The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII

by Marion Kummerow

  She swallowed hard, trying not to reveal her anger. In October 1939, she read his first letter, his last was dated May 1941. All was a blatant lie. His letters forged. Something inside her turned rock hard and died.

  “What is my assignment?”

  “Let’s start with the turncoats. The Polizei, collaborationists, sympathizers.”

  “I have the lists of them. Hidden. You’ll have them on your table tomorrow.”

  He gave her a quizzical look. “You never mentioned it during the interrogation.”

  “It was my trump card.”

  “Smart.” A shadow of displeasure ran through his face. “But why do I have to be surprised? I’ve read your file. Your hiding place, is it far away?”

  “If you let me go by foot, it’ll take me about an hour. Maybe more. How passable are the roads?”

  “We go in my car,” Krivosheyev said.

  Pointedly, she looked at her soiled and stinking rags, which she could not call attire. He understood her hint. “Sentry!” A soldier poked his head through the door. “Bring Comrade Kriegshammer to the bathhouse.”

  “Yes!” He saluted and stepped aside to let Ulya go first.

  “Private! Wait.” Krivosheyev found a slip of paper on the table and made a note. “This is for Major Matveyev. Her uniform must be ready when she is finished in the bath-house. “See to it.”

  Thirty minutes later, she stood in front of him in her uniform, maybe a bit too loose but still an NKVD uniform with senior lieutenant epaulettes.

  “You look different.” The lieutenant-colonel’s eyes swept over her. “We should go.”

  Outside, a middle-aged sergeant opened the door of a brand-new foreign Jeep and they clambered into its back.

  As they drove through the city, no one spoke. Similar to other parts of Vitebsk they passed, Nikolskaya was in a state of destruction and only Bagdan’s house was spared as though by a miracle, proving it was their intended destination. “Slow down.” Ulya touched the driver’s shoulder. “It’s that one on the left.”

  Without windows or doors, like a skeleton, inside, the house was bare of anything. Not a single lamp. Not a single piece of furniture. Fresh and old mice droppings were scattered everywhere, the overwhelming stench of feces and stale urine. It was most likely used as an outhouse providing some kind of privacy for the Germans or the Russians when they stormed the city.

  “Well,” Krivosheyev grunted, not bothering to hide his impatience. “Where are your lists?”

  As they walked to the conifer tree, devoid of its summit, Ulya concentrated on the sounds and noises of the wood, the hardly distinguishable rustle of leaves, the cracking of twigs by their every step and, against her will, thought of Rita. When crows rose from a tree with ominous, throaty cries, she wondered what kind of sign it was. It became obvious in seconds. In the dugout’s place, now a crater gaped open. Nothing was left, even from the boxes. “Here it was.” She turned to see Krivosheyev’s eyes narrowing and his mouth pulled into a sour grin.

  “So, no traces of your proof,” he said as a statement, his shoulders stiff, most likely with anger.

  “We’ll see.” Ulya took ten steps to the tangled birches now cracked in half. A mound of earth and twigs covered the place where the smaller dugout used to be. “I need a spade.”

  “Yeremenko, a spade!” Krivosheyev turned to the driver who stood behind at some distance from them.

  “Yes!” A brisk salute came, and the next moment he was running to his car. In minutes, he returned and Ulya pointed where to dig, herself grabbing and throwing away the twigs.

  “Let him work.” Krivosheyev motioned her to stop.

  Deftly, Yeremenko dug and soon his spade struck metal, which was the box.

  “And this is . . .?” Krivosheyev’s eyes caught and held hers.

  “In it, I stored the spent artillery shell casings with the duplicates of my reports and the mini camera with my last, not dispatched, roll.”

  “Ah-ha.” Krivosheyev rubbed his hands in jubilation. “Yeremenko, clean the shells and carry them to the car.”

  Back at the SMERSH headquarters, her—as she understood without asking—new superior invited her to his room and, after opening the shells with his penknife, dumped the notes on the table.

  As they sorted the notes, sitting side by side, Ulya recording them in a ledger, Krivosheyev’s features grew relaxed. Already he looks forward to being praised by his superiors, maybe even awarded for his diligent work, came a resentful thought. Let him, as long as it gave her time to deliberate her next move, the thought of which had sprouted in her. But she didn’t know yet what it would be.

  All of a sudden, Krivosheyev became official. “Senior Lieutenant Kriegshammer, you’ll handle the population. People keep returning to Vitebsk. We expect there will be German agents among them. The registration of the returnees will give you a chance to discover the collaborationists, former Polizei, all the vermin. We will appeal to the locals for help too. You’ll get a separate room in the building so nobody can have access to your files, except the trusted officers.”

  “Trusted?”

  He shrugged. “Were you not taught to distrust?”

  “I was. In this case, why should I trust you, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel?”

  For the first time since their encounter, a smile found its way through the mask of harshness. “Enough for today.” He put the notes in the safe and, pushing the shells into a corner of the room, ordered, “You go to Major Matveyev. Anybody will show you where to find him. He’ll assign you to a women’s officer’s tent. As soon as some houses are restored, you’ll get a better accommodation.”

  Ulya saluted and stepped into the corridor and yes, the lieutenant-colonel was right: the first person she asked how to find Major Matveyev pointed her the way.

  In a big room with stuffed shelves, boxes, and packages, she got all the necessities for a little while, a signed order for a cot in a women’s tent, and a referral for the canteen.

  After she settled in the tent and shook hands with her new neighbors, young uniformed women of different branches of the armed forces, she went to look around the violated city. Now and then, she saw civilians, mostly women—in rags, faces skull-like from starvation—queuing around military mobile canteens.

  The first thing she wanted to do was check on her girl. Navigating through the heaps of debris, she reached Kommunisticheskaya 11 and sighed in relief that the hut had survived all the hell of the last weeks. On a blanket on the grass in the front yard, the girl, all skin and bone, lay. As Ulya inched closer, she saw the little one’s brilliant green eyes staring unmoved into the sky. The child tilted her head at the noise but showed no reaction.

  Ulya felt a pulling in her chest and something caught in her throat. For a second, she wondered if the child she had lost was a girl or a boy, and then realized with bitterness, there won’t be three Ks for me. No children, no kitchen, no church.

  The woman Ulya had met at the train station on the day of Ewald’s departure to Germany—to his death, she flinched at the memory—stepped into the yard and scooped the girl into her hands. Perhaps the child, at two-and-a half years of age, was too famished to learn to walk or even crawl.

  The very next day, after work, Ulya headed to Kommunisticheskaya 11 again.

  At her knock, the woman opened the door. “What do you want?” She peered at Ulya as though trying to summon up where she had seen her face.

  “We met,” Ulya saved her the attempt.

  “Did we?” Suspicion and, perhaps, fear hardened her haggard features.

  “In February. At the train station.”

  “Ah, yes, you didn’t feel well. You thanked me for something I remember. What was it?”

  “Your care.”

  “Care?” As on that day, a glint of curiosity flashed in her eyes.

  “My name is Ulya. I knew your niece.”

  A frightened uncertainty appeared in the woman’s tired but beautiful gray-green eyes. To spare her m
ore suffering, Ulya added, “I was with the Underground too.”

  “Ah, you do know Natasha was not collaborating with the fascists?” A cry of relief broke from her lips. “Can you confirm it if it comes to it?” She reached out and grabbed Ulya’s hands. “My acquaintances, those few who survived, branded Natasha a traitor and Lyubochka, her daughter, German, that is fathered by a German. Everyone avoids me, don’t even greet me. I’m afraid that if some report to the authority . . . But you know the truth. Do you?” After Ulya’s nod of assent, she invited her inside the house.

  Since that day, Ulya regularly brought little parcels with food for them. Anna showed her where she kept the key for the entrance door, and Ulya could come even when Anna was at the hospital.

  The child was sickly, her hair just a down, her little body a rack of ribs. She hardly had eaten anything and didn’t show sympathy to Ulya, however hard she tried to win over her heart. Every time she appeared, the girl studied her for a few moments as if she were a complete stranger and never took anything from her hands. Ulya sought to interest her with Ewald’s present, but the girl’s indifferent eyes glided over the gorgeous doll with no change of expression.

  59

  August 1944-Winter 1945

  Little by little, the population returned to Vitebsk. A few found their houses fit for habitation. Others built shacks of board debris, broken bricks, and pieces of tin. Many dug out holes, adapting them for housing. Right in front of them, in-between some bricks, on a piece of iron, they set kettles or soldiers’ cauldrons to cook their food.

  Quickly, Ulya settled into the work routine and the end of summer, autumn, and winter of 1945 passed in cataloging the names, dates, and all supportive information about the collaborationists from the available and mounting sources. Everyone seemed happy to point out a former Polizei, adding to the pile of tips on Ulya’s table.

  Her monotonous work was sometimes interrupted by being summoned for a confrontation with a detainee suspected of cooperating with the enemy. Were they all collaborators or German agents who betrayed their Motherland? All these old men and women? Their old age couldn’t fool SMERSH; they knew the main objective of SD selecting residents for sabotage missions and intelligence in the rear of the Red Army was old people or invalids not subjected to mobilization. “Sonny, what do you want from an old woman like me?” Women wailed. “Dear man, look at me, what use is such a grandpa?” They punched themselves in the chest or lifted a crutch or a stick, claiming their innocence. What their fate was after the interrogation, Ulya did not know. Execution of the sentence belonged to another department. What wasn’t a secret was that train after train full of people kept moving eastward. To Siberia, to gulags it was rumored.

  She didn’t delude herself: a vague shadow of suspicion would always hang over her head as well and who knew what could surface from the murky ocean of interrogations of everything and everyone. What if Hammerer survived?

  Meanwhile, the Soviet armies freed the Baltic Republics and continued toward Germany, liberating Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia on their way. On January 12, 1945, the Vistula-Oder operation began. By the end of the month, the Soviet armies came to Oder.

  The uneventful flow of days was interrupted on the evening of February 18, 1945. On her way to Kommunisticheskaya, Ulya let her mind slip back to a week before, the sense of mirth welling up inside her at meeting the girl. Will little Lyubochka allow me to stroke her head again? She exhaled a long sigh of contentment and the next moment, two bullets whistled past her head. She stumbled and felt a tingle run down her spine. On instinct—her lock knife not an adequate defense against a gun—she ran over to a half-destroyed shack about twenty meters from the path. Just two steps away from her goal, another gunshot ripped through the air. She glanced back and through the gathering darkness, saw a shadow throw itself behind a pile of rubble.

  Inside, she ducked and peered through a windowless opening at the darkening sky. The crows, startled by the shots, circled above the roofless structure with ominous cries.

  Who was the gunman? Not an experienced shooter. But who then, and why?

  She crouched in the corner of a crumbled wall and looked round it, her ears on alert. There was only stillness beyond. Then, something flitted across the corner of her vision. Swinging round, she stepped back. As the sound of the scurried steps faded into the distance, she peered in the direction but saw nobody. Whoever it was had disappeared behind the demolition heaps, leaving her with a horrid sense of foreboding at her back.

  60

  March 1945

  It happened on one of the early spring days when from a pile of complaints, Ulya pulled a four-fold piece of paper reading in uneven handwriting, with grammar mistakes of an uneducated person. “G.P. Dobrova. Born January 3, 1894. I live at Nekrasov Street, 21. I suffered from the accursed fascists. I must report. I have information about a woman. She collaborated with Germans. She slept with a Nazi. A just punishment caught up with her at the hands of Partisans. It served her right. She left a German bastard girl behind. I know where she lives. On Kommunisticheskaya 11. I want to help. To get rid of any damned German from our city. I am a true patriot of my Soviet country.”

  The snitch’s last name, Dobrova, meant “good-hearted” person. Nasty pig.

  Ulya tucked the denunciation into her jacket pocket. Just the thought of what would happen to the girl if she were taken from Anna, her only relative, made Ulya ball up her hands into fists. Anna’s fate would be as bleak as the girl’s, too.

  Ulya paused for a brief moment before the decision formed in her mind. She grabbed a box of matches and a stack of old newspapers and exited the building.

  Gusts of wind whirled clouds of soot-covered snow across the rubble as she headed to Nekrasov Street. The wooden hut she’d known since she’d spied on Hahn and Natasha, was in a state of such dilapidation, it could collapse at any time. Hiding behind a half-destroyed house, Ulya weighed the situation and played a waiting game. Soon the woman opened the door and stepped out to close the shutters.

  The street was deserted. Feeling a strange numbed comfort, Ulya approached the hut. Only a thin ray of light making its way through a crack in the shutter indicated a candle or a kerosene lamp burning inside. Soon the house fell into darkness.

  Ulya shoved pieces of newspaper through the multiple cracks in the wall then wheeled her head around, peering at the frozen earth at her feet. In an instant, her eyes found a piece of concrete block. Refusing to feel sorry for what she was about to carry out and, after looking around, finding no onlookers, she barricaded the door with it then set the fire. Two blocks away, she turned her head in the direction and saw flames dance between the charred heaps.

  There was no gloating but there was no relief. Could Ulya be sure Dobrova was the only one to possess the information? Questionable. The girl was in danger. So was she. Her chest grew heavy with a familiar ache. What if NKVD started interrogating the matter? Who knew what they would dig up? What if Hammerer survived the explosion in which she almost lost her life?

  She had to find a way to protect the girl. And herself.

  61

  April 1945

  The shutters were closed, and it was dark save for the halo of a candle flame. It cast trembling shadows across the walls. Ulya and three other women—stooped, black-clad figures—sat on benches and swayed, letting out the long, drawn-out wailing laments over a coffin on the floor.

  At the knock on the door, Ulya turned her head. A long moment later, a whisper came. Words undistinguishable.

  “Are you looking for a place to stay?” Ulya asked in a lowered voice. No wonder. Vitebsk inhabitants kept returning to the city only to discover their houses didn’t exist anymore. Finding a shelter, a roof over your head was considered a blessing.

  A young woman inched through the door and, after taking the situation in, stepped closer to Ulya. “No, I am looking for Natasha Ivanova. She must live here.”

  “She used to live here. The d
eceased was her aunt.” Ulya got to her feet and, as she headed to another room, called over her shoulder, “Come with me, and shut the door after you.”

  The young woman who could be Ulya’s age, looked exhausted and rather worn, but her mild and beautiful features were hard to miss. She followed and, after closing the door as she was told, squinted at Ulya as though trying to recognize in her something familiar, but Ulya knew they had never met. “Who are you? Why are you interested in Natasha?”

  “I am Lyuba. I am her best friend. We were schoolmates. We—”

  Lyuba? Like the girl’s name? This woman was godsent! struck her like a bolt and with it a decision formed with clarity. She didn’t let her finish. “When did you see her last?”

  “The last time . . . before the war. But why? Why is it so important?”

  “I see,” Ulya said. “I see.” After a moment’s deliberation, she continued, “What did you do during the war?”

  Seemingly annoyed, the woman turned to go.

  “Wait.” Ulya grabbed hold of her elbow. “I see you are not from around here, are you? Otherwise, you would know that during the occupation Natasha was a well-known figure . . . so to speak.”

  The woman stared at her, uncomprehending.

  “She was known for her special relationship with the Germans.” Ulya stepped to the bed in the room’s corner and bent down, raising a sheet that hung to the floor. Beneath it, like a hunted little animal, the girl hid in the corner curled into a fetal position. “You know, we’d better go outside for a minute.”

  The visitor followed her into the backyard.

  “Lyuba, you said your name was? I see you are angry with me, but still, I want to know what you were doing in recent years. Unless you answer my question, I won’t tell you more.”