The Witch of Stalingrad

by Justine Saracen

  “I think it’s the concentration camp at Vinnytsia, and the Germans know we won’t bomb them. It’s filled with our POWs.”

  “A POW camp, here in the Ukraine? Of course, it makes sense. We have their POWs and they have ours. Do you think it’s possible to find out if any of our missing pilots are there? I mean, do the Germans keep track of the names?”

  “I know what you’re thinking. We’ve all thought it. But she’s dead, Alex. Just let it go.”

  *

  Emotional lethargy had kept Alex there. The hard physical strain and the companionship had sustained her through the grieving, but now she had to leave. With the next delivery of photos, she’d stay in Moscow. Maybe it was also time to go home.

  Coming from the mess bunker, she bent forward into the blowing December snow and was heading for her own dugout to sleep when a figure appeared in front of her.

  “Major Bershanskaya, good morning.”

  The major didn’t greet her back but merely said, “Please come with me to headquarters. Someone wants to speak with you.”

  “Uh, yes, of course.” The solemnity of the request was ominous, but she followed the commander back to the two-room shed that was both her office and sleeping quarters.

  Three officers were waiting. Though they were clothed in heavy sheepskin coats, their maroon and royal-blue caps revealed they were NKVD. Her heart began to pound.

  One of them stepped forward. “Alex Preston?”

  “Yes?” she answered quietly.

  “You will please come with us.” The other man grasped her lightly around the upper arm and turned her toward the door.

  “Can I fetch my things from the bunker? My clothes and my papers?”

  “We have your papers and you will not need the clothes,” the officer said, and a moment later, she was outside in the snow again.

  A half-dozen women had come forward, and they watched, seemingly as baffled as she was, while the NKVD men pushed her into the rear of their vehicle. A Lend-Lease American jeep, she noted, like the ones she’d seen at Archangelsk.

  The men were silent on the long trip to the railroad station, and there was no point in asking why she was being arrested. Unlike Victor, who could be prodded to talk, these agents were like robots.

  The train trip, too, was silent, although the two men smoked and spoke occasionally with each other. She sat across the aisle, and though she wasn’t handcuffed, it would be futile to attempt escape. No German planes strafed them, and she almost wished they would, though what would she do then? Dash over the snow-covered fields into the woods to die of exposure?

  An official car met them at the Moscow station, and when it turned a corner onto a side street called Lukov, she recognized the terrifying building at the end of it.

  Lubyanka Prison.

  The NKVD headquarters was, in fact, a stately building from an earlier century, but, after the rumors of what went on in its cellars and interrogation rooms, it had an aura of deadly menace. Her chest began to ache.

  *

  It was true that the best torture begins with waiting, for in the three days she languished in her basement cell, she went nearly mad. She’d always assumed the powerful men in her life would assist her if necessary, but what if they didn’t know she needed them?

  She was both relieved and terrified when a guard finally fetched her. Was it to liberty or interrogation? The walk down the corridor to a dark room told her it was the latter. The interrogation room was bare except for a few chairs and an overhead light, and the whole place had the acrid smell of old sweat and cigarette smoke. If she hadn’t been weak-kneed with fear, she might have laughed at the movie-set banality.

  But the men who filed in after her weren’t actors. She recognized all of them. First, the nameless man she’d sometimes seen at the Hotel Metropole. Victor’s replacement, obviously. Then Lavrenty Beria, head of the NKVD, who had as much blood on his hands as Stalin himself. Behind him came Ivan Osipenko and, astonishingly, Tamara Kazar, as slender and rigid as the general was plump and relaxed.

  Alex felt like a gazelle encircled by a pride of lions.

  Beria was the first to speak. He was small and balding, and squinted through rimless glasses. A trifle schoolmasterish, he also bore an ominous resemblance to photos she’d seen of Heinrich Himmler. He took a step toward her, a sheet of notepaper between his fingers, and she instinctively tried to lean away from him.

  “What was the nature of your relationship with the pilot Lilya Drachenko?” he asked.

  The question she dreaded most. Forcing calm on herself, she replied, “We became friends of a sort, when she learned I was a pilot too, though I didn’t see much of her after she left the night bombers.”

  “I presume you mean the 588th Bomber Regiment. What were you doing with them?”

  “Yes, the 588th. I was photographing them for my magazine.” Her voice sounded high and tight. Would they think she was lying? “With the permission of Stalin,” she added.

  He was unimpressed. “Did Lilya Drachenko provide you with any military information?”

  “No, only the basic workings of the U-2 so I could fly it in an emergency. Which is what I had to do at Stalingrad. After the pilot Katia Budanova was shot, I flew us both back to the base.” Surely mentioning Stalingrad would help her cause.

  Unfazed, he held the notepaper in front of her nose and asked, “Do you recognize this?”

  It was on the same kind of paper Lilya had used to write her mother, and as she read it, she became nauseous with fear.

  My dear Alex,

  I think about our last meeting all the time and am amazed how much everything has changed for me since then. You are so sure of yourself, and you give me courage to see what could be, what is on the other side. I love my Motherland, but I have a vision of life now that goes beyond our governments and our nationalities.

  Duty and exhaustion hold me in their grip, but I will get the information that you asked for and that I promised you. There is so much about us you don’t know, so much I want to tell you. And I hate that we have to always meet in secret.

  When the war is over…

  The letter ended abruptly and was clearly unfinished. How excruciating that it was in the filthy hands of the NKVD.

  “I’ve never seen this letter before.”

  “That’s not what I asked you. Do you recognize this letter?” At his signal, a second man, burly and brutish-looking, came and stood beside him.

  She saw no point in acting stupid. Wasn’t the best lie the one that was nearly true? “It’s addressed to me, so I guess it’s from Lilya Drachenko, but I never saw it. Where did you get it?”

  General Osipenko replied from behind him. “We found it among the things she left behind. What is the secret information to which she refers?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Beria nodded and his muscle man slapped her hard, stunning her and causing her ear to ring. In a moment, the warm trickle on her upper lip told her she had a nosebleed.

  “You’re going to have to do better than that. This letter suggests an exchange of secret information and incitement to treason. Do not toy with us, Miss Preston, and think your nationality will protect you. You would not be the first American to be executed at Lubyanka.”

  For all her efforts to remain calm, to give them nothing to find suspicious, she trembled. “There is no secret information. I used to be a pilot and I simply asked her to find out how I could learn to fly the Yak. She promised to look into it. Other than that, I’m a photographer. I submitted all my pictures to your censors, and I never incited Lilya Drachenko to anything.”

  The blow came again, knocking her head to the side and cutting her lip against her teeth. Blood and mucus trickled over her mouth and onto her shirt.

  “I can assure you, we have far more disagreeable ways than a simple slap to encourage you to speak.” Beria took off his glasses and cleaned them on a handkerchief.

  Alex licked the blood
from her lips. “I don’t know what you want me to tell you. I have no secret information, just an interest in flying. I swear.”

  A third blow knocked her and her chair over on its side, where she hit her head on the concrete floor. For a moment she was senseless, and when she came to with a throbbing head, she was still in the same place.

  “Take her back to her cell. We’ll give her the night to think it over,” Beria said, and stalked away.

  *

  Alex crouched on the floor of her cell. What could she say that would get her out of Lubyanka? Would it save her to admit it was simply a love letter? But she knew of the Kremlin paranoia. The NKVD would find their love, if they bothered to call it that, even stronger evidence of espionage and treason, with a touch of sexual perversion. She almost sobbed with despair.

  Cruelly, Terry’s warning arose in her memory, taunting her. It can’t end well; there will be no going off into the sunset with this one. Instead, it was going to end on the floor of a prison cell.

  She fell unconscious again; she couldn’t tell how long, but her thirst told her a long time had passed when the cell door opened. She flinched and closed her eyes as the harsh overhead light went on.

  Squinting, Alex struggled to a sitting position, leaning against the wall as Tamara Kazar entered, lithe yet rigid. Sliding across the floor made her head start pounding again, but at least she wouldn’t be lying helpless at Kazar’s feet.

  “That it should come to this, eh?” Kazar’s tone was neutral, not particularly sarcastic. The remark didn’t merit a reply.

  “A pity really.” Kazar stood over her now, her hands clasped, officer-like, behind her back. “I saw immediately what an intelligent woman you were and hoped we might get to know each other. I think you would have been worth the trouble. But you couldn’t resist toying with that silly young creature, could you? And look where it’s got you.”

  “That silly young creature was one of your best pilots, and she gave her life in heroic sacrifice.” It hurt now to speak through swollen lips.

  Kazar shifted her weight onto her good leg and tapped softly with gloved fingers on the other one. “Yes, she was a good pilot, but as for heroic sacrifice, you are romanticizing. It appears she didn’t give her life at all.”

  “What are you talking about? They found her body next to her plane. What more do you want?”

  Kazar tapped again, perhaps for effect. “They found her airplane, not her. To be sure, the charred body lying near it gave reason to assume it was Drachenko. But…” She bent forward and brought her face close to Alex. She smelled, faintly, of alcohol.

  “But what?” Alex hated these cat-and-mouse games.

  “She was wearing sandals.”

  It took a long moment for Alex to grasp the significance, and before she could speak, Kazar elaborated.

  “No pilot flies in sandals when she has a perfectly good pair of flight boots. It couldn’t have been her.”

  Alex hardly dared say it. “Then she’s alive.”

  Kazar shrugged. “Perhaps. Though, if she’s been captured, she’s not much better off.”

  “You really hated her, didn’t you? You hated all of them for questioning your authority.”

  “For questioning it, and for demeaning me before my superiors. After years of struggle to advance in the military, I was brought down by a handful of spoiled girls.”

  “Well, you had your revenge, didn’t you? You sent them off on ‘special duty,’ where almost all of them were killed. All but Lilya.”

  “That was General Osipenko’s idea. Not to kill them. He’s not that vindictive and neither am I. It was just to put them to work some place where they couldn’t undermine the confidence of the regiment. Most of them were happy for the glory it brought them.”

  “So why do you care about the letter? Do you really think Lilya Drachenko was prepared to commit treason? And that I’m guilty of espionage?”

  Alex struggled to her feet and stood woman to woman with the major, refusing to play the supplicant. “You said I seemed an intelligent woman. You seem so, too. I think you know that it’s a simple love letter, not evidence of conspiracy, and you’ve had me arrested for personal vengeance.” She took a breath. “You’re a female officer and surely had to struggle through the ranks. How can you do this to another woman?”

  Kazar straightened, if possible, to an even greater rigidity. “What do you know about struggling through ranks, you privileged capitalist brat? I’ll tell you a little story.”

  She paused for effect. “Once there was a daughter of a farmer who owned a little land and sold some of his crop. That made him a kulak, and because he was a kulak, he was executed as an enemy of the people. His land was confiscated and his house destroyed. Now imagine that little girl, living every day with hunger in the ruins of that house with her mother, not even allowed to go to school. And even when her mother curried favor with the party and got her in school, she was shunned as a kulak child, that is, until she gave a report about people spreading anti-Stalinist rumors.”

  She paused again. “How quickly the doors opened then, to the Komsomol and to the flight school of her dreams, and to the military college, and each advancement cost only a little report, a few names. Then, imagine her delight, twenty years later, to not only receive the Lenin prize, but also to be given command of a regiment expressly approved by Stalin himself.” She took a step closer.

  “Then, suppose a group of swaggering pilots threatened to destroy that prize. What would you have done?”

  Alex was speechless at the tirade that amounted to a confession. “I…I don’t know,” she answered sincerely. It was a kind of horror story, however you looked at it. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I want you to know why you are finishing here in Lubyanka. You’re an intelligent woman who chose badly, and you sealed your fate when you joined them.”

  “Them? The pilots who died at Stalingrad?”

  “Yes.” Kazar sighed, and her sorrow seemed genuine. “It could have ended differently.” She took a step forward and pressed a sudden kiss on Alex’s lips.

  Then she turned away and marched from the cell, the steel door clanging behind her with a terrifying finality.

  *

  Alex estimated that about ten days and nights had passed, though the lack of a window made it impossible to tell. A jailor brought her bread at intervals, but was it once a day or twice?

  And all the while she was assailed by fear, dread, guilt, confusion. She feared the NKVD, dreaded the next visitor who might be her torturer, anguished over Lilya’s fate in the hands of the Germans, and in her more lucid moments, she brooded over the common tragedy of the two women who hated each other. Both their fathers had been executed, and both had tried to undo the shame with patriotism, but Tamara Kazar had also become a snitch. Alex asked herself what she would have done and had no idea.

  Then, when she’d begun to lose hope, the metal door swung open, and in the entryway Terry Sheridan stood like a shining knight.

  Two guards marched in, yanked her to her feet, and pulled her past him through the doorway. She glanced back wordlessly at him, ensuring that he followed them down the corridor into a room with a table and papers.

  Still without speaking to her, he signed some papers, passed a few packs of cigarettes to her captors, and waited while her manacles were removed. Then he led her down another corridor to the main portal of the building.

  “How are you, old girl?” he asked, touching her gently on the back, once they were on the street.

  “Been better,” she said, and stood impassively as he opened the door to a car, presumably some official OSS vehicle.

  Once inside, he turned to her. “Jesus, Alex. How did you let it go so far? How could you have not seen the danger?”

  “Could you just get past the ‘I told you so’ part of the conversation and tell me what you did to spring me? How did you even know where I was?”

  “It’s our job to know where peopl
e are. And besides, the NKVD didn’t dare keep a Western journalist hidden for too long. I think the commander of that woman’s regiment asked questions, and an inquiry started, and word finally reached the State Department. It’s a good thing Harry Hopkins likes you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, he’s the only one with leverage. When he heard about your arrest, he hinted that the next Lend-Lease shipment of war material might be delayed if the US president knew Stalin was imprisoning American journalists. It was a bluff, but it worked”

  “So, my release had nothing to do with my innocence but came down to sheer blackmail.”

  “It’s the way the world works, Alex. And since the powers-that-be will bail you out only once, I suggest you behave yourself for a while.”

  She fell silent again as they rode through the heartless streets of Moscow, where haggard, war-weary people still dragged their sled-loads of firewood behind them.

  “She’s alive, Terry. I’m sure she’s alive. The body by the plane wasn’t hers.”

  “Alex, for God’s sake, you have to get over that woman. This obsession almost ended your life.”

  She ignored him. “If she’s in a POW camp, I can surely find out, right? Through the Red Cross or something?”

  “It’s not so simple. First of all, neither the Germans nor the Russians give a shit about each other’s POWs, and second, it’s winter. If the Germans have her, she’s as good as dead.”

  “I need to know. One way or another.”

  “Well, you can forget about looking for her from here. Beria’s condition was that you leave Russia. You’ve got forty-eight hours to get out of Dodge, and you’re confined to your hotel until you do.”

  She exhaled agreement, resignation. “I need to cable George at Century. He’ll know what to do with me. I sure as hell don’t.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ve already talked to him.”

  “You contacted my boss? How? Why?”

  “How is none of your business. We have our ways. As for why, Harry agreed to spring you from Lubyanka, but we had to have a place to relocate you. The plan was to put you on a plane to New York City, so that’s why I called George Mankowitz. He was shocked, but you know George. The magazine’s his baby, and you’re his best photographer.”