by Erika Holzer
The two of them double-timed it up the dark road, straining to make sense of the silhouettes clustered about a small truck with its headlights switched off. “International Red Cross” was stenciled on both doors.
The flames of a small bonfire illuminated the scene. “Cherner? Brenner? Over here,” the CO called out. Next to the fire stood a man in a shabby civilian overcoat with curly red-blond hair. “Mr. Johannsen here is with the Red Cross. Take a look at these kids, Brenner,” the CO ordered. “See what you can do for them.”
“Kids, sir?”
“Yeah, kids.” The CO turned on his flashlight and moved its powerful beam about five yards further down the road. The light paused when it fell on a pair of tiny bare feet, and then moved up to the huddled form’s nearly skeletal body.
Then another child. Another…
There were ten of them. The oldest looked to be about twelve. She was holding tightly to the hand of the youngest, who couldn’t have been more than three. The rest seemed to be between four and ten years old. Brenner bent down for a closer look, and then gingerly examined them one by one. Girls with stringy matted hair. Boys whose heads had been shaved. Their tattered clothes and swollen stomachs, their enormous eyes staring out of bruised emaciated faces, gave them the look not of children, Brenner thought uneasily, but of aging dwarfs.
The CO, a stubby man with sharp probing eyes, angrily stuffed his hands into the pockets of his field jacket. “Talk to the older child, Cherner. She seems to be in charge of the others. Tell her we’re here to help them.”
“Мы здесь помочь вам,” Cherner translated.
The child stared. Then, “Нет не разговаривать русский,” she replied. “I not speak Russian.”
Cherner took a closer look at her. The same Nordic coloring as his own—blond hair, blue eyes. Before his parents had emigrated to America and their name, Chernovsky, had been shortened to Cherner, his mother said people wrongly assumed they were Norwegian…
Cherner cleared his throat. “Зробіть ви розмовляйте Українською?” “Do you speak Ukrainian?”
“Так.” “Yes.”
He turned to the CO. “They’re Ukrainian, sir.”
“Talk to them. Find out what this is all about.”
Cherner spoke to the girl in quietly reassuring tones. After a few minutes, she answered him haltingly.
As soon as Brenner did what he could medically, Cherner steered the kids to First Sergeant Rosen, where GIs began feeding them Army rations. Spam, sausages, biscuits—and the most popular item—chocolate bars. It was obvious the children had never tasted anything like chocolate in their lives. The First Sergeant was beaming. Some of the GIs were teary-eyed.
Cherner glanced at the stenciled words—International Red Cross—on the doors of the small truck. “How were you able to rescue the children?” he asked Johannsen.
“You know about the camps?” Johannsen asked.
Cherner and Brenner glanced at each other. Cherner nodded grimly.
“A concentration camp called Sachsenhausen is not far from here—about 22 miles north,” Johannsen said. “Back in April, it was directly in the path of a fast-moving Russian armored column. The Nazi commandant, an SS Colonel, had standing orders from Himmler to ‘evacuate’ the camp before the Russians got there. I tried to persuade him to release the survivors—especially the children. He just smiled and began moving everyone out in two seemingly endless columns. Sick, starving, half-dead creatures. They were prodded along by bayonets. Those who couldn’t keep up were shot and left where they fell…”
Johannsen shuddered at the memory.
The older girl, still holding the three-year-old, sidled over to Cherner.
“I ran my truck beside the line of march next to the commandant who was in the lead,” Johannsen continued. “I implored him to free at least some of the children. That perhaps he had children of his own. When he smiled too, I figured he was about to move on without answering. Damned if he didn’t look down from his horse and say, ‘Mr. Johannsen of the International Red Cross, I can see that these ten children are together. Consider them a parting gift to your fine organization as a token of my good will.’ The older girl, here, took me for an American,” he continued. “I don’t speak her language, but it was obvious from the start what she and the older kids were terrified of. ‘Nyet Russkies. Nyet Russkies,’ they repeated over and over.”
Cherner turned to his CO. “They have good reason to be terrified, sir,” he said in a voice choked with emotion. “The Russians consider it a sport to kill Ukrainians—at least the ones they don’t use as laborers or cannon fodder.”
“What did you find out from the girl?” the CO asked.
“Her name’s Irina. Their parents are dead. She as much as said it’s up to her, now, to protect the others. Little Mother,” he said softly as the girl, eyes partly hidden by her matted hair, hugged the three-year-old to her chest. “What shall I tell her?”
“That we’re Americans,” the CO said tightly. “That we’ll find a place to hide them where they’ll be safe from the Nazis and the Russians.”
“I have to go back,” Johannsen told the CO. “There may be wounded survivors in those ditches,” he said bleakly. Johannsen shook the CO’s hand, nodded his thanks at the GIs, got into his small truck, and drove off.
“Go get the deuce-and-a half, Cherner,” the CO ordered. “You and Brenner take the kids. The rest of us will walk. There’s a deserted farmhouse a few miles back, not far from the river. Wait for me there. And Cherner?”
“Sir?”
“Keep your lip buttoned. You, too, Brenner. The fewer people who know about this the better. It never happened.”
* * *
Under the protection of the CO, and with the connivance of other troops during the few weeks after the Americans moved into their occupation zone, the Ukrainian children were also moved several times. They were being cared for by one of the few remaining orders of Catholic nuns Hitler hadn’t decimated. Most of the GIs who’d been helping the children initially had moved on, losing track of them.
Kurt Brenner hadn’t thought of them at all, too preoccupied with how to speed up his pending discharge. He’d already been admitted to Harvard Medical School, but there was a problem. He wasn’t due to be discharged for three more months—October 1945—and classes began in late August. Harvard had made it clear that if Brenner couldn’t start with his class, he’d have to wait until the following academic year.
Like hell I will.
“Medic!” a voice shouted.
Brenner finished his sandwich, tossed a half-full can of beer into the muddy river, and watched as the swift current sent it spinning downstream. He hurried up the steep incline of the riverbank to Glienicker Bridge, where the American Corps of Engineers, aided by liberated Ukrainian workers, had floated an unstable pontoon bridge across the Havel River.
Permanent repair work was progressing well. At nearby Ceceilienhof Palace in Potsdam, GIs were replanting hedges. A line of slow-moving 21/2-ton Army trucks, loaded with building materials, headed for the Palace to repair walls, ceilings, and moldings. Brenner had been detailed to the general area as a medical corpsman—by then, mostly treating GIs with construction injuries.
He wrinkled his nose.
I wish they’d repair the smell around here.
It was going on three months since Berlin had fallen, but the stench of open sewers and the occasional dead body still permeated the air. It was an ongoing complaint with the GIs. The goddamn Krauts had emptied their cesspools into the Havel River.
“Medic! Where the hell are you?”
Still here, unfortunately, he brooded.
Brenner stepped over planks and stray pieces of iron, keeping carefully to the side of Glienicker that was propped above the water line by wooden pedestals parallel to the pontoons.
At the bridge, while he attended to a soldier’s cuts and bruises, he fell into a convers
ation with a Russian officer he knew, but whose job was a mystery to him. He and Major Dmitri Malik had played chess a few times. While Brenner could beat the man with his eyes shut, he usually let Malik win against the day Brenner might want a favor. Then, too, there was the profitable black market business that the two of them were engaged in.
Launching into his usual complaint, Brenner mentioned that he was going to miss the start of medical school and lose an entire year. That guys who’d arrived in Europe—mostly infantrymen—were rotating home before he was.
They had been speaking English. So when the major suddenly looked around, lowered his voice, and switched to German, Brenner was startled.
“Tell me, Doc, what do you need to get orders moving you out sooner?”
“That’s what frustrates the hell out of me, Major. It takes next to nothing. Just a clerk at division—probably a corporal—who inserts an earlier date on my transportation orders and sticks them in some box. Why do you ask?”
“I have friends everywhere,” Malik said, dodging the question.
Of course you do, Major.
They ran into each other on the bridge a few days later. After the usual pleasantries, Malik said, “How would you like to leave Berlin in a week or so, Kurt?”
Brenner thought he hadn’t heard right. After a moment he said, “You can pull it off that quickly?”
An eloquent shrug. “That depends on you,” Malik replied.
“Anything, Major! Penicillin. More medical supplies. Petrol. Dope.”
Malik looked bemused.
“If it’s money,” Brenner said, his mind racing, “I’ll send you some as soon as I get back to New York—within reason, of course. A few thousand? Maybe five?”
“I have something else in mind,” Malik said, his smile enigmatic. “You’ve always wondered what my position was but never had the nerve to ask. I’m NKVD—Soviet Intelligence. My work is with Operation Keelhaul.”
Chapter 22
It was dark as Brenner left Soviet headquarters in East Berlin and picked his way gingerly through brick-littered streets, stopping only to show his pass to a pair of Russian soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie before crossing from the Soviet zone back into the American.
It was all arranged. Tomorrow morning the Ukrainian kids would be picked up by Soviet authorities, including the Communist version of the Red Cross. Malik had assured Brenner that under Operation Keelhaul, the children would be well taken care of.
His young subordinate, Lieutenant Aleksei Andreyev, had reinforced Malik’s assurances. “We have a great deal more to offer these children than placing them in foster care—or worse, stuck in some displaced-person camp,” Andreyev told Brenner.
“Come now, Kurt,” Malik interjected, picking up on Brenner’s skepticism. “If at the Yalta Conference, the President of the United States—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, no less—and now his successor, Mr. Truman, promised to ‘encourage’ repatriation for some larger political end, who are you to question the judgment of two American presidents?”
An unanswerable argument, Brenner told himself. Besides, why would anyone want to harm a bunch of kids?
It hadn’t been easy finding them—not at first. Eventually, Brenner had tracked down First Sergeant Al Rosen, who remembered him from when the Red Cross guy had rescued the children. A couple of drinks loosened Rosen’s tongue. The children had been moved from place to place until they’d ended up with the nuns, he told Brenner. Arrangements were being made to have them moved to a DP camp in France.
After leaving Malik and his aide, Brenner walked aimlessly for hours, concentrating on the formidable obstacle course typical of post-war Berlin: broken pieces of pavement, mounds of rubble, collapsed buildings, gaping holes camouflaged by a thin layer of gray-black dust—
And came to an abrupt halt at the sound of angry voices. He realized he’d ended up practically at the main gate of the nunnery.
The criminal automatically returning to the scene of the crime?
It was where the Ukrainian children would spend their last night before being repatriated in the morning. So why was a Soviet truck parked in front right now? Brenner wondered.
So much for “tomorrow’s” arrangements.
The Russians always kept one step ahead of you, he thought. It was worth remembering.
Ducking into the shadows, Brenner watched a group of Russian soldiers emerge through the nunnery gates led by—no surprise—Major Dmitri Malik. Ten whimpering children were hustled into the back of a truck. Brenner watched the truck pull away headed, no doubt, for Potsdam in East Germany.
An American jeep roared out of the shadows. Brenner almost jumped out of his skin. Joe Cherner flung open the door on the opposite side of the jeep. “Good timing, Kurt,” he said tightly. “I’ve been watching the nunnery off and on for weeks. Figured something like this might happen. Hop in. Let’s see where the Russkies are off to. What are you doing here so late?”
“Same as you, Joe,” Brenner said quickly. “I’ve been keeping an eye out from time to time. The Ivans are good at staying one step ahead of you,” he added as an afterthought. It was true enough.
Keeping well behind the Soviet truck, Cherner followed until he was pretty sure where they were headed. “Glienicker Bridge,” he muttered.
By the time they got there, a Russian truck had pulled up at the West Berlin end of Glienicker Bridge. Two American sergeants sat in a jeep facing West Berlin. Cherner skidded to a gut-wrenching stop right behind Ivan’s truck.
“This bridge is officially closed to vehicular traffic until repairs are completed,” one of the GIs announced.
“No problem, sergeant,” Malik said politely. “We will walk.” He signaled to his men, who proceeded to hustle the children out of the truck.
The column moved to the center of the bridge, Major Dmitri Malik in the lead, followed by other Russian soldiers who were hustling the children along. A grim-faced Lieutenant Aleksei Andreyev brought up the rear.
“Don’t let them through!” Cherner yelled to the sergeant behind the wheel of the jeep.
“I can’t stop them if they’re walking, sir!”
“Then I will!” Cherner’s voice was choking with rage.
Brenner shivered—and not from the cold night air. The bridge’s emergency lighting was a blessing. In the dim light, he couldn’t see the expressions on those small faces. But there was no way he could miss Irina. The girl was clutching the tiny three-year-old in her arms.
The sound of footsteps mingled with the slapping of waves against Glienicker’s damaged side. As Irina moved to the unobstructed section of the bridge, the children following behind her, she teetered slightly at the edge.
“Keep to the other side!” Malik warned—in English first, then Russian.
Brenner’s breath caught in his throat. It suddenly occurred to him that the children couldn’t understand either language!
It must have occurred to Joe Cherner too. He had leaped out of his jeep and was racing toward the middle of the bridge. Raising his sidearm, he fired into the air.
Malik and his soldiers turned into statues.
As if on cue, Irina paused. A ruptured support beam from one side of the bridge hung in the water like a broken limb, leaving a narrow breach. A few feet beyond, the pontoons bobbed in the water. The darkness made it hard to tell where the sky ended and the river began.
Suddenly Irina cried out and leapt into the breach. Three older boys followed instantly, three others hesitated but only momentarily. Two children—the youngest—froze. Russian soldiers scooped them up.
As Joe Cherner reached the scene, tears running down his face, the only thing his probing flashlight picked out was a shadowy patch being dragged downstream that might have been Irina’s hair floating on the gray-black surface.
“Don’t look down,” Malik said philosophically, appearing suddenly at Brenner’s shoulder. “By next week, you’ll be saying goodbye to all this.”
Thanks a lot, Major. Let’s hop
e Joe Cherner is so distracted that your remark didn’t register.
But it was Malik that Cherner pointed his weapon at. And not for long. The barrel of a rifle was pressed against the back of Cherner’s neck.
“Show some sense, Lieutenant,” Malik said coolly. “I have ten men here. Lousy odds, ten against one. My advice? Walk back to your jeep and move on. Forget this ever happened.”
Cherner hesitated before holstering his .45. He turned on his heel and walked slowly toward his truck.
His friend Joe was smart enough to move on, Brenner thought, but forget? Never.
He wondered if the same was true of him.
Chapter 23
Kiril stood on a stretch of unprotected tarmac at Schönefeld Airport, the major civilian airport of East Germany and the only one that served East Berlin. It was a cold, gray afternoon with no buildings or foliage to serve as a windbreaker. His fedora was soaked. His threadbare raincoat slapped against his trousers. Dark glasses obscured his eyes.
Beside him, Galya shivered uncontrollably even in a long coat lined with down, marveling at how Kiril could be so oblivious to the cold.
His mind was elsewhere. Would Dr. Kurt Brenner succumb to blackmail? he wondered. Damn Aleksei’s secretiveness and his need-to-know rules! In Moscow, he had shown Kiril bits and pieces of the Brenner file, but not enough to get a clear picture of Dr. Kurt Brenner, famous heart surgeon—or Kurt Brenner, private citizen.
Then go over what you do know, he told himself wearily.
German father and mother. Both naturalized American citizens, both employed by their son’s cardiac institute. Dr. Brenner’s flamboyantly successful medical career. A long bachelorhood followed by marriage to a journalist. Brenner’s widespread and apparently earned reputation as a humanitarian because of his nonprofit cardiac clinic for indigent children. Temperament: Brenner was known to cancel an entire day’s surgical schedule and lock himself in his office on the rare occasion when a patient died on his operating table.
A man of contradictions, Kiril mused. A renowned surgeon who had declined every invitation to medical exchanges in Iron Curtain countries, yet heaped extravagant praise on Medicine International’s Peace through Medicine activities in such places.
