The Berkut (30 page)

Waller leaned over and dipped her hand in the water. "It's warm!

Hot baths!"

"There are minerals in it," Brumm said. "Very soothing for tired muscles. On the far side"-he held the lantern higher and pointed
,
"there's a ledge under the water, like a bench. The deepest part of the pool is only a little over a meter, so you don't have to be cautious."

As some of the girls began to undress, Herr Wolf blushed and backed into the tunnel. Brumm stopped them. "Later. First there's work to be done." Their disappointment showed. "We work first, then eat, bathe and sleep. Remember your duty, always your duty
must come first. Don't let yourselves be fooled by our circumstances. The valley affords us protection, but it doesn't make us invulnerable. We are still in great danger, and everyone must understand this." His voice was cool, deep with authority. "On the other hand," he added, his tone softening, "after your duty is done, your time is your own, and I assure you the warm water will feel wonderful."

While the clean-up detail worked around him, Herr Wolf sat on a wooden bench, his legs crossed and his hands clasped around one knee. For the most part he was quiet, but from time to time he called out for one of the girls to catch a spot of dust she had missed. While they obeyed him without question, Brumm noticed that the girls were beginning to respond to Herr Wolf more as if he were their grandfather than what he had once been. They went about their tasks cheerfully, acting more like the young girls they were than the soldiers Brumm was trying to turn them into.

Satisfied that the housekeeping would be done, Brumm turned his attention to making small doughballs from a loaf of bread. When he had filled a small bowl with them, he beckoned Beard to come outside with him. They walked upstream for almost a kilometer without a light. Beard found himself tripping with nearly every stride, while his colonel walked quickly and smoothly, never stumbling.

"How do you see in this shit?" Beard called out as he stopped to rub a shin.

"I don't." Brumm laughed. "My legs know where they're going.

I simply follow them."

When Beard finally caught up, the colonel was sitting by the edge of the fast-moving brook, baiting a hook with a doughball. "Best place in the valley," he told his sergeant. "Three different species of fish. Two in the moving water, usually in the deep pools or at the edges of the riffles. There are also some small, deep ponds of warmer water that contain a species like carp. Bony, but properly filleted and sea
soned and cooked long enough, they're quite good. The best fishing is at night. Watch."

Brumm held a light under his arm and pointed it down toward the water. They were directly behind a curve where the water back
-flowed and formed a dark pool. When he lowered the line until the dough ball disappeared just beyond the light, the line immediately snapped taut. A fish broke water and jumped, landing with a loud smack. Brumm jerked it onto the bank with a single snap of his wrist and used his foot to pin it to the ground. Reaching down, he caught it
under the gills with his forefinger and hoisted it for Beard's inspection. The thick-sided fish kicked its tail violently and reflected the light.

"White trout," Beard said in amazement. "I thought the only place they existed was in the streams of the Schwarzwald in Bavaria."

"There and in this one valley," Brumm said proudly. "Some kind of evolutionary accident. See how easy it is?" Nearly every drop of the line brought an instant strike. Beard took each fish as Brumm pulled it in and threaded it onto a forked stick. When they had enough, Beard cleaned the fish quickly and expertly with his SS dagger, brush
ing the offal off the rocks into the fast water, just as he had done as a boy in his own favorite fishing spots.

On the return journey to camp Brumm shared more details about the valley with his sergeant. "There are some small deer and sheep on the sou
th cliffs, domestics gone wild, m
any birds in the spring.
In
the fall, ducks and other waterfowl stop here. One or two people could survive here indefinitely. With the size of our group, we'll use our supplies first and not destroy the natural balance until we have to."

Ever the professional, Beard took this opportunity to tell Brumm that he didn't like leaving the entry cave mined with grenades. "If somebody stumbles onto it and he's not alone, he'll know that the traps are there for a reason. Better, I think, to block off this end naturally and create a barrier that won't arouse curiosity." Brumm agreed; they would take care of it in the morning.

"We're going to be here for some time," the colonel said. "We have to maintain discipline, establish a routine and keep to it. We'll use the time to train the girls. It will keep them fit and active. Those two handled the Americans admirably. I think we can make some progress in turning them into soldiers. That's your primary respon
sibility."

"How long will we be here?"

"Months," Brumm replied. "At least six."

Suddenly Beard grabbed the colonel's shoulder from behind and stopped him in his tracks.

"The girls
... " he began. It was difficult finding the right words.

Even though they were like brothers, technically Brumm was still his colonel. The sergeant major drew a deep breath and blurted,
"Was sich zweit, das dreit sich gern-what
comes together in two likes to turn into threes."

Brumm laughed. "Why, Sergeant Rau, I think your prudishness is showing."

"Much more," Beard said with a nervous laugh. "They're also ...
experienced.
Do we ... ? I mean, we don't fraternize with our men. It isn't allowed ... " He tried to speak with some grace. "We've always slept with our men, but do we now sleep with our men, if you get my meaning?"

Brumm smiled. "I've given it some thought. It's a very delicate balance and a proper question to ask ourselves. It's predictable that the pressure will build-natural urges and all that. But we can't afford a pregnancy here, or petty jealousy either. Both could be disastrous. We have to mold a unit and make sure that all of us pull together."

"It's the togetherness that scares me," Beard said.

"I think it would
be unnatural to deny it," the c
olonel told him. "But there will have to be some rules-firm ones." Brumm wasn't sure what they were going to be, but he had ten minutes before they reached the dwelling to think about it, he told himself.

35 – June 4, 1945, 1:00 A.M.

For Johann Pescht hate had become the force that sustained him; it was his deity. He had been a Jew, but no longer. Now he saw himself as an avenger; he would pay back the Nazis. It was his right; his father and mother, his wife, Anna, and his five children had all died on the same day as he was forced to stand aside and watch helplessly while they marched naked into the gas chamber. Only he had managed to survive. It had begun in Belsen, a camp in Poland. Then there had
been a long stint in Ravensbrü
ck, north of Berlin, a camp for women only. He had been sent there to participate in bizarre experiments. Later he had been sent to Dachau and finally to Buchenwald. It had been a tour of nightmares.

Pescht was sickened by his own behavior, but he knew he was powerless to act differently; his desire to live, however despicably, was stronger than his desire to live morally, and he found himself doing whatever the pseudomedical technicians and Nazi doctors wanted. Something inside demanded: Live, whatever the cost. He copulated before audiences, answering their questions as he labored over his
sometimes frightened, sometimes angry partners. He did his duty be
fore two-way mirrors and for motion-picture cameras, in cold rooms and hot, in states of disorientation-both depressions and euphorias
created by drugs, with tight young women and cringing old women, with women restrained, with some healthy and some first beaten, and once, the most terrible time of all, with a dead one, a red-haired woman of thirty who had been starved and whose hipbones protruded like small wings, the purpose of the experiment being the determination of the life expectancy of sperm in a cooling corpse.

Toward the end of the war the doctors who had so enthusiastically pursued their scientific studies began to disappear from the camps. The medical experiments slowed, then stopped, and there were too few doctors left even to staff the medical section. Pescht, who had lived well as a special performer in the research section, found his security gone, his means of survival taken away; he was shipped to Buchenwald and there assigned to a burial detachment that did its work with bent shovels and blunt picks in all kinds of weather, laboring in shifts of twelve hours or more. During such shifts many of his fellow workers died, often succumbing in mid-strike against the earth, adding to their fellow workers' burden.

From the beginning Pescht was determined to survive. He stole food and clothing from other inmates. He eavesdropped on new ar
rivals and told the guards everything he heard, sometimes embellishing his tale-telling with stories of his own creation. There was nothing he would not do to curry favor with his masters. He knew that survival at any price--especially at the price of others' lives-was a moral outrage, yet something stronger inside him overruled his conscience and impelled him to do what was necessary for himself.

With the ample rations of the medical unit a luxury of the past, Pescht withered to skeletal proportions. Even after Hitler became chan
cellor, Pescht had continued to consider himself first a German, a loyal and patriotic citizen, second a father and husband-and last, by a good margin, a Jew. Yet his country had declared his kind to be subhuman, enemies of the state, and shipped the Jews to camps where the German acumen for organization was translated into mass produced death. Worst of all, his God had deserted him. How else could such nightmares be accounted for? In the early part of his captivity he had prayed long and hard, but eventually he abandoned the notion that there was a deity; what else could explain such things being allowed to happen? God was dead; in fact, Pescht reasoned, He
had probably never lived at all. On the other hand, it was clear that the Devil not only lived but thrived.

In
late April 1945 Pescht awoke early in his barracks and clumped loudly in his wooden clogs threading his way through the dead and sleeping bodies on the floor.
His reputation from Ravensbrü
ck had traveled with him, and after a near-terminal stint with the burial teams he had finally been reassigned to the Lagerschutz, a kind of police force of inmates who willingly cooperated with the Nazis and main
tained order inside the compound. As a member of this security unit, his food rations increased but only marginally; still, a gain was a gain. All through Germany there were said to be shortages, and the camps were last on the priority lists.

Pescht was assigned to the camp brothel, where he spent his days and nights running errands. Buchenwald had a large proportion of female guards, many of them Austrians, and most of these coarse peasants used him just as the male guards used the more desirable female Jews in the camp. He didn't mind.

Outside it was still cool and misty. His breath burst into the air and hung above him in small clouds, marking his progress through the muddy campgrounds. He hurried toward the brothel in the hope of finding some morsels of food left over from the previous night's play. But as he walked he began to be aware that something was different. At the brothel he found the girls silently gathered around the fireplace. Usually when he arrived this early they were still in bed. Those not se
lected for another night's stay were then returned to their barracks; those who had been chosen slept in comfort until the afternoon.

"Pescht," one of the women called out. "They're gone. They left during the night, every one of them. What do you think it means?"

Suddenly he understood what he had felt and not seen. "It means liberation, you simple cunt. The Americans are coming."

Pescht had nurtured a plan. His intent had been to escape, but liberation would make his task easier. Initially there had been fifty inmates brought in on the plot, but disease and punishment had de
cimated their ranks. For weeks thousands of new prisoners had been arriving, and the original group of conspirators was now spread all over the camp. He had to see the others. He spent the morning contacting them, and when the Americans arrived in the early afternoon, Pescht and his group acted as the camp's official greeting party.

He had planned it well. He took the American commander, a colonel, straightaway to the camp crematorium, told him its purpose, then stood back to wait for the American's predictable response. The colonel stared wide-eyed, paled, stumbled outside and vomited, then went into a violent rage at all Germans and all things German. It was precisely the reaction Pescht had hoped for. Over the next several days he and his unit, which included a few thin females, helped the Amer
icans sort out the mess. Several groups of American generals came and went, their faces taut with anger.