Potsdam Station jr-4

by David Downing

  Over the next ten minutes he did his best to make amends. As Paul and his comrades hunkered down helplessly in the emplacement trenches, the rocket-launcher crews systematically worked their way across the wood, drawing ever nearer to the German guns. Looking up, Paul saw that the stars were lost in smoke, the branches above bathed in orange light. This is it, he thought, the moment of my death. It felt almost peaceful.

  And then the salvo fell, straddling their position with a flash and crash that threatened to obliterate the senses. Paul had his eyes closed at the vital moment, but still had trouble focusing when he opened them again. Haaf, he realised, was screaming his head off, though he couldn’t hear him. Something had landed in the boy’s lap – a head, Paul realised – and he had leapt to his feet to shake it off. Before anyone could stop him, the boy had clambered out of the trench and disappeared from sight.

  Someone shone a torch on the head. It was Bernauer, the other gun’s loader. His emplacement must have taken a direct hit.

  Another salvo landed, sounding much further away but still turning nearby trees into torches. They had all been deafened, Paul realised. It would pass in a few hours. Or at least it always had.

  The rockets kept firing for another ten minutes, the hiss of their incoming flights barely discernible above the hissing in their ears. Once they had stopped, Utermann gestured them out of the trench – the Soviets might be playing games, creating a false sense of security before launching more salvos, but an immediate infantry assault was much more likely.

  There were no obvious human forms in the other emplacement, which was itself barely recognisable. Paul had seen such sights in daylight, and felt grateful to the darkness for cloaking this particular jigsaw of blood, flesh and bone.

  Hannes cursed as he tripped over something in the dark. It was Haaf’s life-less body – a large chunk of the boy’s head had been sliced off.

  A red flare suddenly blossomed above what was left of the wood – Ivan was on his way.

  Utermann was waving his arms around like a demented windmill, trying to get their attention. ‘Let’s go,’ he shouted, if Paul’s lip-reading was any good. The sergeant must have been feeling pretty lucky, Paul thought. Up until this evening, he and Corporal Commen had always taken shelter in the other emplacement.

  The five of them moved off through the battered wood, clambering over fallen trees and sheared limbs, working their way through the mosaic of fires still raging. Fifteen minutes went by with no sign of pursuit, and Paul began to wonder whether the Russians had decided to call it a night. The hissing in his ears had almost gone, and he found he could hear his own voice, albeit from some distance away. As he walked on, the sounds of his and his companions’ progress grew steadily clearer, as if someone in his skull was cranking up the volume.

  ‘How’s your hearing?’ he asked the man walking behind him.

  ‘I can hear you,’ Neumaier said.

  Another fifteen minutes found them staring out across depressingly open fields. The moon had just climbed over the horizon, and the landscape was visibly brightening with each passing minute.

  ‘The next line runs through Görlsdorf,’ Utermann said, gesturing to the right, ‘and along there,’ he added, sweeping a finger from north to south, ‘across the Seelow road to Neuentempel. It’s about a kilometre away.’

  ‘When does the moon go down?’ Hannes asked.

  ‘About two o’clock,’ Neumaier told him. He’d been on watch the previous night.

  ‘So we wait?’ Hannes suggested.

  ‘Yes,’ Utermann decided. ‘Unless Ivan turns up in the meantime.’

  Russell had a night of anxious dreams, and was relieved when a hand shook him roughly awake. It was still dark and cold outside, but by the time they had downed mugs of tea and chewed their way through hunks of bread and jam, light was seeping over the eastern horizon. A long walk across the tarmac brought them to their transport – a Soviet-built version of the American DC-3 which Varennikov told him was designated a Lisunov LI-2. It had space for thirty men, but the two pilots were their only fellow-travellers. Five minutes after clambering aboard they were airborne.

  It was Russell’s first meeting with the fourth member of the insertion team. His first impression of Lieutenant Gusakovsky was favourable – the youngish Ukrainian accompanied his handshake with a pleasant smile and seemed less full of himself than Kazankin. He was tall, good-looking and seemed extremely fit. He had, Varennikov revealed, played centre-half for Dynamo Kiev before the war.

  The Lisunov had rows of rectangular windows, and one of these offered Russell a panoramic view of Warsaw as they came into land just before noon. He had expected damage – the city had been bombed for a couple of weeks in 1939 – but nothing like this. As far as he knew, there had been no fighting inside the city, but the centre looked like a giant had danced all over it. A farewell gift from the Nazis, Russell could only assume. It didn’t bode well for Berlin.

  The airfield, which lay several kilometres to the south, was awash with Soviet planes, personnel and flags. The one lone Polish emblem tagged to a long row of hammers and sickles might have been an accident, but looked more like an insult. A glimpse of the future, Russell thought.

  Rain began falling as they walked across the grass, and was soon beating a heavy tattoo on the corrugated roof of the canteen. Nikoladze and the two soldiers disappeared in search of something or other, leaving Varennikov and Russell to pick at the dreadful food. Working on the assumption that Berlin’s current cuisine would be even less rewarding, Russell consumed as much as he could, sealing his achievement with a stinging glass of vodka. Varennikov had brought a book of mathematical puzzles to amuse himself, but Russell was reduced to reading the army newspaper Red Star. There were several stories of tragic heroism, a few slices of that cloying sentimentality which Russians seemed to share with Americans, and a bloodthirsty piece by Konstantin Simonov encouraging Red Army soldiers to take their revenge on the German people. Russell checked the newspaper’s date, thinking that it must have been printed before Stalin’s recent edict emphasising the need to distinguish between Nazis and Germans, but it was only a few days old. Simple inertia, he wondered, or something more sinister? Whichever it was, Berlin would pay the price.

  They took off again in mid-afternoon, this time aboard a smaller two-engined plane which only had room for the four of them. It was a rough ride through clouds, with Poland’s mosaic of fields and woods only occasionally visible a few thousand feet below. Kazankin seemed worst-affected by the bumpy flight: he sat rigid in his seat, carefully controlling each breath, a study in mind over stomach.

  It was getting dark when they bounced back to land on another makeshift airstrip. ‘Where are we?’ Russell asked Nikoladze, as they walked towards a single small building surrounded by large canvas tents.

  ‘Leszno,’ the Georgian told him. ‘You know where that is?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ It had been the German town of Lissa until 1918, when it found itself a few kilometres inside the new Poland. They were about two hundred kilometres – an hour’s flight – from Berlin.

  Nikoladze disappeared inside the building, leaving the rest of them outside. The clouds further west were breaking up, offering glimpses of a red setting sun, and a series of Soviet bombers were dropping down onto the distant runway. ‘Where have they been?’ Russell asked a passing airman.

  The man’s initial reaction was dismissive, but then he noticed the NKVD uniforms. ‘Breslau, comrade’ he said curtly, and hurried off.

  So ‘Fortress Breslau’ was still standing. It had been surrounded for two months now – a mini-Stalingrad on the Oder. A beautiful city, once upon a time.

  Nikoladze emerged with the news that a tent had been reserved for the team. As they walked towards it, the landing lights on the distant runway winked out. The Luftwaffe was still out there, Russell deduced. He wasn’t looking forward to the next night’s flight.

  In the tent they found a sackful of foreign worker uniforms,
rough dark trousers and jackets with the blue and white Ost patch. ‘Find one that fits,’ Kazankin told him and Varennikov.

  The uniforms obviously hadn’t been washed in living memory, but Russell supposed that a band of sweet-smelling foreign workers might be deemed suspicious. He found an outfit that seemed a reasonable fit, and didn’t actually stink. There was a torn square of paper in one pocket with a couple of strange-looking words scribbled across it. Finnish perhaps, or possibly Estonian. A fragment of a life.

  ‘Will we be carrying guns?’ he asked Kazankin.

  ‘You won’t,’ was the instant answer.

  A few minutes later Nikoladze arrived with two pieces of bad news. The Germans on the Oder was putting up a stiffer resistance than expected, and Berlin by Lenin’s birthday was beginning to look a trifle optimistic. More germane to their own operation, there was no sign of the inflatable dinghy which Nikoladze had been promised. The plan, as Russell now discovered, involved a dropping zone a few kilometres west of Berlin, a long walk to the Havelsee, and a short voyage across that body of water. A further hike along the paths of the Grunewald would then bring them to the edge of the city’s south-western suburbs.

  It seemed an ambitious programme for a single night.

  Paul was woken by a tap on the head. He had fallen asleep with his back against a tree.

  ‘Ivan!’ Neumaier hissed in his ear.

  Paul could hear the Soviet infantry crashing through the wood behind them. They couldn’t be more than a few hundred metres away. Scrambling to his feet, he followed Neumaier across the lane, swung himself over the gate and joined in the headlong flight. The moon was almost down now – another few hundred metres and the night might hide them.

  The field was mercifully unploughed, its owner probably somewhere west of Berlin by now. Racing across the turf, Paul had a memory of one Jungvolk instructor urging him to run faster on a weekend exercise in the country. It must have been around the time of the Berlin Olympics, because the man had screamed: ‘this is not some fucking gold medal you’re running for – it’s your fucking life!’

  He caught up with Utermann, who was always moaning that his right knee hadn’t been the same since Kursk. By this time they were over three hundred metres from the trees, and no bullets were flying past their ears. Glancing over his shoulder, Paul thought he caught a hint of movement in the wall of trees behind them.

  They caught up with the others, who had gone to ground in a ditch between fields. Paul had no sooner sunk gratefully onto his front than two ‘Christmas trees’ rippled into life above them, the Soviet parachute flares scattering what looked like blazing stars across the night sky. The five men kept their heads down, pressed into the wet earth of the bank. All that talk about German soil, Paul thought. And here it is, stinking in my nostrils.

  As the flares dimmed they cautiously raised their heads. A host of shadows was advancing towards them.

  Once the lights had flickered out, they made their way across the stream and up into the adjoining field. As they began running an excited shout rose up – one of the Russians had seen them. A single rifle cracked, and Paul thought he heard the bullet pass by. A volley of shots followed, with no more effect. They were firing blind.

  But someone would be asking for another flare, Paul thought.

  There was an explosion behind him. He was looking back when another went off – mortar rounds were landing amongst the Russians.

  And then the machine-guns opened up, and Neumaier, twenty metres ahead of him, suddenly stopped in his tracks and toppled to the ground. Paul came up as Hannes turned his friend over – one eye was staring, the other gone. Utermann and Commen were still running, screaming out that they were Germans, when both went down together, as if tripped by the same wire.

  Paul crouched there with Hannes for what seemed an age, waiting his turn, almost revelling in the breathtaking absurdity of it all. But the machine-gun had fallen silent – Utermann had obviously been heard, albeit too late to save himself – and voices were calling them forward.

  They did as they were told, almost falling into the foremost German trench, but there was no time to rest. Someone gave them each a rifle, shouted something vaguely encouraging, and moved on. Paul stared at the gun for several seconds as if unsure what it was for, shook his head to clear it, and took a position at the parapet. Many Russians were down, but hundreds of others were still charging towards them, screaming at the top of their lungs, the leading echelons no more than fifty metres away. Paul took aim at one, and saw another go down. He took aim again, and his first target went down bellowing.

  A few seconds more, and the first Russians were amongst them, some leaping across the trenches, other straight in, rifles firing then swinging, blades glinting and falling. One swung wildly at Paul, and he swung equally wildly back, catching the man across the neck with a sickening crack.

  He scrabbled in desperation at the wall of the trench, and managed to haul himself over the edge. All around him, men were heaving, grunting and rasping, like warriors from some ancient battle between Teutons and Romans. In the dark it was hard to distinguish friend from foe, and Paul saw no reason to try. Weaving his way between personal battles, he ran for the next line of trees.

  Since the weekend bombing of the ground-level extension above the cells, the latter’s capacity had been severely diminished, and the two Jews from the Lübeck train had been allowed to share in the relative freedom of the fourth basement room. Effi had initially thought it prudent to stay away from them, but she badly wanted to know what had happened to their friend, the young man she had once sheltered in the Bismarck Strasse flat. After two days had passed she decided it was safe to make contact.

  From the doorway of the furthest room, she could see them sitting against a wall. Their faces still bore the marks of the last interrogation, but they still seemed more animated than most of their fellow-prisoners. Both got warily to their feet as she approached.

  The thought crossed Effi’s mind that they might suspect her of betraying them. ‘Do you remember me?’ she asked unnecessarily.

  ‘Yes,’ the younger of the two replied. He was about twenty-five, and looked intelligent.

  ‘What happened in Lübeck?’ she asked them quietly.

  ‘We don’t know,’ the young man said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘We were already on board the ship. We’d been hiding in the hold for a few hours when the roof slid open and there were the Gestapo, shining their torches down at us and killing themselves laughing.’

  ‘They never let slip how they tracked you down?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What happened to your friend?’

  ‘Willy? He’s dead. He made a break for it as they led us off the ship, jumped off the gangplank. There was some sort of stanchion sticking out of the wall, and he landed right on it. He looked dead, but they shot him a few times just to make sure.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘He told us he’d met you before, that you’d helped a lot of Jews.’

  ‘Some,’ she admitted.

  The obvious question must have showed in her face. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her. ‘He didn’t tell us your name or anything else about you.’ Or we would have told them, went the unspoken coda.

  It didn’t seem to matter now. ‘It’s Dagmar. Dagmar Fahrian,’ Effi said. There was a hint of guilt in the older man’s eyes, she thought. He had probably given the Gestapo her description. She couldn’t blame him.

  ‘I’m Hans Heilborn,’ the younger one said. ‘And this oaf is Bruno Lewinsky.’

  ‘May we meet again in better times,’ Effi said simply. ‘Have you heard any news of the fighting?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lewinsky said, speaking for the first time, ‘I heard two of the guards talking.’ He had a surprisingly cultured voice.

  He’d probably been a university professor, Effi thought. So many academics, scientists and writers had been Jews. How much knowledge and wisdom had the Nazis destroyed?

  ‘The
Russians have broken through on the Oder,’ Lewinsky was saying. ‘They should be in the outskirts by the weekend. And the army defending the Ruhr is surrounded by the British and Americans. It’s bigger than the army we lost at Stalingrad.’

  Effi noticed the ‘we’ – after everything that had happened, these two Jews still thought of themselves as Germans – but mostly she was thinking about Paul, and hoping that he’d been taken prisoner. She wasn’t sure John would ever forgive himself if his son was killed.

  As dawn broke Paul was sitting on a wall in Worin. He was one of around fifty men who had reached the deserted village through the darkened woods. Most of the others were from the misleadingly named 9th Parachute Division – their airborne status had long been merely honorary – along with some stray panzergrenadiers. All were remnants of remnants, of those units once entrusted with the defence of the Seelow Heights.

  Paul had not seen Hannes since the hand-to-hand battle with the Russians, and rather doubted he would again – if his friend was still alive, he’d probably been taken prisoner. And if he, Paul, was the unit’s only survivor, then God had to be smiling down on him for some strange reason.

  Or perhaps not. If all of them were going to die, then someone had to be last.

  He bit another chunk off the sausage he had found in one of the abandoned houses, and eyed the growing light with some alarm. Soviet planes would soon be overhead, and a further withdrawal seemed advisable. He assumed that his battalion had been pulled back en masse, probably in the direction of Müncheberg, but heading that way without orders might prove a risky business. The two military policemen on the far side of the village square had already given him – and just about everyone else – suspicious looks, and Paul suspected that their current passivity was well calculated. They would have loved to order everyone back in the Russians’ direction, but feared, with ample justification, that they might be shot if they tried. If Paul tried to strike out on his own, they would have no such worries. For him, for the moment, safety lay in numbers.