Another Kind of Country (21 page)

‘Jews,’ Pillnitz whispered in Reder’s ear.

Reder had never quite believed the stories of mass murders, of crematoria specially built in the depths of Germany and Poland, of death squads, Einsatzgruppen, whose sworn aim was to rid the world of the scourge of
Juden
.

He believed now. The smell forced you to believe. The still-breathing ragged skeletons. The fly-blown piles of tangled corpses that had never made it to the fires. And the tall chimney stacks rising like sentinels of death above the whole rotten structure. Reder looked again at the Soviet soldiers from the cities of Russia and the central plains of Mongolia and thought:
who are the savages now?

He bent beside the fence and vomited on to the wire.

When he stood upright again, Reder knew that he no longer served under a flag of convenience, a banner of survival. In the year since he had been captured, through all the beatings and kickings and humiliations, he had asked himself: can you truly fight against your own? Is your own skin more precious than the survival of your own homeland?

Reder wiped the traces of vomit from around his mouth and knew his answer: the perpetrators of this obscenity in the Polish countryside were not his people. The flag they flew was not his. The
state they fought for was no longer his homeland. The Führer could go fuck himself.

The words of Commissar Nikolai Kulakov came back to him:
we will bring you the justice of socialism and work with the German people to build a new socialist democracy
.

He hadn’t seen Kulakov since that day outside Kirovograd. Other commissars had come and gone, lectured the prisoners on the vices of fascism and the virtues of Communism, but it was Kulakov’s simple words that had stayed with him. Maybe, just maybe, they would meet again.

He was lost in his own thoughts when he realized that one of the walking skeletons was standing in front of him. There were sores on the fellow’s scalp and face; only toothless gums were visible when he opened his stinking mouth.

He strained to understand the words croaking from the toothless mouth.

‘Food,’ the skeleton in rags said in Polish. ‘Have you anything to eat?’

‘
Leider nicht
,’ Reder said. ‘
Es tut mir leid, aber ich habe Zigaretten
.’ Unfortunately no, I’m sorry but I have cigarettes.

He saw the fear, the horror, in the wasted features, realized that he had answered in German.

He saw the skeleton step back then move towards him again, raise its skinny arm, and swing at him with a puny fist.

It was like being tapped on the face with a withered daisy. He could have pushed the skeleton away but he stood there being beaten with feeble slaps; he saw the toothless mouth purse itself and he waited for the spit to come. The slaps ended and Reder put his arms around the falling skeleton and realized that his face was wet with more than spittle; that he, too, like the ragged bundle he was holding upright, was weeping silently.

June 1945

Jaworzno Labour Camp

Poland

Colonel
Solomon Karel, square-jawed, heavyset, took the salute of the departing Russians almost casually. The steel in Karel’s eyes had nothing casual about it. Karel had things to do, scores to settle. The sooner these Reds were out of
his
labour camp, the sooner he could dole out the kind of punishment these inmates deserved.

He looked at the lines of prisoners in the central square of Jaworzno Central Labour Camp: ragged, scabrous creatures, eyes downcast, afraid to look at their new camp commandant.
They don’t realize yet how much they have to fear
.

Karel had ordered this assembly so that the prisoners might witness the formal transfer of power from the Soviet forces to Poland’s Ministry of Public Security. The war was over, the fucking Führer was dead and Stalin and Churchill and Roosevelt would soon meet in Berlin to decide how to rule the world.

They wouldn’t be ruling Jaworzno Labour Camp
. The small detachment of the Red Army that had taken charge of the camp was finally pulling out. From now on, it was a Polish camp run by Poles. And mostly a camp
for
Poles: collaborators, Nazis, fascists. The local so-called ‘ethnic’ Germans could take what was
coming to them also: Karel would personally make sure of that.

He shook hands with the young Russian captain who was handing over to him. Too young, too easy on the vermin within these barbed-wire fences. Fucking Russkis had even deloused and cleaned up the camp after releasing the small group of inmates who had escaped the gas chambers at nearby Auschwitz. Cleaned it up for the scum who now stood under the burning sun waiting for Colonel Karel’s dismissal.
Let them wait: the burning sun was nothing to what the future held
.

‘All yours, Colonel Karel.’ Captain Zhivkov had had enough of Poland. The stories coming back from Berlin meant he’d been missing all the entertainment, stuck in a Polish backwater.

He dismissed his men, could see their eagerness to be gone in the way they hurried to the two waiting trucks. Their kitbags had already been stowed, the drivers had the engines humming.

‘One moment, Captain.’

The Russian turned, saw the hatred in Karel’s eyes.
This fucker was bad news
. Pity the poor bastards lined up on the baked mud of the square, waiting for Karel to take charge of their existence. Even Karel’s own uniformed men looked apprehensive.

‘Yes, Colonel?’

‘I want those two Germans, Captain.’

‘What?’

‘Those two Germans wearing Freie Deutsch armbands – they’re mine.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about, Colonel?’ The captain glanced over at the waiting trucks, saw Reder and Pillnitz waiting to climb aboard.
They knew their place, last for everything, but they were good men, knew which side they were on
. ‘Those two are my men.’

‘They’re Germans, Captain, the
fucking enemy.’ Karel’s grin was menacing. ‘And they’re from Poland,
ethnic
fucking Germans. They’re mine.’

Captain Zhivkov sighed, exasperated. What the fuck was an ‘ethnic’ German? ‘Those men have served under me for months, Colonel,’ he said.

‘And now they’re going to serve under me.’ Karel looked across at the Russians settling themselves in the trucks. ‘They’re mine, Captain, make no mistake about that.’

Fucking Poles, we liberate them and all they do is make trouble for us
. But the captain was in no mood for a confrontation, the June sun was too high and too hot; his men were as anxious as he was to be gone from this evil, stinking hole.

‘Reder! Pillnitz! Over here!’

The two men jogged over, their expressions an odd mix of anxiety and an eagerness to please.

‘Sir?’ They stood to attention in front of their captain.

‘Colonel Karel here claims you are ethnic Germans from Poland.’

Neither of the two men looked at Karel.

‘Well?’ The captain’s impatience was evident.

‘I’m from Hamburg, sir,’ Pillnitz said.

‘And you, Private Reder?’

‘I’m from Steinplatz, sir.’

‘Which is Poland, Captain.’ Under the beetle brows, Karel’s eyes narrowed. ‘This one is mine, Captain.’

‘Sir,’ Reder swallowed, looked only at his Russian captain, ‘Sir, Steinplatz is in West Prussia, in Germany.’

‘Fuck you!’ Karel spat. ‘Steinplatz was part of the land you fucking Germans stole from us.’

Reder licked his lips. Had he come this far, survived this long, to face certain death in a stinking camp run by a Pole? ‘Sir,’ he
said to the captain, ‘I’m a soldier in the Free German Army—’

‘You’re a fucking Kraut!’ Karel turned to the Russian captain. ‘I tell you, Captain, at least one of these fuckers is mine.’

Captain Zhivkov looked at his men, seated on the benches in the trucks, smoking, laughing, some of them looking back, the question written on their faces: why aren’t we out of this fucking place? He looked at Karel’s own men, saw in their weary expressions how much they distrusted the Russians who had set them free. And in the rows of ragged prisoners he saw despair, the despair of men who knew that from now on their lives would hang by a thread.

And then there was Pillnitz. And Reder. Two men who had given whatever he had demanded but whose lives, like the prisoners’, now hung by the same flimsy thread.

Fuck it, Berlin was waiting and he’d had enough.

‘Pillnitz,’ he said, ‘get in the truck.’

He didn’t look at Reder as Pillnitz hurried to the lorry. He couldn’t look at Reder.

‘Sir—’

‘Shut it!’ Karel roared.

‘This man is still under my command, Colonel.’ Zhivkov still couldn’t look Reder in the eye. ‘What is it, Reder?’

‘My kit, sir, it’s in the truck.’

‘Your kit won’t be much help to you here, Fritz.’ Karel laughed.

‘Come with me, Reder.’ Zhivkov turned on his heel, followed by Reder.

‘Don’t forget to come back!’ Karel’s taunt followed them to the truck.

One of the soldiers threw down Reder’s stuff, rolled up in the greatcoat that had been taken from one of the prisoners executed outside
Kirovograd.
How long ago? A year, a grisly lifetime?

‘We have to get moving, Reder.’ Captain Zhivkov could not say what he truly felt. How could a Red Army captain say sorry to someone who was, after all, just a German prisoner-of-war? But the fucker had served him well and willingly. Impulsively he took a packet of cigarettes from his tunic pocket and held it out to Reder.

‘Take them,’ he said.

Reder shook his head. ‘Thanks, Captain, but we both know they’ll just be taken from me.’

Zhivkov shrugged, nodded.

‘I have a favour to ask, Captain,’ Reder went on. ‘In Berlin, or wherever you serve, you might come across Commissar Captain Nikolai Kulakov of the Fifty-second Guards. He and I met at Kirovograd. It was Captain Kulakov who,’ Reder hesitated, ‘who showed me the way to socialism. He once said to me that he and I might work together to build a new socialist Germany.’

Captain Zhivkov saw Reder with new eyes:
you just never fucking knew
.

‘Captain Nikolai Kulakov of the Fifty-second Guards?’

Reder nodded.

‘And you want me to tell him where you are?’

‘Yes, Captain.’

Zhivkov looked over at Karel, waiting with hands clasped behind his back.

‘Stay alive, Reder,’ Zhivkov said.

He couldn’t stand it any more. Abruptly he swung on his heel, got into the cabin of the truck. As the two lorries pulled away he looked back and saw, through the rising dust, Karel beating Reder about the head with clenched fists. Staying alive, Zhivkov said to himself, is easier said than done.

The
best that could be said for Colonel Solomon Karel’s reign over Jaworzno Labour Camp was that he ensured that all his prisoners suffered equally: nobody escaped his brutality.

You took your turn in the forest, sawing and hauling, eaten alive by insects. Or on a whim you were dispatched to the nearby coal mines, hacking at the brown coal hundreds of metres below the earth, the sweat running in black rivulets down your scarred skin.

And sometimes, just for the hell of it, you were ordered to dig a trench that was long and deep and straight. You learned quickly that, when you had finished, you’d be ordered to fill it in again.

Letters and parcels brought with them their own particular pain. Once a week, before work, Karel read out the names of the prisoners who had mail.

A corporal stood beside Karel, in his hands a small box of letters and parcels; there were never many. Karel held each letter and package above his head as he called out the name of each fortunate inmate.

Or not so fortunate. Often Karel would explain that because of some misdemeanour prisoner so-and-so had forfeited his right to his letter. The pain of deprival was deep as hunger, sharper than the cold. One dwarf-like fellow – a farm labourer, he’d told Reder – couldn’t take it. Driven to madness by the sight of a letter denied to him, he’d hurled his small, squat body at the camp commander and tried to grab the letter from Karel’s hand. ‘My wife!’ he’d screamed. ‘My wife!’ Two guards held the little man while Karel kicked him into unconsciousness. The battered body still lay on the ground when the prisoners returned at the end of the day. Reder and two other inmates were detailed to bury the remains in a corner of the camp near the latrines. Don’t let that bastard Karel ever know what you’re thinking, Reder
told himself as they filled in the shallow grave.

Reder had never seen a parcel handed over to an inmate: some infraction always meant confiscation. The inmate was, however, always made aware of what he was losing: a loaf, a length of Polish sausage, a pair of thick, knitted socks – Karel waved each item in their faces, then tossed it into the corporal’s box.

Sometimes a book came and suffered the same fate as the bread or the sausage.

Once the book was for Reder, the only package – or letter – ever directed to him in Jaworzno Labour Camp.

Karel shouted Reder’s name as he waved the book almost jauntily in the air.

‘
The True Meaning of Communism
, Reder!’ Karel came closer, stood in front of Reder. ‘Tell us the “true meaning of Communism”, Comrade Reder.’

Reder was silent. Speak and you’d be kicked.

‘Answer me!’ Silence also earned a kick or two.

‘I don’t know, Colonel.’ Reder stared straight ahead, past Karel’s shoulder.

‘And you’re not going to learn from this shit, Reder.’ Reder risked a quick look as Karel tore the book in two, saw the red hammer and sickle on the paper cover.

‘We think this might be seditious material, Reder, sent to you by a traitor.’ Karel had a single sheet of paper in his hand; Reder caught a glimpse of a few handwritten words on it.

‘Who is “K”, Reder? Who is this writer without a name, someone who signs himself only “K” and says “I have found you, stay alive”? Who is this “K”, Reder?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

Karel nodded. It was the corporal’s turn to kick Reder.

‘Who is “K”?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’