Another Kind of Country (20 page)

You can have your bullet in the back of your head right now – or talk and buy some time.

‘You are wondering,’ Kulakov said, ‘if you will be executed anyway, even if you do answer my questions.’ Reder said nothing. ‘We are not all uncivilized beasts like this fellow here,’ a sideways glance at Bukanin, ‘and I give you my word that, as long as you are within my reach, no harm will befall you. So I say again, the choice is yours, Major Reder.’

He saw it all in a blurred rush. The smoke-filled cellar, your comrades-in-arms around you. The Iron Cross at your throat, the swell of pride in your heart, General Bayerlein’s salute. He saw his mother in the milking stall, the full tits in her fingers, the fresh milk steaming into the waiting pail. He felt the motorbike throb between his thighs along the country lanes near home, the wind against his goggled eyes. And he saw his own prisoners lying in the snow, the dark blood pooling around their shattered skulls. The murder of unarmed prisoners did not sit easily on Hans Reder’s young shoulders. Nor on his conscience. Yes, he fought under a flag, for the Fatherland, but he fought also for his comrades. As had those soldiers of the Red Army who now lay murdered in the dirty snow.

‘What d’you want to know?’ he said to Nikolai Kulakov.

Kulakov shrugged. ‘Everything,’ he said.

There was something hypnotic about the commissar. The pale eyes, Reder thought, they bored into you with all the fervour of that old idiot woman back home who assured you that the delft figure on the village chapel cross had leaked red blood from its side. And the commissar’s voice, musical, unthreatening, and yet full of its own certainty, the voice of a man who only ever spoke
the truth and who expected his listeners to recognize that truth.

‘I need this information,’ Kulakov was saying, ‘because it might help to shorten this conflict, even if only by a single day. There’s been too much dying, too much killing. The Red Army does not come to destroy your homeland but to give new life to your diseased country. We bring you the gift of socialism, a fair and just system where all men and women are equal.’ Those eyes once more reaching into Reder’s heart – or what remained of his heart. ‘Where we are all equal
in life
, Major.’

And Reder knew that Kulakov was reminding him that the only equality to be shared on this filthy battlefield was in death.

‘I want to hear everything,’ Kulakov said again.

Later, it seemed to Reder that everything was just what he had told Kulakov. Starting was the hard part; once he’d opened up about General Bayerlein’s disposition of his forces, the rest spilled out more easily. Or maybe it was the skill with which Kulakov probed him, taking him from his village in West Prussia through his brief training in Danzig to the campaign on the eastern front.

When Kulakov offered him a cigarette, the commissar saw the nervous way that Reder glanced back at the line of prisoners outside the open doorway. A look and a word from Kulakov saw the NCO hurry outside and snarl something at the guard. The unlucky prisoner nearest to the guard got a rifle butt to the chest as the prisoners were herded from view.

‘So, Major Reder, you have decided to help us, yes?’

I want to see home again, sit in my mother’s kitchen
. ‘I’ve told you what I know, Captain,’ he said.

‘Sit down, Major.’ Kulakov nodded to the NCO, pointed at a wooden box which seemed to be waiting for the fire. He waited until Reder was perched on the unsteady box before continuing.

‘You should know, Major Reder,’ he began, ‘that the Soviet army is an unstoppable machine. We have
defeated the fascist forces at Stalingrad, at Leningrad – and your comrades will die here
also at Kirovograd. All across the eastern front our armies are advancing towards Germany. In a year or so the Soviet armies will be in Berlin. Make no mistake about it, Major, we will cross your borders and exact the most awful revenge upon your people for the crimes that have been committed against the Russian people.’ He stared at Reder. ‘You understand this, Major?’

Reder nodded.

‘I need to
hear
your answer, Major Reder.’ Steel in the voice.

Reder swallowed. ‘Yes, Captain.’
Barbarians let loose in our streets and fields, and yet this man speaks Hochdeutsch, the language of educated Germans
. ‘I hear you.’

‘Hear this also, Major. We are a just people and our armies will bring to your country the true justice of the proletariat. We will bring you the justice of socialism and work with the German people to build a new socialist democracy. For this great work, Major Reder, we are going to need the cooperation of Germans who understand and appreciate the true meaning of socialist justice.’ Another pause, another stare. ‘You understand my meaning, Major?’

Only too well, Captain: I have no wish to lie dead in the snow.

Reder said, ‘I understand, Captain.’

‘You speak Russian, Major?’

‘Only a little – I speak Polish.’

‘The Poles! At least you Germans know how to put up a fight.’ Kulakov snorted. ‘Take my advice, Major, learn Russian. And stay alive, wherever you are. From now on you’re out of my hands, in the care of animals like this,’ a thin smile at the NCO, who grinned back, ‘as a guest in one of our prisoner-of-war camps. You’ll be half starved and half frozen to death. We both know that life is cheap out here in the snow. If you’re lucky, you’ll live to see the end of this fucking war. If you’re wise you’ll cooperate
with the authorities wherever you’re sent. You understand me?’

Once more Reder nodded. This time it didn’t seem so difficult.

‘This,’ Kulakov looked around the smoky farmhouse, ‘this is the future, these uneducated, honest members of the proletariat. I was a lecturer in German literature at Moscow University but some of our officers can’t even read, they need pictures on a map. You’re in the middle, Major Reder, you can read and write, you’re the son of peasants but you have mastered modern machinery, the very heart of today’s proletariat.’ He took the half-full packet of cigarettes from his pocket, passed them across the table to Reder. ‘I’ll see that you are given something to eat here – the cigarettes are a token of my good intent. You impress me, Major Reder, as someone who is not afraid to make a decision, someone who is not afraid to survive – unlike some of your comrades.’

Again, Kulakov looked around at his companions. ‘Survive, Major, and join with us in a great understanding when this war is finally won. You know my name – Captain Nikolai Kulakov of the Fifty-second Guards. Remember it. I can’t help you once you are taken to a camp but, if we both survive, maybe we can do great things together in Berlin.’

Kulakov was no more than a few years older than himself, Reder guessed, but there was something in him that inspired obedience, the desire to please. Or maybe the desire to close your eyes to your betrayal of your country, of the Iron Cross that was hung round your neck. It was for his comrades, not for a bunch of Nazis, that he had gambled with death.

The commissar got to his feet. ‘Like I said, Major, your first duty is to survive.’

Reder looked at him. ‘I’ve been in here a long time, Captain Kulakov.’ He
shrugged. ‘I have the other prisoners outside so maybe,’ he made a face, ‘maybe your sergeant should rough me up a bit.’

‘We can do better than that, Major Reder.’ Kulakov spoke rapidly to the NCO. Reder watched the sergeant blink, open his mouth as if to speak, then march quickly outside.

From outside came the bark of commands, then the rat-tattat of machine-gun fire.

‘Go now,’ Kulakov said, ‘your secret is safe.’

Instinctively Reder clicked his heels and bowed before marching out into the day. Gun smoke hung in the air but it could not hide the dozen or so bodies that lay dead in the snow.

‘
Du! Für du!
’ The sergeant grinned, impressed by his own command of German. He was holding out to Reder a German greatcoat. He pointed at the nearest corpse, coatless, blood leaking through the tank man’s field blouse. ‘
Für du
,’ the sergeant said again.

Reder forced himself to look at the corpses lying in the bloody snow.
For you indeed
.

He fell to his knees, his hands clawing at the stained snow.

He heard the metallic cocking of a weapon and looked up into the barrel of the sergeant’s rifle.

‘Get up, Major.’ Kulakov was standing beside the sergeant. ‘There’s nothing under the snow except more blood and dirt.’

Reder got to his feet. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, tried to come to attention.
You’re a prisoner but you’re still a soldier
.

He tried to speak but no words came.
Shoot me too
, he wanted to say.

‘You’re alive, Major Reder,’ he heard Kulakov say, ‘and maybe you and I will both survive to work together in the future. I hope so anyway.’ Kulakov
took a thin paperback book from his pocket, handed it to Reder. ‘It’s a gift, Major.’

It was strange, a book put into your hands while you stood among corpses.
Socialism: The Solution
. In German, the title printed in black on coarse brown cardboard, the inside pages only a little less brown. Reder had heard of the practice of such books and pamphlets being handed to selected German prisoners.

‘Stay alive, Major.’ Kulakov turned away. There was neither power nor malice in the sergeant’s kick that sent Reder on his way.

In his long captivity
Socialism: The Solution
became Reder’s companion. He read it in snatched moments, always fearful that it might be taken from him by one of the illiterate guards. Over time the words and ideas in the book became part of him – an idea, in the midst of hell, to cling to with hope.

Sometimes, too exhausted to read, Reder’s eyes would linger on the dedication printed in the book:
In Memory of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht
. Reder could remember the names being mentioned by his mother and father in a not-in-front-of-the-children whisper: two Berlin Communists murdered by the Nazis. The names on the rough paper became friends on Reder’s journey west with the Red Army.

The Soviet advance westward was inexorable. Long before his country’s surrender, it was clear to Reder that the war was lost. What was less clear was whether he would survive to see its end. Life with the Red Army meant you were always hungry, always lice-ridden. And always living on the edge. As the Red Army pushed west, prisoners came and went. Mostly they went.

Some of them went in goods wagons, destined, according to their guards, for Siberian camps where they would be worked until
they dropped. Some succumbed to hunger, wounds that would not heal, illnesses that were beyond recovery. For these, a bullet seemed a merciful end; the alternative was to be clubbed and kicked to death or simply to be abandoned in the frozen wasteland.

Hans Reder survived through cunning and luck. He laid railway tracks, fixed broken machinery, coaxed reluctant engines back to life. He took his kicks and bruises without complaint, worked fast at whatever tasks he was assigned. He listened to his captors, engaged his guards in brief exchanges of conversation, gained a basic command of the Russian language. This, and his skills as a mechanic, won him the confidence of the transport boss attached to the attacking forces.

In October 1944 Reder was a tiny cog in the support machine of the huge Soviet army encamped on the eastern bank of the Vistula River, opposite the city of Warsaw. The eastern districts of the city, Praga and Mokotow, were in Soviet hands, taken without too much difficulty from the retreating Germans. Across the river, in the doomed Polish capital, the doomed Polish army of resistance fought against the superior German forces. Hans Reder wondered, along with the rest of the Red Army, why they did not attack across the river. He was still a prisoner, still on starvation rations, but now trusted enough to be thrown extra scraps of food along with scraps of information. The accepted rumour was that Stalin had forbidden any assault on Warsaw until the Polish resistance was already crushed by the Germans.
You can see the shape of things to come
: thus, the softly spoken words of another prisoner, a Luftwaffe pilot who had survived a crash-landing east of Minsk and who, like Reder, owed his survival to his skill with engines. ‘Stalin wants rid of the Polish leadership,’ Captain Pillnitz said between spoonfuls of the watery potato soup. ‘After the war Poland will be just one of
many Soviet satellites.’ Captain Pillnitz seemed undismayed by his own prophecy: like Hans Reder, he had accepted the need to cooperate actively with his Soviet captors.

The Red Army sat and waited while the Poles surrendered and the still-retreating Germans systematically destroyed the city, street by street, block by block, house by house. In January 1945 the Red Army marched into a devastated place of rubble and smoke. By then Reder, along with Captain Pillnitz and hundreds of other ‘lucky’ prisoners, was wearing on the sleeve of his German greatcoat the identifying armband of the Free German Army of the Soviet war machine. His armband didn’t put a gun in his hands but it confirmed his trusty status, made survival perhaps a little more possible.

Reder hoped that their advance might take them north, that he might learn something of his family. It seemed almost too much to hope that they would all survive the Russian onslaught – and yet what else was there to hang on to except hope?

Instead, Reder’s division swung south, towards Krakow, sometime seat of the kings of Poland. Reder never got to see the city of Krakow. Their advance across the flat Polish countryside was swift; resistance was light, as if the German army were prepared to surrender this monotonous countryside without a fight.
They’ll make a stand in Krakow
, was the agreed wisdom of the advancing troops. Reder looked at the Slav and Mongol faces around him and wondered what they’d make of the fabled city of kings. He overheard only guffaw-laden exchanges about watches and jewellery and women waiting to be fucked.
Savages
, Reder thought.

Next day, as part of a detachment diverted to a place called Birkenau, Reder found a new savagery that was beyond his ken. The smell reached them long before their handful of trucks got there: a sickly stench that made some of the men vomit over the side
rails of the lorries. Rotting animals, decayed corpses. The smell of death had become familiar but this was different – heavier, danker, choking the sky, defiling the very earth. The stench intensified as they drew closer to the compound: a series of barrack-like huts surrounded by fences of barbed wire. The guards had fled, the gates hung open. Stick-like creatures with shaven heads and sunken eyes stood listlessly behind the open gates, watching without interest as the trucks drove inside and the Russian soldiers jumped down on to the stinking, frozen earth.