool of blood, and put it to his mouth.
“Open wide,” he said. Hermann complied and Heinrich spilled the black grossness down his throat.
“Taste good?”
Hermann swallowed.
“Hah, hah,” Heinrich jeered. “There might be a soldier in him after all.” He gave his new friend a pat on the shoulder. “Let’s get this goat out of here!”
Heinrich took up the corpse’s rear and nodded commands to the others to help raise the head and torso. Boys who held the bloodiest parts kept the flesh in the air so as not to let it rest on their biceps where it could soil the uniform.
We carried the goat into camp. It weighed upon us. Not only was it heavy, but smelly, and the black hairs prickled against my hand. The face of the goat was still in memory: a pudgy nose, father’s eyes, stubs that sprung like a devil’s. I saw in the corpse my father’s last moments in life. Ivan ran at him in countless numbers, too many to lock in a pin, men who were taught to carry machine guns and fire at anything that wore a steel helmet. He fought them knowing he would die. Death to him was the goat and I was the goat.

CHAPTER FOUR

The officers grinned as we went by them with our kill. When I saw our Hauptsturmführer, his cheeks flushed crimson. He came over to us, arms akimbo, and shook his head in disbelief.
“I told you, sir,” I heard Lessing say behind him. “These soldiers hunger.”
The officer smirked in reply.
“Why carry it?” I thought to myself. Let the officer have the kill. Its death came as an answer to my own doubts : bravery and valor were nothing under the unforeseen powers of nature. If the officer’s conception of life was so misshapen by self-righteousness that he had forgotten mortality, I decided it would be better to leave him with the offer to bite into the flesh.
With a military solemnity, our Oberscharführer led our pack to the washbasin, where in a triumphant tone he proclaimed, “Lassen Sie fallen es!”
We flung the beast to the ground. It felt better not having the weight to bear on my frame and I shrugged my left arm to relieve the soreness. The thought of the upcoming feast as a reward for our travails made me shudder with revulsion. To eat away at my father’s memory would be a disgrace to my love for him. The goat’s meat was tainted with his presence and would corrupt my insides with every swallow.
“Bilden Sie auf,” Lessing commanded.
We scattered to restore a formation. I stepped in place next to Schroeder, got my distance, and then came to parade rest. Once all the soldiers stood in ranks, the officers appeared again in front of us, my ears waiting in anticipation for what they would have to say.
“Stillgastanden!” Lessing yelled.
I snapped to attention. Flies buzzed by, probably hoping to alight on our fallen prize.
“I see no further training is needed,” began the Hauptsturmführer, standing between his second officer and Lessing. The grin he had shone us only minutes before broke from his lips. It expressed pleasure in our brutality. “For your reward, all of you will tomorrow go home to your families on leave. Be proud for proving yourself as soldiers. Our Führer will be proud of you.”
Joy sprang from my heart. I wanted to leap into the air and scream with gladness. This was it! I had waited a month to hear those words. My original conceptions of the officer fell away with this final proclamation and I wanted to hug him for his graciousness. Though it was difficult, I hid my feelings behind a serious demeanor. In two or three days mother would see me in my uniform, a grown man, and her loneliness on the farm would come to an end.
“Who killed the buck?” Lessing asked.
“I, Oberscharführer!” Hermann shouted from behind me.
“You?” the Oberscharführer replied in a sarcastic voice and he muttered something under his breath. “Come forward our ‘little’ warrior,” and he empathized the word “little” with a disdainful high pitch in his voice.
Hermann ran to the front of the formation showing nervousness in his quick strides.
Lessing took from the sheath on his belt a dagger and held it, the handle end pointing forward at Hermann.
“Take it,” he said.
For a moment, Lessing kept a firm grasp around the blade. Probably mindful of the eyes peering at him, he soon gave way to the force tugging at the opposite side, slice marks left on his palm from holding the steel, and our little warrior became possessor of the weapon.
“Schütze,” Lessing said to him. “You have proven yourself worthy as a brave fighter amongst all of us. For your brave action, I bestow on you the honor of skinning the buck. Your comrades will help with the gutting. Do you accept this responsibility?”
“Ja Oberscharführer,” Hermann said.
“Good. Then the matter is settled,” he stepped back, gave a curt nod to the Hauptsturmführer, and then made a turn on his heels to look at us. “You have thirty minutes to make this buck hairless and ready for the fire. Any slackers will be punished, don’t worry. Just remember, it must be hairless, no junk left in the belly. Those who I feel did not put their all into this childish chore will be served with guts and intestines, and you will eat everything up or be chosen as participants for my new exercise.”
Any exercise devised by Lessing raised horrible possibilities in my mind. I remembered one of his previous creations to enforce discipline that had left one boy with gashes on his hands and knees.
“Kompanie austreten!”
With a shout of “hurrah”, soldiers broke ranks and ran for the goat. Before I left my place, Lessing gave me a disgruntled look. He let the officers disappear into the tent and then stepped close, scratching at his chin while staring at me. As if ready to say something, his lips made a motion, but nothing came out. He spun around and went for the door of his tent, but as he held onto the cover, showing only the back of his steel helmet he shouted, “Schütze Krueger.”
“Ja Oberscharführer,” I said, afraid to breathe.
“It’s your turn for night duty. Report to me after eating.”
“Ja Oberscharführer.”
This order from the sergeant filled me with disappointment. The exciting prospect of having a full night’s rest before leaving had now become impossible. I went over to Hermann, wishing he had a rifle so he could shoot me, but he stood there with a smile, presumably glad at having been favorably noticed by the Oberscharführer.
“He’ll take that knife if you don’t start,” I said to him and knew Hermann understood that I meant Lessing would take it if he were not quick to fulfill his responsibility.
“I know,” he answered and ran to the goat. The boys held the beast by the sides, keeping its back in the gravel and the belly up. I kept behind Hermann as he came over to shave the hair off its breast with the blade.
“Hurry!” the soldiers said, as the steel flashed across the chest, leaving bloody punctures in its skin from rapid swipes.
“You’re going too slow!” Heinrich said. “Let me do it, you’re not doing it right. Here,” and he stole the knife from Hermann and went to work on the goat’s undersides, raising giggles from soldiers when he sliced off the genitals. As he snipped at the hairs on its back, his hands and knife dripped with blood. His progress was sloppy but swift.
“It’s ready,” Heinrich said, and we lifted the goat off the ground, now hairless in the sun, and threw it into the washbasin. Water rose from the tub and splashed on us as the body sunk and we gave the beast a few dunks in the liquid, blood swirling up to the surface with every push until it became a red bath.
“Get it out,” said Wittor, a blonde-haired youth, first to announce that most of the fuzz had been washed away, and we pulled the corpse out and took it to a space behind the basin where the earth lay moist from a previous rain. As I brought the buck down, water fell from it onto my face and shoulders, soaking my uniform.
With the skinning done, Heinrich thrust the blade into the goat’s neck cavity and split through the body’s midsection. A sour smell arose from flesh as the steel cut a seam in the skin, slicing further down to the belly and lower abdomen, where stringy intestines fell out in a red slime. I stooped over this wound and began shoveling out the innards. It was the worst job in the whole process, but others knew I could rip through it without any abhorrence, and so they stood by to watch as my hands tore into the flesh and threw out organs. As I dug my hands further into its recesses, they emerged slimy.
After removing the last of the refuse, I backed away, my mind in a swirl. Something peculiar had arisen in my thoughts about this goat that had not affected me in gutting previous catches. I felt as if I were disemboweling my father. With every tug at the entrails, I saw him crying in pain, his legs smashed by shell fragments. It was horrific. I wanted to stop, but my hands had kept working, controlled by a mindless urge to get things done, and there came the shrieks from father with each pull, forcing me to succumb to his pain. When I had finished, this mental anguish had risen to such fervor that tears came to my eyes. I had to turn around and hide my sobs, so that others would not see the weakness plaguing my soul.
“Otto,” Hermann said, and I felt him press upon my back. I tried to choke back tears, but their sudden onrush made it impossible, and as he sought my attention, I turned away.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing. Just go help them,” I said. For a second, the gumption arose within me to tell my comrade about my affliction, but this desire was dismissed for knowing that soldiers nearby would overhear and think it wrong to utter such things.
“Don’t forget, you have to clean this mess,” Hermann said, pointing to guts lying about. He ran to catch up with others carrying the corpse to the fire pit. The cooking area lay about fifty yards behind Lessing’s tent and in the center of this clearing stood a pile of rocks flanked by two wooden poles supporting a spit. It was impossible to see it from where I stood, but I knew its every detail from memory.
With head bent, I went toward my tent to retrieve a mess pot for the digestive organs. Flies followed, landing on my hands, and tickled the skin. In the distance was heard the shuffling of feet as the soldiers neared their objective.
“Hear this, hear this,” Lessing said from inside his tent, and his voice died away under a howling wind that flew against the corridor of shelters, then was heard again much louder saying, “Ivan will be surprised. He won’t know how to deal with these soldiers.”
The words sounded false as he said them.
“Deal with these soldiers,” I muttered to myself. They knew how to deal with my father, I thought. They shot him dead and went on to kill others.
The pot lay inside the door of the tent, half hidden under a wall cloth. I took hold of it and went over to the mess left over from the gutting. The organs were gritty with dirt and as I tossed them into the pail flies flew off the films of grime, and clung to my shirt.
A simple job, under the effect of these thoughts of my father, had now transformed into a repugnant duty. I began to reflect on my father’s last moments before he left for the battlefield. He knew his place in an army outnumbered by an invading horde and he did have doubts of a successful return home from the front. Many times when I sat down to dinner with him, he would start a discussion on the probability of his survival in a battle against opposing forces.
“Otto,” he had told me. “Never find yourself alone on the field. A soldier has greater chances in getting out if he’s with comrades. I’ve seen too many dead, who were careless. Who thought they could beat Ivan all by themselves, and guess what they got? A bullet in the back. Always stick with comrades, or you’ll be running with death.”
When he had spoken those words, I knew they were the truth. My father had seen war’s ugliness, and never, despite my entreaties, told me about its glories.
“Your instructors say you are superior to the enemy,” he chuckled after a brief talk I had with him on lessons learned during my day in a Hitlerjugend institution. “They say, whatever you do, only victory can result, for our race is superior. Your teachers tell you only the lies. Soldiers live by chance and chance alone. The moment you’re thrown into the fire, it’s only you and a rifle, no superhuman strength will keep you alive. It’s like jumping into the ocean, with the waves crushing, and if you go too far out, you might be caught in a rip. The rip doesn’t care who it pulls, Ivan, Tommy, or Ami, it kills all. And that’s what you can expect from war.”
To him, war was an abomination, yet under the pervasive ideologies running counter to his beliefs, others who I thought would be open to hearing his truths, would make themselves impenetrable through their practice of false ideals. “Heil Hitler!” was their answer to anything, and if asked what religion they professed, since Christianity was looked down upon, the response was, “blood and soil.” Jesus remained a living presence in my heart; even through the years of my indoctrination into the country’s principles, the Holy Spirit kept my soul from sinking into an abyss where everything held material significance. I had father to thank for keeping my faith intact. He prayed during the nights he was home at the farm on leave and told me never to give Him up, for from Him came the strength to live under the uncertainties of the future. In my circumstances as a soldier, I hid my religious beliefs, conveying my faith only to Hermann, but if the time came to stand for my convictions, it would take more than torture to sway me into atheism.
“Blood and soil,” I muttered under my breath and sent a mocking look at the organs in the pail. Bloody and dark with grime these intestines revealed a horrid side to what we were taught to worship. If I believe only in guts, I thought, why exist?
From behind came footsteps. I turned to see Lessing, striding towards me, his trousers so tight around his legs that the bottom seams rose above his boots. It was apparent from the tense look on his face, with eyes bulging and brows in a wry upturn, that a sudden worry had arisen to disturb him.
“Achtung!” I shouted, and came to customary attention.
“Where’s the Kompanie?” he barked.
“Oberscharführer, they are trussing the goat.”
“And you, are you done with this!” and he pointed at wet impressions left on the gravel.
“Ja Oberscharführer!” I said.
“Then go to your comrades. We must get the fire kindled, or it’ll be too late to eat.”
“Ja Oberscharführer!”
I broke into a sprint for the other soldiers, swinging the pail at my side, and when getting amongst them, I saw the goat was already stretched on the spit over a pile of logs.
“Did you bring a match?” Heinrich asked, alighting from one of the rocks around the pit. He gave a sneer when looking at the gore within my bucket.
“No,” I said. “But the Oberscharführer, is coming this way too. He will have one.”
As I said this, Lessing trudged up to our gathering and we went to attention.
“Men, ready to go?” he asked in a calm voice.
“Ja Oberscharführer,” we answered.
The sergeant took out a match from his shirt pocket, struck it against a rock, and put his palm around it when a fire sprung. Before approaching the pit, he grinned at us.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You wish there were cigarettes for the end of this match. I see the hunger. Don’t deny it, Wernøe .”
Wernøe stared with a pitiable expression at the sergeant. I was astonished Lessing knew him so well as to guess precisely at his feelings.
“Only a day, can you wait a day, schütze?”
“Ja Oberscharführer,” said Wernøe, but with no fervor in the words: the others could guess he was lying.
“Let us hope so,” he said, and it was the first time I had seen our sergeant in a congenial mood in our presence. He bent over the logs, let the match fall from his fingers onto a dry twig, and stood there in wait for a spark to arise. Nothing resulted from this attempt.
“Heinrich get me a dead branch from the forest,” he said, still leaning over the pit. “Hurry.”
It took a minute for the boy to return with a bundle of twigs. He went to Lessing and kept them under another lit match. As the sergeant stuck it between twigs, the needles were set ablaze, and Heinrich threw the pile onto the logs. The flames spread to larger lengths of wood, crawling along bark in orange waves, which snapped at the air.
“That’s more like it. Good,” Lessing said.
The fire swallowed the surrounding wood, its appetite unquenchable, its arcing peaks grew higher until fluttering only a hair’s breadth below the goat.
“That’s how quick a tank burns once you hit it with a panzerfaust,” the sergeant remarked. “But it’s wise not to be near one when that happens.”
A few soldiers giggled at this jest from Lessing, but others kept mindful of the sergeant’s disdain for exuberance and kept silent.
“Mmm,” he said. “You can already smell it. I believe we will have some fine meat tonight, do you not think so, Hermann?”
“Good meat, Oberscharführer. Good meat,” and the childish tone in which these words were spoken from Hermann’s mouth, made us all chuckle.
“You hear that soldiers. Only a warrior can give such an honest opinion. Grand!” Then with a mocking look at Hermann, he gave him a slap on the back, and laughed. “Good meat, good meat,” he said, imitating Hermann but with failing grace.
This change in Lessing was very unusual. After being brutish for several weeks, his formal conversation with us now seemed out of keeping with his military ideals, yet it gave me a firmer respect for him. He, like us, knew how to giggle at comical things.
“Hermann, what did you do before joining the ranks?” Lessing asked.
“I was a Hitlerjugend¸ Oberscharführer.”
“And what did you do there?” Mindful of our standing around at attention he said, “Sit down everyone.”
We sat on the gravel staring up at this changed man, who held none of the animosity seen in previous days, and who seemed ready to befriend us.
“I was a mechanic, Oberscharführer.”
“Ah, mechanic,” Lessing answered. “Did you drive a motorcycle like we did in training? Did they teach you all the ins and outs of mechanical knowledge?”
“To me and five others around you, Oberscharführer.”
Lessing pointed at random soldiers and asked, “Who has working knowledge of motorcycles? Do not stand up, but let the mechanics around here show me their hands.”
I raised my hand, being one of the boys who had gone through the same schools as Hermann.
“It’s always helpful to understand mechanics,” Lessing said. “I’m proud of our panzer crews, fighting bravely out there against Ivan. There have been times where I have owed my life to them. Machines make an army strong; without them, it makes very difficult the usefulness of foot soldiers.”
“My father drives a panzer, Oberscharführer,” mentioned a soldier sitting on a rock, Hulf, whose long white face peaked in the center with a sharp nose. He was the sharpshooter of our Kompanie, having made perfect scores on all our visits to the rifle range. “He drives the new Tiger tanks.”
“Oh the monsters,” Lessing said. “Not even Ivan knows how to stop one. When I saw one in Warsaw, painted over with camouflage, I was surprised how large it was. The gun on the turret was humungous, long as a boxcar. Amazing. Well.” Lessing brushed hands against his trousers. “You know what to do, men. I must get back to my tent. Keep watch on the buck. Turn the spit, whatever it takes to get it prepared. When the buck is cooked, and you feel it’s ready to be eaten, I expect a soldier of the Kompanie to stop by my quarters and notify me of its readiness.”
“Ja Oberscharführer,” we answered and got to our feet.
“I warn you all, if the buck’s overcooked, there will be reprisals waiting for the Kompanie, and I know how all of you like my reprisals.”
“We will not fail you, Oberscharführer,” hollered Heinrich.
The Oberscharführer went back to his tent. We stared at him in awe.
“What happened to him?” asked Wernøe , his face distorted with shock.
“I must be dreaming,” said Schroeder, the dark brows rising high above his eyes. “This is too much for me to handle. Did Lessing just say those things? Did they hit him with a hammer?”
My personal reflections upon this matter were that the officers had something to do with the sudden change in Lessing. When he disappeared into the tent, the feeling of awe still hung in my brain, and I wondered if his transformation would last. Only the span of an evening could tell if the change was permanent. What worried me was the possibility that his good mood would vanish with the arrival of night guard duty, when the absence of protection provided by the swelling ranks might have an affect on his persona, and urge him to direct his pent-up wrath at my mishaps.

CHAPTER FIVE

Night came. The trees outside camp appeared as dark pillars gating a primeval hell: behind laid only an abyss, hiding strange carrion crying from its depths to break the stillness. Pine tops stabbed into the starry sky forming a corrugated backdrop for the flames. Our fire burned full, its energy growing more powerful with the wood thrown on it, and sparks flew into the air. We sat round our hearth, tearing at the last of the goat meat with our teeth, and talking about the good things that might await us at home.
“I don’t know what my mother will think of me when I walk through the door,” Schroeder said. “She’ll probably cry. I don’t really know. It seems so strange when you think of home here. It’s different, almost like an imaginary place. I will have a better answer once I return from leave.”
A gleam cast from the fire shone on him and his eyes sparkled. A cool wind blew at us from the trees, slanting the sheets of flame so that their tongues lashed out at the camp. I felt warm in my corner near the pit, standing on the gravel with Schroeder, drafts of hot air from the fire buffeting the wind’s attempt to creep in and chill our skin.
“My mother will probably take me to a pub,” I said to him. “She used to always go with father and get drunk when he came home from the front. She will do the same with me,” and I stopped to chew at the meat on a rib. Hunger had won over my indecent thoughts about its consumption. My belly was full and with every swallow it seemed to be heaving to spit up its burden, but I ate on, knowing the food would be put to use on the evening watch.
“You pig,” said Schroeder.
“What?” I said, taking offence at his harsh words.
“That’s the fifth serving you have eaten today. How do you do it?”
“I just don’t eat so much of the morning’s grub.”
“What a pig. What if Lessing decides it’s time for a run, what will you do then?”
“Throw it up, I guess,” I laughed.
“And Lessing will kick you in a ditch,” he said.
“So what if he kicks me in a ditch, it’s better than a mess kit spanked against my arse,” I said reminding Schroeder of the time he was slapped in the buttocks by Lessing with his own mess kit for talking in ranks. “Besides, this is the final day. He wouldn’t be cruel enough to throw in any such tricks.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. You still have to see him tonight.”
“See him I will,” I shouted as a rebuff. “And I will make sure to tell him you wish to be woken before dawn to clean your shirts for tomorrow.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I will,” I said, laughing at my devil-may-care attitude.
“If you do, I will no longer be your comrade.”
“You are so gullible,” and I tossed the clean rib into the pit. “Ratters are all swine. They’re only good for the fire. I would never do such a thing. I’m not dirt.”
“Here,” Schroeder said and he bent down, took a towel from his trouser pocket, and swiped at fallen particles of dust that threatened to diminish the mirror shine on my boots. This gesture filled me with kindness toward his generosity. For the span of a half an hour, I had toiled at my footgear with the cotton of the wet sleeve of a tunic, as others cooked the meal. “You don’t want to start your duty on the wrong foot, if you know what I mean.” He rose to look at me again, a smile breaking from his thin lips, “Lessing can see a smudge on a pair of boots blindfolded.”
“Dunke,” I said to him.
“That’s for not meaning what you said,” he chuckled.
Heinrich, appearing from around the fire without a helmet on his head, approached me.
“Time to report for guard duty or get the punishment,” he said.
“I know.”
“Are you ready?”
“I have to go back and get my rifle.”
“Then what are you standing around for?”
As soon as I trudged away from the fire, a cool wind lashed at me, causing a chill to crawl up under my shirt and into my skin. I gritted my teeth, hoping the pain would abate after my body grew accustomed to the sudden temperature change. Evenings in the forests were always bitter, even in the summer time, and now, in the autumn, the winds blew in preparation for winter. The ground, muddy in the day, was hard and frosty at night. With a quick pace, I ran to the tent, images of Lessing with a malicious grin on his face terrifying my mind.
“One more night,” I said to myself. “Then there will only be mother and the pub and maybe the taste of Schnapps rolling down my throat.” I wanted so much to leave, to climb over the white fence around father’s farm with its wooden sign carrying our artistically lettered family name: “Krueger”. Then I would rush into the barn, forgetting my knapsack, to see how Mola, the white calf of our stead was doing with only mother to milk her. Everything will be just as I dreamed it would be. Mother will be the same as when I left her those long forgotten months ago and her love will embrace me and will make me feel as if I had never left the barn to lose myself in this place. A soldier I may be, but home, an abode of tranquility, where there is no one to punish a man for dereliction of duty, is heaven.
The wind howled in my ears under the steel helmet and I shivered against the chill.
“Why did we not get the autumn parkas the soldiers were getting on the front,” I thought to myself. “Maybe Lessing thinks our health is expendable.”
The flap door of my tent lay open, rippling in the breeze, like a sail torn off a ship’s mast, and when a roll of gray cloth in the fire’s gleam filled with air, I took hold and pushed it to the side. Inside the tent, there was pitch darkness.
“What else do I need?” I muttered to myself. “Yes, my rifle.”
At the far corner of the tent, rifles were stacked in such a way that soldiers knew from memory their exact position. Remembering that mine lay third from the left, I put my hands on the first steel barrel, felt the second, and then, without regard to toppling the pyramid, I took my rifle and ran outside, a loud clatter trailing my footsteps.
The cold breeze bit at me again as I left the tent. I came to Lessing’s quarters, lit dimly by a lamp. The glow threw an orange triangle on the space of ground in front of the door and its appearance seemed almost unpleasant amidst the dark expanse. Hesitation kept me from making a step on to this platform of light.
“What will Lessing think of me?” I thought to myself. “He will find something wrong, he will cast me into my tent and order me to get ready for a run. I can’t make this step. I must make this step,” and my foot crossed the darkness into the orange shade.
Through a gap in the tent, I saw Lessing standing as he talked to two officers who sat on stools. They ate goat’s meat and their backs, behind the wall cloth, hid from view the forward portion of their uniforms. The light from a hidden lamp made their expressions and movements less hostile and the good-hearted look on their faces as they spoke to Lessing, the Hauptsturmführer squinting his eyes after a jest from his second in command, caused him to slap his left pant leg in deference, made me feel not afraid to enter this world of superior men.
“Oberscharführer, Schütze Krueger requests permission to enter,” I said. Fear rose within my heart as these same people who had laughed with such grand happiness before the coming of my voice, now got up from their stools with serious demeanor, and gazed at me through the door.
“Schütze Krueger?” Lessing said in confusion, as if he had forgotten I was to arrive here for guard duty. “Yes,” he said. “Report!”
I stepped inside, timid before all the eyes fastened on me. Their formidable presence, clad in gray uniforms with epaulettes and badges, and the silence pervading their stares, shattered a comfort barrier that held my mind in check and kept others from noticing any sign of personal distress. Now that this wall was broken, I screwed up my eyes to see them only in a blur. This reaction allowed me to bear many difficult situations where it was impossible to stare into another’s face without showing surprise.
“Oberscharführer, Schütze Krueger reporting for duty,” I said, snapping to attention.
In the haze rising from my distorted vision, a vague form I recognized as the body of the Hauptsturmführer by his tallness, came up to Lessing, and then looked at me.
“Is this the soldier you’ve been telling me about?” he asked.
“Yes,” Lessing said. “He can speak Slavic like any dirty partisan. He know’s a little bit of English, too.”
“Astounding.”
“Schütze, where did you learn to speak the enemy’s tongue?” Lessing asked.
“My mother, Oberscharführer,” I said, thinking back to my youth when she would sing slavic lullabies to put me to sleep. “But she is half Slavic,” I went on again, trying to clear my name. “My grandfather, a peasant, poorer than a beggar, came to Germany to find a good life. My mother, she was born here, in Bavaria.”
“And your father,” put in the smart looking officer, an Untersturmführer. “What is his nationality?”
“Of pure Aryan blood, sir,” I stammered out.
“That assures he’s not a dissident,” the second officer continued. He too could not be seen with clarity under the self-imposed mist thrown in front of my eyes and he appeared in two blurry halves.
“The country needs soldiers like you who can speak Ivan’s tongue,” the Hauptsturmführer said. “Have you heard of partisan warfare schütze?”
“Jawohl,” I answered.
“He knows where his duty lies,” he said, grinning probably at the serious tone in which the answer came from my mouth. “You just wait,” he added, turning to the sergeant. “It’s self-evident through the work they have displayed in training, that Ivan will be at a loss. Especially with this young fellow, just by looking at him,” and the Hauptsturmführer stepped in front of me, observing my stern complexion as I stood at attention. “He’s got the heart of a warrior and the build too.”
“I agree, sir,” Lessing said. I unscrewed my eyes while gazing at the sergeant and saw he was growing agitated with the conversation. “He is more thin than muscular, though, but that’s what is needed in the east, a schütze who can run where his duty calls. Should I dismiss him to take on his duties?”
“Certainly, Oberscharführer,” the commander replied.
“Give me your rifle, schütze,” Lessing ordered. I let the strap fall from my shoulder, he took the firearm, rubbing the barrel and stock with his hands, then thumbing the chamber with a quick look inside, he gave the rifle back. “Your rifle is satisfactory.”
With a deft movement, I slung the rifle into its rightful position.
“You know where to patrol,” he said. “Make a circle around the camp, walk by the tents, make sure no lights are on. I don’t have to remind you again, do I?”
“No, Oberscharführer,” I said, feeling the want of slumber at this inopportune moment, the start of a long night’s ordeal. I believed the sergeant had given me guard duty as a form of torture. Maybe he knew my thoughts just by staring into my soul with those impenetrable blue eyes. There had to have been some demon taking residence within him, who, during periods like after our skinning of the swine, prompted good action with hidden motives. Now the demon smiled through his glassy stare and I knew this did not reflect appeasement, but the desire to inflict horrible acts of viciousness on a boy he held as much respect for as a wild dog.
“Then leave us,” he said.
I cut a swift turn on my heels and went out into the cold. The fire shone itself in the distance, a flickering monster of light. Around the flames, shadows shot in front of its breath, casting darker imprints on ground already made black under the night sky. These obscurations were soldiers who had hung around the pit to clear the mess left over from the evening meal. I noticed Heinrich, shoveling dirt onto the fire to snuff it out. Others joined him in this task. Curious, I went up to them.
The fire made hisses under thrown earth. It still hung on in its struggle for life as piles fell into its breathing mass. With a brief look at this free spirit spawned from nature, a hungry animal that devoured without remorse, nor hated the things it could kill, I looked up at the stars. The moon sat above the pines, a brilliant coin with a distraught expression. It had just begun a voyage across the heavens that would take an entire evening to complete, and seeing its perceptible remorse for my travails through its crater eyes and mouth twisted into a look of horror, I knew it was going to be a long night. Guard duty had always been a march to fend off an enemy more powerful than Ivan or the sergeant: sleep, a predator that could sneak up on any victim and cause chaos.

CHAPTER SIX

The moon crossed halfway through the sky, leaving the landscape a pale blue under its radiance. Gentle snores arose from soldiers within their tents sometimes cut by the howl of a passing wind. To keep myself alert under these conditions, the tramping of my feet were timed, so that they landed in smooth strides for two minutes, and then for the next two, fell in a stomp upon the ground with harder strikes. I went about the entire circumference of the camp in this fashion and stopped at a place to ponder on home and its joys. I thought of Hermann too and his unfortunate family circumstances.
The woman waiting for him would not be grateful for her soldier’s return. Evidently Hermann had a horrible mother. He would tell me on occasions about how she invited other men into the house while his father was away fighting, and sometimes I, too, would see these men walking half-naked around her place, searching for their clothes. I stayed quiet about it, but wondered why Hermann never told his father that his mother cheated on him every day he was at the front.
Hermann never forgave his mother for being unfaithful, and hated her soul more than anything living on the earth. I would say to him, "You must forget your mother, you are not hers anymore." But he could not forget, for he still loved her through his deep hatred, and when the nights were cool and I could hear the wind breathing through the trees outside the camp, Hermann sat on his bedspread crying, telling the Lord he missed his mother and wanted her to be faithful to him. It was so hopeless. How cruel for someone to abandon such a wonderful boy. How cruel to make a boy think of his mother in such a way as he did, to loath her but still find love for her, a flea-bitten bitch always being mounted by stray dogs.
A tent cloth rustled in the distance. My thoughts broke at this sudden intrusion and I turned around to see a dark form approaching in the distance. The mold of the body stood too large to be recognizable as one of the other soldiers, and as it came close, I could discern the uniform and steel helmet of Lessing.
“A shitty morning,” he said, as he came over to me, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.
“I think it’s a very good one, Oberscharführer,” I said, hoping not to incite his temper.
“Don’t lie, it’s a shitty cold bog. But I’ve been through worse. Much worse, and you will too.”
These words seemed to awaken nerves that had not adapted to the freeze and I felt my body tingle against new hurts. Lessing saw me shiver and grinned.
“You better get used to it. On the steppes, it’s far different. None of these small chills that hit and are gone, no, over there, the pain is continuous.”
“Ja Oberscharführer,” I said, and smelling the smoke from his cigarette, I savored a puff from it. This was one of his games, I thought to myself, coming to me with this object of contraband in his mouth, so he could torture me with its nearness.
“You know something, schütze? You remind me a lot of myself years ago, when I was just a boy like yourself, joining the Waffen SS. I was a doubter.”
His comments were unusual and I waited in suspense for what he would have to say about his past. This was the first time I had heard him compare events in his life to those of lower soldiers and I wondered if through this conversation he was trying to reveal his complete awareness of my inner struggle.
“Doubting is natural in a soldier. It keeps him on his toes,” he went on. “But against Ivan, doubting only spreads bad morale, makes a Kompanie ineffective. It’s bad and it kills. Would you like to see your favorite comrade, Hermann, for instance…” and as if mocking the soldier, he spoke the name in a higher tone of voice. “Would you like to see this Hermann with a bullet in his gut?”
“Nein, Oberscharführer.” His repulsive remark infuriated me .
“Good, then end the doubting. I look at it this way. When you’re in battle, the goal is not to stay alive but to charge into the enemy with every chance you get. If you think this way, nothing can stop you from proving your loyalty.”
“I will not doubt, Oberscharführer.”
“What made you join the Waffen SS in the first place?”
“My skills and a desire to serve the Führer,” and then I was speechless. There was a greater reason that had decided my entrance into this elite force. “And my father, Oberscharführer. He made me decide.”
“How did your father come into it?”
His question brought me back to a recent memory. Three months ago, while back at the homestead, my father had shut me into a barn, a shovel in his right hand and a rifle in the other. A breeze had blown through the loft, screaming against wallboards and amongst rafters. These sounds only made my father’s silence more terrifying as he stood there in his gray uniform.
“You know why you’re here?” he had asked.
“No.” I said and gazed at the shovel and rifle he held ready to be used in some chore.
“It’s time to make a choice,” he said. “You’re seventeen years old. Look at you. You’re old enough to do any man’s work. The Hitlerjugend did great things, but I can’t have you staying here no more.”
The words spoke with finality. I remembered feeling a surge of fear rise in me, a sudden burst of shock. It was the last day of my childhood, yet the little boy within felt unready to leave.
“Why?” I asked.
He struck me in the chest with a rifle butt. Its movement was swift and cut my breath. I fell to the ground with a burning stomach, hurt not so much by pain but by his brute answer.
“You know I love you son,” he had said, his face broken in contours of desperation. Father’s voice rang with self-reproof and I knew he felt sorry for what he had done.
“Father!” I cried, bursting into sobs.
“Stand up!” he shouted.
I struggled to my feet and stared at him through the wetness of tears.
“Stop your crying. Only ladies cry,” he said, and thrust out the shovel and rifle he held in opposite hands. “These two things build dreams, Otto. They’re both an honest man’s living. I worked them hard to get where I’m at today. I’ll be proud for whatever you decide on pursuing. But you must choose.”
I had thought in those brief moments if escape was an alternative. How glad I would have been if in his possession were keys to an imaginary place far away from the ordinary consequences burdening young men who turn seventeen. The Hitlerjugend had taught me to love war and in picking the rifle over the shovel, the choice meant fighting for the Führer and a reunion with old comrades. I took the rifle and when my hands closed around the barrel, father frowned. It was not a frown of disappointment. I had seen this grimace only once before, at the death of my sister to pneumonia. Grief had taken him.
“Now it’s done,” he said and left the barn. Two weeks later, he was shot dead in Poland.
I glanced at the sergeant. He stood in frustration, awaiting an answer. The night air was still with the presence of dread. It hung around like a plague and kept my thoughts dwelling on forbidden doubts. It would be hard to clear them from my mind, for they stuck with a powerful vigilance.
“Well speak up, schütze,” Lessing commanded.
I had to say something. In not giving a response, I was setting myself up for reprimand. “My father gave me a choice,” I said, and then hoping to hide the whole story from him, I gave a short reply. “He gave me the choice between hard labor and fighting: I chose fighting, Oberscharführer.”
“You fool, there’s hard labor in fighting,” he chuckled.
Then, as if I couldn’t have made more of a fool of myself, I yawned at this remark.
“How dare you! I’ll teach you not to yawn on duty!” he snarled.
So stunned was I by this vicious remark that senseless words fell from my lips, “Yes, it will not be, Oberscharführer.” I had spoken in a fruitless attempt to end his frustration.
“Shut it! On the ground now!” With this command, I fell to hugging the earth. I got a mouthful of frosty dirt and shivered against its chilliness. Here comes the hell fury, I thought, and I cursed my lack of physical control. Alertness was key to a successful mingling with Lessing and when a sign of weakness, like fatigue, crept out in noticeable form, it was answered with torture.
“Get up,” Lessing commanded. “Run strides from the pit and back. Schnell!”
I shot to my feet and sprinted into the darkness, trying to reach the pit that lay a hundred yards away. My breath came out in smoky puffs. When I reached an ashen lot, discerning a circle of boulders as the barrier around the pit, I stopped only for a moment, time enough to turn in the opposite direction and run back to Lessing.
In eagerness to end the exercise, my movements toward the standing black form, seen in the distance by the light of a cigarette, were hastened. Awakened from an imminent slumber by this jolt of energy gave me some hope that the fatigue was over.
As I reached him, he pointed back in the direction whence I had come, and said, “You’re too slow! Faster.”
I took up the sprint again. The running came easier this turn. I reached the pit with a swift promptitude and charged back with even quicker speed. The return was greeted with a snarl from Lessing and a spray of dirt kicked up by his boots.
“Too slow! Again!” he screamed.
Now exasperation swelled in my mind and cruel thoughts upon the sergeant and his form of reprimand fueled me to run faster than the last two trials. Up ahead, it was not the familiar pit marking a halfway point in the sprint, but a blazing fire, created by an angry impression left on my consciousness.
The arrival at this fiery crossroads took my breath away: I wanted rest and an end to this madness begun by a cruel man whose temper rose as easily as the orange glow from coals raked atop a flame.
With no regard to my surroundings, my mind caught in a jumble of hateful reflections, I almost ran into the sergeant on the return passage. Although he gave no expression of amazement over the immediate finishing of this circuit, he pointed to the ground, and knowing what he wanted, I gave him my rifle, fell to my hands and knees, and then rose to a pushup position. With swift promptitude and while maintaining a straight spine, my chest fell and rose until Lessing’s voice called down with a count. The movement was repeated for another eighty counts when I was too weak to lift myself off the ground, and only a harsh retort from Lessing sent me back onto my feet.
“Now run in place!” he commanded.
It was as if I were being used as a steam engine, with only two pistons to push the gears into motion, and these exercises forced me to sympathize with all the toils machinery went through in daily operation. If a locomotive had feelings, I wondered, would it not protest against the engineer, and instead of pushing forward on the tracks, shoot out flames from the boiler to kill its tormentor? Strange ideas sometimes make vital connections between those who suffer a similar fate, and in my dire circumstances, this thought helped ease my physical suffering and made it less difficult to keep up a satisfactory pace.
I looked at Lessing amidst my attempts to keep the legs chopping in a continuous motion, breathing through the nose rather than the mouth to feign weariness, and he gave an abrupt smile. I knew he was impressed by my tough versatility throughout the exercise, never revealing to him my desire to end the torture, but showing only my personal capability in carrying his exacting commands.
“Halt!” he shouted.
I sprang to attention.
He spit out his cigarette. “You know what you are, schütze?” he said in a fluster. “An old gramps, a good-for-nothing, and too lazy for work. If I see you again trying to snitch a nap while on guard duty, I’ll cancel your leave so quick.” He waved his finger a hairsbreadth from my eyes. “Is that clear?”
“Ja, Oberscharführer!” I hollered out the answer in a quick gasp, astonished by his words. How frightful it would have been if he had gone through with this threat.
“Good,” he answered, putting his hand onto his forehead in disappointment. “Take your rifle.”
I snatched the firearm from his grasp, mindful not to touch him, and let the strap bear upon my shoulder. When this had been done, he turned away from me, and went to his tent. As he walked away, a surge of relief shot through my body, and I could feel my toes again. An unmistakable joy, almost greater than that found in the reunion with a loved one, radiated within me after his departure. In this sensation, it was not so much what was given as a material reward that counted, but rather the period of loneliness under the stars, with only the wind in the trees as a companion, which gave in its natural splendor a reward akin to bliss.

CHAPTER SEVEN

From the country road a rumbling awakened me from a reverie as I stood near the smoldered remains of a fire pit. The sun sat above pine tops, shedding a golden hue over the skyline, and on the tents it left streaks of faded white against shadow. The growl from an engine broke through the morning tranquility, echoing against pines, growing more distinct under chirps of birds flying in the expanse of blue above me. Can it be, I thought, that this sound coming from the forest is our passage home?
The haze clouding a mind spent by wakeful activity in an overnight watch blew away with the arrival of this new hope. I felt giddy as a child who sees his father come home with a satchel full of toys. The growl grew louder, a grinding chorus arose as wheels hit gravel, and on the instant, a gray truck appeared from behind a pine, its headlights shot out, the driver inside almost unseen behind a windshield wet with mud.
My God it had come, I thought in glee, we are to really leave this hell.
The truck went forward, a chariot of relief, its canvas roofed tailgate and wooden sides grimy, signatures of experience from the front lines.
The driver looked out from his window with sleepy eyes, his forehead marked with stress lines, and the cap on his head, a wooly gray under shadow of his compartment, was marked with the skull and crossbones. The urge to come up to him and shake his hand was alive in my mind, but in haste to bestow military courtesies, which required above all things abstinence from gleeful reaction, I ran to him and stood at attention within reaching distance of his driver-side door. The engine of his vehicle clanked into idle and the tires came to a stop.
“Is this 14th Kompanie, 29th Panzerdivision?” the driver asked in a husky voice. No evident surprise showed on his countenance and it kept a constant dumbfounded look, as if his mind had grown weary of seeking answers to useless questions.
Doubtful on how to address this stranger, who might as well have been an officer filling in for an enlistee, I made a quick glance at his rank tabs, recognized his rank as a corporal in the motor service, and answered, “Ja, Rottenführer.”
He opened his door and stepped out, looking short and muscular. He went over to the front bumper, grabbed a clod of mud lying upon the metal, and broke it in his hands. Sand fell through his fingers as he continued kneading and crushing clumps into smaller pieces. As he performed this nervous action, he kept his gaze on the camp.
“Where’s your Kommandant?” he asked.
“In the tent, Rottenführer,” I answered. I pointed at the tent closest to us. “If you need someone to lead, I’ll be willing to take you.”
“That would be all right,” he said, then smacking his pants, he walked towards Lessing’s tent. I followed, keeping my distance in hope of not pestering him with unwelcome attention.
When we arrived at Lessing’s tent, the driver stood by, conveying by his steadfastness a desire that I should go in first. Before I could open the flap, Lessing barged out, with a sleepy countenance.
“I thought I heard a truck outside,” he said, then looking at the corporal he managed to bring out a smile. “So you’re ready to take my soldiers away are you?”
“It was your orders, Oberscharführer?” the corporal replied.
“Not mine,” and he nodded inside the tent, “but the orders of my superiors. I’ll get them rousted out of their flea bags.”
Lessing seemed half-awake, for his speech drawled out in low monotones, as if he whispered from a dream. It amazed me to see this iron-willed drill sergeant, who was always at the peak of his powers, act now like a man overtaken by a night’s overindulgence in alcohol.
“Otto, get them formed up in caps, rifles, and rucksacks. I’ll be out shortly.”
He said it in a caring voice, so different from the one heard only hours before amidst torturous physical punishment. “Why just stand there? Eh?” Lessing barked. “Do your duty or get my boot between your legs!”
“Ja Oberscharführer,” I answered in reply and turned on my heels to fulfill his request.
“Can you believe them?” Lessing remarked behind my back to the corporal. “They put me in charge of idiots. What you think of it, eh?”
The corporal snickered in reply.
I ran to the first tent, thrust my head inside, and found soldiers bustling about, already awake and waiting for departure.
“Otto,” Schroeder whispered, sweating with worry. He rose to his feet from his bedspread, a sensation of bewilderment in his facial expression. He looked ready to cry if the news I had to offer was not satisfactory. “Is it…?” He could not finish.
“Shut up, don’t get excited,” I said. “Get outside. We have formation.”
“We’re saved!” Schroeder shouted. “Saved!”
“Rucksacks, rifles, and your caps on,” I answered. “Our ride is here.”
Schroeder, his thin eyebrows twitching in joyful elation, threw his arms around my waist, and giggled. “Can it be true? Has it really come? We are now soldiers! Soldiers! Can you believe it Otto?”
“Yes, but we must go. We have to keep our wits,” I said, and feeling Schroeder’s form rocking against mine from the sensation of his inner bliss almost prompted tears to fall from my eyes.
“No, I must compose myself. I can’t go out like this,” he said, and he stepped back, gave a shrug of his shoulders, and then strapped his steel helmet to a suspender. The other boys too, laden with only light accommodations on their battle packs, a silver field flask atop each bed roll, left with their helmets hung from a suspender strap, and on their heads sat sleek wool caps with skull and crossbones patches. They went out in quick order, leaving Schroeder and me alone to contemplate our favorable predicament.
“Take your helmet off,” my comrade said to me.
I took the bowl off my head and felt the cool air seep into my wet scalp. Before digging into my trouser pockets for a cap, I made a few rapid swipes at my hair to get rid of the dampness.
“Let’s get out,” he said.
“Yes,” and I followed him outside.
From every tent, soldiers ran to a location between rows of tents, their gasps of merriment resounding over the pound of their boots. In each face, I perceived a gladness spawned by the end of a month’s pain, a month that made many long to quench parched throats too long dry from lack of sweets, made others miss their mothers, and made Wernøe yearn to get through training for the chance to smoke a cigarette. Wernøe the first to emerge from a tent on the far right reaches of the encampment, still fumbled to button up trousers opened by an erect morning surprise. When he had got to his place and gave a look around to see if anybody had noticed, he tried slamming it down further into his pants. Lucky for him only I seemed to notice.
I stepped forth toward the expanse of gravel where soldiers lined up, a stretch of earth that had once swallowed my days in misery, and now took me in with kindness and relief. As we got into our positions in formation, Lessing strode in front of us, talking with the driver and two officers who followed close behind. Their expressions were despondent, yet when the Hauptsturmführer turned to glance at us, his face shone, serious and hard. I hoped bad news was not soon to come.
“Stillgastanden!” Lessing shouted.
We came to attention. Our breathing fell silent. Only the wind made a noise against the tent cloths, as we waited, almost in dread, for what would be said by our commanders.
“I say this in earnest my men,” the Hauptsturmführer started, his candid tone catching my interest, “as a brave soul who has seen four years of war. You are all soldiers of Germany and have earned the right to call each other comrade-in-arms. May you serve proudly in this time of need. I hope the lessons you have learned here will aid in your fight against the perpetrators who try, only to fail, to pierce our ranks and get a foothold in our country. Remember the ones who have fought and died to defend this land and our flag. Men who gloriously lost their lives to maintain us, to insure a better future for our brethren, and to give growth to another generation of honor- bound Germans. It is to their memory we continue our great cause.” His voice was true and powerful. With one hand raised in front of us, palm downward, he resembled a Teutonic Knight beckoning the seas to part. From this hand came the final hope, a powerful signature to our undying allegiance, and the guidance from a father whose strength would bring us ultimate glory. “Heil Hitler!”
“Heil Hitler!” we replied in unison, hands extended to worship our ruler.
“Ten day passes will be distributed, at the calling of your name,” he continued. “When you have received a pass from your Oberscharführer, proceed to the truck, and then, my men, my soldiers,” and he emphasized our title with an affectionate tone, “you will be taken to a train station, not far from these lodgings, to be out-processed. Look around you. Look at the comrade next to you. Two weeks into the future, that schütze might save your life. Keep sharp. Know your enemy. I will be there when the fighting is fierce. I will be the first to charge into fire to fight Ivan, to give the initiative to us, but I also need you to fight gloriously for our Führer and for the glory of yourselves. There is a real enemy out there, but we are stronger than them if we fight to our utmost potential. We will win together. That is all, my brave comrades.”
Then, with a nod to our sergeant, Lessing began calling out names, and soldiers dropped out of ranks, some nearly in a faint, when the word to come forward rang in their ears. As he continued to read off names on passes, each soldier in turn quitting his place, leaving behind an empty void made wider with the withdrawal of others, a sensation of excitement had begun to churn my insides.
Not long after, the air was rent with a sudden stillness, and in the static atmosphere surrounding me, I thought everyone had their eyes pinned in my direction, and the attention of the forest, even the birds unseen in the branches of the pines, had all of a sudden, turned to look at my rigid form.
“Schütze Krueger!” Lessing called, and in my ears, his voice sounded like a warden’s key jingling into a dusty lock to set a prisoner free. At last it had come!
I ran from my place to the appointed spot in front of the sergeant. He seemed too busy to mind my presence. Our eyes met once, but in his stare, there was only a hurried look. He jabbed a stamped slip of paper into my hands. As soon as its pointy edges pushed into the skin, the sergeant shouted another name, and I went away, without regrets, to the awaiting vehicle that would take me home.
I came up to the truck when Hermann, walking at my side, decided to tag along as a companion for the ride. He gave a mock salute and in a whisper said, “I don’t care so much about seeing mother. I’ll go along with you this time, but only if it’s alright? We can take up our old habits, like in the old days, remember, when we used to ride our bicycles into town?”
He had spoken dreadful words, but I thought him brave for saying them. He knew I had seen first-hand his mother’s failing graces and we both had wonderful times just playing amongst ourselves in the absence of parents.
“Sure,” I said. “How does it feel to be free now?”
“Huh,” he asked.
“Free. You don’t live with your mother anymore?”
He gazed down at the ground, scuttling his feet against the gravel, and through his actions I could see he was perturbed by the question.
“Lost,” he said, with disturbed honesty.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Within the musty interior of the battle-worn truck, the awareness of my freedom hit me with a sudden rapture, and for a moment, sitting down on the side-bench underneath the canvas overhang, soldiers jutting against me for their own piece of space, there came a loss of breath at the revealing of this wondrous prospect. It was not that I hated being in the Waffen SS or felt shame for serving a country in its great time of need, but when a soldier has a parent and a decent home awaiting his return, these qualities sway him to embrace family remembrances after months of mental and physical hardships. Memories of mother’s fair blonde hair falling down to her shoulders as she dug up the soil to lay seeds for flowers, the dress of plaid hugging her thin form, filled me with a sensation of happiness, and I regretted not having bent over with her to help in those tasks. Tears began to well up in my eyes as I thought upon these reminiscences. She is a good mother, one any boy would be lucky to cherish.
I looked around the truck bed for a distraught face, one with a similar expression of awe towards their break. The surroundings reminded me of a puppet chest thrown onto a traveling circus boxcar, when the puppeteer has crammed as many wooden actors into the space provided, leaving no room for comforts. The soldiers to my left in their gray uniforms and caps took cigarettes out of cartons being passed over heads and limbs kicking for a spot not taken by bodies. Those fortunate to have found a place on the side benches slouched back on their seats clouding up the compartment with exhaled smoke. Most of them kept a calm demeanor, as if thoughts upon home became the primary source of their contemplations, and their interests seemed bent on enjoying as much as they could from their cigarettes.
“What about you?” Hermann asked, speaking in a jovial tone. He grabbed the rifle held in my left hand, with its butt end on the floor, and gave it a shake. “Do you want any?”
“Smokes?” I asked, even though in his lap were a carton full of not the German and other eastern brands given to most of the soldiers, but coveted American cigarettes.
“My, where did you get those!” I asked, staring at his supply. “American brands are to die for.”
“Don’t know,” Hermann said. “The corporal gave them to share out. He might have stolen them from the Americans.”
“If he wasn’t shot at in the attempt,” I said, envisioning the corporal behind enemy lines, his hands full of American cigarettes, running under gunfire and mortar attack to reach his unit with the booty.
“Do you want one?” he asked.
“No, I’d rather pass,” I said, not to be prudent towards my health, for in those days smoky lungs were the least of my worries when every day soldiers were thrown into shallow graves with a bullet in the gut. I just didn’t want to start a habit that would make a misery of my days at the front line, a place many had told me lacked in cigarettes.
A cool breeze blew into the confines of our bed and I felt cold upon my face. As we progressed down the road, the wind began to grow even chillier, and its numbing effects tore down my tolerance of the outside air. I wanted a head scarf. It was one of those pieces of clothing issued to most soldiers during the winter months, but not to us. A sudden moan from the back of the truck broke my thoughts upon our frigid circumstances and I supposed it to be another complainer, who such as myself, sat in disagreement with the breeze blowing in on us, yet as I gazed closer, this soldier of short stature, whose reddening cheeks and tense eyes gave off an appearance akin to a madman before a nervous breakdown, cradled a photograph as if its destruction would mean his demise. Ulman, as long as I had known him, had never been a man who honored his parents, but the way he looked at this picture made me wonder if he did carry affection towards them. Maybe he didn’t just crave to see his parents, but held a hidden almost psychotic fascination of his loved ones that made him now in reverence press hard on the photograph’s glossy surface.
“What did you do?” he uttered, moaning again. “You tore her to pieces!”
He lifted the photograph, torn in two with what looked to be a pin attaching the severed pieces. To my surprise, the top piece did not present a continuation of the original image, but of a soldier in a military cap, while the bottom portion was that of a woman’s flowery dress. Somebody had chopped off the woman’s head and defaced it with a gum-faced recruit of the Waffen SS! The soldiers sitting around him drowned his anger with rancorous laughter.
“You swine!” he clamored. “Why did you do that to my mothers picture? This is wrong. So wrong!”
“Didn’t you hear,” Heinrich said, giggling. “Ullman’s mother is half woman, and all man. The proof is here. Just look.”
And he took the picture and landed a kiss right upon the manly top half of the photograph. “Ew, I think she has just bitten my lips off.”
The soldiers smitten with laughter jostled around in the cab, some with hands outstretched to grab the photograph from Heinrich’s clutches, but he thrust it away from them with a rude shake of his shoulder.
“You’re a dog, Heinrich,” Ulman retorted.
“No, I’m sorry comrade. It is your mother who needs a leash and a bone, because a face like that…!” and he chuckled maliciously. “She has the true filth of the Russian peasant about her. Did she used to paddle you with the end of a nailed board?”
“Bastard,” Ulman whispered, folding his arms in displeasure and looking askance at the back end of the truck, as if to avoid any further confrontations with the bully.
“It’s the milk and mushrooms!” Wernøe gesticulated. “They feed them to the women when they’re young, their faces grow big boned, and then, there you have the birth of a monster.”
“You’re a fool,” Heinrich answered.
“Enough,” started Hermann. The soldiers went quiet, surprised at the utterance from this less than notable recruit. “Aren’t you afraid of what our Hauptsturmführer would think of this? Putting the face of a man on a woman’s body could be regarded as an offense.”
“An offense to his mother of course,” Wernøe said.
”Come to think of it,” Heinrich uttered, giving Ulman a pat, and directing his words to him. “Your mother could be a distant relation to our Oberscharführer Lessing. All she needs is a sharper nose and a bigger dress to hide all the muscles. Maybe she would make me do push-ups if I came into the house with dirty boots on.”
“Braggart,” Ulman said.
”No, you do not understand,” Hermann brought forth in a pleading voice. “This picture could be an injustice to our people. Don’t you know Ivan throws women into the ranks and dresses them like soldiers to fight us? Do you want to be thought of as a Bolshevik?”
Just hearing the label, ‘Bolshevik’, made Heinrich turn red and shift sidelong looks at his colleagues with nervous hesitation.
“It was in joke,” Wernøe said. “Let a joke be a joke, Hermann.”
“But this is serious.”
“Keep quiet you,” said a tall soldier at the back. It was Erich, whose forehead was so wide and his chin so small as to make his countenance reminiscent of a light bulb, although the only light it sparked shone in radiant eyes of blue and a lashing tongue. “The only good Bolsheviks are dead ones. You know that as well as I do, and it would be wise to end this talk before that leave paper you have there in your hand disappears, and you find yourself at the front line without a rifle to save you.”
“Woo, hoo,” Heinrich said. “A scary thought.”
A jostling from the truck caused me to throw my hand against the seat to keep balance. The vehicle turned left, as soldiers reached to grab onto anything welded to the sides of the bed to stop them from bumping into their neighbors or falling onto the floor. The growl from the engine, which had hummed a soft song under howl of the wind, cut to silence. We had reached our destination.

CHAPTER NINE

Relief is the respite given to those who suffer great hardships for lengthy expanses of time. It can come in the form of a nap in the corner of a foxhole or in the long awaited hollering command from a sergeant when a set of exercises has come to completion. It can surprise the most common of soldiers into believing it one of the greatest joys of life, for from it comes fleeting happiness, a sudden sensation of excitement hangs on its arrival. Yet for myself, this sensation of relief when we had driven into the train station, was transformed by a horrible experience.
We got off the truck under a noonday sun peeking through clouds. The smell of grease and wet wood hit my nostrils. When we walked from the vehicle, Hermann nudged me to draw my attention to a scrawny dog.
Two guards patrolled the tracks, and as we neared them, a door from a boxcar had been slid open to allow exit of inhuman forms, who wore similar uniforms to ours, but whose limbs and heads were so mummified that they appeared as if they had returned to life from eternal slumber in a tomb. Another comrade aided one of them, his head a mess of bloody bandages. The mummy who followed the limper mumbled incoherent words. As we approached them, he came to a halt, and his guide followed the action, looked over his shoulder and saw his follower nod in our direction.
“Here comes another fresh batch,” said the limper.
The mummy, staring at us from two black slits in a mass of rust-colored bandages made a frightening guttural utterance, which I suspected to be a laugh, but at its inception came out like the cry from the raven which had taunted me for those painful moments crouching next to the goat before its demise. When the laugh broke upon my ears, horrible and foreboding of doom, I saw the raven perched in the tree above the baying goat, peering into my soul with those beady eyes of mystery, its taunts shattering the confidence built inside of me from months of soldiery discipline.
“Run away, run away,” the bird cawed in loud repetition.
The chant rang louder in my ears and just to hear each exclamation filled my heart with the urge to flee the crowd and run without respite to some secluded hideaway.
I felt a squeeze against my arm.
“Otto, what’s wrong with you?” Hermann asked. “You look pale.”
“Nothing, it’s nothing,” I said, but my heart raced with uncertainty. All of my senses were ready to explode at the coming of another cackle from that most unfortunate stranger who had just peered into me and found the empty spot, the forbidden nest of dissent, and my soul began to cry out against my circumstances. I looked back over my shoulder at the mummy, in eager anticipation of another word from his crippled vocal cords. He was already behind us, engrossed by a conversation with his friend, but the loud cackle still seemed to emanate from his bandages, and the dark coat he wore, although made of wool, hid the feathers of a tormentor.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “That injured man frightens me.”
“But who?” Hermann asked.
“It’s obvious, just look behind you.”
Hermann turned to look and then gazed back at me in confusion.
“What man? There’s no one there,” he said.
I looked and with astonishment saw that the handicapped pair had vanished from sight. They must have turned behind the train, I thought, yet broad connectors throng between boxcars, made this impossible.
In frustration I walked on, the thought of the raven and its malicious chant still cawing in my mind, and when we got to our place by the train, in shadow of the box car, a sergeant in Wehrmacht olive uniform approached us. In a hasty manner he asked for our passes. After he had looked at both of ours, verifying we were not soldiers who had taken restrictive leave, a death penalty offense, he allowed us to walk on to the platform of the now steaming train, a blackish gray under the cloudy sky, and proceed into the passenger compartment.
Hermann and I climbed the few metal stairs leading into our car and looked around for a place to sit. A sick stench rose from the walls and leather bench seats. The space was like a death room, with a smell of decay, rot, and disinfectant. As we moved towards the back of the compartment, since the forward sections were taken, the smell grew stronger, and even soldiers sitting on both sides of the middle aisle, their cigarettes lit and the smoke clouding up the room, could not blot out the horrible death smell.
“Over here,” Hermann said.
With a desire to leave the train and vomit, I motioned to him to go for a window seat for a breathe of fresh air. We ran for the bench seat and squeezed our way through legs and rucksacks, which blocked our passage to the empty end, until we reached our place, and sat down. The seat about swallowed me in its excessive accoutrement of leather, yet it felt very comfortable, and, fatigued from the overnight watch in camp, I shut my eyes, and my body slumped into its softness.
“Otto,” Hermann shouted.
“What?” I said awakened before a sudden fall into sleep.
“You’re lying on your rifle, put it down on the floor.”
The rifle rested against the wall, its barrel jutting outside the window, and if I had not been reminded of its presence, it would have fallen outside, another very serious offense. I placed it between my legs, then without warning, blackness dimmed my vision, the eyes shut for a second, then reopened to see the room in a blurry swirl. At last, even though I tried to get up, the lids shut over my eyes, and I was knocked into a senseless void.

CHAPTER TEN

In the middle of a dream, a flash awakened me. It exploded from the front of the train and soldiers at the forward sections shot out of the boxcar. A bench seat on the left, its wall end hanging seesaw over the side, swung to the motions of the train as a frantic soldier, at its precarious end, tried reaching for a hand rest safe within the confines of our racing compartment. His eyes were glazed with fright as he looked at me, probably hoping I would come to his aid.
“Give me your hand!” he screamed, but I could not get out of my chair. Fear pressed me into its leather restraints and I felt safe within its embrace.
From below, there came the screech of brakes thrown against wheels to stop its rapid acceleration and as the train began to decelerate, I saw pine trees outside the front quarter, passing by like livid pillars, bordered with the gaping hole now ripped into the front of the box car. The man screamed terribly from his perch, his last grip of survival slipping away from the cut wood of his seat frame.
“Schütze!” he screamed. “Help! Give me an arm! I can’t hold much longer!”
His eyes, wide in terror, made the tense wrinkles in his reddening face even more frightening. It was easy to save him. Only two steps and a reach over the side would insure the soldier’s survival, but my legs felt anchored to the floor.
Blood and debris littered the compartment and I turned to Hermann to see if he had been hurt. A head hung between legs, a stream of blood gushing down. I threw my hand to his jugular to stop the bleeding, but the red streams poured through my fingers in torrents.
“Can’t you see I’m falling! Please, I don’t wan’t to die!” shouted the dangling soldier. His words filled with entreaty pained me to remain there next to an already dead comrade, one who could not be given assistance, unlike this man who sought a hand of deliverance.
I thought of mother and how she would react if in saving this fellow soldier, I died in the attempt, and came back home in a casket. Such a catastrophe would destroy her. Then there was this other soldier, who probably had family of his own back home. What would they think if they found out his survival had depended upon a fellow comrade sitting not far away. If I failed him, it meant failing his children, his wife, and his siblings, and that was worse than to sit stagnant. Resolved that such a fate was better than cowering in my seat, I got up, ran over to the soldier whose last grip clung to the unstable chair outside the train, and reached out to grab for him. He avoided the swipes from my hand and his fearful reaction to my offer of assistance struck me with confusion.
“Grab on!” I shouted to him, but as I reached out again, he shifted his body to the right, almost falling off his perch. “Don’t you want help?”
He veered away from my attempts.
I continued to grab at the open spaces near and around his form. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.
The soldier came to a stop and my hand caught hold of his sleeve.
“I got you now,” I said in triumph, yet as I pulled the cloth, black tufts blew out from underneath his cuffs. They flew at me in feathery clouds. What was wrong? Maybe the man wore a lamb’s wool coat beneath his uniform? It was so strange and when I continued to pull at him, more of these black feathery tufts shot out. I looked into his face. A dark beak struck out of his skin, then his forehead busted out with feathers, and the layers of flesh which made up his demeanor, were cut away by an emerging bird’s head. It was the raven. The transformation came so suddenly, that it kept me standing at the edge of the boxcar, my body paralyzed in the position it had taken in the retrieval of this mutant bird. It was too real to be a dream, but something in my head said, “This is false but genuine all the same.”
I stumbled backwards. The raven clung on to the edge of the bench seat, staring into my eyes with beady receptors of a hidden truth that I did not understand. Then it flew off the seat, a flap of its massive wings pushing me to the floor, and vanished into the forest.
Such a sight should have brought me into a faint, and as I lay there on the floor, there came the realization that I was in a dream, and on the instant, my eyes opened to another strange reality.
I awoke again to find the train had not been thrown open by a freak explosion: its walls still stood around me as I lay in the bench corner, my head against a leather backrest. The train was motionless now, probably having reached its stop-off for fuel and debarkation. A man in a gray uniform stood in the center of our aisle, with perspiration on his skin, and a tense quirk to his cheek as he spoke to us in curt German, “Get off the train. Air raid!”
He grasped the head of our front seat, now empty of passengers, and bent over us with a stern look. He had an appearance reminiscent of Lessing, except for the wrinkles around his brow, and as he stood there, the sweat hanging in beads upon his upper lip not so much from heat but what I perceived to be inner worry, his appearance beckoned forth a message not needed to be expressed in words. I nudged Hermann in the shoulder, who sat next to me in perfect physical health, unlike the condition I had found him in last, and sidled out of his seat into the aisle. Still standing there, the man smiled at me, as if he understood what had just transpired in my sleep. Was I dreaming again? I thought for a second, but then threw away this idea when the surrounding compartment, with its torn leather cushions and squeaky bench seats, sent off the familiar hospital smell, a consoling reminder to the reality of my environment.
“Get out, get out,” he said in a sudden tirade. I about fell into the aisle under this loud retort and followed Hermann towards the front of the box car, where in single file, a mob of soldiers in different uniforms, some only in white undershirts or suspenders, waited to step down on to the side platform and leave the train.
Air raid sirens blared from the distance and I could hear thump-thump of anti-aircraft fire over the mechanical buzz of our train engine in its idle rest. As we reached the platform, I noticed sporadic activity amongst passengers outside the train. Soldiers, most of them appearing annoyed at an abrupt stop to their trip, frowned as they trudged into a trackside ditch, while others, more aware of the immediate dangers of an air attack, fled with great speed towards the safety of the modest dugout, a haven not deep at all, but to those crouched to the ground, it gave excellent cover from shrapnel.
“The dogs,” Hermann remarked. He also showed a certain resentment at our debarkation. We walked, not in haste, but in unmindful regard of the dangers of an aerial attack. The bombers came in so often now that the low murmur of air raid sirens rang like breakfast and dinner bells telling us to get under cover for a short time-out from our duties.
“Only miles from home and we’ll have nothing to bring us there,” Hermann murmured in my ear, trying not to be heard by others who expressed similar concerns through signs of consternation: their heads downcast or shaking from side to side in anger, yet the officers, dignitaries we feared would overhear, with their stone brevity and lack of sympathy, walked around as if waiting to punish any lewd speaker. “It sometimes just makes me want to…”
“Make you what?” I caught him. “To grab onto their wings and pull them to the ground? Do you think you’re a Hercules?”
“More Hercules than you,” and then he turned to look at plumes of smoke rising over the bend of a hill ahead of us. Our surroundings were abundant with these smooth rises and drops of wheat-covered expanses, standing out against the rising gray cloud hallmarking the ravages of the bombers, which seemed to betray the cause of darkness in the deadness of the grass. This massive stretch of lifeless undergrowth seemed to have lit its own fire.
Hermann sat on the side of the trench and threw pebbles at the dirt. This new hindrance seemed to have irritated him beyond speech, and I went closer to where a few soldiers, two with scruff on their chins and upper lips, stood with hands around their cigarettes to block a wind from snuffing them out. One with a hard beaten mask of sun burnt skin and squinting eyes, tapped me on the arm and in an apparent attempt not to be overheard by the officer conversing with the train engineer on the outskirts of our trench, he whispered into my ear, “I think they’re all dead. Not one survivor.”
“You think so,” I said, to appease the man, whose voice rang out hoarse and left me with a very unpleasant sensation.
“They’ll have to dig four feet into the ground to find their ashes. That’s how they do it. Those are fighter bombers flying over there,” and as he pointed to silver sparks flashing out of the smoke in the distant chaos, signatures from a formation of fighter-bombers, he wove his other hand as if to imitate a flying bird. “Saw a man blown into the ground by one of those planes you see there. Nothing left of him but the ashes I scraped up with my boot.” Then he came even closer to me to give the last bit of his commentary, and although I began to fear this soldier in his crusty olive uniform, too large for his strident body, there were no other abstractions to detract my attention from him. “They say it’s not too bad to die that way. You feel nothing, not like what’s waiting for us.”
“You’re in the Wehrmacht, are you?” I asked.
“Ja, saw my first duty at the Dnieper. I’ve seen so many rivers, yellow, white, blue, and green, I could fancy being a ferry pilot, although I only saw them from bridges, and running in the other direction. You know, that river coming off there is the first I’ve seen black,” and he grinned in jest, nodding to the billowy smoke clouds rising up out of explosions.
“Is it as bad as they say it is over there?” and I regretted having said such a thing, for my heart was not ready for an answer.
“It depends,” he laughed, not in hilarity, but what appeared to be nervous hesitation.
“What do you mean?” I asked, now growing curious.
"Some say war is the best way for a man to know himself and when he finds himself, then he meets the devil. The devil, comrade, is out there," and he pointed to the smoke and brought his finger down quick when an officer looked our way. "Out there in the smoke is the devil, yet if you don’t meet him, who’s the better for it? Not the accountant behind his oak desk, or our ladies back home. You must meet the devil to know where you stand. He changes you out there. Shows you something that you’ll remember until you start peeling the old wood off your walking stick, that’s if you live that long. That’s how I look at it."
“And you?” I asked, very intrigued by this man, who like my father, had a view of the war much different than the boasting accounts given by veterans of our Waffen SS divisions in my early youth. “Have you been injured?”
“Many times,” he said. “But they patched me up and threw me back in. Got a flesh wound on my upper thigh,” and to attract as little attention from the officer who he probably felt would approach him if he started to get the gist of our conversation, the soldier nodded to his left thigh. “Thought I would die from the loss of blood, but they bandaged her real tight, stopped the bleeding. Two months later, I’m back in the front line with a limp. Unless you’re half dead, the Kommandant don’t care if all your fingers are cut off, you’re clear for combat duty.”
When I looked at the horizon where bombers played their game of death within hellish clouds, there arose in my ears the sound of an approaching drone. I thought it another formation of bombers in route for the same target, but out of the smoke a black dot broke away, and flew in our direction.
“Get down!” cried a soldier at the farthest corner of our ditch.
I knelt, gazing at the aircraft. As it came close, its drone burst into a long-drawn whine, and the propeller became visible, spinning in rapid revolutions. For a second, I believed it futile to curl in a ball as the others did to avoid injury, yet as this bulky bird of metal flew closer toward us, dipping its wings right before it dove low for a kill, instinct drove me to hunch my shoulders in preparation to jump away. Leap for what? I did not know, but my body geared to lift itself into the air to dodge the threat.
Flames shot out from the propeller and bullets cut a path through crowds of passengers. Two rows of splashing dirt and flesh erupted from the earth and thrashed towards my position. As this wall of chaos came nearer, knowing there was no time to run in the other direction from the onslaught, I got ready to leap away. The machine gun cut off, and before I had a chance to jump, the fighter-bomber rose, churning up a gust of air that knocked me against the Wehrmacht soldier. He threw his arms around me in a protective embrace, and I gazed up just to see the aircraft fly over us, with its fuselage and steel wings.
“Almost done for,” my comrade giggled. It was odd to hear him jest at this horrific occurrence. He let go and I got back up, my attention still on the aircraft, now a dot between two silver lines in the sky. It rose higher, made a turn to the left, and then flew off too far to be seen.
“Over,” my comrade said. “Must have run out of bullets,” he said, and then he glanced at the front of our dugout, with a grimace of disgust. “He didn’t leave with nothing.”
I stumbled back in awe, wiping a trickle of sweat from my forehead. The sight before my eyes was gruesome. One man, his right leg, split by shrapnel, threw himself upon his neighbor, and let out screams of anguish.
“Oh, my, here, I’ll take the pain away, just wait,” said a nearby brown-haired soldier in an olive uniform similar to that of his Wehrmacht comrade, who knelt beside him, fumbling behind his belt to grasp his first aid kit.
Even though the cripple appeared to be in great pain, he got to his feet, as if to show nothing was wrong, and as he did this, a flash of bone thrust out from his pant leg, and he fell with a shriek. Three soldiers ran to his assistance and took him out of the trench and into the train. The sight made my insides churn with uneasiness. Even here, hundreds of miles away from any front lines, the brutality of war showed itself, and for a third time, a primal fear arose in me with its desire to run away to some hidden place. The gumption to flee towards the train and jump into a compartment, or under its belly, even though between the wheels there was nowhere to fit my body, drove me to run out of the trench and walk by our transport. At the center of our boxcar, I bent down to see if anywhere between the mess of metal beams and springs, there could be some enclave that would provide protection from the madness.
Hermann followed close by, probably curious about this odd notion, and then cut in front of me.
“What are you looking for?” he asked, and as he said this, soldiers began to leap back onto the train.
An officer in a simple field-gray tunic at the rear of the forward boxcar hollered at us, “Back on.”
“Let’s go, hurry,” I said to Hermann, taken away from my thoughts by the command.
Hermann gave a confused grimace, as if I had not come up with the answer he wanted to hear, and we ran for the side entrance platform, leaped up onto it with help of the railing, and returned to our seats within the boxcar, where our voyage began again, but with another horrible interruption.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The train flew down tracks, past fields of growing wheat, and went onto a straightaway where it lost its momentum, fell to a crawl, and then came to a stop. The hospital smell within our cramped box had begun to appall, similar to the aroma arising from slops that have sat in a bucket overnight, and vomit stole through a swallow to dribble down my lips. Hermann saw it and I felt embarrassed to have shone him such a weakness, but he answered with an all more apparent disgust.
"You smell it too?" I asked, and with a grin, as if to hide the embarrassing disgrace on my lips, I made a quick swipe over it with a sleeve. He was not staring at me though, but outside the window.
"Look at that," said a soldier in the seat in front of us, who got up to glance in awe at the same thing.
Curious to this sudden distraction unrelated to my sickness, I looked to the right, and through the sheet of glass, almost too thin and pitiful to act as a barrier between two worlds, there arose the cauldrons of hell. At first, I was breathless, taken unawares by the destructive display, but then lost this amazement when a sensation of bewilderment thrust upon my conscious a desire to probe for a meaning in the chaos.
Corpses lay strewn across most of the pebbly concourse, their fresh faces and hands stuck in a timeless stance for a sign of help. They wore not the regular soldiers garb but an assortment of various clothing: brown and blue coats, some with no shoes upon their feet, and right by the tracks an old man in a torn vest, held a cloth bundle very near his chest, and I could swear that something gave a rustle within the dead man’s baggage.
"Don’t worry men, those are not ours out there," said an SS officer, at the edge of the most forward bench seat in the left aisle, stiff and muscular in what appeared to be a newly tailored button down uniform with the blood armband and swastika on his sleeve and his voice struck so loud it sounded as if it came right next to me. "They are only Bolshevik prisoners."
This was the first time I had seen fallen Bolsheviks. We were taught that they were of different political sway, which could not intermingle with the Volk. I looked at them and when seeing an old man’s bundle shift, and saw fingers curl out from the cloth, minuscule stubs from what appeared to be a baby’s hand, I was struck with a contradiction to this belief. Why would an old man carry a baby in his arms and not his mother?
"There’s a baby in there," said the man who sat in front of us, pointing at the blanket outside. He then gazed at me with an expression of disgust.
"What did you say, schütze?" said the SS officer, who had gotten up from his bench, and stood in eagerness for an answer.
"There’s a baby over there outside our window," and he pointed at the black sack, which had now been pierced by a leg from the kicking newborn.
The SS officer bowed over my seat with his muscular gait, and with apparent anger, swore a curse under his breath, "Cunning wretch," he said, then with an abrupt change of expression, looked at me in gladness. "Come with me."
I rose from my seat with my rifle and went with the SS officer to the platform that hung outside our train. All about the station, there hung a gray mist fueled by fires bellowing from structures torn by the ravages of an air raid. Soldiers ran about the smoke with their machine pistols at ready, stepping over corpses without noticeable repugnance towards the carnage, showing rather an eagerness to search out and destroy some hidden enemy who I assumed hid from them underneath bodies for their barrels prodded these places. To my left, on a separate track, was the tail end of another train, derailed, and with boxcars lying on their sides upon the debris littered terrace. Some of the cars did not meet the same fate as their cousins, with wheels firm upon their causeways, but near the head, where the engine and many of its predecessors looked ready to ride away from the havoc, a jet rose in a breathing column to the skies, testimony to a hit by gunfire.
"Get me that baby," said a voice behind me and rather than turn and look at the SS officer, whose formidable build left me with an uneasy flashback of Lessing, I leapt down from the platform and strode over to the newborn.
I rushed to the spot, where a dark blanket similar to the petals of a flower opening in bloom, split open to show a life hidden within its folds. A giggle came from this newborn as it kicked at its wrinkling restraints with scrawny arms and legs. In a moment, I had my hands around the infant, put it near my breast, where it clung on with a trustful assurance, and began to nimble upon the SS runes on my collar. It felt so good to carry this young life. I was reminded of my father and the joy he must have felt to cradle me in his loving embrace.
As the journey back to the SS officer turned into a loathsome chore of having to relinquish such an adorable child, who reminded me so much of Franz, an innocent member of bad circumstances.
"Give it to mother," the SS officer laughed. He outstretched his arms to grab the baby and his mouth broke into a grin of what appeared to be honest affection for this orphan. I gave the little Franz to the SS officer and he held it with as much care as if it had been his own son. He looked up from the baby at me. His face transformed into a mask of supreme authority, lifeless, and taut. "You see the train over there?" he asked, nodding behind him.
"Jawhol," I said.
"See if they need assistance in rounding up Bolsheviks."
"Jawhol," I answered, and ran to the ruined train, my pace ever increasing, until the baby screamed. I took one step further, believing it only a regular fit that newborns went through, but it came again, horrible and full of pain. I made a swift turn about, and there was little Franz, naked and at the end of two risen arms, the skin upon him red with convulsive sobs as he hit with flailing limbs to be let free.
"There, there, mother’s here! Don’t cry. Shush, don’t cry," the SS officer then broke into a mocking laugh, and I was petrified by its ruthless candor. He even spit his tongue out at the helpless newborn. "Soldaten," he hollered to soldiers who were still combing the station grounds for the enemy. I cut behind the corner of the rear boxcar, the only stolid conflagration that had survived the rain of shrapnel and explosions, and leaned against it, hoping I could see my little Franz, without attracting personal attention from these visitors. "You search all over for them, and here I have found one," the voice echoed.
Out from behind the car, three soldiers in gray tunics, their machine pistols slack upon their straps, ran to the SS officer. Their collar runes, even in the distance, flashed, labeling them as soldiers of the glorious Schutzstaffel , and they came up to the platform in laughter. All of them seemed joyous to this discovery of one live soul.
The SS officer’s next action stole my breath.
My legs felt so weak below me, I had to hold onto the foot of an access ladder, to keep my balance. How could he do it? My mind was screaming with uncertainty. Passengers in my own train, stared through the portals of glass at my weak form, with their own solemn demeanors reflected off the glass in a greenish hue, and I wanted so much to not be there before them, but to have been in a boxcar to faint in cries of loathsome disgust. My own people! They were animals! How could they do this?
Afraid they might see me in my awestricken state, I paced backwards, continuing the mindless voyage to where the Schutzstaffel had told there was need of assistance to gather Bolsheviks, but why I did not stop in my tracks and flee from the scene could only be made clear by a mix up in the brain, an indecision on what to do, for the problem in front of it was so absurd, so animalistic and primal, that any reaction made on my part, would have to be learned again to cope with an action so away from a civilized norm. So, the body took a reticent course in reply to this occurrence, and kept at a steady trod into the void behind me.
Still in shock, I felt my legs give way, and to the ground, I fell, upon some stiff clothed form. A sharp bark right next to my ear awoke me from a trance, and a snout, snarling with fangs, shot out drool with each vicious outcry. I turned to see a police dog at the end of a leash, showing in its snips at my head, a desire to clamp down its jaws for a kill.
"Get up, schütze," shouted a harsh voice from above, but I was so much in a daze, with the vicious barks, and the swirl about my conscious after the previous chaos, that all I could do in answer was utter a grunt.
"Schütze, what’s wrong with you, get up, I need your assistance. Get your composure," said the voice.
I grunted again, wondering why the dog, even though its intentions were to devour every length of my flesh, was now calling for my immediate launch from a helpless state, to one where it would be hard for it to continue its hungry scheme to devour my life. My mind caught in a primal state, the dog became the arm of the SS soldier and with every thrust of its tawny paws, grunts issued forth with greater force than the preceding cries, as if this dog had brought me down to the mental anguish of my Little Franz, and for a moment, the soldier Otto, with his discipline and vigilance under pressure, was not there, and only the infantile personality remained, instinctive in its essence, and using babyish backlashes to counter a threat.
"Get your composure back together, or I’ll report you for negligence of duty. What is your Kompanie, schütze?" The dog went silent. "Schütze?" the voice was heard again, but with a benevolent tone and seeing the German Shepherd at a solemn squat near a pair of gray legs, I was struck with the realization that the dog had not spoken these words.
I got to my feet. There beside me within a gray uniform, stood a sergeant in the Schutzstaffel, with a cap at a cant upon his sweaty brow and a tinge of menace emanating from his youthful countenance. His height from head to toe was compact, much like his canine companion, but his muscular endowments made up for the lack of qualities in his stature, and gave him a formidable stance. I wondered if he too had stomped the life out of Bolsheviks with his fists and was vying now to do the same to me.
"Ja Scharführer," I uttered in a crisp retort, trying very hard to hide the anguish from him, although under the circumstances, it was as difficult as the concealment of an obvious lie. He saw through the false display of seriousness and seemed aware of my internal strife. "You are on leave I suppose?" he asked.
"Ja Scharführer," but I could start no meaningful conversation with this man, for it was too hard of an effort just to stand there in denial of what had transpired only moments before. "I was ordered to come here."
"There could be a need," then he paused, for the dog had got to the end of its chain, and with shut jaws, pricked its ears and began to pull him towards the derailed train. "I thought I had got all of them with grenades. Well, follow me!" he said, behind the ferocious barks from his canine, and he threw out slack from his chain, letting the dog lead to where it had presumably heard or smelt something.
I pursued close at his heels. To the head of the train the dog ran, uttering barks into the smoke, as its neck tried to writhe out from the collar. I could only think about the possibility that this dog had smelt out another victim, one who I feared would meet the same fate as my Little Franz. We came close to a cattle car, a bleak oaken color under the smoke and the canine came to a halt to give loud snaps at the apparent discovery of another prisoner.
"Schütze," the sergeant gasped, yanking the dog back to keep it at bay. "Go in there and look for survivors. If you find any prisoners, bring them out, and listen to me, if they try anything give them the butt of your rifle."
I leaped into the train, almost not knowing why I had gone inside, for my body had reacted before the mind came to answer his plea with a plausible action, and within the shell of the cold box car, the walls about me a garish gray, with a pile of ash near the door and the smell of smoke arising from the smash up in the center where grenades had fallen, I almost impaled myself on a jutting floorboard. I made a step to the side, thankful to have avoided death, and glanced up to see the cloudy abyss visible through a puncture in the roof. The sky shone in its grayness and thick impenetrability a tinge of gloom for the things transpiring below it.
Laying about the wreckage within the boxcar in piles of horridness were lumps of flesh strewn around corners of the boxcar as if it was a new breed of moss. The chaos shone the signs of thrown grenades by either the Schutzstaffel or the guard behind me. An intact hand, white in its deadly paleness, seemed ready to reach out and give me a shake from its crevice between two broken boards.
All these images struck forth in a parade upon my conscious, but I tried to think of the smoke and how it went onward without heed to these horrific occurrences. There was no smell but the smoke and in a corner of the car, blood lay wet upon the walls, a bright paint with mixes of white flesh. Nearer to the floor, portions of torsos with their wild plants of hair still growing on their scalp, looked upon me.
Then there was movement behind the shadow of some wreckage. An arm, clad within a blue sleeve, made a faint swish at the air. It did the same action again and I wondered if it was just an illusion, for it was absurd to believe someone could be alive in the carnage. Then it rose to slap at the air and fell with a groan.
"Show yourself!" I shouted, and raised my rifle to point at this survivor.
"Please I didn’t mean any harm."
"Show yourself!" I shouted again and kicked away a wooden obstruction blocking passage to the man.
"I tried to escape, but I’m injured," he said. "But I guess this is my end. The end to all the murder I have seen these last few days. They killed her you know. They burst into my wagon to kill her and the children, too, my two sons. Ah, you should have seen it," and his tone went weak and I came to him, not in consternation, as I had before, but in a perturbed state. I saw his bloody face and it was lean and broken by wrinkles. "They came in, in the same clothes you have on, and just lined them up and shot each one. Then they made me live to remember it. Made for work, they told me, and if I refused, a bullet to the head. Why didn’t I just quit then, it would have saved me from this."
"Can you walk, old man?" I asked.
"Old man? Did you just call me old man?" and the prisoner gave such an affectionate look from his eyes that it made me pause. I sat next to him and saw his right leg lay under a heavy board, probably too large to dislodge. As I got ready to yank him out from the crushed boards, I happened to glance into his eyes again, and saw the same benevolent look. It was the same expression my mother had given me after my return from long months in the Hitlerjugend and in it there could be seen a longing for friendship.
"Why do you look at me so?" The old man asked. "Has it really reached your head, this foolishness you see around you?"
"I do not understand, please get up, so we can go," I said, but I did nothing to further this order, in hope the old man would follow through with the command.
"You are much different then them, too much different," the old man continued with a shrewdness to his words, "I would have never thought even under this, that a boy like you would stumble around like he does not know why he’s here, and I tell you, this!" and he gave finger points to the bodies about the boxcar. "This has no explanation, and I saw you come in here, and you did not laugh as they do and why? Then this old man you call me, to you I’m dirt and you call me an old man. It is not of your position, to say a thing like old man."
"You talk lies," I said, but felt what he said was true.
"Lies? You live in a lie. If you were one of them you would have shot me. I can say to myself before my death that I have met a soldier with a conscience."
"But you have not seen the things I have seen this day," I said, and the words seethed through my teeth, for the internal struggle within had lost to the truth spoken by this victim of horrible circumstances. I did not care so much anymore about his blood and instead succumbed to his correct insight of my inner torment.
He put his hand upon my shoulder, frail and sick in its paleness, and gave it an affectionate caress.
"Schütze," the sergeant hollered from the door of the train. "Have you found any living?"
"He speaks to you," whispered the prisoner.
As he said these words, my head sank into my arms to let out tears. I could not bear the insanity any longer and the only escape offered to me was in a natural release of the guilt, washing it away with each cry against the sleeve.
"I wish to tell you something," said the old man, with such honest caring for my affliction. "You are not a bad man. You are not one of them. You wouldn’t cry if you had been. Just remember what I say to you, for someday my words may help you save one even less fortunate then myself. This Nazism, all of it is a madness. I have seen the worst of it. Let me up. He has found me. I will go to him."
"But he will kill you," and I looked to find he had already gotten to his feet, even with the bad leg, and he went for the door.
"Then I will die, a man who never denied his own self."
"No, stay here. I will hide you. But you must be quiet."
I picked up debris lying around and put it over him, trying to hide his presence.
"You are a good man, please remember that," he said again. "Save them, these unfortunate people. They have no one else to help them under this madness." When I had put enough wood scraps and other materials about his person to give him disguise, I left, pondering upon his words. The man had looked into my soul and made me self-conscious. Who was I? The old man had given an assumption that I was lost, in denial of my true being, and through his good actions of non-hostility and understanding, he had broken original beliefs about Bolsheviks, considered untermunschen under Nazi philosophy.
The sergeant gave a yank on the leash and the dog flew back to his side as I came to the threshold of the boxcar. I gazed at the Scharführer in awe, for the angry expression upon his face shone in great contrast to the tranquility of the prisoner I had left behind.
"So you found no one," the Scharführer uttered. I could see it now, the promise of the "superman" drown into the Scharführer’s rage for this supposed person in the boxcar.
"Nein, Scharfuhrer," I answered.
I leaped down upon the ground and with disgust went to the end of the boxcar, hoping the sergeant would not find the innocent man who knew universal truths.
The voyage back to the train was wrought with a mental confusion that had given birth to remembrances of a similar moment in my youth. I imagined Franz again, stuck between the many fists, trying to free himself, but still with the smile upon his jester’s face, and the image struck now with greater truth than in the past. Franz was dead! I just knew it had to be true. His life taken by the Fuhrer and his SS!

CHAPTER TWELVE

A mansion, half hidden behind alders, greeted us with gables of chipped paint. Father left the house to squalor with his voyages into death and its presence made me expectant for the worse.
Hermann went ahead, yet he sidestepped upon the far edges of our road, fearful of the house too, waiting for surprises to jolt out from its doors.
“Home,” I said, and with a nod made Hermann understand I wanted to stop. My mouth was parched and with a swift turn around, I got at a canteen warm after a six-mile trek from the station.
“It looks quiet,” Hermann said, as I drank from the feldflasche. “I wonder if anybody’s here.” He pointed across the dirt road to a wooden post, a figurehead to a stretch of fence, where a bucket hung amongst flies. After a swipe over my chin to disperse the watery excess, I went to the post, and with a quick look inside, engulfed my head in the buzzing swarm. There arose in my nostrils a rotten smell from a yellowy film lying stagnant over what appeared to be stale milk. I fell back onto the road, caught in a clamor of coughs, as I tried to blot out the stench.
“Pew,” I said. “You should smell that.”
Hermann laughed and went over to attempt the braver act of imitation. He struck back with horror in his face, cackling in apparent triumph at his survival.
“Smells worse than the,” but when the word “train” hung in my conscious, I could not fathom the speech to express the horrible machine and instead of enlivening the memory, I hid it with a smirk, all too helpful in the concealment of the unutterable. “The boy who gets to the front door last is the last to take a swig of my mother’s Schnapps.”
“You swine,” Hermann retorted, and went at a sprint into the grassy yard. He leapt over a rusty metal panel, the remains of a tractor father had dismantled to provide material for the war effort, and went up the few scaleable stairs leading onto the porch. Still trying to resurface from my mental confusion, I took a slower passage to the house, hoping through distraction to forget the ordeal at the station. Relief came in the steady training of my eyes on the figure standing in shadow of the patio roof and before the entrance into a heavenly abode.
After knocking at the door, Hermann went to an unwashed window at the far left corner,. I began to worry. Had mother left? Had something horrible befallen her?
“Mother!” I shouted, in a flurry of doubt, almost tripping over my boots as I ran for the porch. Hermann banged at the door with the butt of his rifle, probably hoping its bark would elicit a response, and I flew to the window, wiping at the glass, which did nothing to clear the dust. As bumps upon the door continued to rock out a greeting, there came no response from within. After one last futile glide of my palm upon the surface, hoping with an imaginary force to clear the pane for a look inside, I gave up the effort. I tapped, and as the hand retreated, it left behind a worn mask which stared out with limpid eyes. I fell back in horror. The face vanished and then showed again, a shadowy demon’s visage, almost indiscernible amongst speckles of dust.
“Aye,” I gave out in consternation and shot a nervous grimace at Hermann. He took up his rifle and got away from the door, probably assuming from my look that what was inside wanted to hurt us. There arose a clatter of hinges and a sudden clank from a lock. The door swung open.
“My son!” a voice cried. Onto the porch ran forth a woman in a white morning gown, with a furrowed forehead, and a chop of blonde hair tied behind her head in a knot. For a moment, this woman, who came in a sudden charge upon me, seemed an imposter, someone posing as my mother, and I took a step back. She reached to embrace me, but halted in mid-stride, seeing how uneasy I felt in her presence. Her hands fell to her sides and she gave me an imploring look from her all too familiar face. Again, I thought this was not her, for in my thoughts she had been different, yet as I began to hear her breathing and smelt the perfume about her person with its scent of cinnamon, I recalled the moments when mother had surrounded me with that smell as she attended to matron chores about the house. This was my mother and I thrust myself against her, with arms about the thin waist, and glancing into those deep eyes, which at one time had shone with youth, I kissed her gown and then her cheek.
“My son,” she cried. Yes, I thought, I have come back to you, please never let me go, and I held her firmer, hoping she would not relent in her affectionate caresses upon my back. “You have returned to me, and you look so proud, so much like a man,” and she stepped back, escaping my attempts to bring her back into my arms, and eyed me in amazement. “I can still remember you, a baby, my own baby, and now I see before me, my son, a man and a soldier.”
“Oh, mother sweet mother, I have missed you so much,” I said, and almost broke down in tears with earnest heartache. “You have been in my thoughts all the time, but please mother, let us go inside now. You see, I have brought Hermann.”
My mother turned to him, with an expression of recognition to an old Hitlerjugend friend, and then gave him her hand to shake. “I remember you all,” she said, yet the words came out dreamily and with a tinge of melancholy. They sounded as if she had not seen us for years, although we had not been gone for but a few months.
“Let us go inside mother.” I led Hermann into the quaint darkness of my home. Inside against a wall there lay a sofa with plush cushions. In the center of the room, at rest on shiny oak floorboards, a card table with various books I had brought back from the Hitlerjugend leaned against the stem of a brass lamp. It was apparent no changes had been made to the book stack since I left for the Waffen SS. At the near corner of the stack, were Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in red gilded covers, dusty from non-use. Mother had never read a book in my lifetime, being devoted to household pursuits like knitting clothes and serving supper, while father, a warrior who had seen battle on the front, had come into this room to disrupt my reading and tell me to attend to the livestock. I remember the grimace that would appear upon his face when I walked by him, jubilant with words that had flown into my consciousness from some powerful text. Soon after my chores, the night lectures at the kitchen table began, when father told of his philosophical views on life and war, using terms I had read in books to contrast the realities he had seen at the front amongst men of similar ideals as the authors. He had told me to swear on my love for him and the family never to discuss his dinner conversations with anyone, saying, “It is because I love you so much, that I tell you the truth. But you must still do your duty, like any soldier, and keep to your obligations. Never forget the truth though, it is the only thing that is real in this mad world.”
The reminiscence of those childhood days continued as I went to the sofa and saw above it the photograph of my father with one of his comrades at Smolensk. The glossy surface thrown into splendor by flames behind the two characters as they stood smiling by an artillery piece highlighted more the destructiveness of war than the camaraderie sprung from its confusion. The flavor of father’s cigarettes still hung about the picture and it gave me a feeling that father was still there in the room, alive through the vibrancy of this photograph and the scent he left behind.
“So how are things?” I asked, speaking more to the emptiness around me, since mother, even if she had been there, did not make her presence known until I had turned around and saw her at the window picking up a pile of shirts from the seat of a rocking chair behind the door.
"Supply work as usual, my love. I’ve been packing and distributing uniforms from morning to night. These last few weeks have been the most trying. There has been no food about with the rationing and no ready labor. The farm has been all but forgotten since you and your father left. The raids, oh, the countless raids, it drives me crazy whenever they fly over."
“And the livestock, what happened to them?” I resented my mother’s not keeping up responsibilities around the house over her other work. “Have you let them loose?”
“No, son, hardly. All of them have been taken.”
“Taken?” I said, aghast. “But why?”
“The soldiers came when you left and took them. They took everything. It was for the war and I saw how badly they needed them so I gave our cows, the pigs, and all the hens. For my gratitude they gave me better pickings from the rations.”
“You gave everything away mother without talking to me.” My voice rose in consternation. “Now we have nothing? Nothing but the house?”
“These are hard times.” Mother lowered her voice to a whisper, as if fearful of reprisals.
“Yes, but we could have managed with the livestock. Father would have been against it.”
“Your father was a different man, he was against everything. It surprised me he was never thrown into prison for the things he felt strongly about. The Führer was never foremost in his mind when it came to making decisions.”
“Mother, don’t say such things about father. He was an honorable man.” I came up to her, gazed at Hermann knowing he was one of the only comrades who had not been assimilated into the superhuman ethos of our Kompanie, and went on, unabashed. “He saw what the others did not see. He knew more than any of them.”
“Knew how to bring corruption to this house and the Gestapo to our doorstep.”
“The Gestapo, mother?” I said. “Let’s be serious. The Gestapo has never been here. Father was too smart for that. He knew and told me what could happen if I let out what he said here. I have seen so much today mother, that the Gestapo, even with their legions, could not steal the truth from me.”
“You talk brave words for a boy who has been a Hitlerjugend, a servant of our Führer. Do you not know that the Gestapo could be at our doorstep now, listening to what you say, and would send you away to prison, or even worse?” She made a step back with a worrisome look towards the door as if she expected the entrance of the Gestapo.
Oblivious to her distress, I came up to her, put down my pack with the rifle and embraced her. “But mother, you worry too much. Do not worry any more. I am here, and this loneliness, I know it has been bothering you this last month with my absence. Forget this talk, and don’t worry. I fight for you, to keep you safe.” I looked into her eyes and they shone with a fearful glimmer. “Mother,” I whispered, feeling her heart beat against my chest, as I pressed closer, staring further into those clear pools of uncertainty. The sight brought me back to the glance given to me by the mummified soldier, his bandages thick with blood. Oh God, my mind screamed, his image is there! I lurched towards the couch in fear, feeling an onrush of painful emotions. “I need to sit down.” I fell into the cushions, at a loss to do anything else but sit and salvage my thoughts.
“Your trip must have been exhausting,” my mother said with a worrisome tinge to her voice. “I will prepare you something, just wait.” She came to the couch, taking up a pillow, which she put behind my head to act as a cushion, then she ran away and returned with a blanket. The pillow was a hindrance, so I put it back in its place, yet the blanket, one from my own bedroom, with its soft wool and familiar grayness, was a welcome amenity. I snuggled into its warmth and almost fell asleep but mother’s voice kept me in a wakeful state. “I was able to get some bread in town, and a little length of sausage. It’s very small, but with my ration card I was able to bring back just a little more.”
“Mother you should have waited,” I said, my speech coming out in a sleepy drawl, “You should have waited before you let our livestock go free. Now we have no food.”
“I never expected you to return so soon. How do you think I would have been prepared, eh? And with the planes flying over relentlessly, your mother would have starved.”
I glanced at Hermann. He was still standing by the door, appearing too nervous to make an advance into the room.
I leapt up from the couch and cut into a hallway, went down its musty length into my bedroom, where I found, spread full in blackness upon the mattress of my bed, the shirt and pants of a Hitler Youth uniform. They appeared ready to jump from the brown sheets and embrace me with a hint of candid memories of youthful gaiety in the labor service, but I looked down in a gloom. All about me, the white walls became a barrier of light, untouched by smoke and flames raging not far beyond them, and they gave the room and its small writing table with legs of rickety wood beaten black by constant kicks thrown at it, a homely radiance. I came closer to the bed, its headboard pressed against a window frame stained red by seventeen years of rust, and gave the uniform a thorough inspection. It appeared mother had taken too much time in its preparation for the shirt was starched smooth and the pants had no creases. I touched the cuffs of the shirt, pondering on what foolery caused mother to spend so much time on articles I would never wear again.
Women were so ignorant about the military. I could imagine mother being one of those spectators who applaud a clown’s jaunting dress while expecting to see them in their motley after the carnival. “I don’t remember you from the show,” she would say in ignorance, “why the different look?” From the cuffs, my gaze went to the armband, blood red with its swastika encased within a white oval. Its appearance, brilliant against the continuity of black in the uniform, made it a distraction. I looked hard at it. It grew wide before my eyes and seemed to rise from the bed, circling in revolutions upon its white axis, a gear which chopped at the purity, yet with every slice it made, the blades came out bent.
A sudden screech erupted from the living room and I flew down a few strides of hallway. I hid behind a corner to listen. Further sounds arose, ringing with a melodious uproar of strings, rising in a constant crescendo until horns stole through with a deep melody. It was Hermann’s favorite song, a Hitlerjugend military march. The music screamed from father’s gramophone. As I looked further past my corner to see Hermann, his lithe form stomped in front of me without acknowledgement of my presence, and he went on in circles about the room, caught in a musical fervor.
I gazed to my left and saw mother at the dining room table with a butcher knife. She held it in such a way to make her appear ready to leap and thrust it into Hermann’s gut. The lion-like expression, brimming from her face with evil intentions, made me edge closer into the room. With a swift look at me, her face became tranquil. The wrinkles torn around her cheeks from strenuous work blew out the skin within into flabby balloons, pinching an almost imperceptible mouth into a pout. With a swift cut through the sausage length on the table, she seemed to disperse any misconceptions.
“I see you’re hungry, don’t worry I almost have it ready,” she smiled, and then went back to the meat. Again, there came the angry look upon her visage and it was more fervid in its desperation with each shout of a horn from the record player.
The song reached its peak. Horns fought for supremacy over the chaotic beating of drums. For Hermann, the music must have awakened his inner beast, and with every bark from the horn, he struck the air with his fist, and then smiling at me, took my hands, and swung me about the room. The music roared behind us as Hermann, his blonde hair swishing with each turn, laughed in mockery at my confusion. His laughs were terrible, hiding a sinister secret, and I frowned, watching his solid form, stark in its dizzying whirls, direct me at random to various corners of living room. At one moment, my knees hit against the couch, or a foot caught under a stool, flinging it at the wall. The craziness continued, and his despicable expression, how I wanted to tear it from his face, looked down in haughtiness on my reluctance to share his bliss.
“Powerful, can you not feel it, Otto?”
What was there to feel in this song? I thought, looking at my comrade with a queasiness born from our spins. It was only a fight between instruments, striking into clear space to utter their signature. To me power was an action and could not be defined in a musical tune.
Hermann let me go. I fell against the wall and smacked my back against a chest of drawers. I slid to the floor, dizzy, and numb from my contact with the obstruction. The record skipped.
“Sorry, Otto, I thought you knew?”
“Knew what,” I uttered, rubbing at the soreness.
“To pull out of the dance. You’ve always done it before. Remember you twirl, then pull out in a spin, like in the old days?”
“Ja”, I said. “I just forgot,” and I remembered those days of foolishness, where we broke away from the military rigidity of hard training in the Hitlerjugend, to practice a dance move, all to the tunes of this march.
Mother, caught in a worrisome flurry, stood at my side, and put pressure upon my hand. “Are you hurt?” she asked with a woman’s diffidence. To have given a candid answer, would betray cowardice, and Lessing had spent months trying to steal that fear from my consciousness.
“It’s nothing, mother,” I said. “So, is it done?” I asked, pointing toward the table where she had been preparing the sausage.
“Do you not want it cooked?” she asked.
“No, I’m starving,” I said, and with a swift scratch at my stomach, I rose to go and eat this rare delicacy, far better than the broth and other meals we had to hunt for in camp.
From behind came Hermann’s footsteps. When I had got to the table and bolted down a meat slice, his steps came to a halt, and out of the record player, a wailing tune arose, against the original rhythm of the song, and stole into my ears as a repetitive nuisance. A scratch in the record had caught the needle between two notes. The horn gave off staccato cries, starting with a low murmur then ending with a long drawn-out wail.
A shiver shot through my body. The sound was all too familiar and it made me lose breath. I threw a fist against the table and the sausage cuts fell onto the floor. The cries from the record player went on, but now I did not hear the music.
“What are you doing, Otto? What’s got into you?” I heard a woman say from behind, but the voice, although there, rang out from a darkness which clouded my perceptions. I answered each tune from the player with a grunt. I hit the table again with my fist. Hermann tapped me on the back. I swung around and pushed him into the wall.
“Don’t you hear it!” I screamed at him. “Don’t you mess with me! Can’t you see!” I came at him seeing before me a white shadow upon a black void. “You’re an animal, can’t you see, don’t mess with me.” I swung jabs at this whiteness, expanding amongst the dark with each angry release from my consciousness. “You’re an animal!” I ran away from this white form, attacked by a nightmarish blackness, and in my ears, there came successive howls, which broke into cackles. They were yelps from the baby at the train station.
"Why!" I cried. "God!" I felt about me in the blindness, but I could grab nothing. The constant cackles from a baby struck the ears with a louder intonation and I felt fingers press into me.
Terror caught me motionless as they jabbed into the skin, hoping to kill with each poke, but I broke away. In a moment of desperation, I shot out from this black blanket, and awoke out of the nightmare in a cowering position at the foot of the couch, holding onto cushions as if with my last grip before a fall into oblivion.
“Otto!” Hermann shouted, with a slap at my face.
I looked at him in exhaustion. He brought me up onto the couch and I sat there in a daze, trying to recollect my thoughts, as mother, in awe, stood almost reluctant to touch me, probably in fear of another outburst.
“What was that?” Hermann said. “Are you all right?”
I could not talk. The nightmare struck me dumb.
“He has the chills. That’s what it is,” mother said, her hand upon my forehead, and when she drew it back, her flabby cheeks sunk from the mouth, and her teeth shone in a tight clinch. She went back to the table. I concentrated on a crack in the plank ceiling. The crack’s passage across the wood, winding through various rings and wavy patterns, was halted by the edge of another board. I concentrated for a second upon this fissure. Then the unbearable memory came back and to escape it, my gaze flew back to the start of the crack, followed it down to its tragic end at the start of another board, and my thoughts went calm.
“Really, I don’t know what it may be,” mother said. “He’s just tired, yes, but I have never seen him act up like this. He must have the fever.”
My gaze was still on the crack and in its hairline canyon, I saw darkness, and from its depths, an almost imperceptible drum roll fell through, beating louder as I lay there upon the couch nearly faint.
“My, here they come again!” mother shouted. “Don’t they ever stop,” and she stood over me, her head shaking from side to side, as if a madness had taken control of her too, and upon her face was an ill pallor. “Help me,” she whispered through her teeth, and the utterance, although it rang loud in my ears, came out very faint, probably so Hermann could not hear. I did not know what to give as an answer. Instead, I maintained a listless stare upon the worn mask before me, but even from this worn massacre, I could still see signs of the youthful mother of my childhood.
The room around me reverberated with the drum roll and as I gave more attention to it, the sticks beat too fast for a tattoo, and a rising bass shook the windows. The drum became a drone, not striking out just one perceptible hum, but unleashing a massive chorus. The sound came from outside and I gave a furtive glance at the window then came back to mother’s helpless visage. “They never stop,” she whispered again, and I heard a door fly open, then shut. Hermann had left. “They are my music in the morning, they remind me that I am still here, and how better they sing than the birds,” she continued in a dreamy dialogue.
“Shut up mother!” I shouted at her, fearing she had lost her sanity.
“But they do sing, Otto, my darling. Better than the birds.”
“Mad!” I shouted. “You’re mad.”
“No, just listen,” and she pushed me further into the cushions, so I could not leave. “You remember when father left?”
“Mother, why, do you continue like this?”
“Do you remember him in his uniform? Those gray pants I ironed, do you know how long it took to get them ready?” and she smiled, taken by a dreamlike urge to tell a story, which had no significance for me, but to her seemed very important to disclose. “For two hours before he got up in the morning I ironed those pants and got out the wrinkles made in his travels against the Bolsheviks. He was such a good forthright man, and he knew what was best for us, and best for you, Otto, but sometimes, his mind was in the wrong place, but when he came to me that morning…do you remember?”
The sight of mother in this crazy state was painful and I began to entreat her with shakes of my head to stop. She continued, as if I were not there.
“He put on the uniform I had fretted over for so many hours, kissed me…oh, how lovely it was to kiss him that last time…to embrace him. And you, Otto, you were standing at the table, happy about your forthcoming challenges in the Waffen SS. You make me so proud,” and she gave me a pat, still with her other hand jammed against my shoulder, to shove me between cushions. “That final goodbye has been sorely missed these last two months, and I loved him so much, you know, I really did love him to death. He was my first love, and you were the charming spring from that love,” then she shook. An unusual quirk broke from her countenance and she looked away from me, downcast. Then she returned her gaze, yet not with the previous dreamlike expression, but a distraught foreboding. “You are the only one I have left!” Even under the incessant drone, which sang with its loud cantor outside, I could still hear the record player send out a staccato cry. “I don’t have him anymore, he left and got murdered by the Bolsheviks but you…you are still here. I have cried weeks alone, kept here to attend the house while you were away, and those nights alone were horrible, Otto. You can’t imagine what it is like to be alone, waiting for a loved one’s return.”
“Please mother, please,” I said, and my hand went to her cheek, which she pressed in affectionate regard. “I love you so much, but please.”
“You’re my only son, Otto,” she cried. “Don’t let them kill you too. You will come home to your mother and not be killed, will you?”
“Mother what are you saying? I just want to get up,” and I tried to squeeze out from her staunch press upon my shoulder, to no avail. “I just want to go outside,” I pleaded. “Please let go.”
“You’ll be murdered!” she shrieked.
“No mother,” I said, and realizing that a gentle approach to escape would fail, I gave her a forceful push. She fell back and I leaped away.
“But why must you leave me here all alone!” she gasped. “You don’t know what it’s like to be alone.”
“Mother, no,” I shouted down at her in pity, but her words, although spoken from a mental illness, cut through my thoughts with unreasonable clarity. I wanted her to talk more, although my tongue lashed out for her to cease. As I stood over her, cringing at the cowering form at my feet, with her hands about the tips of my boots, a sudden parallel to the broken woman who washed the feet of Jesus sprung to mind. From this act of hopelessness, I began to realize the anguish mother had been through during my absence. Is this how somebody goes insane? I tried to imagine her loneliness, yet saw only the darkness, rising from the horrible meeting with the prisoner at the train station, and with a fresh revival, the nightmare tore through my consciousness, and the horrible cackles rang from his bandages again.
"Why?" I uttered, yet mother did not answer. She was crying. "Mother can’t you hear it? A baby whimpers for help, but we do nothing? We let him…die."
She sprang to her feet. A sudden repose in her facial features showed that she had come to some realization, yet she still tottered about in a drunken swagger. She frowned. “You let him die.”
The utterance blinded me. I felt I had been set aflame and I screamed, hoping some hand would reach and pull me out, but there was only the anger, and it threw images of the train at me in rapid succession. The mummy cackled at our ranks, hiding the feathers of a tormentor within the confines of his coat.
“No!” I shouted, and I sprang at the imaginary flames about me, trying to destroy them with rage. “You lie! You’re nothing but a lie,” and I ran to the player atop the chest of drawers, tore the record from the needle, and ran toward the portal of light. Ahead, illumined by the flames, was a passage of escape out of the nightmare, and yet on the other side, a deafening buzz from thousands of bees stung through this refuge to create another chaos. I sprang into it, breaking the record in my hand in half, and found myself alone in a field.
Above, steely arrowhead formations flew into a blue expanse. Countless in their numbers they bellowed out the same tenor, a drawn-out whine, which brought more confusion into my already distraught thoughts. They cry and my mother cries for me, I thought, and I screamed in utter abandonment.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Rope,” I heard my mother’s voice from behind. “I need a length of rope.”
I ignored her request, my eyes fixed on a beer bottle, following the rise and fizz of the bubbles within the gold liquid. These translucent circles, some small, others bigger than their brothers, floated to the watery surface, unfettered, and as they got to the top, only the air kept them from breeching the tip. At that moment, even though their existence was momentary, I began to yearn for their freedom and saw myself as one of those bubbles running away from the bottom where the madness lay. I felt listless and fit for anything but mournful staring outside my bedroom window, where with help from the contents of the beer mother had left on the sill, I drowned my uncertainty with drunkenness.
“Rope, Otto,” my mother said. “Go to the shed and give me some rope, darling,” yet I continued to stare outside the window at the sun as it sank below the dead offshoots surrounding our muddy yard, illuminating it with a golden brilliance.
Rope? What did my mother need with a length of rope? I shuddered with foreboding.
“Shut up, mother,” I said and when she answered with a pitiful sigh, I shot a quick look at her. “You know you’re in no condition to be out of bed. I told you to stay in bed and you got up.”
“But I’m lonely in there,” she said in melancholy. “I wanted to come in here and ask my son for a simple thing and here he shouts at me as if I were a cow to be shooed away. You should know your place.”
“Mother, you’re ill. Don’t come in here until you’re well.”
“But it’s so lonely in there.”
I took a swig from the beer, put it down, and then, feeling the sip was not enough, took it up again to gulp down the entire bottle. When I finished, I threw it behind me. The bottle shattered against the wall.
“Get out!” I screamed, amongst a spray of glass shards. The door slammed as she exited the room.
The despair came again. It did not arrive in the form of bad memories, but in a numbness, brought on by the alcohol and a ringing sensation in the head and I threw my hands against my face, let the fingers crawl down my cheeks until they came to the chin. As I prodded at the crevice below the lips, a sudden image flitted through my brain. It was of the raven. Somewhere within those beady eyes, which had stared at me in my dreams, was an answer to calm my tumultuous thoughts. To the creature, everything was clear.
I stared outside the window again. Above the field, dark bilious clouds pushed in from the west. The wind rose and the blades of dead grass, now black against the darkening horizon, swished with ferocious spasms. The air in the room became cold. From the distant mountains behind the fields, gray patches of clouds fell down their sides, rolling further into forests cupping around their bottoms, then after masking these reaches in a dank fog, charged toward my house. I meditated mutely while watching this phenomenon. I hoped with a morbid fascination that the fog would move with enough force to cause the windowpane to shatter. As it sped upon the muddy lawn, a wall towering to the sky, I suddenly feared the fulfillment of these hopes, but this grayish barrier, although it hit the window with an incredible quickness, only spat a flurry of snow at the glass.
Winter had arrived as a surprise. As the cloud broke away, the yard amazed me by its abrupt transformation. Instead of showing its reminiscent brownish and miasma like contours, the storm had thrown out a blanket of powdery whiteness upon the ground. Even the grasses, although almost indiscernible in the dusk, shone as if sprinkled with sugar.
Then a shadow appeared in front of my window. It made a tap on the glass and in my intoxicated state, I thought it funny and laughed at the stranger outside who tried to get my attention.
“Otto,” it said. “Come out here.”
I laughed again and tapped the window in answer.
“What are you, drunk?” said the stranger and when I looked closer, I saw it was Hermann. He had thrown on a gray service coat and smoked a cigarette and as he stared at me with a quizzical smile, he stepped backward, as if in fear I might throw myself into the window.
I staggered out to him from the kitchen door and put a hand upon the wall to steady myself. Hermann gave me the cigarette he held covered behind a palm to keep the tip lit against the icy breeze. I took it from him, shivering from the cold and envious of my comrade’s protection from the elements in his bulky watch coat and headscarf. His red face grinned at my uneasiness. When I took a puff from the cigarette, the wind almost ripped it out of my mouth.
“So you’re all right now?” he asked, and probably thinking he had said the wrong thing, he gazed down at the ground.
I knew he meant to say it in honest concern for my condition, yet his question came at a wrong moment and I hesitated before giving him an answer.
“Ja, I’m all right.”
The snow fell heavy now and it covered my feet. I began to kick at it, to test its thickness and a powdery cloud blew upward with each blow, until I hit the mud underneath. I looked at its contrasting darkness to the neighboring white and felt a sudden desire to leap out and step on a new patch of snow. I did so and saw an expression of relief on Hermann’s face.
“What happened in there?” my comrade asked and I stared at him in his headscarf, the face jutting out from two flaps. It did not look like he really wanted to know, and would prefer small talk.
“I don’t know,” I said curtly, a lie, but I just could not tell him about the unutterable thoughts I had, even under the alcoholic haze. “I think I just lost it, you know with father not being here, it was upsetting.”
“He fought and died proudly for the fatherland,” Hermann said, with an almost machine-like rapt expression.
“Ja, you’re right. But I miss him. I miss those talks at the dinner table. He was such a knowledgeable man. He knew so much about our enemy,” and I kicked at a new layer of snow pressing up to the tops of my boot flaps. The snow came down in sheets of unrelenting flakes and my uniform shirt and pants were spattered with it. “He knew Ivan’s weaknesses, its strengths, he had seen so much out there. I always admired him more than anyone else. He also knew something about our fatherland that others did not see. He saw,” and I touched my eyes, to inflect what I said in visual terms. Then it came to me, father never held much allegiance to our Führer, and to anyone else would have been seen as a renegade. I pondered on what had driven him to make such a breach. Had he seen something? Then the memory of the train station came again and to escape it, I shot a quick glance out into the distance, where pillaring out from powdery mounds, the grasses shone almost like knives coated with frost. I shivered at the sight and edged closer to Hermann to share his warmth.
“This awful cold,” I said. “Something tells me, this will be a hard winter, a long one too.”
“Don’t wish it,” Hermann said.
“Then don’t listen to me. I’m drunk and a doubter. Even our Obersharführer thinks I’m a doubter. A doubter often lies.”. I gave him the cigarette to finish.
“What about your mother?” Hermann said, his words hesitant. “Do you think she will be all right when we’re gone?”
“Sure she will, soon as I give her the rope.” In laughter, I pointed to the side of the house, where under pine branches weighed down by snow could be distinguished, a lean-to shed. I stomped in the powder toward it, Hermann sloshing behind my prints. I came to its white cross square door, nudged at it, then opened it fully. Inside there were haystacks, untouched during my three-month absence and on plank walls, each on their individual hooks, hung various yard tools. I went further into the shed, where in the darkness I could see nothing and felt about the wall for the item I sought. In my search, I almost stabbed my hands on the tines of a rake and as it fell away in the void, it hooked onto a hairy braid, as if someone had left a tail of hair coiled upon the wall and I lifted it from the hook, took it outside and shook it at Hermann.
“You see, mother will sleep well, I have found it,” and I wrapped it around my arm, looking prepared to rappel down some mountain or tie up a boat at dock with the hemp. The cold cut into me and I shivered, holding the burnt tip of the rope, in hope that the charred end would release some imagined warmth to vanquish the frigidness, but the cold remained, horrible and merciless. I struck out for the house with wide strides in hopes of an escape. Then I came to a halt.
“Grenade!” a voice shrilled from behind.
I fell to the snow. With a glance to my left, I held my breath, and awaited a detonation. Seconds went by and nothing. The rope cut into my wet clothes and I wanted to adjust it. Why did the grenade not detonate? I rubbed off crystals from my brows and made a swish with my hips to burrow myself further into the snow, then heard laughter behind me.
“Get up you drunk!” a voice shouted and from the jovial tone, I discovered there had been nothing to worry. Hermann ran beside me, ankle deep in snow and swung back his arm, ready to throw an imaginary grenade, then with one quick gasp, he launched it forward and envisioning myself on the battle field, I took his action as preparation for an assault.
“Schnell!” he cried. In a burst of white, I shot up from the ground and went at a sprint toward the right flank of the imaginary impact point of the grenade, dove into a depression, close, but far enough to the target to not be hit by shrapnel, and dug my face in snow.
Hermann shouted out an explosion. I pretended to hold a rifle in front of me, while my comrade from behind shouted out bursts from a firearm.
“Suppressed!” he shouted and knowing I had found the best place to eliminate the enemy in his moment of confusion fleeing from the grenade, I picked off fancied soldiers, who if they had not been stuck in the blast, were taken out by my bullets.
“Got them all,” I waved back at him and he helped me up out of the depression, patting snow off my uniform. “It’s cold, let’s get inside,” I said, and with a glance at the door, a brown square against a backdrop of frigid whiteness, I ran to it, barged into the kitchen and in haste to warm myself and dry wet clothes, I stole a blanket from the couch. The darkness within the living room gave off a dreadful atmosphere. I felt almost like being stuck in a cave miles under the earth, with only a blanket to keep me warm. I wiped the cloth over my body, keeping it pressed on wetter spots to soak in all the moisture, and as I did this, I went toward my mother’s bedroom, left of mine down the hall, and stood before it, wondering if I should knock before walking inside.
Hermann came up from behind. I looked at his shadowy figure for a brief moment, his shoulders illumined by a bluish glare from the outside light filtering through the kitchen window.
“You can go to my room and sleep if you want,” I whispered to him. “I’ll be in there after I give mother the rope.”
There was no movement from the shadow.
“I’ll be back,” I said. In answer to this, the shadowy figure disappeared, and left in its place were the faint contours of the kitchen table. I knocked at the door. A rustle arose from the other side. I struck at the door once more and heard a murmur. I felt discomfort about awaking mother from her slumber, but she had wanted the rope and I thought it my duty to give it as reconciliation for the thrown bottle.
“What is it?” she asked.
“May I come in?” I asked.
“Otto, is that you?”
“Ja,” and I nudged the door open, trying to find mother in the unlit room. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the blackness, and as they became keener to the environment, they picked out the bedpost corners and white covers upon a mattress, a pale blue shade under cast from the window. There was movement above these covers, a sudden shifting of cloth, as if the thing underneath thought it too cold to keep the head uncovered and with this movement, mother shielded herself from view.
“You can come in,” she said, under the blankets and her voice came out muffled. “Sit down next to me, Otto.”
I went up to her, feeling in the dark recesses for a seat. My hands met the wooden armrest of a chair not far from her bed. I sat in it. “I brought the rope for you,” I said, slipping it out from my shoulder and shaking the length at her.
“Good, thank you, just put it underneath the bed,” and she let her arm fall limp by the bedside and with a pathetic motion, she pointed to where she wanted it. She gazed up at me, flecks of twilight revealing wrinkles in her brow, and a glimmer shown in her eyes. “Otto, I want to tell you something.”
“What, mother?” I asked in anticipation of what she would have to say.
“I understand you,” she said and the words were odd and unexpected, I did not know what to answer.
“But mother,” I said, in a confused state.
“No, I understand you,” she said again and she took hold of my hands, played with them in an affectionate way, then thrust hers back into the blankets and turned away from me. “I know what you were thinking earlier today. I know why you were so sick. I have been like that too.”
“Mother, you do not know.”
“Yes, I do,” she insisted. “But it’s not the worst of it. Soon this war will be over and if you are not shot dead, you will come home to me not as the Otto I remember now, but as an invalid. The Bolsheviks will do it to you as they had done it to your father. I have seen too much this year, too much.”
“I have began to doubt too, mother,” I said, and even took the braver step to tell her my innermost thoughts. “I’m starting to doubt our Führer, mother. It seems he does not…” and I hesitated for a moment, a sudden knot caught in my throat. “They used to tell me in the schools mother, that we were superior to all peoples, invincible. That others should be trampled upon, scorned, and avoided, like the rats scampering out of the filth from the sewers, but I knew it was not true. I am not a superman. I have seen, mother, with my own eyes the lame soldiers sent back home, the crazies in our ranks, but not the superman.”
“Otto, you are excited, calm down,” she whispered, grasping onto me, as if to anchor me to the floor, so I would not float away in my fervor.
“But, I have seen the lies, mother, the lies father told me. I do not know why, but this purpose I am going out to serve has become confusing. I do not know what I believe anymore. I know that my father was right in most of the things he told me.”
“You’ve always been a smart boy,” mother cut in. “Since birth you learned to speak Slavic, learned how to work the farm when your little legs had just begun to learn how to walk, and what you say to me, it is too big, I’m simple, I can’t think with your bigness, and I’m sorry, but I must go to sleep. Please let your mother rest now, Otto. She is tired and weak.”
“But mother, if you would only listen,” I begged.
“No, I cannot hear anymore of it.”
Then to divert the talk to a more pressing issue, I began to discuss her condition.
“Mother, I worry for you. You are getting so ill,” I said, not thinking of a physical ailment, but of her mental problem. “You need somebody here with you when I’m gone. I do not think you should be alone. Is there someone around us who could care for you, a neighbor perhaps?”
“A neighbor,” mother scoffed. “Do you not remember?”
“What, mother?” I asked in consternation.
“All of our neighbors were sent to the ghettos.”
My mind grasped the words with cold understanding. I remembered the moment they had been taken. A gray truck, without a canopy, drove down our road with a load of bundled up forms. People hid within assortments of various coats and jackets and looked my way with gloomy faces. Hermann, who at the time was only a small boy of twelve years, stood amongst a clan of other Hitler Youth at the side of the road, blowing goodbye kisses at these departing fellows, and after every kiss, he and his comrades spat out curses. I contributed to their malice by being there, gawking at people who had once been my friends, whose children played with us and whose only crime was to be of different complexion and mindset. Franz sat amongst the others at the rear of the tailgate and he gave me a look I would never forget. On that jester face, which had always smiled upon me, I saw the recognition of betrayal.
“I cannot talk to you anymore,” I said to my mother, got up from the chair and left the room. Something awakened in my conscience. I knew I was not the same boy anymore. My old hateful personality no longer existed. It had begun a change at the train station that ended in its destruction with the look of understanding given by the raven. It was hard to explain, but this trick the Führer had played on me since birth, with its blatant lies hidden behind promises of triumphant rewards, became clear, and with this knowledge, the man-god no longer existed for me. He was not my real father.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A knock at the door woke me from a fitful slumber. I stared up at the ceiling. The sun had come up, but was not bright, and above me, the boards shone with a grayish luster. The knock still rang in my ears. I remembered with brief recollections previous moments where I had woken in the night to a whistle blowing in through the window frame. Its sudden canting made me believe mother had burst into the room to frighten us with a wild utterance, but this knock was not a whistle, and it sounded too rough to be from natural disturbances. I looked about the room, trying to shake off a desire to continue my sleep. I first focused on Hermann, huddled in his service coat and bedspread upon the floor, then at my writing desk, then as my mind tried to drag me into unconsciousness, I shot up out of bed, and felt the cold floor with my toes. With my blanket still wrapped about my body, blocking stabs from the frigid air, I made progress towards the door, swerving away from Hermann, who lay prone in the middle of the room, his small mouth open and uttering brief snores. When I stepped over him with a hit against his face with the blanket, he hocked up some phlegm, and I made a leap to his side, hoping not to awaken him.
The knock sounded again, but this time it did not come from my door, but from the main entry. I kicked Hermann in the gut. His eyes flew open, with phlegm still caught in his throat, and he coughed, his neck reddening as he tried to spit it out. He threw a fist to his lips, coughing louder, until his hand swung back with snot upon it.
“Get up,” I told him. “Someone’s at our door.”
At first surprised, Hermann got up from his bed, and wandered about the room in directionless circles. I threw open the door and ran to the living room. The door was beaten a third time, but this greeting came with more ferocity, and I fell to the floor at its call.
“They must be here,” uttered someone from the other side, and it rang with a manly voice. “We may have to go in from the back.”
“No, they are only sleeping,” said the other, with a sharp rise in his speech, which made me believe him to be of military authority. “We should knock again, but with more push,” and before they had the chance to proceed with this notion, I opened the door.
Standing under the patio roof were two non-coms, in camouflage uniforms. I shot to attention. Both of them smiled at me. Lanky of stature, with hard-boned faces, they both shared the same brownish hair under gray skull and cross-bone caps.
“Are you Schütze Krueger?” the one on the left asked. He held a paper, probably some type-written order. Behind them, the snow lay thick upon the ground.
“Ja, Scharführer,” I answered back, stock still, with arms at my sides, the blanket curled about my feet. It felt embarrassing to stand there before them in just an undershirt and pajama bottoms.
. “At ease, Schütze,” said his other, and with a swift crane of the neck, he looked fleettingly behind me into the house, as if in search of someone. “Is Hermann here with you?” he asked.
“Ja, Scharführer,” I answered and took up the blanket into my arms.
“Leave is canceled,” he continued. My heart stopped in my chest when he said it. “We have orders to bring you back to barracks. Your Kompanie is expected to receive marching orders. We tried to reach your training unit before leave was sent out, but as you see, there was a delay in communication.”
“I will bring Hermann out, Scharführer,” I said.
“No, we can wait here. We have a car sitting outside your drive,” and both non-coms looked behind them at the gray Kubelwagen parked only yards from the house.
“Do you not wish to come in out of the cold?” I asked.
Both of them laughed. “Schütze,” the one on the right answered, his thin lips broken into a jaunting smile, “you have a lot to learn about war. This is not cold, comrade, but another day in an all too late summer.” With an expression on their visages of desire not to continue with further useless talk, but to hurry on with business, they went pacing about the porch, in impatience for me to get ready to depart.
I went into the bedroom in a flurry of confusion, unprepared for such an abrupt end to my long sought leave, but orders were to be followed, and Hermann, although he sat on my bed in eager anticipation of the news I had to bring from our guests, could not have known the troubles awaiting us.
“Get your gear, we have to leave,” and I put on my uniform in haste, shoving legs into trousers, yanking up socks, and then flung on my knapsack, as Hermann sat by all the while, staring at me dumbfound. “Do you not hear? We must get out.”
“But we just got here.”
“Ja, we have orders to leave this place and return to barracks.”
In apparent angst, he rolled up his bedspread, tied it behind a knapsack, and threw on military clothes. When we had everything on, I went to mother’s room, but the door was locked. I gave a knock at it and there came no answer.
“Mother, we are leaving, please open the door,” I said.
“You abandon me,” she said on the other side and the voice came out faint, as if weakened by grief.
“Mother, please open. Both Hermann and I would like to say goodbye.”
“You are leaving me…”
I gave a vicious tug at the knob. “Open this door.”
“Go and die for the fatherland!” she shrieked. “Abandon the woman who gave birth to you. Otto, do you not know where you go? You go into death!”
“But mother, let me in.”
“Join your father in the grave.”
It made me furious to hear such talk, mother wishing my death, and I made a charge at the door, but the frame only shook against the thrown weight. “Please, mother, please,” I pleaded, but she did not say a word, and in dejection, both Hermann and I left her and the house to join the waiting NCOs. We went down the snowy yard to the Kubelwagen, which still had its motor running, and put our knapsacks below the back seat.
“Problems with the family?” one of the NCOs asked, in paltry disregard of the conversation he had probably overheard.
“No, my mother is just ill. It’s all these bombings. If it drives the hens nuts, it drives the women insane,” I said.
He laughed at this jest and all of us fell into the tiny vehicle, the interior hidden under a collapsible roof reminiscent of a weatherworn umbrella, but with the rank smell of canvas, and got ourselves comfortable within its cramped quarters. The cold, although worse outside, shot into the Kubelwagen from the open windows, and it felt like we had been shut into an icebox. The driver, snorting out smoke from his nose, put his vehicle into gear. I broke into shivering, a fit I could not stop until I bent down and put my knapsack in my lap. Hermann, who sat next to me, took his gaze off the NCOs in front of us, to look at me with a mischievous smirk. I wanted to push him out for giving me such a look.
Our vehicle started down the road. The tires hit snow in a spray as we went further into this milky clog. There came an abrupt hit on the brakes. The driver swung behind to look out the back. He shoved me in the shoulder.
“Look!”
I swerved my head outside the side door to gaze behind and what I saw, so horrific and sudden, made me turn back to the driver in disbelief. That could not have been there, I thought in self-denial. The image, brief and stark, shot again before me: a phantom in a white shroud soaked in blood, it could not have been there, ghosts did not exist, yet it was there and I did not want to see it again. I was frightened.
“Shit, agh,” the driver shouted, and his teeth bit against each molar in fear. He patted my head and I knew by this motion he was desirous for me to repeat the previous directing of my senses upon this monstrosity following our Kubelwagen.
“No, this is not happening,” I whispered. I had to force myself to look back, and when the phantom showed itself upon the road, arms waving, and blood streaming down its clothes, I did not know what to make of it, but was terrified.
“Otto,” it shrieked. “Were you going to leave without giving your mother a kiss goodbye.“ I recognized her, she strode half dead, with bleeding slit wrists, and a noose about her neck, the tail of the rope at a drag upon the ground in front of the blood-soaked dress. She was wheezing, this crazy shape of abandonment in the last throes of life, and she held out her wrists to me as she went up to the vehicle. “I tried to hang myself, but I couldn’t Otto, the hemp was too weak.”
“Mother!” I screamed, fumbling with the door, launching a kick at it in despair until it flew open, and ran up to her. No, I thought, this could not be happening. My mother would never succumb to such depths, but there she stood, the life force from her veins gushing forth in fountains upon the snow. She fell and I held her head in my lap, caressing the blonde strands upon her scalp, hoping she would recover, but there had been too much loss of blood, and my mind could not take in all the chaos. I began to scream, lost to the madness she had brought forth in her suicidal charge. “Mother,” I cried down at the pale face, its eyes in a constant stare up at me. She was fading away quick. “Why, mother why?”
“Just remember,” she whispered and it came out faint like a death rattle. “I loved you more than that scoundrel,” and although she did not refer to the villain, I knew she had meant the Führer.
“Mother, please don’t die,” I murmured, but she was already dead. Her cheeks gave off an ashen white sheen and her eyes, brimming with despair, were open, lost, staring into an abyss. “No,” I said, in a sudden denial of her demise. “You can’t die, mother. No, don’t leave me! I am all alone,” and I squeezed her face, showering it with kisses.
“Come on, you must leave her,” said a manly voice from above.
“No, I must stay here.”
“You can’t,” it said again. “You must let her go.”
I screamed back in answer then began to rock mother back and forth in my lap. Thoughts of my childhood shot forth in rapid procession, reminiscences of mother in her better days before I joined the Hitler Youth camps. Then she had been so beautiful and right-minded and would walk about the house humming sweet songs. I missed her voice already and those soothing tunes, their invisible notes lingering in rooms even when she was not there. Their memory had put me to sleep many a night as I sang them to myself in the training camps, with my comrades throwing in their own ballad on occasion. Now she was not there to sing such wonders. She was but a memory like her songs and I could not fathom her demise, for the vibrancy of her life was too great to end in this suicide. The Führer had murdered her. His fight with her had begun even before the war and had now ended in this wintry demise.
“I will bury her,” the manly voice said and it was spoken in profound affection.
“I hate him,” I muttered through my teeth, and screamed in silent anguish against the man-god, whom I had sworn to fight for and protect.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was a makeshift burial fit for a soldier on the front lines. Time had pressed the two sergeants to dig a hole behind the house, throw my mother in, and then cover it with shoveled out soil. I could not watch the ceremony, even though Hermann kept me informed of the progress of her burial, and asked if I would want to see my mother one last time.
“No!” I cried at him in a fury. Why her of all people? How many in my family would have to die to please the man-god? I was the only one left now, besides Hermann. Mother’s burial had been a turning point. The Führer became a monster and I did not ponder now on how to serve him with greater bravery in these hard times of war, but on how, without noticeable actions, I could inflict as much pain upon him as he had given her. He came to mind as a spiteful idol while I sat upon the road where she had rested before her passing and shot my hands into the snow, clawing at it, as if it were the man-god in the living flesh.
Why had it taken so long for me to come to this realization? I looked at Hermann, standing by me on watch over the gravediggers, a boy who probably, lost to ignorance, still held loyalties to the Führer, and would not hear me out if I talked against him. He and the rest of the Kompanie could never understand the hate I had towards this man. This was a war to defend the home soil from foreign invasion and any thoughts that ran counter to our soldierly purpose were forbidden. I would become a traitor in their eyes if I had revealed my feelings.
The sergeant came back. He touched me on the shoulder, a shovel in the other hand. I glanced up at him and his face was torn with grief.
“My brother died at the front,” he said. “I know how it feels to lose a loved one. If I can do anything to console you, comrade, please do not hesitate to ask.”
Then the image of the raven shot forth again into my mind and looking up at this sergeant, with snow flecked about his thin chin and wool collar, I began to despise him for his ignorance of the universal question, brought forth by this bird which had haunted my dreams and thoughts. From the sergeant, although his lips never moved, came a chant, and I yearned to answer its call.
“Run away, run away,” the voice said, and yet as the sergeant continued to stare at me in consolation, piercing my doubts with a sorrowful countenance, reminding me of my obligations to the fatherland, I knew he stood as a barrier to my desire to escape. It was too early to act upon these urges. To hide my troubles, I gave off a false expression of indifference to mother’s passing. Anything less, although I was amongst men of sympathetic intentions, would be looked upon as cowardice.
I got up, brushed snow off my shirt and went to the vehicle. I never looked back at the house. It was a horrible place.
The car started down the drive once again, slicing through snow with its tires, leaving a tirade of hateful reflections in its wake. I would have to forget about mother and concentrate on my duties: her death was too tragic, and with the upcoming challenges, its remembrance would only deter me from showing at least visible signs of patriotism. I looked to my right and saw Hermann, who, crammed close next to me in the cab, even though looking upon me in sympathy, showed an eagerness for the fight, with his constant rubbing down of his rifle and the looks he gave at the sergeant’s sub machine gun at rest upon the floor.
“Revenge her death, comrade,” said the driver, bringing me back to the painful memory of her demise and I looked outside hoping he would stop his talk, but he continued. “Fight for those of us who have also lost loved ones to the beast. Our fight is with the Bolsheviks. Fight against them for her,” he muttered. Those words, how horribly they seemed to ring in my ears, were pushed to the side, since they came from one who held deep loyalties, feelings I did not wish to judge. Maybe he said it to fuel my hate, to harness it for the fight, but it did nothing to release my hidden anger whose origin target was not Ivan.
A half-day’s drive took us into a snowy lot right outside a concrete structure. The building was flowered with swastika banners rippling in the icy breeze and at guard in front of the main entrance into this fortress, was a shield with various barrels butting out, their tips pointing at the murky sky, where, thankfully, no aircraft flew today. The men had left the shield to defend the doors into this bastion, where at every window above the main entry, was a mess of crossed and crisscrossed impenetrable bars.
As we climbed out of the car, the driver came to my assistance, taking both my knapsack and rifle, leaving me only to carry the burden of the merciless cold. The trip to this outpost had been an excursion through a frigid nightmare, where at every turn, a freezing wind had cut through the cab and launched an attack upon my senses. To escape from it, I had huddled myself close to Hermann to share his warmth, but as we got further up in the mountains, where the snow fell in sheets, the temperature sank to extreme depths, making it unbearable even with my comrade as a buffer. I stepped out of the car, shivering. My fingers and ears pulsated in pain. I followed the sergeant into the barracks, frowning at the two guards in their steel helmets and woolen white parkas, who looked upon me with mocking expressions, trying to demean with their insolent giggles the shaking ruin passing between them.
Inside the fortress, it was warm and comfortable. We were led through a dark hallway into a room lit by the dull cast of light bulbs swinging about on their chains to the motions of our driver’s pull against their cords. Their glow fell upon the clean white sheets tucked into bunk beds on either side of the room, with a locker in the recess between them, and an array of battle packs in single file upon the floor.
With evident sympathy, the sergeant, after he had thrown down my pack and set my rifle against the locker, put his hand upon my back, gave it a pat, then, probably noticing my lack of response to this notion, made a step behind him, and left the room. Hermann sat next to me on a bottom bunk, ducking his head in an attempt not to knock it against the low-lying mattress.
“Otto, I was thinking,” he said, but I cut him short.
“Please don’t talk,” I said. “Please.”
Hermann leaped away and went to a bunk on the other side of the room. He kept quiet the whole time he dug into the confines of his knapsack, taking out a fresh pair of socks, a bar of soap, and a razor. Then, as if mindful of my anxiety, he ran out through the door. Alone with my worries, I flung myself into the blankets, pulling them up to my face as I cried out for an end to the madness. I crumpled the sheets against my chest, swung jabs at them, threw them up at the top bunk, and fought with the invisible anger, which seemed to rise from their whiteness. Was white not pure then? I thought, looking at the clean sheets, recalling mother’s red-stained dress, once white. The power rising from her last words told a story of truth, truth to descry the whiteness, revealing the evil behind its cleanliness.
Then a chant began to repeat itself from the depths of my thoughts, “run away, run away.” Neither the goat nor my father had the chance to act upon those words and they both met a horrible death. Would I die in the same way? Just pondering upon my own demise became unbearable and I curled up into a ball, the once proud warrior and defender of our Führer now an emotional wreck, and let out tears of despair.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Formation was called next morning. I stood erect within the Kompanie ranks, listening for the sound of my breathing or the chirp of a bird, but over the icy wind howling out its call, only the voice of the Hauptsturmführer, loud and stark, could be heard.
“Good morning, comrades,” he said, as he strode in front of us. He wore a white parka and his face, reddened by the cold, made his eyes appear like pale flames leaping from a fiery cauldron. He stopped in front of the first man at the end of our front rank, then pulling at his gray cap he went on to say, “I brought you here today men, because there is a menace penetrating the borders of our fatherland. The Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Tito…” He snickered at the name. I knew he would not go into specifics, for the news clips and countless briefings had given us a clear image of this Bolshevik leader, an expert in partisan warfare, who had managed to cause havoc for our troops occupying the Balkans. “As you may already know, Tito and his bands are piercing into our rear lines, cutting off our supply routes to Greece. We must stop these Bolsheviks before they cut off all road junctions to our defending armies there. Our glorious Führer, with great deliberation, has selected you fine soldiers, for your true understanding of the enemy’s language and fearsome determination to squash this pest. The Bolsheviks are not men, remember. They are the vermin thrown out of the pits of that Stalin pig, who sits about in a chair laughing as his rats are slaughtered under our gunfire.”
We laughed at this fantasy, knowing it was expected and would not be looked upon as discourteous. “He carries no sympathy and remorse even for his own men,” our captain went on. “We are all honor-bound and care for each other and seek for the total destruction of these unclean, unshaven beasts, who, because of their Bolshevik vices and vileness, wish only to infect our country with their filth. Will we tolerate their lack of morals comrades?”
“No, sir,” we replied in unison.
“Then let us fight to the end, as brothers of the fight, honorable men of the fatherland, to eliminate Tito and his band of Bolsheviks. So are you ready my men, to charge with me into their lair and take it back for the fatherland?”
“Ja Hauptsturmführer,” we answered.
“Then let us go. Oberscharführer, form up Kompanie and dispatch them to the motor pool.” As we stood in formation, Lessing came up in a camouflage parka, the split brown and orange designs resembling a jacket of dead autumn leaves ready to be blown away. His steel helmet was masked with a cloth of similar splendor and in a harsh voice, bouncing off the high barracks wall behind him, he called, “Kompanie, austreten,” and with a barbarous yell, we broke ranks and ran for the vehicle collection area to occupy our transport to the front.
Up ahead, in a line, two gray trucks, their engines at a steady growl, appeared ready to dispatch us to a train station for onward travel to the war zone. I still felt uneasy after yesterday’s bought of depression and it was hard for me to share in the excitement the others felt for their first clash with the Bolsheviks. I wanted to stop, to sit down on the snowy terrace, watch the jubilant soldiers in their numbers be whisked away to some faraway battlefield and find on at least one of their expressions before they took a step into the truck, a sign of regret or worry. It would have been easy to spot just one of them, who, snatched away from his mother, was probably dragging a similar anchor of angst as he sailed into the unknown. Maybe I knew too much, through mother’s death, through the bird’s chant: the journey we ran into to kill other men was madness.
I walked with Hermann to our truck, all of us warm in our new winter uniforms: a white padded jacket, thick white leggings, and a steel helmet above a headscarf embracing the face. We resembled a clan of snowmen, with deadly intentions, yet one of us, myself, unaffected by the patriotic fervor running rampant about the ranks, had begun to doubt.
The trucks, crusty with snow, made it hard to see the old gray of their paint job under the ice against their sides. The canvas overhangs, draping high over their beds, gave off a false sense of security from the merciless cold, for they were open to the elements at the rear.
I followed a few boys in our Kompanie running to a truck next to the commandant’s house. The truck was not to be admired, a blanket of snow lay on its hood, headlights were shot out and the bulbs exposed. What stood to be appreciated though was the commandant’s mansion, an old two-story brick building with Romanesque pillars flanking glass doors. A white balcony lipped out from the second floor and roofed a small line of gray stairs climbing up to the entrance. Soldiers in front of us made it a good gesture to stop and stare at this mansion for a brief moment, as if admiring a future luxury that could not be theirs.
I ran until I got behind the truck. Two soldiers reached out to pull me aboard. They threw me inside. With a quick jolt, the vehicle started down the street, and Hermann and I found a place amongst the crowd.
I sat on a bench against the side of the flatbed, took off my steel helmet and put it down. There were many other soldiers inside with me. I looked up at the looming gray of the canvas overhang that flapped in the breeze as the truck shook with the dunking of its tires into potholes in the rough road. Suddenly hot ash hit me in the face. There was a lit cigarette lying on my leg thrown from a soldier in the back. After brushing it off, I crushed the burning ember beneath my foot to prevent a fire.
I turned to find Lessing bent over, no longer in the autumn uniform he had been wearing in formation, but in our white garb. He sat at the further end of the truck, looking at me with a sneer upon his visage as if to say, “I got you, swine,” and then to seal himself as the perpetrator of this stunt, he laughed. “Put your helmet back on!” he shouted.
I was powerless. His control over me was unconditional and just looking into those eyes, deeply intimidating, hoping for me to lash back with grounds for him to strike a blow, made me put the helmet on then look the other way, beyond the tailgate to the road behind us, a brownish band, broken by snowy rivulets.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

We got off the train at a border town in the Balkans. The snow had let up and the suns rays shot through breaks in clouds, lighting up our police vehicles. In a lot between two bands of supply shops with their raised cement walkways and corrugated roofs white with snow were motorcycles with sidecars in a dull gray color scheme. Behind these bikes were two trucks, a half-track, and behind the curve of a shop, the sloping armor of a compact tank, its barrel pointed towards us, as if ready to fire a projectile and end our mission at its start.
Lessing formed us up outside the train, with our Hauptsturmführer beside him pulling at his gray cap in probable discomfort at the sun’s brightness, which even though at its early zenith, threw gleams upon our rifle tips. We stood in a combined group of soldiers, some from our own Kompanie with others who had been brought in to conduct joint police actions.
“All right men,” the Hauptsturmführer began. He stood upon the train platform with an enthusiastic energy so contrary to my own mental anguish that it almost made me want to whimper in formation to counter his pride. “Lessing has been appointed battle leader of your Kompanie, report to him for orders, I will be commanding all military movements from the rear panzer, which has graciously been accorded to us by the Prinz Eugen division. Remember men. Keep your eyes open for partisans. They’re a dangerous band if you underestimate their potential for surprise attacks. We’ll stop at towns along the way to warm our cold bodies, but be ready for some long rides in this weather. Keep your distance from forward cars in your trek, for if they’re hit by enemy fire, yours will have time to move in for support. You understand me? One blazing ruin gives us better hope than an entire Kompanie destroyed by gunfire. Keep to the ranks, give the fight to the swinish Bolsheviks, and if you can, capture Tito for me, I’d like to have a chat with him.”
We laughed at this remark, although the encounter between these two leaders would have been a horrible death for either Tito or our Hauptsturmführer, depending on who held the advantage.
Lessing released our formation, broke us into separate groups, and then led me to a motorcycle, stomping in front of me in fast pompous strides upon the snow to keep a lead in the charge. With a gruff air he hit against the headlight and said, “This is your bike, schütze, and your gunner is Schroeder.”
He left without a glance behind him, caught in a rush. So I slung my rifle behind my back, settled into the driver’s leather saddle and glanced to my right to find a white steel helmet balanced above a bundle of thick white garb in the sidecar. In a sudden break from stillness, two arms sprang out from this coat and went to work on the prow machine gun.
Up ahead, Lessing and two other soldiers seated themselves in the lead motorcycle, a grayish pin amongst a limitless white expanse. He threw his legs over the rear spring saddle behind the driver and as if lost, took out a map from his coat and began to examine it. Within a minute, he brought his hand up, the signal to start our engines. I kicked my bike into gear, listening to the magneto spark the cylinder block into action and a roar broke through the pervasive quiet and rose to a loud pitch as it bounced off shop walls, rising further with the bark from other engines.
I could not hear Schroeder next to me, who, with a grimace below his steel helmet, tried to say something over the chaos, and to show my confusion, I shrugged my shoulders. He knit his thin brows.
“I can’t hear you,” I yelled at him and he slumped back into his sidecar with visible disappointment, but in gentle reprisal to this retort, he tapped my leg and then gave it a soft caress. He mouthed the affectionate words, “I’m sorry,” with his lips. I gazed forward at Lessing, distraught at this visible sympathy for my mother’s death and knew it would be better to forget it right now and look upon my duties. I was nervous about the march. Would I do something wrong in this first patrol, which would bring the sergeant’s wrath upon my mishaps? I cringed at this worrisome thought and reached for a pair of goggles resting on the air filter cap bulging out from the bike’s fuel tank: a breath over the lenses and two swipes from a hand, and I put them on.
With the goggles over my eyes, everything in front of me seemed to appear so much clearer than before and in hopes that Schroeder had made equal preparations, I gave him a passing glance, saw that his goggles were in place, then re-settled myself into the saddle, waiting in fervid agitation for the start signal from Lessing.
The sergeant took his time, glancing back from his map at us, as if waiting for an answer from someone at the rear. I hated looking at the redness of that face, which seemed to permeate with hate into my person at every backward turn, sending a chill up my insides each moment our eyes met. I wondered if he knew of my mother’s tragic suicide and if he did, thought of it as an unacceptable weakness, which needed to be quashed with harsher discipline. He was the only soldier from the Kompanie who had not shown remorse for her loss.
Then the signal came. A swing from Lessing’s hand and the immediate departure of his motorcycle into the white abyss beckoned the machines behind him to follow. The forward bike left its place and in answer, I shoved against the side-shift lever, put the bike in first gear and with a jolt, the motorcycle made a thrust towards the lead machine. A push upon the accelerator handle brought me smack behind the forward bike, my tire slicing a wake in the ice right behind its rear fender.
The driver ahead, turning over his shoulder to see me at close tag, gave his bike a sudden burst of gas, and sped away. I let up on the accelerator, thankful to have avoided a collision and gave him a salute off the brim of my steel helmet.
We went further down the frozen road, bumping over its ruts and with various turns of my head to observe progress of other bikes, gray silhouettes against chalky fields, I was awestruck by the sudden appearance of our commander’s panzer charging quickly past us. As it came close, its massive rubber wheels cutting into the frozen mud, it threw up a mist.
The tank resembled a steel gator, with its sloped nose, various hatches similar to scales and above its length, a massive turret, where our Hauptsturmführer, standing in a white parka with only his top torso visible, stared ahead defying the cold. It seemed unusual for a man, battle scarred and a teller of fearful stories about our enemy, to maintain this confident stance. Did not the thought of death, something that terrified me after mother’s loss and the goat’s passing, haunt his brain with its awful presence? I began to wonder if I too would steel up like him through my experiences and look at war not in fear, but as a release from these worries.
The incessant roar from our engines broke through these reflections and made me aware of our penetration into this wasteland. We were in untamed territory. The sudden appearance of a tree in the milky plains beside the road was enough to make all the forward drivers swish their heads in its direction, as if fearful that a gun-toting partisan swung by its branches.
Every road sign passed was hidden in snow, masking the kilometers separating town from town. Each distinctive arrow, pointing further into Tito’s country, gave blind assurance we headed in the right direction.
Occasionally my motorcycle scaled a hill and as it came to the summit, where only the sky could be seen above the break, a worry would shoot into my mind. What if on the other side, guns at ready and his artillery sighted, Ivan were waiting? The fear of this confrontation kept my senses peaked, until at the summit, with a sudden bend over my handlebars to peer over the crest, I would drive over the top, ease off on the gas and find to my relief only an empty down slope in the landscape.
We continued our trek. I kept the motorcycle in low gear, hoping to conserve fuel and while longing for a stop in our voyage to take refuge from the merciless cold, the pressing need to get as far away from bad memories behind me, images of mother and death, steadied my hand on the gas. Damn the chapped lips and the wind biting into my body with its merciless constancy, these elements were nothing in comparison to the thought of that unexplainable horror.
Then we found a contact. A dark blur upon the horizon, indistinct, but threatening, made the lead panzer, a grayish box in the distance, slow to a crawl. I could see the Hauptsturmführer bring up his binoculars, exchange words with unseen tank crew below him, then throw a glance at Lessing’s motorcycle at his side. I thought the object might be a tank, but our commander, as we came closer to this danger, did not close up the hatches to stop and fire a salvo. His vehicle kept at a crawl towards the blur. Our motorcycles followed this change in speed with a let-up on the accelerator.
As we got nearer to this strange apparition, this perceived tank, a tower of blanketed items, the brown canvas blowing in the breeze, was an innocent peasants cart. The leader of its single horse, whose waving drew our attention, was clad in some shabby costume, a doughy coat, with a peppery colored cap pulled down over his forehead.
With the panzer at a stop beside him, Lessing and our motorcade blocking his further progress, the peasant could do nothing but hold on to the bridle of his horse and with his other hand, pat its snout, as if to stop it from nervous shies at the frightful arrival of new visitors.
Lessing shoved his motorcycle right next to the peasant and after a look behind him, waved us to stop. We shut off our engines near the cart and sat ready to overhear their conversation.
Schroeder, as customary orders dictated, brought to bear the machinegun upon this stranger and slammed a belt into its feeder. With a calm demeanor he nestled himself into the seat of his sidecar, waiting, with what I thought an all too unhesitant air, to fire.
“Sprechen sie Deutsch?” Lessing asked, as he got off his machine and approached to inspect the wagon. His eyes darted glances all over its beaten sides, between its wheel spokes and having passed behind the ancient transport, he came away with a mischievous smile, which he shared with our commander, who leaned over the top turret hatch.
The peasant spoke something unrecognizable in his native dialect, which our commander understood, for they struck up a conversation. Their talk went on for a couple of minutes. The peasant, legs shaking underneath him and a clammy pallor sucking blood from his cheeks, showed nervousness in his talk. He gave me a few glances, saw the machine gun trained on his horse and tried to hide his fear with false smiles and furtive glances at his cart.
“He says there is a village not far down the road,” our commander hollered from his panzer. “He says his family was killed there in a skirmish with Ustashe, also something about there being no food in any of the villages, but whatever the jabber, I think the man’s a partisan.”
“A partisan, eh,” Lessing said, not hiding his visible glee from us or the victim branded with this title. “I could have guessed he was a Bolshevik. Just look at the coat, the mongrel face, why deal with a rat in the first place?”
Then the peasant shot a glance down at the ground, scratching his neck as if he did not understand Lessing’s words.
“Are you a partisan, you monkey-faced swine?” Lessing joked at the man, who stood against his horse probably hoping it would come to his aid in this difficult confrontation. “You know what I think of Bolsheviks?” Lessing jabbed at the old man’s coat, threw the peasant against himself and then shoved him to the ground. The frail man fell with a wail. I felt sorry for him. The man seemed innocent, but the soldiers about me were laughing at his maltreatment.
“Get up you filthy partisan!” Lessing shouted and he thrust kicks into the fallen man. The peasant, curling up in a ball, gave out shouts of protest at his maltreatment. Every stroke from Lessing’s boot, he tried to stop with a block from his hand, but the blows came too quickly and he gave up, screaming in pain.
It was awful and I felt powerless to stop his abuse. My mind uttered the words to relent but they could not reach the tongue to emerge in speech, for I was afraid to show compassion, since the men who issued these threats were my superiors.
With a swift movement, catching the peasant’s collar and pulling him up from the ground, Lessing took out his shiny sidearm from a belt holster and put the barrel against the poor man’s head.
“Partisan, nothing but a big-nosed partisan!” Lessing taunted, the eyes below his steel helmet flashing with hate and he pushed his victim behind the cart, the laughter of comrades cheering on his maliciousness. Even Schroeder, someone who I thought had sympathetic intentions, began to giggle at Lessing’s exploit.
Why do they laugh? Do they not see that this is cruel? Yet then I realized that our training had encouraged us to indulge in these brawls and my mind began to recognize the relationship between brutalities at camp and mercilessness on the battlefield. Our education had bred this hateful disregard for a strange culture, one we were taught to fear and ridicule.
Unseen by us, Lessing had a few words with the old man, before we heard the eruption of an explosive report. The horse shrieked and attempted a rush at our bikes, but the heavy load cut its momentum and it fell back in place, its pupils racing about in two frightful white pools. Lessing came back from behind the cart with bloody hands. Our Hauptsturmführer threw him a towel and he wiped the remains of the kill from his red palms, so they came out clean and clear of any evidence of his monstrous deed.
“Quick march,” said Lessing, mounting his motorcycle. Without any expression of remorse for the fallen man, he beckoned us forward into the wilderness. Nearby bikes shot out from their cluster around the wagon, their riders giving only brief looks to the corpse behind it, the sight of death seeming to be more an object of mockery than fear.
I was in a distraught state of indecision and could not speak up against such stares. The power exuding from the sergeant was too dominant. I could not fight it in the presence of his followers. In dejection, I put the motorcycle in gear, cut away from the horse and followed the lead motorcycle.
We pressed on, our engines at a constant roar that broke the stillness with a chaotic crescendo. Further onward the road climbed into mountains. Here the driving space narrowed to a trail. Its length speared into higher elevations where the road’s sheer turns and drop offs were enough to keep a hand ready on the brakes to avoid a fall over a cliff. On the right hand side of the road, rocks crusted with snowy masks stabbed out from crags.
White veins bled through cracks in the rocks like streaks of plaster giving life to deadness. The rocks sheer points reaching for the sky, seemed so close a comparison to my own emotional turmoil, that I laughed at their passing numbers, giving credence to a mystery only our understanding of freedom could answer.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

As the mountain fell into a ravine, the passage ahead turned into switchbacks and the panzer, leading our charge, took a cautious approach at these turns, sometimes coming too close to the edge, having to make sudden alterations in course to veer its tires back on to firm ground. A fall down those all too steep crags was a frightful possibility even for our motorcycles. The front bike, speeding into a turn had almost fallen over the edge but saved by a driver’s sudden jerk of the handlebars.
Below us in the valley, amongst a forest of trees, nestled massive slanting roofs, their tops so thick in snow they looked like sugary crusts of pastries. As we got further down these houses sprang out in batches and I noticed smaller structures behind them, chimneys smoking and eaves studded with icicles. Even farther behind these small dwellings, were large corrals separated by fences, studded with an occasional shed or outhouse.
It seemed a quaint and innocent hideaway amongst the mountains, but there were no people, and when there are no citizens in a village, it means either they have fled or waited in ambush.
Our road made a thrust into the village. As we got further down, a crack rang in my ears.
In a sudden break from the entourage, Lessing’s motorcycle shot out and made a swerve towards the rock wall. The Oberscharführer, with frantic waves at us to stop our bikes, flew off his seat and broke into a roll along the trail. I slammed my brakes, saw Lessing somersault by, screaming with his bear-like yell and thought of trying to leap away to catch him, but his momentum was too quick and he came back to his feet at the roadside. Mud and snow caked his uniform. He ran to the panzer and fell to his knees beside it.
“Sniper!” he shouted.
Verdammt! I thought and in frantic response, I got off my bike and used it as cover.
“Report! Where did the firing come from?” our commander hollered from his panzer. I gave a quick glance forward and saw his head stick out from a side hatch, looking on Lessing with a smile. It was apparent neither he nor the sergeant was afraid and they spoke jovially about the incident.
“I’m certain the village, sir,” Lessing shouted, crouching before our commander. At kneel by the sidecar tire, with the smell of hot exhaust and warmth from the engine block blowing upon me, I felt this place to be a safe refuge from bullets. Schroeder lay further up, his body pressing upon the sidecar’s prow. He gave sudden kicks behind him into frozen mud to stretch out his legs.
“Can’t tell what house the shot came out of. The damn partisan! He’s a good marksman. Got my driver,” and I followed the turn of Lessing’s white helmet as it looked upon the wreckage sandwiched between massive boulders. The bike still appeared drivable, but the driver, a bundle of white garb flecked by blood, had fallen dead in his seat. “I’ll try to draw him out!” Lessing said and then turned to me, his face showing such a serious expression, of both hate and eagerness for action that I wanted to turn away and look at the motorcycle, but he had found me out of other attentive soldiers and it was obvious I would be a target for a proposal. “Schütze Krueger, relay a message down the line!”
“Ja Oberscharführer,” I uttered in curt obedience.
“Call for a sniper and MG team!”
“Ja Oberscharführer,” and I relayed the request to the kneeling driver of the motorcycle behind me who shouted out the call to other rear echelons. Within minutes a soldier brushed by, his body bent, with a rifle clung to his side, and came up to Lessing. After him, three white forms ran to meet with him, one carrying a steel box, another binoculars, and the last bent under weight of a heavy machine gun. They all conversed with our Oberscharführer in a whisper until an exchange of hand signals broke up their meeting with a sudden sprint in opposite directions.
From my cover next to the motorcycle, I noticed the sniper run for the panzer. When he got to its massive front tire, he fell to the ground and brought his rifle to bear on the village. The machine gun team fell into a roadside ditch, made sight adjustments on the weapon, smacked a belt into its chamber and then sat in wait.
“If this partisan is as dumb as I think he is, he will take the bait. A good marksman does not have to be smart,” Lessing laughed from his place behind the panzer. “I need a motorcycle, Schütze,” he said to me and in answer I climbed back on the bike, although it was dangerous with a sniper down in the village, but an order had been given and I put the bike in gear.
How frightful were those moments as I drove to him, the cold air blowing into my face and screams from the wind and engine knifing through the crevice between steel helmet and headscarf, reminding me of death in chase inches from my head. I gave the bike a rapid push of gas over the narrow but dangerous space in way to rendezvous with the sergeant. As I passed from this void into safety behind the panzer, a slam on the brakes kept me from a crash into him.
“You’re crazy!” Lessing shouted, the red face below his steel helmet aflame with anger. “You could have been shot, haven’t you learned anything from training.”
Then I remembered the mistake made in my quick passage. I should have put the motorcycle in neutral and pushed it. The immediacy of the command had made me forget.
“Dismount,” Lessing commanded.
I got off the bike and stood before the sergeant, waiting in eager anticipation for his next order. He crouched in shadow of the panzer and its darkness gave a grayish tint to his white uniform.
“You see that motorcycle over there, schütze?” he asked, pointing at the wreck behind me.
“Ja Oberscharführer,” I said, knowing the sergeant had almost not escaped this machine with his life but moments ago.
“Bring the fallen comrade to me and duck down. There’s a sniper in that village who has the top of this road sighted. If you stay down, you’ll not get hit,” and with a gentle push at my arm he said, “Go now!”
I ran for the motorcycle, bent over, following Lessing’s instruction, and made it. The sight of death came again from this lifeless form lying over his machine. I didn’t shy away in disgust, but it was unusual to see him in this state. A boy who had laughed and made free motions with his limbs now lay dead as the rocks and metal about him. When I tucked my hands underneath his chest, pulled the corpse on to my shoulder, the steel helmet hit my neck in a lifeless swing, and I almost let him drop in fearful reaction to this queer motion.
A bloody wash spilt from his head where the bullet had hit and it dripped on me as I ran back. Damn the body was heavy. It felt worse than the goat, almost like a fat man, and I broke into a sweat in the brief interlude it took me to return.
“Where do you want it, Oberscharführer?” I asked, eager to put it down somewhere. I did feel sorry for the comrade, but it seemed strange to bear his dead weight, as if he were a machine gun ready to be set up to fire. Deadness belonged to inanimate objects not people and I wanted to rid myself of this unknown phenomenon.
“Put it in the seat of your bike,” he commanded and with a towel he had taken out from his pocket, he came up to me, and stood by to observe my placing the corpse in the driver’s seat. As soon as I let go, the body slumped against the handlebars and Lessing, with a quick push, elevated the corpse, so that it sat upright.
“You just see,” the sergeant said. “That sniper won’t suspect what’s coming his way.” Then he made a swipe over the bloody corpse and soaked up most of the redness, although stains were still left upon his white jacket. “Learned this trick in the East. The dumb swine always fall for it. If they want to play death against my men in the mountains, it’s only fair to return the gesture, right?” he laughed.
“Ja Oberscharführer,” I said, although I was still oblivious to what he had planned for the sniper. Then he took the dead comrade’s rifle and stuck its butt against the bow curve of the rear fender.
“Keep hold of him, schütze,” Lessing said, and I kept the corpse steady upon its seat with an embrace.
He dug the rifle barrel underneath the back of the dead man’s steel helmet and after some initial resistance from gravity, sometimes pushing down the firearm, Lessing managed to entangle it in the head straps. He came away from the body with visible glee.
I stepped back from the corpse and it sat in place, without my support, appearing like a manikin upon a motorcycle, motionless, but ready to ride down the road. A rifle lay behind it as a prop to steady the dead mass against the frame.
Lessing then flung open the lid to the sidecar’s rear luggage compartment, dug into it, sifted through various articles, and brought out a length of twine. He shut the lid and went to the rider.
“This will work,” he shouted. He administered the string to the dead comrade, tying its bitten off ends to different points on the bike, hiding its existence by a shift of the corpse’s coat. To maintain the corpse’s balance, he brought both lifeless arms to bear on the handle bars, and tied one hand tight about the accelerator handle, pushing it in, and the other he tied at the handle tip, so as to position it away from contact with the brake lever.
“It is ready. Put the bike in gear, Schütze,” he ordered and coming up to this inert driver, who had the appearance now of a living person, I hit the shift lever and the motorcycle drove off. The machine sped down the slope into the village.
“You ready, sniper?” Lessing said, directing his words to the soldier lying behind the front tire of the panzer, who at the bark of the passing motorcycle engine, had begun to scan the landscape with his scope.
“If he fires, he’s dead,” said the sniper.
Lessing giggled in return.
“Now it begins,” he said, laughing even more in apparent eagerness for the coming conflict. He looked at me with evident pride in his trick, but his joy was self-centered and I stared at him with insecurity. I thought his trick would not work.
The motorcycle, a stiff astride its saddle, continued its descent. When it got to the village outskirts, the engine humming, a crack broke the air. This report was preceded by a shot from our sniper.
“One dead,” said our gunner and he glanced up at Lessing, as he went to him to give a congratulatory pat on the shoulder.
“Where there’s always one filthy partisan,” Lessing remarked. “There’s always another swine ready to take the gun. We’ll have to march through.”
The motorcycle with its dead driver down below kept true to its course, traveling into the depths of the village and then further on into the wilderness where it trumpeted its presence with a roar, reminding me of a damned voyage into the unknown. It seemed only the dead and Lessing, half-dead himself, were not afraid to leap into this void, for in its recesses there was a sought-after treasure to satisfy their mad appetites. I was afraid to march down into the village, for a sniper’s report meant a band of resistance in small or greater numbers lay in wait for us to spring their trap.
“I’ll lead the charge,” our commander said from the open hatch of his panzer and he shut it. The vehicle started and went ahead, racing down the hill, its fat tires grinding against frozen mud.
“MG team!” Lessing shouted.
“Ja Oberscharführer,” yelled back Heinrich, who glanced up at our sergeant from his ditch, showing similar eagerness for a clash with a gleeful expression upon his tanned face.
“Give us cover fire. Shoot down there in short bursts to save ammunition. We’re marching into the village. Rejoin the Kompanie after we’re in. Schnell! Schnell!” he shouted, and with a wave behind him down the road, he said, “I need a motorcycle, Schütze!”
Another bike came to meet our sergeant. Schroeder sat in the driver’s seat. He got off when Lessing made a stab into the sky with his thumb as a gesture for his dismissal from the machine.
“Schütze Krueger, get on,” he said, pointing to the bike’s forward saddle. “You will be my driver. Schroeder get in the sidecar and keep your gun loaded and ready. We might have a firefight down there. Damn partisans always love to throw surprises at unsuspecting comrades, but we’ll get them.”
“Ja Oberscharführer,” answered Schroeder. He fell into the sidecar. The MG-42 in the ditch began its chatter-like fire, reminding me we at least had support in this march.
I got onto the motorcycle, Lessing climbing behind me onto the rear saddle and with a tap on my helmet, I pushed the side shift lever forward into first gear and we started off. As I gave the accelerator more gas to get closer to the panzer, its grayish boxlike form moving steadily forward into this frightful channel between opposing house fronts, a sudden fear shook me. I glanced back at Lessing, knowing he had given birth to this uneasiness, felt not only for our destination but for his presence: in his white uniform, leaning upon a metal ring handhold, a quixotic smirk breaking from his hard face, he embodied a spirit of frightful power.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The panzer went past the first row of buildings without a shot fired from their windows. When our motorcycle had got through, it felt as if I had left another world, a free one, to enter into a forbidden den, where our presence, amongst the eerie weathered planks, towering to ancient cornices underneath roofs heavy with snow, was pitiful in comparison to this cold deadness. I knew we were unwelcome visitors, yet Lessing, unafraid in this charge into the enemy’s lair, pointed his finger at targets for Schroeder’s MG-42.
We drove further and saw up ahead a sign of life amongst the deadness. On our left in the village center was a church with a towering steeple and open bell loft, snow lining its bottom sill. Below its wooden arch, bleached gray by merciless winters climbed stairs leading up to a raised platform where an old woman on a bench, wrapped in a shawl, stared at us in wonderment.
"Halt!" Lessing shouted in my ear. I put the motorcycle in park.
The Oberscharführer stepped away from the motorcycle and ran up the church stairs, stopping at its doors, jabbing his submachine gun between them to let off a burst.
To my right the panzer pushed into a space between the church and a shack. Then came a very long lull, while the sergeant peeped through the door in search of occupants and the old lady next to him, a hand upon her nose ready to sneeze, kept curious watch over our actions. It amazed me that she unlike the other villagers was not afraid of us.
Lessing turned to look behind him. He contemplated the old peasant woman, who within her vibrant gown and shawl, looked like an ancient tree, its branches mangled and withered, but its fruit still colorful and holding promise of life. He came up to her.
"Granny, are you the only partisan here?" he laughed. The old woman gave a grin and her mouth was only a gap between the lips. She had no teeth. "What a grand smile you have? Look comrades a toothless grin!"
The soldiers about me laughed at this remark, but I still kept a silent stare upon what appeared to be a good-hearted woman, who from the deep reaches in her soul, probably held only good intentions for her neighbors and the world. She was not even afraid to come out here and greet us.
"Just like the rest of the partisan degenerates, she smiles at the iniquities of her comrades’ transgressions," hollered our commander, who had risen from the confines of his panzer to watch at the top hatch. His head was naked to the wind, the blonde strands blowing upon his scalp. It would have not surprised me at that moment if his entire vehicle had become a mountain and our commander, a Viking atop its peak. He held such a commanding presence astride his beast and I shunned him, for I knew this power was false.
Under the influence of the soldiers’ laughter, Lessing chuckled, starting a mocking tirade at this alien form in a village so foreign to us. Then he sprang upon the woman, clamping his hand about her face, hiding her smile in a brutal embrace, and gave her a push over the side. I was shocked by this action and in retaliation leapt away from my bike, ran to this fallen bundle of vibrant clothing, and tried to get her back on her feet.
"Schütze Krueger," Lessing laughed. "Is she a relative of yours, eh? You should not mix with the peasants. It will only come to trouble."
I brought the poor woman up from the earth and patted her gown to rid it of the mud of the sergeant’s hateful release. It amazed me how much our leaders had transformed since our start on this voyage. They had come into battle honor-bound soldiers and rose from this village as monsters of arrogance. I could not stare into those eyes glaring down from the platform, which in their fiery recesses appeared to burn into me with scorn. Was I a traitor now? Had I made the fateful step into noticeable dissent, an action I did not wish to show my comrades, for the consequences were tantamount to suicide?
"Whose side are you on, schütze?" Lessing taunted and I looked down at the old woman, whose pouting visage arose from her white hood, distraught and sad in appearance. The fall having astounded her she wheezed and I eased this suffering with a press into her chest, hoping to assist in the expulsion of air from her lungs. "Get back up here Schütze Krueger, I will have to keep an eye on you."
At first I did not move, worried the old woman would have a relapse of her physical suffering, but as I let go, she staggered back and went to the side wall of the church, leaning on it for support. I went up the stairs to the sergeant, head downcast and worried upon the punishment that would come from his mouth. Lessing hated weakness in visible form and this helping of the old woman was an impermissible breach of his standards.
"Get in there and bring them out," the Oberscharführer said, pointing the barrel of his MP-40 at the doorway into the church. "You will need this," he said and gave me his submachine-gun. When I had thought a punishment would ring from his lips, there came a plea for assistance. The man was crazy! I took his firearm.
"Wait!" he said, holding me back. "I think I saw a table in there. Stay here, Schütze." Then he turned to the commander’s panzer. "Sir," he said, waving his hand to get the Hauptsturmführer’s attention.
"Ja Oberscharführer," the commander replied.
"We have need for an assembly. The townsfolk should be directed here!" He pointed viciously at a stretch of road where the pack of motorcycles sat in wait. "In the middle of the square. I have found a table inside and will bring it out."
"Sounds splendid, Oberscharführer. It will be like old times."
The sergeant burst into the church. The commander fell back into his vehicle and a voice broke out from a loudspeaker atop the forward beak of his panzer.
"Citizens," it blared. "Your village has been occupied by German forces. Please leave your shelters with ID cards and proof of citizenship to be checked as legal proof of your residence. Your obedience to German laws will also be checked. Your Bolshevik subjugators have been eradicated and your new defenders will ensure your protection. Move in an orderly fashion to your village’s center, before the church, where further orders will be given."
A sudden bang from behind made me turn to see Lessing, an oak table, its legs chipped, gripped in his bear-like hands. I made a move to the side and watched him charge down the stairs with this heavy load, his movements aided by jeering soldiers seated on their motorcycles. With a triumphant yell, he put it down near the middle of the road and with what I thought an all too chivalrous attitude he slammed it with his fist. His attitude changed at this point from hurriedness to visible anger.
“I just hate traitors and partisans!” he shouted. “They are the most vile breed of men.” Then he smacked the table, excited by his own rage. But after this display of visible displeasure, his anger was gone: a calm demeanor took precedence and he threw a look at me, so cold and listless, it made me stumble back in fear.
“Now you can go in there and bring them out,” he said and as I turned and went for the church doors, I was stopped by a wild utterance, spoken in malice, which rang in my ears with torment. “Traitor!”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I went through the double doors into the church, glad to have found refuge from the outside crowd and went about its cold interior in confusion. Two lines of pews, gray and old as the weather-beaten gables, spread to an oak pulpit. Above it all, unaffected by the madness, was a dark crucifix keeping vigil over the room. I went toward this indomitable symbol of suffering, brought back to memories of home when father would pray with me after supper, always tearful at the conclusion of his offering to heaven, hoping others would follow rather than distort His teachings. He had told me to promise never to forget God even as a soldier. “Man without freedom is a slave," he had said. "Without freedom man begins to doubt God. When God is dead in the minds of people, people play god, and only the evil remains.” Even with the threat of detection by the Gestapo, he would talk to me about these forbidden things. He knew me too well to believe I would report him to the police and standing between the pews which marked a path into another world, behind them only chaos before a portal of goodness, his memory began to taunt me to challenge the evil minions waiting for my return.
In a daze, my thoughts centered upon the crucifix and father, I went towards the pulpit. If I stood in it, I thought, maybe the madness around me would stop and the spirit of mother would reappear in flesh to help me find a way out. She had loved me over the Führer. Maybe father would come into the chapel also, not in his uniform, but in a tattered cloak, pulling out keys to the imaginary place.
As I went by a pew, a sudden movement distracted me. A pile of black cloth, bulging out from under a seat, still and lifeless in appearance, lay at rest upon a ball of gray hair. I stopped, wondering at first if this were a dead body left by Ivan. If it was alive and he or she had been kept behind to fight in the resistance, it could be dangerous to squeeze through and confirm its condition.
I made an approach, my MP-40’s barrel leading the way. A prod against this silvery ball spawned a reaction from its possessor and an old woman, with bushy black brows and a sharp chin rose, shaking within her garb. She mumbled a plea in her native language, something I did not understand, for it was spoken neither in Slavic nor German, but she showed through her physical distress a fear of my intentions.
She lifted up her cloak, pointed underneath it to show two children in a frightened embrace. They were thin and frail boys in torn woolen smocks of matching gray. Their stubby fingers, the only chubbiness upon their bodies, held their protector’s dress, as if it would save them from the stranger who had found their hiding place.
I stood speechless, taken by this utter destitution. They had probably been in the chapel for days without food or water. The lifeless famished pallor on the children’s cheeks was difficult for me to stare at without turning away. What was the superman under this suffering? How could man think of such things when those who sat below him were left in such squalor? I wanted to help them, do anything to take their suffering away. I knew they would meet an uncertain fate if they were led out front, so my eyes raced about the room, trying to find a place to hide them and as my gaze passed dingy walls, the crucifix and the pulpit, they fell upon a door tucked behind the platform. I was happy to have found it.
“You must get away from here. It is too dangerous. I am here to help you,” I said to them in Slavic, hoping they would understand and the woman nodded in affirmation, as if she had taken in my words. “There is a door out back. I will lead you there. Come.”
The old woman reached out for my hand and I felt its pressure upon my palm. She reminded me of mother and this memory of a departed one fueled my compassion. I led her and the two little boys to the back door, where, with a light turn of its handle, I held it open and in Slavic said, “you are free, run as quick as you can. Get away from here.”
They ran into a white field, the children at close tag behind their mother. One boy stopped to stare back at me. His mother turned him back and their feet again kicked up the snow. I shut the door content they would make it to the forest.
A loud voice trumpeted outside the front entrance of the chapel. It came out muffled from where I stood, but as I went further down the pews, toward another meeting with Lessing, it rang out clear.
“Citizens move in an orderly fashion where further orders will be given.”
Barking dogs could be heard under this announcement from the panzer’s loudspeaker. As I came nearer to an encounter with this other world and heard, through cracks in the door, shouts, laughs, and Lessing’s jocose taunts at villagers, I felt reluctant to step outside. Something was very hellish about all these sounds, as if the devil had dug a roasting pit around the front drive of this sanctuary and its crackling fires tried to sway me into its fiery embrace.
I took the chance and threw open the gateway into the fire, greeted by a painful sight. In the middle of the road, surrounded by soldiers with police dogs, stood Lessing at a table, receiving shuffles of paper from a crowd of peasant folk crowding around him in their workers’ garb of thick woolen garments and headdresses. Some were children, crying in fearful apprehension at their mothers’ sides, innocence amongst a mob of confusion.
A woman, mountainous in build and with a hard face under black curls, threw her hands in the air in lamentations to some god, who under these conditions, could not free her. The crowd attacked Lessing, jabbed papers at him, but he would not look at them and pointed threateningly at the table. The soldiers made a circle, corralling the villagers and police dogs, hungry and vicious at the ends of leashes, bit at any who strayed too far away.
The sounds of these crying citizens and barking dogs made me feel uneasy as I went down the stairs to give a report to Lessing on the absence of hangers-on in the chapel. After seeing this madness, where people were herded like cattle, with no decency, into a massive horde without identity, it relieved me to think I had given salvation to at least one family. Some of these faces looked upon me as if I could help free them from their bondage. I felt so sick and helpless, even more aghast at the condition of the children, who if they were not crying, gave confused glances at the grownups, or clung closer to an elder in visible terror.
They were simple people, who wore home-spun clothes, hemmed in from all sides by a wall of military might, clad in clean white uniforms and steel helmets, innocence in the center of evil.
I went up to Lessing, but felt too disgusted to give a salute or military welcome.
“There is no one in the chapel,” I said to him and the Oberscharführer, probably spotting my disregard of a proper salutation, shot a serious look at me.
“Say it again, Schütze!” he screamed.
“There is no one in the chapel,” I said, braving his retort with sarcasm. How I hated him now. His red face under helmet seemed to reflect a justification in yanking these villagers from their homes, with not even a flinch at the cruelty wrought upon them by nipping dogs and cursing soldiers.
“Say it again, Schütze!” he said, now in a flurry, slamming his fist into the papers, so they flew away like cranes at crack from a hunter’s rifle.
“No one in the chapel!” I shouted back.
“You traitorous swine!” he flung a jab at me, but I leapt to his left and avoided the blow. “No one in the chapel, you are a liar!”
The Oberscharführer then broke away from the table and made a rush by me. He ran back into the chapel, probably to ascertain the truth. I stood at the edge of the table with a dumbfounded stare at the smiling soldiers around the panic-ridden crowd of villagers. Soldiers without dogs either sat upon motorcycles outside the ring or were in a cluster below icicled eaves of a cabin across the road, flamethrowers strapped to their backs. I could envision from these suggestive dangers a horrible end to an already heartless assembly.
Lessing came back, charged down the stairs and then bent over me. I felt a physical abuse ready to happen, but only his heavy breath fell upon my fear-stricken form. I wanted to turn and punch him, just to get rid of the nagging presence of terror he provoked with his presence, but his intimidating stance was interrupted by a holler from our commander.
“Citizens,” the Hauptsturmführer said, from atop his panzer, and below him, stood a lanky man in a fur coat, who, with his head sticking out from a collar, looked like a vulture, with blue eyes bulging from a wrinkled face and no hair upon his scalp. He said something in his own language in answer to the commander and I figured he had been chosen as an interpreter. “One of your comrades, a partisan, shot and killed one of our soldiers up there,” and our commander pointed to the mountain pass, his interpreter matching the action. “I am a man of discipline. This village is under the jurisdiction of the fatherland and breeches in law are highly discreditable to our standing in these territories. The killing of a German soldier of the Waffen SS is punishable by death. You probably are aware of these serious offenses since I noticed you still have a gallows here for punishment. Being true to my service and honor-bound to my Kompanie, these breeches cannot be tolerated. Lessing, move this rabble to the gallows. They are all a bunch of partisan scum and deserve to be eradicated.”
“Ja, Hauptsturmführer,” the sergeant answered, his hand raised in a customary salute, then he waved to circling soldiers, who at this sign, pressed into the crowd with their dogs.
“Children are to be separated,” the Hauptsturmführer declared. “Oberscharführer, only men and women will be hanged. Have soldiers direct children into the shed for a partisan redress.”
Without hesitation, the Oberscharführer strode through mixed ranks of citizens and with aid from a few other comrades, sent the children out. Police dogs gave added assistance in subduing resistance from reluctant mothers, but the soldiers managed to get into the crowd quickly and yank out smaller members without much retaliation from their older kin.
The door of this quaint shed, a rickety construction of thrown together wood scarps on the far side of the road, was thrown open, with dogs on each side keeping guard. Children were pushed in. Soldiers carried toddlers to the entrance and then tossed them in over heads of taller captives already crammed inside. Cries arose from within, tiny voices pleading to mothers for salvation, but as parents tried to rush and save their loved ones, the Oberscharführer threw up a smart line of soldiers and dogs to halt their advance.
Then our Oberscharführer, with a wave of his hand cleared soldiers away. He stole two potato-smashers from his belt, pulled their igniter balls, made a dash, and then lobbed them. The two grenades vanished into the shed. The soldiers shut the door and ran back, youthful cries trailing their retreat. A roar rattled the ears. The shed vanished in explosions.
“The children have been eliminated, Hauptsturmführer,” our sergeant returned.
“String them up,” the Hauptsturmführer ordered in answer.
Screams from villagers within the outer rings made me cringe in protest. How could I save them? They were pushed in a rush to the gallows, dogs lashing at them, their backs prodded by rifle butts from comrades in a charge for this log-tiered monstrosity stretching over the road behind our commander’s panzer.
I followed, a helpless victim of this confused tide, and felt a need to run in the opposite direction, away from this crowd heading for their doom. A lad in a gray shirt pushed me up onto the scaffold, his collar and wrist cuffs frilled with felt, and when he gave back an innocent look of condolence for his mistake, I nodded in affirmation, but wished I could convey in words my sympathy for him. I did not know his language, but tried to show with a grimace, knowledge of his suffering, and a need to redress it through an act of charity.
The makeshift scaffold, a raised wooden platform below a beam, had no drops. I stepped about it, looking down upon the multitude that sought cover underneath, and many of them were trampled as they went for this false salvation. Soldiers outside the circle, realizing some of the partisans had found refuge below the platform, let their dogs loose into these crannies.
Below me, through breaches between planks on the scaffold, I could see flashes of fur dart by, then a frantic person would throw his hands around a beam, and a yell of protest arose as police dogs attacked him. Lessing, right beside me, looked down at the spectacle with a devilish leer. Now I realized his intentions were not justifiable but of the greatest evil. I did not want to glance at him, fearful his hateful personality would influence my own, and looked down, although below me struck an even more horrible sight of innocent villagers being torn apart by canines.
“Schütze Krueger,” Lessing yelled, trying to be heard over the painful screams arising from below. I could not look up, lost to thoughts of these suffering villagers, subjected to the greatest degradation. “This vile breed forgot to provide us with rope. We cannot string them up without rope. Go find us rope.”
The words struck into my conscience like a needle, shattering my reflection upon the misery of the crowd and replacing it with the image of mother at the bedroom door, her wrinkly face pitiful and full of entreaty. “Rope,” she had requested. “Otto, give me a length of rope!”
“No!” I shouted out, and in fearful response to this order, how horrible it rang out when spoken, I fell upon the boards. “No! No!”
“No,” Lessing shouted. “You disobey a direct order? Why, you filthy swine.” He took out a sidearm from his holster, bent over me, and jammed it against my cheek. “I’ll kill you for disobeying a direct order!” he barked. I heard a click, but no explosion. I was still alive. His gun had an empty cartridge. “Verdammt!” he screamed. “You lucky Ivan- speaking bastard, you’re too valuable. Get rope, you traitorous swine.”
“No,” I screamed back, looking at the faces amongst the crowd, who looked upon me in wonderment. They probably saw in me a sign of salvation in my protest against an authority wanting their deaths. I wanted to satisfy this desire, but the fearful power above me, in the form of Lessing, maintained his monstrous control over the operation. I felt a hand around my collar and a yank choking me as my body was brought upright on the boards. Then came a vicious kick from behind and I fell into the waving hands, caught by their embrace before an impact upon the ground. They patted me, as if in elation at my show of solidarity, then got me up, showing only goodwill in their spoken remarks.
I wanted to help them against the evil, but we were pinned from all sides by a phalanx of soldiers. In a moment, I knew it would probably be my neck within the first noose made at the gallows, but the thought of it did not scare me, for a feeling of elation had taken grip. I knew these people were victims of inhumanity and I felt content that my comrades were more responsible than myself for any ill treatment.
I walked through their ranks, my charge impeded by tight squeezes between arms, until I came out into a space where dogs awaited me, barking at ends of chains. A horrible end became a possibility.
“You go get me some hempen nooses, schütze. Or this gun will be loaded and you will die as a traitor before all your comrades,” Lessing shouted.
I turned back, gave a fleeting gaze at Lessing in his white uniform and steel helmet, his sidearm flaunted in the air, an assurance of the seriousness of his threat. Then I looked at our commander erect in the panzer whose observation of the whole masquerade was made scarier by his leering countenance. These men were evil, I thought. How could anybody follow orders from such underlings of Satan? Father had been correct in his assumptions about the superman. The man who rejected God to become his own god was the devil.
A stare at the church came with an even more startling revelation. A lump of coal, black and glossy, rose to the roof from the eaves, and as I got closer to a battle with the canines, this ball took a different shape, as wings spread out, and its distinct hops, gave away a contrary identity. It was a raven. It took the church at a nimble climb and as it reached the roofline, a blue sky its backdrop and the protrusion of a beak pointing towards a far-flung destiny, it amazed me to see the creature. The raven seemed to be an overseer of the chaos, unmindful of the brutality, but possessing a hidden truth to dispel the madness.
“Please,” I whispered in entreaty to this winged scavenger. “What do I do?”
The raven made a sudden swing of its beak at me gave an attentive look and then sent it back in a stare at the horizon. “Run away, run away,” could be heard chirruping in my ears and above the church the raven flapped its wings. It sprang up from the roof and flew behind the steeple.
“Run away, yes!”
“What, Schütze?” Lessing hollered from the distance.
“You’re evil, Oberscharführer. An evil man!”
“Traitorous swine!” Lessing shouted and in a fluster, he pointed his sidearm at me. It was frightful to see it there, the barrel, this time probably loaded, trained on my head. No report came. “I will have you hanged! Comrades, bind this Schütze and put him in the church. I will deal with him after stringing up these partisans.”
Soldiers fell into the crowd, put cuffs about my hands, then pushed me towards the chapel, but I did not mind these deliverers of justice, even though they had once been comrades, and their actions were in rebuttal to the truths revealed by the raven. Why had I not listened to this hidden message sooner? The soldiers pushed me up the stairs, mindless of my tripping over the top step, but I got up.
I was taken into the chapel and escorted down the pews and then led to a confessional against the wall.
“It’s locked on the outside,” said a comrade at my right, whose biceps bulged from under his sleeves. He made a cursory examination of the knob by turning it quickly, and then, probably content it would be secure, took off my handcuffs, pushed me in, and let the door slam behind me. I heard the click of the lock and knew escape would be impossible.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I sat in a dark confessional. Light filtering into its quarters came from cracks in wallboards, where a beam shot through to show the room’s accouterments: a chair at the further corner, only a stride away, and a hassock with armrest below a screen at my left. I went to the chair, sat down, and took off my steel helmet, caressing it as I tried to orient myself to the darkness. A musky smell arose from the leather hassock, filling the room with a heavy air. It was hard to breathe, but I put my mouth to the wall and took in breaths at the cracks.
Through these slits, I could make out in the distance several log cabins with thatched roofs. Soldiers ran to them, flamethrowers strapped to their backs. They burst into a house and yanked out a man in his cap and white shirt. He stood very tall and I wondered why he did not push his captors away in defense. He waved to some unseen occupants within the dwelling, who at the call of threats from soldiers, burst out in a flash of dark cloaks. They were two women. One of them, visibly short and wrinkly, seemed to be his mother and the other, younger, but with lines of hard labor engraved on her rigid face, was probably his wife. I stared at them, wondering if they would meet the same fate as their fellows at the gallows, but something happened contrary to my expectations.
Attackers threw the man to the ground and kicked him, and then to the screaming lamentations from his wife, they dragged him up to stand in the middle of the road. Then another soldier approached, his flamethrower’s nozzle pointed upon the man’s chest, and let off a fireball.
I hit against the wallboards, trying to break free from the cell to save the victim. Each fist found only resistance and I cried in protest. It was too late. The fire had spread throughout the man’s body, lighting him like a torch, and he ran down the road away from soldiers who only laughed at his predicament.
“No! Why?” I screamed and then threw myself at the door, pulling at the handle in an attempt to open it, but it would not budge. “Get me out of here!” I screamed. “I can’t stand this! I am not one of you,” and in despair at my bondage, I fell back into the chair in horror for the actions occurring not far from this hideaway. It seemed almost too terrible to contemplate these atrocities, as though there were a tentacle trying to grasp out all my pity and replace it with depravity. It would have been horrible to fall into this trap.
I tried to think of good things to distract me from pondering too much on the vileness. My thoughts brought me back to earlier times at home, but the vision of mother and her suicidal charge arose to shatter the tranquility. Another image of father at the dinner table waiting for my return from the Hitlerjugend camps to strike up forbidden conversations would bring up the realization that he had died a horrible death in Poland. The telegram from the front had read: “He fought and died honorably for the fatherland.” Yet the memory of his death, separated from the delusional glories of a warrior’s funeral, arose in its horrid truth as a fate fit for the tripe cut away from good meat in a butcher shop. Life, I thought, was it only a chaos? The balance between good and morbid worked together to stabilize our fragile existence and without it, only the nothingness could reign. How could God in his infinite goodness allow the morbid to take such strong precedence?
Then I saw the answer in the black screen a hairsbreadth from me. No one stared from the other side, but an impression, left by a mouth pressed to the panel, a darker color against the black, spoke silent words into my consciousness.
“Choice,” it said.
Yes, I thought, a choice. Choices were the essence of life. Man could turn to the bad or to the good with only a decision. How I wanted to be on the good side, for on the good side there could be the possibility of love.
Hours went by, while sitting in contemplation of my decision not to take part in the massacre and I began to grow fearful of my upcoming death in a hempen noose. What made death even more frightening, I realized, was the expectation of it and the constant waiting for the end to come. In the crowd, I would have gone straight up to the gallows and hung from the first rope without much regret, for amongst lamentations from the crowd and my inner protests the fear had not taken hold. Lessing, in his genius for evil, did not allow this swift release and threw me into a small prison and in this action, made the final solution more terrible, for in this chamber arose the possibility of death, a terrible thought, more horrific than anything he could administer at the gallows.
The fretting over an eventual demise turned into dread as I heard explosions in the distance, then a shout rang outside the confessional.
“It’s a bombardment!”
I stared through the wall cracks and saw nothing left of the log cabins but cinders and burning hulks. Soldiers ran down the road in their white uniforms, escaping an unseen danger. Another explosion roared in the distance. It sounded like artillery. I bowed my head as a shell shrieked through the air, then in curiosity lifted my gaze just high enough to stare outside.
A sudden flash blinded me. A geyser shot out from the road and threw up earth. The confessional shook as mud chunks beat against it.
The impact startled me. I put my helmet back on.
Another shell flew in and exploded. Dirt rained on the confessional. Chunks beat against the wallboards. All I could see were brownish clouds, which in those brief moments, appeared as if a latrine had dumped its load, for the mud went dripping down the boards, making it hard to see through the cracks.
To shift my attention away from this chaos, I began to concentrate on the screen, with its dark mouth print upon the panel. From its impression, left by lips that had once spoken wise words, another truth flew out into my consciousness. Maybe this bombardment had been a godsend. Now Lessing, too busy with the enemy, would have no time to prepare my execution. I felt relief, but then remembered the villagers who had died before me, probably innocent of any wrongdoing, but sent to their death all the same as a show of discipline.
After a succession of artillery explosions, the whistles from shells screaming in close proximity to my hideaway, silence fell and stuck for minutes, until, very near, a machine gun barked off its rounds. The bullets whizzed by, but did not hit. I stared again through the cracks. There was nothing outside but rubble and scorched earth. Chatter from an MG42, unseen but aimed near the church, assured my Kompanie was still in the village.
“What is it?” I said to myself. “Is Ivan attacking?” I had heard the partisans were experts at village ambushes, but knew our Kompanie, of the finest elite stock, could finish off any resistance, unless they came in divisional strength. Maybe this attack was a heavy offensive from the Russians and the idea of such a massive push scared me, for I was defenseless and I knew about Ivan’s lack of sympathy for Waffen SS soldiers. They would burst into my confessional and probably stab me with bayonets.
I wanted to get away and escape through the woods, but the door was locked and if Lessing or his soldiers did not open it, I feared another more horrible warden in a partisan uniform would come inside. He would not fire from his sidearm like Lessing in comradely affection and the thought of such a contrary death terrified me.
I stood up from the chair and went about the confessional, thinking of ways to break through the door and get out. Maybe there was a roof panel, but when I looked up, only unbroken lines between wooden boards met my gaze. In disappointment, I fell back into the chair and went back to the peephole.
Gun chatter amongst distant artillery fire could be heard, but nothing was visible. Then something shot by the wall and after it a flicker of brown coats ran down the road. I was amazed. More brown coats ran down the road and as one went further past the others, a nearby bark from a machine gun ended its dash, and it fell. I pressed closer to the wall to discern this broken leaf fallen off a moving branch and did not see a German soldier. No, the dead form, clad in peasant garb, stared from a weather-beaten visage, not clean-cut like our soldiers, but furrowed by laborious toil, the face of a partisan.
I fell back into the chair. This realization was terrifying. The partisans had made it into the village and my Kompanie could not impede their advance. Only moments from now, I thought, the possibility of a meeting with these fearful adversaries would become a reality.
No, I thought, I will not give in to a brutal fate, and went down on my knees in search of a cranny below the walls, some loose panel or crack weak enough to break through with only a kick, but a complete barrier met my eyes. Then the confessional screen arose as a possible escape and I punched it, piercing a hole through the mesh, and on the other side, saw another booth, but with no door, and to my disappointment, only a similar space to its sister chamber with bench seat and enclosing walls. I wanted to cry in frustration, but there was no one who would hear or sympathize with my inner anguish, so I held back tears.
Shadows passed by the wall. They came in relentless waves of darkness, sounding their movements in jangles from equipment and tramping boots. God, I thought, they were swarming the church, but chatter from a nearby machinegun broke through their ranks. Screams and small arms fire arose in response from the partisans.
I stood close to the door, too distraught to watch the spectacle and saw shadows dance into my chamber, sometimes stretching to the roof right above me. A dark form shot by the crack and fell under the murderous fire of a MG42. A spray of bullets popped holes into the lower casements and ricocheted off the floor.
“How do I get out of here?” I muttered to myself. The possibility of having to stay to see the end terrified me. There could be nothing worse than being left in a village occupied by the enemy. Then I heard a bang from the main church entry. Someone had come inside. Was it a partisan? I shoved myself against the door, holding the handle to bar entrance.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

“Are you here, Schütze Krueger!”
The shout came out hoarse, yet full of entreaty. It was Lessing’s voice.
“Ja Oberscharführer!” I screamed back, but was apprehensive of his intentions, since he had promised my execution.
I let go of the handle and saw it turn. The door swung open to reveal Lessing, his sweaty complexion below steel helmet marked by a glimmer of uncertainty in his hunter-like eyes. Behind him, held tight about the wrist, stood a young woman in a brownish partisan tunic. She looked more petite than rough-looking, and I almost wanted to question Lessing’s intentions in taking a woman prisoner, until the answer arose from her striking beauty. Her brown hair, done up in a bun and her cut marble features, highlighted by two flickering pools staring at me in uncertainty, made her look more like an actress than a soldier.
Her stare pleaded to me for an escape from her predicament, but I answered with a helpless look. Against the might of the sergeant I could do nothing to free her: he had both the weapons and strength to block my advances.
“You see, schütze,” Lessing remarked with a devilish sneer and a glance back at the woman. “She has an Aryan beauty about her,” and he made a pinch at her cheeks, leaving a red mark where he had pressed his two fingers.
She was distraught, as if knowing his implications and began to plead again through eye contact for relief. It was impossible, I thought, I could not help her.
“Schütze, I trust you know how to do your duty. We have had discrepancies in the past,” and at this reflection, he pushed forward his chest, as if to show his domineering power. “But I will excuse your traitorous behavior in light of the current circumstances.” Then he pointed at the open church window left of the main doors, where another comrade crouched, using its lower expanse for cover against outside arms fire. In front of him lay an MG42, a steely gleam bouncing off its barrel from the sun. He tried to set up the machine gun under a spray of outside gunfire. Bullets pattered against the sill and he fell further down into his refuge below it. An ammo box lay next to him, but no loader. “Assist him comrade,” Lessing directed. “Restore your honor against this vile breed.”
I did not answer, as a proper underling would have done in similar circumstances, for Lessing had proven to be more of a murderer than an honorable soldier. I ran down the aisle of pews to assist an ailing comrade. The gunfire struck thick outside and only its clamor and explosions could be heard as I got nearer to him.
A bullet whizzed by my forehead as I knelt next to the ammo box. The taste of smoke and cordite hung thick in my mouth. Another round hit the floor inches away. I knew staying here longer than a few minutes would lead to a speedy death, but brought the ammo box regardless of the danger to the firer, who, steel helmet tucked into his belly, and his hand outstretched grasping the machinegun stock, nodded an assent to my presence beside him.
Despite furious incoming fire, I took a chance, threw open the ammo box, brought out a belt, slammed it into the feeder and then gave my comrade a pat on the helmet. At this sign, he raised himself, shoved the butt into his shoulder, and gave a tug at the trigger, opening fire with a cry of racketing lead. I looked at the firer the whole time, watching him press into his weapon in a stance of machine calmness. With every pull of the trigger, his cheeks shook up and down like a wet mold, but his eyes were wide, staring at the enemy. The soldier in that moment became not a man of his race, but a beast of destruction. The gun spent one lengthy belt in a burst.
“Feed, feed, feed!” he shouted at me.
I brought up a belt in haste and fed it into the MG42. The machine fired again. A few spent shells struck my helmet as they spat out of the firing chamber. The racket and chatter of its barrel was as ferocious as large nails hitting against metal, a hellish roar of shrapnel.
Silence came from the gun. I looked up and saw the soldier grinning over a smoking barrel.
“More partisans!” he cried.
He took aim to fire again but a bullet went through his neck. His head jerked in a spasm as blood spat from a cut jugular. The sudden taking of his life came as a shock, for his movements while firing the MG42, so rapid and certain, made him appear one with the death-making machine. Now this gear had been severed from the main and it would be my responsibility to take up the work. I clung to the butt of the MG42, pressed it into my shoulder, and under a spray of gunfire, seeing ahead the sudden passing of brownish garb by white houses and, with these displacements, eruptions from rifles nearby, I felt it hopeless to continue the fight. There was too many of them and only one firer to expend an all too short belt. I let go of the machine gun and turned to my fallen comrade.
The soldier had slid to the floor, his head torn up with eyes open in a cold stare. His corpse was riddled with bullet holes and the neck lay open with gushes of blood congealing around the wound. There was no face to him. The shreds of skin and flesh hanging from gouges in the cheeks stole away any resemblance to a human being. I thought the body not real, a dummy supposed to look like a man but not a man. I felt sick to the stomach and turned back to look outside the window.
“Oh, a feisty one are you!” I heard Lessing shout behind me and there arose struggling grunts from his woman prisoner. They were unnatural sounds and I glanced at the pews, hoping to catch sight of Lessing, but all I could see was his upper trunk, above the pew back, his body thrusting into the seat and an angry smirk on the side of his face. The woman screamed again and now the shocking awareness came that Lessing was raping her.
He’s a monster, I thought, and under the onslaught of bullets firing into the window from enemy positions, another dilemma arose out of this situation which required action. Should I stay at my post and defend the church or go free the woman from the sergeant? The question needed a prompt answer and I knew the leaving from one could lead either to the breaching of our defenses by the enemy, a horrible possibility that could result in all of our deaths, or the freedom of a prisoner, whose defilement, almost unimaginable even in these conditions of war, gave fuel to my repressed anger.
I went for the fallen comrade’s holster, stole his sidearm, and before leaving my post, came to a sudden realization. I threw open the magazine, found it still had one bullet in the cartridge, slammed it back into the gun, then strode over to Lessing. As I approached him along the aisle of pews, he never turned to look at me and continued with his debauchery. It became unbearable for me to stare at his animal form, a domineering force whose whole existence, since my first encounter in training, had proven to be sadistic and power hungry. Rather than continue to look at his unwavering prominence my gaze went to the altar with its risen platform below a crucifix. It appeared indomitable amongst the sinful excesses at work before it, yet did not lash out at this evil and rather with physical restraint stood as a silent mediator.
I brought to bear the sidearm, pointed it at Lessing, yet with my glance still maintained upon the crucifix. The repressive sobs next to me, beaten back by angry retorts from Lessing, gave out subliminal pleas, pull the trigger, they said, end his life, but the crucifix above the altar, unmoved, gave a different resolution. Let him get away with it, the altar said, his judgment will be given after death. Neither seemed appealing, so in an act of rebuttal, I glanced at Lessing, his white back falling into his victim, and stood behind him. The woman had caught sight of me and stared in a frightful plea for a release from her predicament. To answer it, I shoved the sidearm into her hand dangling from the pew seat. Even this action did not break Lessing’s attention, so lost he seemed to be in his sexual fantasy, and with the presence now of a weapon to counter his criminal desires, it seemed ridiculous now for him to continue towards an eventual fate.
“It’s either him or me,” I whispered to her in Slavic. “I’ve given up killing. I put it into your hands.”
“Schütze Krueger,” Lessing said, and stopping his momentum, made a turn to look behind him and in this moment, the prisoner slammed the sidearm against Lessing’s chest and let off an explosive report. He fell dead in her embrace. In disgust, she pushed him to the side, pulled up her trousers.
I pointed at Lessing’s vile carcass lying between the pews, his hands still outstretched upon the floor, as if hungry even in death to satisfy his sexual appetites. “I saved you from the real monster.”
She let the sidearm fall onto the dead man.
“You know what,” I said. “I’ve given up this Kompanie,” and in disgust, bent over Lessing’s form, searched his belt, and took hold of his combat knife: hoping the woman would not think this action a threat towards her life, I backed into the aisle. “These don’t belong to me anymore,” and I put the blade to work upon my collar lapels with their runes, cut them off, and threw them onto Lessing. “They belong to him. I spit on the SS, the Führer, and the fatherland. I am not the monster.”
Her expression, once broken in fear towards her attacker, now changed to bewilderment.
“Do you want to be free?” I asked her, stretching out my hand for her to grab. “To be free from all this madness?”
“Free, yes,” she said, with an uncertainty in her speech, yet her gloved hand still went for mine and when they locked, I pulled her up from the pew.
“The red star,” I said, pointing to the Bolshevik pin on her collar flap. “You won’t need it.”
At first hesitant, she gave me a quizzical look, but in obedience to my plea, spoken to her in what I thought understandable Slavic, she took off the red star and threw it across the room.
“Good,” I smiled in answer. “Now let’s leave this rotten hell!”
“Wait,” she said, pulling me to her. “You need protection,” and she went for Lessing’s MP-40, took the weapon from its strap, and ran down the aisle with me, relinquishing the firearm once we had got to the altar. Outside the church, racket from small arms fire gave off a warning of certain death if we left through the front entrance. In agitation, I looked about the room, then remembered the back exit, a door where I had given freedom to a mother and children from fate at the gallows, and I led the woman to this escape almost hidden behind the altar.
“We leave through here,” I told her, but was worried that partisans were on the other side eager to spring out and kill us. To curb this doubt, I gave the door a nudge, brought up the MP40, and held it in a firing position as I gave further pushes, always looking about the landscape for a brown coat or a sudden motion upon its wintry expanse. The door was wide enough now for me to squeeze through, but fearing an ambush, I went to my knees, with MP40 trained on the road, and moved the barrel in a swipe to find any targets, but found none. I gave a quick look into the church.
“I’m going to make a run for it. You follow. I see the remains of a house over there. It will give us cover,” I told her, staring back now across the road at wooden beams, remains of a cabin burnt to a ruin by trigger-happy soldiers. “You coming with me?”
“Yes, I follow,” and her undertaking rang with affectionate sincerity.
“Then stay behind me. Hold onto my belt, so we do not lose each other.” I felt a pressure between the small of my back and the belt, making known her compliance to the order. Still doubtful about a safe sprint towards the ruins, I went to the edge of the door, peered behind it, saw a snowy road cut between fences, and in the distance, flames crackling out of lit houses, but no infantry or vehicles. An echo bounced off church walls from incoming rounds, but these destructive whistlers kept their barrage behind us. I felt content we would make it.
“Let’s go,” I said to her.
I darted across the road. The snow was thicker here and my boots sunk into its deep patches, the powder sometimes rising to just below my knees, but with the push behind me from my woman comrade, we got through and made it to the ruins. Chatter from a nearby machine gun, bullets whizzing by us, prompted me to turn around, yank my follower’s arm, then make a wild dash, where I dove into the snow with her by a pile of beams taking cover against the gunfire. I nudged closer, holding her body close against my own, and in this hug, our faces close to each other, her pale lips almost bloodless against the dead white about us, a sudden passion arose within me for her.
She looked so innocent and untouched by the ravages of war and I yearned to dip into this innocence for my childhood had only been a battlefield filled with hate. Now this face, beautiful not for its visual perfection, but for what arose from beneath her skin, a radiating love for everything, even this foe she had put her trust in fleeing the madness, kept me in awe. I could not touch this beauty, I thought, it will only break through contact. Lessing had tried to taint it through his physical lusts, but its charm still blossomed with splendor.
“What is your name?” I uttered.
“Vera.”
“Vera. Well, I hope this won’t be the last day we see each other,” I still could not sum up enough courage to glance at her.
“Me too,” she said, cuddling even closer and I felt a hand on my hip.
“We will be free soon, do not worry,” I said, but a barking machine gun, firing close rounds, broke through the promise. “If we stay low in the snow, don’t stand too far above the ground, we can make it to the forest. Do you see it?” I tilted my head towards the field behind us and she followed the gesture with an assenting nod. “If we run fast, it will be easy.” Yet, even this movement seemed impossible if the machine gun emplacement had range over the field.
“I don’t think we’ll make it,” she said, answering my doubts.
“Yes, if we only are quick about it,” I added, only to reassure her we had favorable conditions for an escape. Then, with a quick look to my left I spotted a motorcycle, its front tire jutting out from behind burnt tiers. It was a double seater without a sidecar. “I found it!” I shouted. “Our way out is over there, see, behind the debris. We are saved,” and looking back at Vera, who showed only a dumb expression, I tugged at her tunic to gain her attention. “There’s a motorcycle behind the burnt boards. Do you see it?”
“Yes,” she answered, with a nod. “But will it not be too dangerous? Those tracers are right above our heads. We will die if we leave here.”
“We’ll die if we stay. Just wait. The machine gun cuts off when its belt runs out. Then we make our run for it,” I assured her.
We waited for a lull between bursts from the nearby machine gun and when a silence fell over us, marred only by distant gunfire within the village, I gave Vera a pat, and we shot up from the snow, sprinting without respite to our freedom. When I got behind the motorcycle, I fell beside it, using it as cover against expectant rounds from the harassing gunner, but no bullets were shot.
“Get on the back seat,” I said to Vera. She leaped into the rear spring saddle, held the metal ring handhold with her gloved hands, and seemed ready for a bumpy ride.
I climbed into the driver’s saddle, expecting that the enemy would not see me, even though my steel helmet poked above the wooden tiers, an easy target. Mindful of this danger, I brought the motorcycle to quick life, starting up its engine, and put it into gear. A roar rang out from the engine block and after putting on the goggles wrapped around my helmet, I gave the accelerator a push.
A cold wind stabbed at me, sapping out warmth, and I felt miserable as we drove down village back streets. I pushed the engine to its highest speed and it screamed with the strain. My lips were on fire and to combat the dryness, I licked them, only to taste a stony tongue as it sank back into my mouth. In our passage we drove by ruins, burnt remnants of houses with only their scorched foundations visible above the snow.
We reached the village outskirts. Up ahead, a road rose over a hill to disappear from sight. The motorcycle made an approach. As we got nearer, an armored vehicle sprang out from behind a cabin below the rise. I gave a yank upon the handlebars to turn away from this oncoming danger, but the tank gave chase, and with a glance behind me, I saw it was a Bolshevik T-34. Its drab olive paint made its allegiance apparent and it raced up the hill, hoping to intercept us.
I shoved the bike into high gear. A metallic squeal screamed out from the tracks of our pursuer, who was close enough to fire its forward machinegun, but as I got to the summit, our bike picked up speed, and tore through the trail. With another glance behind me, I saw the T-34 stop as it surmounted the ridge then rotate its turret until the barrel bore upon us.
I glanced forward and to fool the Bolshevik gunner swerved my bike in a zigzag course. A crack broke the air. A shell screamed above us and I ducked over the handlebars. Up ahead, the road shot up a wall of earth and I made a sudden swerve to avoid death within its clouds. We got through, but another roar told of a second shell headed for a kill. I slammed the accelerator against the handlebar, and with the stabbing wind at war with us too, merciless and painful in its constancy, I began to curse our chances.
I just wanted to get closer to the pines rising in the distance. Their tall trunks and foliage would hide our escape from the Bolsheviks. Freedom was so close but so far away as the shell flew over, exploding in the snow for a near miss.
We came to another rise, not as steep, but still formidable enough to put a damper on our momentum. Our motorcycle began the climb and I gave cautious glances back at the T-34. A smoke plume arose from its barrel and another shell came screaming in.
As the bike pushed over, I felt a sudden jolt in the machine, and almost falling from my saddle, saw a side of the hill break away and burst down into lower reaches in snowy chunks.
I turned to Vera to see if she had got through. Her eyes were open in a daze. She was alive but showing visible strain from shell shock. I drove on into the wilderness, thankful to have put enough space between the T-34 and our bike to avoid being smashed into mincemeat.
Then, as we got into the pines, their stolid branches throwing shade over our trail into the wilderness, I came to a realization that we had made it. We had freed ourselves from the madness. Our entrance into the forest brought us to a door leading out of the Führer’s house and I could smell the pine needles, the thick mustiness of tree bark, and other sweet scents, better than the screams and bloody floors within the master’s manor. We had come to that door and without any regrets, passed through it into freedom.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

We were free. The road ahead went on, icy and constant. I took it at high speed, hoping to outrun the partisans. The ice made the trek harder with its sudden grip upon our tires, but we got through and at the end of switchbacks, thankful we had not slid over a cliff, our bike came out onto the plains, the engine trumpeting our presence.
Up ahead, snow blew in feathery wisps from peaks. I set myself a goal to get behind the mountain ranges, for beyond lay higher reaches, all the better in concealing our movements. I hoped we had enough gas to make the climb. Mindful of this, I eased off the accelerator and took the road at a cruise, looking behind every so often to check on Vera. Each glance showed her in the same posture, her body leaning on the handle, head tucked into her tunic for protection against the cold. I wanted to speak to her, but my lips were chapped and our engine too loud for conversation.
We continued on, frozen passengers stuck in an immense icebox. Our bike neared an incline, switch backing ever higher until it cut behind peaks. The bike took the climb. With a slam against the gear lever and a push on the accelerator, we drove up the first stretch, then cut past snowy boulders, and made headway on another rise. The motor stuttered at the start of each approach, then screamed with strain as it rose higher up the slope.
The further we went, the more I worried over our fuel, probably close to dry, since we ran on a tank depleted by the Kompanie’s campaign. At each squeal from the engine block, a front tire turning from a sheering ascent, I gritted my teeth, horrified our motorcycle might stall before it reached the summit. Yet with each glance behind me, staring down over what had been conquered, it amazed me we had made any progress. Each switchback seemed more like an unassailable rock face than a road pass, but we got through, and at the top, our motorcycle heated and petering out from overwork, we were rewarded with an easy down slope.
From our heights, the road fell into a glen, icy and studded with pines. I let off the gas, put the bike in first gear and let it roll. At times, our bike went too fast, threatening to topple over, so my hand went to the brakes, and our passage down was swift, but eased, until we reached flats, where icy mud gripped our tires. I let off the accelerator. The bike went at a crawl, cutting a slow path through mud, which sprayed by us.
Pines met our advance, their barks jutting out like fingers from white silk. I wanted to stop by one and rest, but the possibility of a better place ahead, maybe a covert between trees, or a cave, which could provide shelter from the elements, made me drive on, scanning the landscape.
I felt a nudge against my shoulder and turning to Vera, put on the brakes.
“What?” I asked. My voice came out hoarse.
“There, look!” she shouted, pointing ahead. I followed her finger, spotting a partisan truck at the side of the road with its white painted sides, broken windshield, and flat tires. I put on the gas and drove closer to it, but kept enough distance away to allow escape from any Bolshevik traps.
I put on the brakes and frowned at Vera. She seemed to understand my frustration, for she threw her glance away from the truck to our forest surroundings.
“I trust you, now,” I said. “You could have killed me in the village, but that truck. I can’t see behind it. You’ve got their uniform, go back there and see if there are any of your people behind it. But no tricks.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I will go there. Do not worry.” She got off her seat and went for the mysterious vehicle. Her feet kicked up mud as she ran and vanished behind the truck. After a moment’s pause, when I thought about even bringing up my MP-40 to train upon her, she emerged from the other side, pressing her knees to catch breath.
“Are you all right? There’s no one there?” I hollered out. She snapped back up and gave a smirk of assurance.
“No,” she said. “They left it.”
“Could you look inside the cabin,” I asked, still leery of surprises, even though the smashed windshield revealed the interior, there could always be the chance of some partisan being scrunched between the foot pedals.
Vera looked at me in hesitation, but then ran up to the driver door, threw it open, gave a cursory look inside, and then returned an answer of negative findings through her blank expression.
“Is there anything in there we can use?” I asked, hoping the partisans had left supplies behind like blankets, food, or even uniforms, but after entering into the cabin and shuffling through its recesses, Vera emerged empty-handed.
“They have taken all,” she said. “We are helpless now. I should have stayed with my comrades. This is all bad.” She ran back to the tailgate, her head shaking in dejection. “I would have lived if I had just run away, if I had just fled from you and joined up with the band. Now I will freeze to death with you.”
“But you have run away, Vera,” I said in reassurance, then got off my motorcycle and rushed to her. I laid my hand upon her shoulder, hoping to calm her ruffled state. “I am sorry I did not leave you there, but we were being fired upon by your own people. We did the right thing.”
“You think so big, you think this is the right choice, to come here and freeze to death on the side of road? You take me on a crazy ride. My comrades are behind me, waiting to find my body in ruins, but they will not find it, for it will be here, frozen next to this truck.”
“But we will not stay here,” I said, hoping to calm her doubts, I seemed only to make her angry.
“Oh, not stay? What you say is nonsense. We will stay here, since we do not have gasoline.”
Seconds went by without talk and then the idea came to me. “Yes, Vera, yes.”
Her eyes lit up at my words, then looked back at me with an expression of dumbfounded surprise.
I ran to the front of the truck, propped open the hood, then began my search. The eyes fell upon the engine block, radiator, and belt, but these objects became distractions for what they yearned to find. Then it appeared to me, the necessary agent of our salvation, radiator hoses! With a few swipes at them with Lessing’s combat knife I managed to snip one in half, then came away with a cut-off length.
“Here it is!” I shouted to her in glee. “Let us just hope it sucks anything.”
“You are crazy, what ideas you crazy Germans come up with.” I ignored this remark and began to examine the outside of the truck, halting my pursuit when I found a fuel tap. I knelt and stuck the end of the hose into it, but then remembered I had made an unreasonable mistake.
“Vera, get me a fuel can.”
“Fuel what?”
“Fuel can, on the side of my bike.”
I heard jumbling against the bike as she extricated the sought after item, but it did not take her long and she shot up next to me, her sweet breath blowing upon my face, as the plastic can butt into my fingers. I thrust the hose into the fuel tap, took a suck, and then spat out gasoline into a can. It was foul tasting and arduous work. With a can almost filled to the brim to prove my efforts had been fruitful, I spat out the hose, then dug my hands into the earth and took in a mouthful of frosty mush, trying to take out the stale taste of gasoline in my palate. Even after a few swigs, the horrid flavor stuck.
“Let’s get out of here,” I told Vera, who sat on the truck tailgate, kicking her legs.
“No rest?” she asked.
“Not until we get there,” I said, although as I said it, I had no idea of our destination, but anywhere seemed better than the village.
I reached the bike with the gasoline can, unscrewed the fuel cap and tilted it into the tank, waiting for the juices to overflow over the top, before bringing it away, and securing the half-full can. Vera had already leaped onto her saddle.
“But where do we go?” she asked, adding weight to my bewilderment. Vera looked perplexed. I answered her agitation with my own dismay.
“They say the Americans are good to prisoners,” I said. “I say we drive and see if they will take us.”
“Will we have the gasoline to make such a journey?”
“With or without gas, we will get there. When I mean to run away, nothing will stop me!” I shoved the motorcycle into gear and drove onward into the wintry expanse.