“Now, wait a minute. Let’s go to a coffee house just next door. I have enough food stamps so that we can even afford a pastry. Let’s just slip away from here and we can talk.”
We walked from the courtyard and turned left to a very small coffee house right next door. Over a cup of tea, Father told me how difficult and tricky it was to escape from Belgrade because of the hasty, chaotic retreat of the German army, the advancing Partisans, and the endless difficulties they had encountered along the way.
“What about the rest of our friends? Are they still in Belgrade?”
“Yes, most of them couldn’t make it.”
“I didn’t see Aunt ’Lyena inside.”
“No, we left her behind. Mama thought the trip would be too difficult for her. You know her health isn’t that good, and Mama thought that it would be too much for us to care for her when we didn’t know what we might encounter.”
“Too much,” I cried. “But how is the poor thing going to make it by herself? She is so helpless. She’s Mama’s own sister. How could she leave her behind?” Tears rolled down my cheeks, remembering how caring and tender Aunt ’Lyena had always been with me.
“War is a very nasty business, Asinka. People do all sorts of things, unable to clearly decide their next move. So please don’t judge Mama too harshly.”
“I don’t believe she is my mother. I’m tired of pretending. Do I have to stay in this awful place with all those ‘friends’?”
Father looked on the verge of tears as he answered, “Just for a little while. I made arrangements for some trucks to get us this far, and I think they will carry us further. I had to trade away some more of Mama’s jewelry. Well, not everything at least, and don’t forget that Uncle Max has a box for you.”
He smiled faintly as he continued. “At any rate, we have to move on rather quickly. Soviet troops are advancing toward Vienna, and I won’t allow you and Mother to fall into their hands. We’ll have to start moving soon . . .” His voice drifted off as he began to think of something.
It was clear that they had been waiting for me, and now there was a rush to get moving, to ensure staying out of the reach of the Soviet army.
“Are all of these people going with us?” I asked.
“But they are our friends.”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I tried to change the subject.
“Where are we going?”
“We have no firm plans. We have discussed the possibility of going to Magdeburg. It’s in the northeastern part of Germany, and there is a Russian émigré community there that formed after the revolution, like Belgrade’s. Oh, I almost forgot. Mother and I have discussed it, and we are all to begin spelling our name as “Popoff” with a double ff instead of v or va ending. It is the spelling adopted by many of the Russians who fled the revolution and settled in Paris. Mama and I agreed that it has a certain French sound and may prove useful if we need to claim that we are residents of France, not Yugoslavia. So please remember the new spelling. Now tell me, did you have a difficult time getting to Vienna?”
“No,” I replied, thankful that he didn’t ask about the details of the trip.
The change in the spelling of our name seemed so silly. It didn’t sound French at all. There was no disguising the fact that we were Russians. What difference could where we were living possibly make anyway? But I didn’t say anything, just simply accepted it.
“Well,” he said, “I thank God that we are all back together again.”
I looked at him then, thinking how gentle and understanding he had always been, wondering what could have caused him to act as he did back in the garage. We finished our tea and a pastry we had shared and walked slowly back to the courtyard. Inside, I avoided speaking unless I was asked a direct question.
Each morning I simply left the house to go for long walks. I learned that the German authorities had issued each member of the group a yellow armband printed with the word Östarbeiter, which proclaimed them to be “Eastern Laborers,” and that while in Vienna they worked at clearing the rubble from air raids, earning food ration stamps in exchange for the labor.
I believe the place where we were staying was owned by a Russian known to some member of the group, just as Countess von Holzen was to Mother. The group seemed to be in quite good spirits, given the events of the time. They apparently were free to come and go as they wished, reporting for work only when they wished to earn more food stamps. Eventually I would be forced to wear the same armband, but in Vienna I was never questioned. My German was, I knew, accent-free, and I could imitate an Austrian accent. I simply never gave the armband a thought. In fact, I was never stopped or questioned. Required to return each day to a house filled with the same dour Russians I had tried so hard to avoid back home, I found that the time in Vienna seemed to go on forever. At last, although it was only a few days, Father announced that everything was ready for our trip to the north.
On the appointed day, the men in the group left early and returned with six small, beat-up diesel trucks. They were about the size of a modern pickup truck and had open beds with wood slat sides. Odd that I remember the six trucks when I don’t remember the number of people in our group. There must have been twelve couples plus me, because I seem to remember that we traveled two couples to a truck. I assume they were the same trucks used on their trip from Belgrade to Vienna, but I don’t recall ever asking or hearing it discussed. Everything was loaded into the trucks, and we formed a caravan. Father drove the lead truck.
The trip from Vienna to Magdeburg on today’s highways and in a modern automobile should take no more than six or seven hours, but in 1944, in the middle of the war, the trip would take us many days. The trucks were in poor condition and had to be coaxed along slowly, and once we entered Germany, the roads were clogged with traffic. An endless line of refugees moved in both directions, most walking and pulling a wagon with a few possessions on it—old people, young women with children. I remembered seeing the same spectacle in Yaintse during the three-day bombing of Belgrade, and I felt just as sorry for these poor German civilians as I had for the Serbs.
Contrary to the atmosphere in Vienna, the air in every town seemed charged with panic. Allied planes flew high overhead each day, on their way to some distant target. I couldn’t hear the sound of bombs, but I knew that the refugees clogging the roads were fleeing them.
Everyone in our caravan had to wear the Östarbeiter yellow armband, and the general attitude of townspeople everywhere was unfriendly, suspicious. There was a special time each day when we Östarbeiters could receive food rations, which took endless hours of standing in line, adding to the length of the trip. Standing in those lines was a special humiliation, as the German nationals passing by shouted insults and harassments. This was a shocking change from Vienna, where people were always friendly and maintained courtesy toward everyone.
We made very slow progress. It was cold, and people took turns sitting in front with the driver. When it rained or snowed, people just huddled together, covering their heads with blankets that soon became wet. The diesel exhaust pipe ran up through a front corner of the truck bed, and I huddled next to it for warmth, happy to let the others huddle under a blanket or to take turns sitting inside so that I wasn’t required to talk to them.
One day when it was particularly cold but free of rain or snow, I sat huddled against the exhaust, reviewing the past few weeks of my life. Somewhere during my odyssey from Belgrade to Vienna, my birthday had occurred, and I had turned sixteen. I couldn’t guess where or when—I didn’t even know the date while I was sitting there in that truck—but I decided that it had been the day I stopped at Rosa’s, the day I had received my first kiss. It was, I thought, a perfect birthday present.
How I hated the thought that I had been ashamed and had sounded so accusatory toward Hans. I cried softly, remembering Hans von Staate and his dreams, wondering what beautiful music he might have created; remembering Kolya as well, wondering if he might have designed a bridge
both stronger and more beautiful than any known. And I remembered Hermann Zahn, the terribly wounded German boy who had given me the camera, hoping he had made it home.
How many other talented and gentle young men has the world murdered or maimed in its current madness? It would be the last time I thought of Hans or Kolya for many years. For at least the next three years, all my thoughts and energies were to be occupied with survival.
On most nights, we slept in the trucks, but when the refugees on the roads thinned, we occasionally found a farmer who allowed us to sleep in his shed or barn. They may have charged us, but what luxury—soft, warm, sweet-smelling hay, out of the weather. But the trip always resumed in the same misery.
Our caravan approached the town of Halle about one hundred kilometers south of our destination, Magdeburg. The road divided at an intersection, the main road leading north to Magdeburg, one branch to a village called Nordhausen, another leading to the village of Blankenburg am Harz, neither of which we had heard of.
Our caravan was signaled to a stop at a military checkpoint. After checking our papers, a German soldier ordered us to follow him to his headquarters in Halle, and our caravan duly followed his motorcycle. He led us to a large building, a warehouse of some kind, with military vehicles clustered about it, where we were ordered to leave the trucks and enter the warehouse.
Throughout my life, my memory has been extraordinary, almost legendary to many who have known me and to most of the people I have worked with. It was either the result of, or the reason for, my success with learning foreign languages, but to this day I have never been able to remember what took place at that stop in Halle. I remember our group was ordered to stand before the desk of an ss officer, but other than that, the time remains a complete blank. I know that Mother was dramatically affected by whatever took place, and I don’t think she ever fully recovered.
Over the years, I have gone over this event again and again, trying to remember what took place and to understand what happened to Mother. She was a sensitive, talented, intellectual member of a very old aristocracy, accustomed to her position in life and the respect that she had always been accorded from everyone who met her, and I believe that the ss officer who conducted the interview or interrogation in that warehouse was particularly brutal and disrespectful. It must have been a severe shock to her sensibilities on top of everything that had already happened.
I believe that when the group left Belgrade, they must have had some official papers or letter of transit that identified them as exiled Russian émigrés seeking work as “Eastern Laborers” in northern Germany, and that although required to wear the yellow armbands for identification, they were in fact free to travel and to purchase diesel fuel and to obtain food rations. I think they felt themselves “free” people seeking work as refugees, their experiences throughout the journey from Belgrade to beyond Vienna reinforcing that belief.
Once the group entered Germany, however, everything changed rapidly. With our first encounter with an ss officer, we were finally faced with the stark reality of being stateless refugees in the middle of a country and population that had absolutely no regard for any of us or any concern at all for what or who we might have been. I don’t know how long we were held at that warehouse, an hour or two at most, but when we left, we followed the road that led to Blankenburg am Harz, not to Magdeburg.
EIGHTEEN
The Labor Camps
We were escorted to Blankenburg am Harz about November 1, 1944. It was very cold. The little village, a resort town nestled in the Harz Mountains, was disarmingly pretty. Contrary to most other towns we had passed through, it appeared untouched by the war. I looked around as we drove, frankly charmed by the pleasant homes and streets of the residential area. But the charm soon gave way to reality.
At the very edge of the town, across the last residential street, a large compound of barracks appeared behind high barbed wire fences, immediately on the other side of the street, and adjacent to other barracks and buildings.
The caravan was halted in front of a building outside the barbed wire enclosure, and we were ordered out of the trucks. The building we stopped in front of was an office of some sort, and a large sign proclaimed “Emil Bentin Contractors.”
Our trucks were immediately driven off by German soldiers. We were sprayed with insecticide and then marched to the empty barrack building assigned to us. We found that its construction had been abandoned some time earlier. It had rafters erected, but roof boards covered only half of the building. The doors and windows were simply open holes lacking any glass or doors. Bales of straw were lying on the concrete floor and looked wet.
A smartly uniformed ss officer entered the barrack and ordered everyone to line up, his shiny boots pacing the length of the line as he took all names and ages. He then turned and faced the group, to order everyone to be lined up in front of the barrack in the morning, to report for work. “Six a.m. sharp. There will be no exceptions.” He turned without another word and strode from the barrack.
What little shred of dignity Mother had managed to retain after the stop at Halle surely was lost here. The officer’s manner left her absolutely speechless. Other women in the group cried, and the men tried to offer comfort and make the best of it. There was no water supply in sight, nor any bathroom facilities. After investigating the grounds, we discovered a well about a hundred meters away and a couple of outhouses that apparently served all of the buildings not enclosed behind the barbed wire. Although I never counted them, my impression was that there were a dozen buildings, all similar, and all complete except for ours. A few of these served as barracks, but most of them, I believe, were used as warehouses or offices.
At the end of the group of buildings where we were located, a narrow wooded area began. Beyond the trees a large camp compound stood behind a tall barbed wire enclosure with lookout towers. I knew it was a concentration camp that housed political prisoners and “undesirables,” euphemisms for slave laborers. I had seen enough of them on our journey through Germany.
The men in the group left to gather wood from the nearby wooded area. Upon their return with a few branches, they informed the rest of us that the camp beyond the wooded area was patrolled by German soldiers and dogs. Someone brought a bucket filled with water, and a fire was lit in the pot-bellied stove. Our clothes were damp and dirty, and we had no idea if the water was fit to drink, but nobody worried about such things. It was clear that clean water, food, bed, bath—all those things were now a part of the past as we would try to survive one day at a time. As the fire began to heat the stove, a truck pulled up and the men were called out to organize a food line.
Each member of the group was issued a metal cup and a spoon, and we moved slowly through a line while a soldier dished out soup. It was warm, not hot, and had something floating in it, but no one could figure out what it was. The soup had no taste other than that it obviously had been thickened with flour. It was soon discovered that the things floating in it were lumps of flour—a simple broth with lumps of flour.
Each of us was also given a piece of hard, dark bread. We were told that there would be nothing else, so we had better make the best of it. We were so tired and anxious about the situation we now found ourselves in that there was no grumbling as we tried to “settle in.”
Fortunately, the boarded roof extended to just past the stove. A rope was found someplace and strung across the room close to the stove, and people removed their outer clothing, hanging it to dry. Everyone soon took a place around the stove to silently stare at the flicker of flames inside it.
We were too tired to talk or to argue, too tired for the usual round of complaints or criticisms. It was so strange to watch everyone in the barrack take some of the straw and try to make a bed for the night. Slowly, each couple rose to huddle together beneath their blankets, and very soon snoring came from every direction, breaking the silence.
I took some straw and soon lay down close to someone. I laid there for a long time,
awake, wondering what was ahead, what kind of future awaited me. I was sure that there were places where people lived normal lives, where young girls dreamed of the future and made plans. Or was there? Was the entire globe at war?
The bits of news we had heard told only of German advances and victories. What was the real news? What was true, and what was not? I was certain that Goebbels did not tell the truth in his broadcasts. Or did he? Maybe this was the end of the world. Maybe this was the holocaust that would bring an end to all civilization.
Aunt ’Lyena had told me that God was angry with mankind, that unless people changed their ways, the end would be near. Maybe she was right. But why does the end have to come now? But if the end comes next year or in a hundred, a thousand years, there will always be young girls who will never see another spring. With those terrible thoughts in mind, I slowly drifted into a troubled sleep that first night in the forced labor camp.
The next morning, everyone was awakened by a shrill whistle. The barrack was icy because the stove had gone out long before. Everybody sprang to their feet, not anxiously answering the whistle but because the brisk movements helped their circulation. The same truck that had brought the soup the night before was outside, and everybody grabbed their tin cup and rushed out into the cold November air. Our hands shook as we held the cups. It began to drizzle, and the sky was as gray and unfriendly as the uniformed German soldiers around the truck. The soup was distributed, the same soup as the previous night, with the same flour lumps and with a piece of the same dark bread.
Everyone ate quickly, standing outside, and placed their cups and spoons in their pockets. It was about 5:45 a.m. Everyone lined up on command, was given a shovel, marched a few yards to the side of the road, and was informed that we would be responsible for digging a drainage ditch along the road in front of the compound.
At precisely 6 a.m. a car pulled up and six German soldiers stepped out and spread along the side of the road facing us as we were ordered to begin digging. The soldiers were all dressed warmly, even wearing earmuffs and gloves. Each carried a rifle on a shoulder strap and walked back and forth along the length of the line, one yelling, “Schnell, schnell, das ist nicht eine Erholungsreise” (Hurry, hurry, this is not a vacation trip).
Ancient Furies Page 31
