Germany has been liberated but the battle for the hearts and minds of the people has just begun.
Prologue
The Seelow Heights, near Berlin. April 16, 1945
Night. The air thick with mist and tension, like a giant spring waiting to be released. Dark shapes of heavily camouflaged T-34 tanks and trucks with Katyusha rocket launchers mounted on their backs towered behind the infantry trenches. In the Oderbruch, first flowers began peeking, with uncertainty, through the hostile, gunpowder-poisoned ground just to be squashed by thousands of mud-caked boots and caterpillar tracks in the next hour or so. In that very next hour or so, thousands of soldiers would find their final resting place among them.
Pre-dawn mist enveloped the earth around the Seelow Heights. It seeped into trenches, clung to one’s clothes and penetrated them slowly but surely. Bad weather for the planned attack. Tadek wiggled his toes in his boots. The water that had collected in the bottom of the trench in the past few hours was already seeping into them. Shturmoviks that were to provide the support from the air would strafe them again instead of the Germans, due to the bad visibility. If the Germans didn’t do him in, the Russians would surely finish the job, Tadek concluded to himself with a fatalistic smirk and squeezed the barrel of his rifle tighter.
Not that he complained, if he were entirely honest. Unlike the former Gulag prisoners whom the Red Army began to acquire in the early spring to use as cannon fodder while storming their main objective – the accursed fascist capital – he was here very much voluntarily. A former Auschwitz inmate, Tadek refused medical attention when the Russian doctors offered it, right after they liberated the camp; explained to some political commissar that he used to be attached to the Sonderkommando – the crematorium gang – and therefore fared much better than the rest of the inmates; rolled up his sleeves, demonstrated his strong arms and asked for a rifle and the opportunity to take revenge, not really counting on either. Strangely enough, the commissar provided him with both and even attached him to a regular rifle division instead of the shtraf company or a penal, mine-clearing unit. Later, Tadek learned that those were staffed exclusively with former Gulag inmates, liberated Soviet prisoners of war or deserters. Compared to them, he certainly lucked out; at least he and a few other Polish volunteers attached to the same rifle company weren’t sent ahead of the tanks through minefields at the beginning of each new battle, unlike the poor devils from the penal battalions. Tadek had thought he’d witnessed enough horrors in his short life but the sight of men being blown up by anti-tank mines easily rivaled what he’d seen in the Auschwitz crematoriums, daily.
The attack was scheduled for 05:00 Moscow time or 03:00 Berlin time. Tadek itched to check his wristwatch “liberated” from one of the captured Germans but the strict order for “no lights” was still in effect. All around him, the same nervous fidgeting. Not a single infantryman could sleep that night. Countless pairs of eyes glistened in the pre-dawn darkness, trained on the frontline.
Something rustled ahead. All at once, several pairs of hands clutched at their rifles, breathless, fingers on triggers.
“Ne strelyat! Svoi!”
Don’t shoot. It’s us.
A collective breath of relief. The sappers were returning from their suicidal mission of clearing the no-man’s-land of mines in the middle of the night. Unlike their forcefully conscripted counterparts from the penal units who would have to clear the rest of the minefield with their own bodies, these men were revered and highly respected among the troops. Those were well-deserved laurels; not a single explosion broke the serene lull of the night. These sappers were professionals, valued by their commanders like gold. When one of them slipped into the trench, Tadek shook his hand with emotion. The sapper clapped him on his shoulder.
“Gotov?”
Ready?
The sapper’s job here was done. Now, it was Tadek’s job to obliterate what lay ahead of the no-man’s-land.
“Gotov,” he replied in Russian and turned back to the frontline, still concealed from his eyes by the wet mist and slowly dissolving darkness.
03:00 Berlin time. All at once, the deceivingly quiet front came alive with thousands of mortars and Katyushas. All around him, the earth trembled as the terrible thunder rolled forward like thousands of Jericho’s trumpets announcing the end of the world, no less. Tadek plugged his ears and opened his mouth to relieve the pressure on his eardrums. He almost pitied the artillerists manning those monstrosities behind him; he was certain they would all go deaf by the end of this bombardment. Of the Germans, who found themselves on the receiving end of this infernal assault, he didn’t even wish to think. Hardly anyone would survive such total obliteration that the 1st Belorussian Front’s commander Zhukov unleashed on their defense lines.
Just when Tadek had thought that the nightmare would never end, the guns had grown suddenly quiet. Through the ringing in his ears, he could still discern the frantic cawing of the birds flying in chaotic circles overhead, terrified out of their wits by not only the bombardment but by thousands of colorful flares that shot up into the sky at once – the signal for the main attack. They hung there for a few seconds like glowing, exotic jellyfish and all at once, it was suddenly daylight all around him, blinding and disorienting. The troops had been warned ahead of time of Zhukov’s recently conceived tactic of installing almost a hundred and fifty powerful searchlights trained on the German positions to stun them and render them defenseless. But even to the Soviet troops, the light had turned out to be so overpowering that it was impossible to look anywhere but straight ahead – ahead and ahead only, across the former no-man’s-land – to Berlin. The light urged them forward, toward the fountains of earth exploding in rapid succession, toward the smokescreen created by the exploded shells that had obscured everything from their sight, toward the trenches, where the torn bodies of their enemies now lay. There was no turning back now. Not a chance for desertion, not in this hellish madness. Perhaps, that was another part of Zhukov’s plan.
Not a single step back.
“Na Berlin!” – To Berlin! – A veritable roar of the charging infantry echoed all around him. And Tadek ran along with them, propelled forward by some inexplicable spirit of destructive delight, mad with a sudden fury and drunk with the desire for revenge.
On the border of Germany proper, next to the disabled carcasses of Wehrmacht vehicles, the very first troops that had crossed it installed a sign: “Here it is, accursed Germany.” The same hatred that they carried in themselves for this country, Tadek felt coursing in his own veins now. On his chest, a medal for courage was gleaming dimly in the smoke-stained morning. He shot and stabbed his way to Berlin along with the troops; first with Konev’s First Ukrainian Front, then with Zhukov’s First Belorussian but the further he went, the worse the withdrawal from such battles was growing. Almost like a hangover after a bad night of drinking, only there was no escaping the nauseating realization that the more lives he took, in revenge for what had been taken from him, the bigger the hole inside of him was growing, sucking the very life out of him with every new battle won.
With tanks rumbling on their heels, they finally reached the German positions. The very few men that had the luck to survive the initial onslaught, stumbled toward them in a dazed state; shouted, in their hoarse voices, the same phrase in their pidgin-Russian – Ivan, don’t shoot, we are prisoners – and nearly fell in a heap at their feet in relief, pushing the safe passage leaflets instead of the white handkerchiefs into the Russians’ hands.
“The white handkerchiefs had been all confiscated before the battle,” one of the Wehrmacht infantrymen explained to a hawk-eyed commissar who conducted the usual interrogation. “By the Feldgendarmerie… to prevent surrender…”
But knowing what was good for them and that all was lost at any rate and that it would have been rather idiotic to die right before the end of this entire affair, the resourceful Wehrmacht landser had still squirreled away a few leaflets, dropped before the battle,
by the 7th Department of Propaganda, attached to the First Belorussian and hid them inside their uniforms. Starved, filthy, unshaven, the Germans held those papers in front of themselves now and searched the Russians’ faces, with their wary, mistrustful eyes, desperately hoping for mercy and not really expecting it, at the same time.
“The only promise Hitler has kept is the one he made before coming to power,” one of the newly-surrendered men uttered with a lopsided grin, as he was being patted down for hidden weapons. “Give me ten years and you will not be able to recognize Germany. What do you know? The old sod did not lie.”
Files and files of the POWs began trudging toward the rear of the frontline, where the NKVD detachment awaited them with open arms. Many of the Germans were mere boys, with legs fully covered by much-too-long trench-coats and with helmets sitting so low on their tense faces, gray with fatigue, that they obscured their sight. Some still tried shooting, prior to their foxholes being overrun but dropped their weapons as soon as the Ivans came close; screamed the inevitable and already-familiar, “Hitler kaputt, Stalin gut!” and scrunched up their little, pitiful faces, expecting a beating. The Soviets ordinarily dealt them a kick in the backside and sent them over to the rear, trembling and harmless. For them, the war was finally over. Tadek was amazed at how relieved they all looked, his former enemies.
By the evening, the air around smelled of burned cordite and churned animal flesh. In their zeal, the artillerists and the tank crews had obliterated every construction as far as the eye could see, in case one of them turned out to be a command post. However, all such posts had long been abandoned by the fleeing company commanders and all that the artillerists had burned was, in fact, innocent farms. The Germans regarded the charred corpses of the animals tragically and Tadek, in his turn, stared at their sorry company assembled in a makeshift pen by the commissars and was suddenly overcome with such profound disappointment, he thought he’d fall over with grief.
Wrong people; this entire time he was fighting the wrong people. It was the SS that took his family away from him and he was shooting and slashing with his bayonet at the regular Wehrmacht, the pitiful lot, munching the unexpected bread rations distributed by the Soviets and grumbling their hopes that “that one” in Berlin would off himself before he’d take more innocent lives with him and someone from the administration would sign a surrender already and they would all go home at last. Some even gathered enough courage to ask the commissars what sort of administration they would have, as though the entire Berlin-taking affair was a finished matter. The NKVD interrogated them for their own purposes – a few lucky ones would even be released and sent back to Berlin to explain to the population that they had nothing to fear from the Ivan and that further fighting was senseless – but even without that incentive the Germans appeared to be glad just to talk – about their families, about the regime, and this time truthfully, without holding anything back for the Feldgendarmes, the German Gestapo, were far behind the lines and there was nothing to fear from them any longer. And Tadek regarded them and wondered what it was that he had to do to right all the wrongs, for slaughtering each other certainly didn’t appear to be the answer.
Within a couple of weeks, Berlin had surrendered. On Tadek’s chest, the medal for taking it sat right next to the one for courage. A new political commissar (the old one had lost his head during the taking of the Reichstag and was hastily buried somewhere near it) sat across the table from him, smiling almost kindly at the Polish warrior.
“Why don’t you stay with us? There’s plenty of work to be done in your native Poland now that the war is over.” The commissar was playing with a box of matches but wouldn’t light up his cigarette for some reason.
“There’s nothing left for me in Poland,” Tadek responded truthfully. “The SS took it all.”
“Where to then?” The commissar smiled even kinder, only his eyes remained cold, like ice on the Oder in the middle of April. “To the American sector?”
“Perhaps, I should rejoin my people, if there are any left.”
Tadek purposely said my people and not Jews but the commissar had understood. For some time, he sat opposite Tadek silently and considered something. Tadek wasn’t his Soviet property, a volunteer only. Not a communist, not a dissident either. Just a man who helped them win the war and now there was no need for him any longer. Tadek saw it all in the commissar’s eyes before the Russian even uttered a word. He expected the commissar to release him from his duties and dismiss him at once but when the Russian spoke, Tadek was suddenly caught off guard by the unexpected question.
“Do you truly think it’ll make you feel better? Among the liberated camp inmates?”
Outside, the air was full of lilies blooming wildly in their orphaned, ownerless gardens. With infinite longing, Tadek looked out of the window.
“I don’t know what will make me better.”
“If the triumph of justice didn’t, nothing will,” the commissar declared confidently.
Tadek only cringed inwardly at the words. This was not a triumph of justice. They won the war but that was only physical liberation; the moral one was an entirely different matter altogether. The Nazis were still Nazis, only without uniforms and therefore, more difficult to weed out among the general population. The world was still a rotten place to live in, rotten inside and out.
If he could erase that disease of National Socialism, at least from one person, that would make him better. If he’d make at least one former Nazi see the light, then he’d have at least a semblance of hope for the future. Only, he was exciting himself over empty illusions and nothing else and he knew it.
“Am I allowed to go?”
The commissar only gestured toward the door, the same artificially kind smile on his face. “Go. We don’t hold anyone by force. The awards are yours by right, so keep them and wear them proudly, by all means. Only, exchange your uniform for civilian clothes before you leave. And the weapon, of course. My secretary will write you a pass to the American sector if you like. All of your people are there.”
And so, Tadek went.
1
Berlin. American sector, May 1945
Tadek awoke with a start, alert at once and ready to spring to attention – a habit formed by a few ruthless years, first by the camp and later, by the army. Slowly, he roved his gaze around the unfamiliar surroundings. The spacious room was still enveloped in darkness, with a few streaks of silvery light creeping through the boarded windows. Hardly any of the buildings in the area had any glass left – the bombs had long seen to that.
Tadek cocked his head to one side and listened. All was quiet, yet he could swear that he heard the familiar voice of his former Kapo, Marek. To clear his head from the frightening illusion, Tadek shook it slightly. To his right and left, rows of bunks stood but this time his fellow former inmates slept in them as free men, each under his own blanket – an unimaginable luxury. He passed his hand across his forehead slowly, wiping the beads of perspiration. Just a dream then. No more Kapos for you, Tadek. No more camp.
Perhaps, the commissar was right and it was indeed a mistake to place himself among the people he’d spent so many hellish years with. In the Soviet trench, he at least slept well, exhausted by the fighting but now, the nightmares returned with a vengeance and they were not about the frontline.
In the morning, more American trucks in front of the former school turned into a shelter. A new batch of wretched creatures – displaced persons, Tadek mentally corrected himself – spilled out of them. Tadek observed them shuffling slowly inside their new quarters, the same bewildered look etched into their sharp-boned features as though they still couldn’t quite take it in, the very fact that their sufferings had come to an end. Wrapped in gray blankets provided by the Red Cross, they were a march of apparitions, not much different from the Auschwitz Muselmänner that Tadek had seen every day. Not just saw but escorted to the gas chambers daily and dragged their gray bodies out of it later so that another part of hi
s Sonderkommando would burn them in the industrial ovens. Raised in a religious household and taught to forget and forgive, he could still have forgiven the Nazis for hurling him inside the camp, however, making him their unwilling accomplice – for that, he would never forgive them.
In the makeshift canteen, an American officer was making his regular rounds, with a clipboard and a pencil in hand, repeating in several languages his usual request:
“If any of you worked in the camp headquarters or with individual SS officers and would be able to identify them, please sign your name and your place of incarceration here.”
Tadek ignored the American and his clipboard, stuffing the bread in his mouth instead, as though to silence himself. To be sure, he could identify quite a few of them; the whole trouble was that he wished to leave all that horror behind and not to be reminded of it any longer, for he could swear that if he ever came face to face with just one more SS man, he’d die. His heart would give in, simple as that. Not out of fear but because of all the evil that had been done to his people by those uniformed beasts. They didn’t just take his family from him, they took everything he believed in, the inner goodness of people and crushed it under their black, spit-shined boots. If he saw just one more of them sneering at his face… No, he couldn’t even imagine that.
And so, Tadek kept quiet.
For some time, for a few weeks, at any rate, it was still bearable for him. The rations were generous, considering and the ancient gramophone, brought by the Americans, screeched some cheery jazz. There were even books to read – Nazi-approved school literature but one could still find something decent among it if one searched thoroughly enough. Few men left, whilst hordes of new ones arrived, chased out of the Eastern part of Berlin by the Soviets. The Americans gave them a few rations and chased them further west, away from the overcrowded school. Only later did Tadek learn that they were displaced Germans, not the former camp inmates. To his great astonishment, it occurred to Tadek that they looked just about the same – bony hands begging for food, desperate eyes, and rags hanging off of them in tatters. Some men observed them with sympathy and asked the Americans if they should take them in. Most, though, openly gloated and shouted insults at the hunched backs of the Germans, adding a few rocks in their direction to drive their point across.
The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII Page 15
