Of Knights and Dogfights

by Ellie Midwood

  At dawn, the fog rolled in and obscured the crypt of a city from sight, consuming it, hanging in heavy clouds over the ruins. The trees, protruding from the ravaged ground, were missing their budding tops now and it was impossible for one to see if they were only shrouded in fog or torn off with a passing shell a day ago. Moist air smelled of explosives and rotting dead; the streets were littered with them. A small Hitlerjugend squad was singing the Horst Wessel song somewhere in the distance. Harald was awoken by the familiar marching tune and sprung from his bed – a habit formed over the years. Only after his gaze roved around the apartment taking in the unfamiliar surroundings and stopped on the corpse on the floor, did he spring to his feet, march over to the window and shut it closed, in silent fury.

  The hospital was in Charlottenburg, which was still unoccupied – at least as of yesterday. Harald headed there first thing in the morning; again, around the Soviet “frontline,” through more rubble and barricades, through the digging brigades, through his own defense troops, who were so drunk that they paid him no heed whatsoever.

  The ghostly silhouette of the hospital rose out of the dense mist. It still stood, even though it was overflowing with wounded to such an extent that many of them were laid out outside and the doctors and nurses tended to them right there, in the street. A teenager who was manning a narrow makeshift barricade in front of it sprung to attention and offered Harald a snappy salute. Staring straight ahead of himself, Harald marched forward, passing him and his roadblock without acknowledging the boy. For the first time in his life, he didn’t shout Heil Hitler back at someone.

  “Excuse me, where can I find Wilhelmina Brandt?” he asked the first nurse he saw. A BDM girl, his age perhaps, with two long braids under her white cap. “She’s a nurse here.”

  “Are you wounded?”

  “No…”

  “Then don’t distract us from our work, please.”

  With that, she turned back to the stretchers in front of which they stood, threw a cover over a soldier’s face and shouted, “this one too,” to a couple of corpse carriers.

  Harald waddled through the sea that was pleading and moaning and calling for help around him; swiftly moved away from the doctors who were shouting frantically to each other and finally found her – by her golden hair, which still shone like a sun in this chloroform-soaked communal grave – his brother’s wife, Mina.

  Bending over a soldier, she was smiling and patting his hand – the only one that he had left. Both his legs below the knees were gone too.

  “Mina!” Harald cried out, navigating his way to her among the stretchers.

  She started, then broke into a smile that appeared relieved and rushed to hug him, apologizing for her stained apron in passing.

  “Mina, you have to come with me,” Harald said without any preamble.

  “Now? We’re so overwhelmed here—”

  Her face was wet with fog, or perspiration from running about for endless hours. Harald studied her closely for the first time, the woman who he had sworn to his brother to protect by any means. In Napola terms, it would have meant to slash her neck if no other option was available just so a proud German woman wouldn’t fall into the beastly hands of those sub-human Bolsheviks. With a chilling lack of interest, Harald suddenly wondered if his Napola still stood or was obliterated by the enemy fire together with everything that it signified. Perhaps it was better that way? Wipe them all out as a nation and start with a clean slate? Scorched Earth policy, on a grandiose scale, like everything in the New Reich.

  When he spoke, his voice was hoarse for some reason. “It’s Johann.”

  Mina’s expression changed at once, became frightful and guarded. “What happened?”

  “You just need to come with me. I promised to bring you.”

  “Is he here in Berlin?”

  Instead of replying, Harald took her by the hand and led her further and further away, until he could hear moaning and crying no longer. To all of her questions and pleas, he only gripped her hand tighter and stubbornly repeated the same, “you’ll see when you get there,” until Mina gave up and followed him along deserted streets.

  Artillery began firing in the distance. The enemy was approaching from the south this time. Narrowly escaping an SS patrol, they darted into a street which soon opened into a shadowed alley with abandoned villas lining both sides. Reichstag big-shots’ heaven. Harald pondered something, finally pushed the wrought-iron gates to the nearest one and motioned Mina to follow him. The door was locked fast. A white sheet hung from the closed window – a silent plea to spare the villa from plunder. Harald searched the ground, picked up a rock and hurled it through the intricate stained glass with rays of light shining out of small swastikas, shattering the past with savage satisfaction. Leaving speechless Mina behind, he climbed inside. Soon, his grinning face appeared from behind the front door.

  “Care to come in?”

  “Why did you bring me here? Where’s Johann?” Golden eyes regarded him wrathfully, with apparent mistrust.

  “Mina, come in, please.” He wasn’t smiling anymore, his face growing stern and emotionless. Only his eyes stared oddly out of the hollows of that death-head mask, bright-blue and clear.

  Leaden with chilling, alien fear which she couldn’t explain to herself, Mina carefully moved forward, inside the hallway, closer to the young man in a dark uniform. How much he had grown; how much he had changed! Taller than her now; maybe taller than Johann even. She still remembered him, a young boy in his Jungvolk uniform, on a train station in Beeskow, standing next to his brother... How long ago was it? Seven years. She couldn’t quite believe it.

  “Harald, you’re almost eighteen, aren’t you?”

  “I will be, in a few months.”

  “No more Napola then? Are they officially enlisting you in the SS?” She followed him cautiously through the dining room and into the kitchen.

  Harald stopped his rummaging through the cabinets and broke into hollow, vacant laughter instead of an answer.

  Her eyes brimming now, Mina pressed herself against the wall. “Harald, what are we doing here?”

  “What do you think I just found? Preserves! We won’t go hungry.”

  “Harald!”

  He slowly put the can down and turned to face her. Only now Mina noticed a pair of scissors which he had extracted from the cabinet and was now holding in one hand. Harald hesitated for a few moments before finally saying, “Mina, sit down over there, on that chair, please.” His voice was coolly polite, but the request itself had the quality of an order.

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  Trembling and hot-eyed, she took a step back. A sad smile appeared on Harald’s face. He lowered his gaze as though not to intimidate her any further. “Mina, I’m a Napola cadet who’s been running marathons for his infantry training almost daily just because it pleased my superiors. You won’t even make it out of the front door before I catch you.”

  A tear dropped from her eye. She swiped it in some frantic gesture. “What do you want with me?”

  “I promised Johann to keep you safe from those Bolshevik hordes.”

  A shell exploded in the distance. A sole ray of light tore through the dense clouds and pierced the window, gleaming on the blades of the scissors in Harald’s hand. She had not once ceased staring at them.

  “Mina, do you think I will hurt you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” He was smiling again. “I’m your husband’s brother. Do you believe for one second that I would hurt his wife?”

  “I don’t know you, Harald. You’re not him.”

  He considered for a moment; nodded slowly. “You’re right. I’m not him. That was perhaps my biggest mistake; my desire to be someone different. Do you think it’s too late for me? For all of us – to change?”

  “I don’t know.” She sounded defeated. A voluminous sigh rose from her chest. She walked over to the chair and sat in it, wi
th her back to Harald.

  She didn’t hear him approach her, only felt his hand on top of her head as he removed her nurse’s cap and undid her hair.

  “Mina, I’m sorry for what I’m about to do but it’s for your own good. It’s only hair; it’ll grow back, I promise.”

  The first gilded lock dropped onto her lap. Mina stared at it without comprehension.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Mina finally relaxed a little in her chair and patiently sat, without moving, as Harald stood above her, chopping off her long, beautiful hair. She even firmly gripped the top part that he asked her to hold while he cropped the rest of the hair close to her skin. He clipped the top just to the right length, neatly brushed it to one side and grinned in spite of himself.

  “A perfect Hitlerjugend, if I do say so myself. I should have been a barber.”

  He then extracted a folded uniform from under his tunic and assured Mina that it came from a local school locker, not some stiffened corpse. It didn’t seem to matter to her now. She was smiling brightly at him, her previous fearful expression gone, vanished like the fog outside.

  “What about my footwear?”

  “Here, put on my boots, only stuff the socks inside them first so that you can walk without difficulty.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m sure that Parteigenosse, who had left this villa in such haste, left something for my feet upstairs.” Harald winked at her and disappeared in the direction of the staircase.

  Indeed, in one of the bedrooms, Harald discovered not only a few pairs of brand new boots but a few perfectly starched uniforms as well. They still sat there, perfectly undisturbed, next to the rest of the empty hangers. A Nazi Party pin gleamed softly on the dressing table, next to a rare edition of Mein Kampf, embossed in gold. The small safe stood open on the floor. The drawers had been pulled out, emptied. So, the man took what was dear to him, Harald smirked. Fucking hypocrites, all of them. His former leaders, whom he looked up to with such reverence.

  He shoved his legs into stiff black leather, caught his reflection in the full-length mirror and, in a sudden spasm of anger, he grabbed the bust of Der Führer from the dresser and hurled it at his own reflection. Drunk on sudden fury, he swiped everything that was left off the redwood tabletop, smashed the dresser’s mirror as well and had just finished tearing the uniforms apart when Mina suddenly appeared at the door, in her new attire. Harald quickly noted to himself that had he seen her in the street, he’d never even consider, as a distant possibility, that this rascal in front of him was a female.

  “Harald! What on earth happened?”

  “Nothing.” He stood, beaming and clear-eyed, in the middle of the devastation, among the remnants of one’s past life. “Everything is fine. Everything is just as it’s supposed to be. I think we’re both safe now.”

  Her hand still trembled in his when the first tanks rolled through the street just where they decided to stay. She still cowered behind Harald’s back when the first infantrymen burst through the door with their rifles trained before them.

  “Kapitulieren.” Harald held a napkin for them both, despite the white flag that was already hanging outside.

  Then there was the already familiar talk.

  “Where from?”

  “Locals.”

  “Your house?”

  “No.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “Dead.”

  “Your comrade?”

  “My brother.”

  The “boys” were allowed to stay in the cellar and even received some potatoes to add to their canned preserves.

  Germany, May 1945

  * * *

  When a call came through on the R/T, from the neighboring airbase, to see if the nearest city had been occupied yet, Johann took off from the runway alone, with a sinking feeling in his stomach. When, after flying for barely ten minutes, he saw columns of smoke rising from the ground underneath, he knew it was all over for him; for them all. He landed, taxied back to his usual spot and shook his head at his loyal crew chief Lutter when the latter asked him if he should refuel his bird. With the reluctance of a lover abandoning his beloved, Johann climbed out of the cockpit and patted the fuselage with infinite fondness. This bird would never fly again.

  The airbase had long ago turned into a sort of gypsy town, with the wing’s families, relatives, and other civilian refugees camping nearby, for there was nowhere else for them to head. As a Gruppe Commander, Johann ordered his men to herd them all as far away as possible.

  “We’ll burn everything here to the ground.”

  By noon, they brought their battered fighters as close to each other as possible and thoroughly pretended not to wipe annoying tears as they doused everything in gasoline. The ammunition was piled not too far away; the fire would take care of it once it spread on the petroleum-soaked ground. They only took their log books and photo albums with them. By dusk, they were heading westward, a veritable pyre bursting into the sky behind them. Johann didn’t look back at his bird. He marched amid his own men and civilians, tears streaming down his face which otherwise remained utterly impassive.

  At night, the Russians came and overtook their little camp that they’d set up in the middle of a meadow. They came with tanks and trucks, drunk like pigs and instantly got to sorting their trophies; first the German wristwatches and later, the German women – in that exact order.

  Johann stood as still as a statue, stunned and uncomprehending, as some Ivan was stripping him of his personal belongings. The wristwatch, the Knight’s Cross, the Diamonds – all found their way into the Ivan’s pocket. Johann remained where he was, hugging his logbook to his chest when the Ivan pulled one of the wing crew members’ wife and daughter out of her husband’s hands, whom he had just as promptly relieved of his personal items. That’s when the madness started, the real one, which he had never seen or could imagine in his worst nightmare during all of the years of his service. The men threw themselves on the Russians and were immediately gunned down or beaten in front of their weeping wives and daughters. The women were then thrown on the ground right where their dead husbands lay and raped – mothers, daughters, and old women alike.

  Junior Leutnant Renke flew as his wingman just a few months ago. Johann watched as he collapsed on the ground when his wife’s turn came and she fell on her knees before Herr Commissar and begged him to take her but spare her daughter. There she was, little Lisl. Why would Renke bring them here? Thought he could protect them, no doubt… In a perturbed spasm of grief, Johann fell to the ground as well and wept, together with them all, the husbands and fathers, who turned from brave aces into victims of the war overnight. He wished the Russians would just shoot them all and be done with it. It was an easier death, surely. Anything but this living hell into which they had been thrown for all their sins. Holding his logbook as a shield in front of himself, Johann begged God for one thing only; take him, along with them all but spare his Mina from this.

  The morning came and with that, the death. They lay next to each other, the families, content and already gray-blue, just like the sky above them. Carrying them to a nearby ditch under a commissar’s black muzzle, he wondered with some numb curiosity how they did it so quietly; how did the men strangle their wives and daughters so softly that no one heard a thing; how did they manage to slash their throats and not awaken anyone before slicing into their own necks with a rusty nail… how did those women keep so quiet, after they’d screamed so loudly, the night before?

  Thirty

  The Soviet Union. The Gulag, Summer 1945

  * * *

  You’re being transferred soon. The Commandant’s order.

  Johann looked intently at the swamp. He stared at it long and hard, for the first time pondering the idea of walking into its silent murkiness and surrendering to it and to hell with it all. If he weren’t so delirious from hunger, he would have indeed found it fascinating, how a few s
hort weeks of the infamous NKVD captivity could break any man’s spirit and he had always considered himself the most resilient of them all.

  He was the one who was cheering the men up when it became clear that they were not going to Vienna like the Soviet commissar in charge had initially promised, luring them, the fresh POWs, onto the train. He was the one that kept their spirits up when they were advancing into the Russian steppes, further and further into the alien vastness, only not as conquerors this time but as slaves, with whom their new masters could do as they pleased. It was he, who organized the sleeping schedule on the train, where there were so many of them that only a third could lie down and rest for two hours and then stand for four. It was he who, by his own example, showed them that ranks and distinctions didn’t mean anything any longer if they wanted to survive. Now, they were not company commanders and former privates; they were the strong ones and the weak ones and the strong ones picked up the hardest work to look out for the weak, for it was the only human thing to do. The only thing that still kept them human, after they had been stripped of all else.

  Such order didn’t last long though. The NKVD knew just how to instill their own order. The first camp was the worst one in this respect. The thing was, it wasn’t even a camp when they had first arrived there and were given some wooden planks and primitive tools to build the first barracks. Johann found it amazing, the low number of guards who were set there to supervise them. Then it all became clear; the entire area, as far as the eye could see, was surrounded by swamps and therefore anyone who wished to try and escape was more than welcome to try. The men did start escaping, as soon as the back-breaking work and lack of food got the better of them, driving them to desperation. They simply walked into the rotting water and let it drown their misery. The guards didn’t mind those escapes, just looked the other way.