The Wehrmacht had seized the schoolhouse for use as a command center. Six Kübelwagens were parked near the entryway and a bareheaded trooper, his blond hair as short and yellow as a newborn chick’s, refueled one of them with a green steel jerrycan. He watched with no apparent interest as the company approached with its convoy of prisoners.
Officers gave orders, ranks broke, most of the Germans headed inside, already shrugging out of their heavy packs, gabbing with each other, loud and happy, ready for the showers (if the water was running) and a hot meal. The remainder of the Gebirgsjäger, a platoon of forty soldiers, irritated that they were still on duty, surly now with hunger and fatigue after a long day hiking through the endless Russian forest, prodded us along to the side of the building.
A German officer waited for us there, reclining in a folding chair, reading a newspaper while he smoked. He glanced up with an idle smile when we walked into view, happy to see us, as if we were friends he had invited over for supper. Setting aside his newspaper, he finally stood, nodding, inspecting our faces, the state of our clothing, the quality of our boots. He wore a gray Waffen-SS uniform with green cuffs on the sleeves, his gray overcoat hanging on the back of the folding chair. Vika, walking beside me, murmured, “Einsatzkommando.”
When we had been formed into rough lines, the Einsatzkommando dropped his cigarette into the snow and nodded at the Gebirgsjäger’s slack-skinned translator. They spoke together in confident Russian, as if showing off for their eavesdropping captives.
“How many?”
“Ninety-four. No, ninety-two.”
“Yes? And two who could not join us? Very good.”
The Einsatzkommando faced us, gazing from man to man, looking us in the eyes. He was a handsome man, his black field cap tilted back from his sunburned forehead, his delicate mustache giving him the air of a jazz singer.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told us. “I know you’ve been reading the propaganda. The Communists want you to think we’re barbarians, here to destroy you. But I’m looking at your faces and I see good, honest workmen and farmers. Is there even a single Bolshevik among you?”
No one raised his hand. The German smiled.
“I didn’t think so. You are smarter than that. You understand that Bolshevism is simply the most radical expression of the eternal Jewish quest for world domination.”
He looked over the blank faces of the Russian men arrayed before him and gave a good-humored shrug.
“But we don’t need the fancy talk. You understand the truth in your bones and that is what matters. There is no reason for conflict between our peoples. Both of us have a common enemy.”
He signaled to one of the troopers, who picked up a stack of newspapers from a wood pallet beside the folding chair and divvied them out to five of his fellow mountain rangers. They walked down the rows of prisoners, handing one newspaper to each Russian. My copy was Komsomol’s Truth; Vika and Kolya had Red Star.
“I understand this is a difficult concept to grasp, after so many years of propaganda. But believe this for the truth: the German victory will be a victory for the Russian people. If you don’t understand this now, you will understand it soon, and your children will grow up knowing it.”
The sinking sun made giants of our shadows. The Einsatz officer enjoyed the sound of his own words and the impression he made upon us. His Russian was technically perfect, though he made no attempt to hide his accent. I wondered where he had learned the language, if he’d been born in one of the Deutschvolk colonies in Melitopol or Bessarabia. He looked up at an ellipsis of three little clouds far above us in the silvering sky.
“I do love this country. Beautiful land.” He lowered his head and gave another apologetic shrug. “All this talk, you are thinking, but we are still fighting a war, aren’t we? The truth is, my friends, we need you. Each of you will serve the cause. In your hands you hold copies of your illustrious regime’s printed lies. You know how honest these papers are! They told you this war would never happen, and here we are! They told you the Germans would be expelled by August, but tell me”—and here he gave a stage shiver— “does it feel like August to you? But never mind that, never mind. Each of you will read aloud one paragraph. Those we judge literate will come with us to Vyborg, where I can promise you three meals a day while you translate documents for the provisional government. Working in a heated building! Those who fail, well . . . The work will be a little rougher. I have never been to the steel mills in Estonia, but I hear they can be dangerous places. Still, we’ll give you better grub than whatever slop the Red Army was handing out—and I will not even try to guess what you civilians have been eating these past few months.”
Some of the older peasants groaned and shook their heads, making eye contact with one another, exchanging shrugs. The Einsatzkommando nodded to the Gebirgsjäger translator and within seconds the two Germans began testing the prisoners. They needed to hear only a few sentences to judge the Russians’ literacy. I looked at my copy of Pravda. Atop the lead article was a bold-faced exhortation from Stalin himself. COMPATRIOTS! COMRADES! ETERNAL GLORY TO THE HEROES WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES FOR FREEDOM AND THE HAPPINESS OF OUR NATION!
The old peasants shrugged and handed their copies back to the Germans without looking at the text. Many of the younger men from the collectives struggled to form a few words. These prisoners took the test seriously, frowning as they tried to decipher the letters. The Germans laughed kindly at the mistakes, slapping the illiterates on their shoulders, joking with them.
“You never bothered with the books, did you? Too busy chasing the girls, eh?”
Soon the prisoners relaxed and shouted at their friends on the other end of the line. They laughed along with their captors when they stuttered out the words. A few made up their own articles, pretending to read while inventing accounts of battles outside Moscow or the bombing of Pearl Harbor, doing a passable job of imitating the reporting style they’d heard on the radio. The Germans seemed to enjoy the ruse; both sides knew nobody was fooled.
The Germans asked each failure to step to the left. The first few men to stand there looked embarrassed about their public humiliation, but they cheered up as the ranks of the unlettered grew.
“Ah, Sasha, you too? I thought you were the bright one!”
“Look at him squirming over there in front of the officer! Come on, come on, it’s the steel mills with us! What, you thought you might get the office job? What a joker; look at him, still at it!”
“Old Edik, you think you can walk all the way to Estonia? Eh? Come on, cheer up, we’ll give you a hand!”
The men who could read wanted to impress the Germans. They recited the lines like actors delivering monologues. Many of them kept going after they were told to stop, giving little flourishes to the bigger words, demonstrating their ease with the vocabulary. They stepped to the right, proud and beaming, nodding to their educated fellows, pleased with how the day had gone. Vyborg wasn’t so far, and working in a heated building with three meals a day was a better deal than sitting in a trench all night waiting for the mortars to drop.
Kolya rolled his eyes, watching the literates congratulate each other. “Look at them,” he muttered under his breath. “They want a prize because they can read the newspaper. And look how condescending those Fritzes are. Maybe I’ll give them the first chapter of Eugene Onegin. Think that would impress them? Sixty stanzas, rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. They think they’re the only culture in Europe? They really want to match Goethe and Heine against Pushkin and Tolstoy? I’ll give them music. It’s closer than they think, but I’ll give them music. And philosophy. But literature? No, I think not.”
The black-capped Einsaztkommando was only two men down the line from Kolya, who stood to my left. I felt a gloved hand squeezing my right hand and I turned to see Vika, her pale face tilted up toward mine, her fierce eyes unblinking even through the slanting rays of sunlight. She had taken my hand to alert me of something, but she did not let go as quickly as she migh
t have—or at least this is what I told myself. I could make her love me. Why not? So what if her general attitude toward me was bored disgust?
“You don’t read,” she informed me with that practiced whisper, too quiet for anyone else to hear. She kept watching me to make sure I understood. For once in my life, I didn’t need an explanation.
The Einsatzkommando, as patient and benevolent as a professor, stood listening to the Red Army man beside Kolya.
“Soon, Europe will fly the great flag of freedom for the nations—”
“Good.”
“—and peace between the nations.”
“Good, good. To the right.”
I elbowed Kolya’s arm. He glanced at me, impatient, ready to show this patronizing Fascist the real face of Russian letters. I shook my head once. The Einsatzkommando walked up to him. There was no chance to say anything. All I could do was stare into Kolya’s eyes and hope he understood.
“Ah, here’s a fine-looking man of the steppes. Have a bit of the Don Cossack in you?”
Kolya stood straight. He was taller than the Einsatz man and for a few seconds he looked down at the German without opening his mouth.
“I wouldn’t know. Born and bred in Piter.”
“Beautiful city. Seems a shame calling it Leningrad. Ugly name, isn’t it? I mean aside from all the politics. Just seems wrong to me. Saint Petersburg, that’s a name that resonates. All the history! I’ve been there, you know. Moscow, too. Expect I’ll visit them again before too long. Now, show me what you can do.”
Kolya held up the newspaper and studied the print. He took a deep breath, opened his mouth to begin—and laughed, shaking his head, offering the newspaper to the German.
“I can’t even fake it, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize! Shoulders like yours would be wasted at a desk. Good man, you’ll be fine.”
Kolya nodded, smiling at the officer like a handsome idiot. He was supposed to join the group of illiterates, but he lingered next to me, his hands in his pockets.
“I want to see if my friend can do any better,” he said.
“Well, he can’t do any worse,” said the Einsatzkommando with a smile of his own. He stepped in front of me and looked me over. “How old are you? Fifteen?”
I nodded. I didn’t know if it was safer to be fifteen or seventeen; I lied on instinct.
“Where were your grandparents from?”
“Moscow.”
“All four of them?”
“Yes.” I was lying automatically now, not even thinking about the words before I said them. “My parents met there.”
“You don’t look Russian to me. If I had to guess, I’d say you were a Jew.”
“We call him that all the time,” said Kolya, ruffling my hair and grinning. “Our little Jew! Makes him crazy. But look at that nose! If I didn’t know his family, I’d swear he was a Yid.”
“There are Jews with small noses,” said the German, “and Gentiles with large ones. We can’t be careless with our assumptions. I saw a Jewess in Warsaw a few months ago, her hair was blonder than yours.”
He gestured at Kolya’s bare head, smiled, and winked.
“And it wasn’t dyed. You understand?”
“I do,” said Kolya, smiling back.
“Don’t be too worried,” the German told me. “You’re young, still. We all had our awkward years. So tell me, are you any better than your friend here?”
I looked down at the newspaper in my hand.
“I know this says Stalin.” I pointed to the word. “And comrade?”
“Yes, well that’s a start.”
He gave me an avuncular smile, patted my cheek, and took the paper. I thought he might have felt bad for saying I looked like a Jew.
“Very good. You’ll keep your friend here company in Estonia. A few months of hard work never hurt anyone. This will all be over soon. And you,” he added, moving down to Vika, the last in the line. “Another child. What do you have for me?”
Vika shrugged and shook her head, never looking up, offering the unread paper to the Einsatzkommando.
“Right, another victory for the Bolshevik education system. Good, all three of you to the left.”
We joined the group of grinning illiterates. One of them had worked in a steel mill before and the others were gathered around him, listening to him describe the terrible heat and the danger in handling molten metal. Markov’s betrayer stood just outside this circle, rubbing his bare hands to keep them warm, ignored by everyone.
“Was that Abendroth?” I whispered to Vika. She shook her head.
“Abendroth’s rank is Sturmbannführer. Four silver pips on the collar tabs. This one only had three.”
The company translator was counting each group of prisoners, pointing at heads and moving his lips. When he was finished, he announced to the Einsatzkommando, “Fifty-seven readers. Thirty-eight nonreaders.”
“Very good.”
The sun was down and the air was getting colder. The Einsatzkommando walked over to the folding chair, where his overcoat waited, while the troopers formed the literate prisoners into two rows and ordered them to march. The Russians gave cheerful waves to their less-educated comrades across the way. They marched with precision now, far different from our stumbling procession earlier in the day. Boots rose and fell on the beat: left, right, left, right. The prisoners wanted to impress their German masters, to prove they deserved this chance to serve out their time clipping newspapers in Vyborg.
The Einsatzkommando wasn’t watching them anymore. He buttoned his coat, slipped on his leather gloves, and headed off toward the parked Kübels. The literate prisoners marched to the windowless brick sidewall of the school building, where they halted and faced front. Even then they didn’t understand what was happening to them. How could they? They were good students; they had passed the test and been rewarded.
I looked at Vika, but she was staring off into the distance, refusing to watch.
The German troopers leveled their submachine guns and fired at the line of Russians. They kept their fingers on the triggers until the magazines were empty and the Russian men lay splayed and shredded on the ground, smoke rising from their singed coats. The Germans reloaded, walked over to the wall, and fired single shots into the heads of anyone still breathing.
In front of the schoolhouse I saw the Einsatzkommando greet the young bareheaded soldier who had been filling the fuel tanks. Whatever the officer said must have been funny; the young soldier laughed and nodded in agreement. The Einsatzkommando stepped into one of the Kübels and drove away. The young soldier picked up the empty jerrycans and lugged them toward the schoolhouse. Before he got very far he paused and looked into the sky. I could hear it now, the purr of airplane engines above us. The silver Junkers flew west, in pointed formations of three, for the first bombing raid of the evening. Three after three after three, filling the sky like migrating birds. All of us, the surviving prisoners and the mountain rangers, stood in silence and watched the planes pass.
21
We slept in a toolshed behind the schoolhouse, thirty-five of us jammed into a space eight men might have slept in comfortably. No one could lie down flat. I sat folded into a corner with Kolya on one side of me and Vika on the other. This was bad for my back but good for my breathing—the gaps between the wallboards provided the only ventilation and if I got too claustrophobic, I could turn my head and suck clean, cold air.
There was no light. The German troopers had nailed the shed door shut; we could hear the guards outside talking and lighting cigarettes, but the prisoners still talked of escape. I couldn’t see their faces and the effect was like listening to one of the radio plays my mother used to like.
“I’m telling you, we could crack it open like a walnut shell. One man puts his shoulder into it, he’d bust right through the wall.”
“You think so? You a carpenter? I am. When they shoved us in here, I got a look at the walls. That’s silver birch. That’s strong wood.
”
“And what happens to the man busting through the wall? There’s guards out there waiting with machine guns.”
“How many? Two, three? We rush them, they’ll take a few of us, but we’ll get them.”
“Can anyone see how many are out there?”
I dipped my head and peered through the gap.
“I see only two. But there might be more on the other side.”
“Long as I don’t go first.”
“We all go together.”
“There’s still got to be a first man out and a last man out.”
“I say we wait and do what they say. The war won’t last forever.”
“Who is that, Edik? Why don’t you burn in hell, you old bitch? Didn’t you see what happened out there today? You still trust these pig fuckers?”
“If they wanted to shoot us, they would have shot us. It was only the fancy boys they wanted, the ones in the Party.”
“Ah . . . you’re a miserable old bastard, you know that? I hope your children shit in your soup.”
Kolya leaned across me so he could whisper to Vika in the darkness, out of earshot of the squabbling peasants.
“That Einsatzkommando . . . he was right next to us. You told Markov we weren’t going to shoot troopers, we were holding out for Einsatz. So?”
For a long count Vika did not respond and I thought she must have been angered by the insinuation, but when she did speak, her tone was thoughtful.
“Maybe I was afraid. And you?”
Kolya sighed. “It didn’t seem like the moment. Shoot one man and get blasted to pieces?”
“No. But maybe we waited too long. That might have been our best chance.”
I had known her for only a day, but Vika’s comments surprised me. She did not seem the sort to admit doubt, and yet here she was using the word maybe twice in a row.
“I almost did it,” said Kolya, nudging my shoulder. “When he was asking you about your grandparents. I thought he might make you drop your pants, take a look at your meat. I had my hand on the butt of my gun. But we talked him out of it, didn’t we? You like what I came up with?”