Unlikely Warrior (6 page)

My mother and I turned pale, thinking of the hidden Jews. Then somehow I managed to stutter, “My … my cousin and I have been learning the Morse alphabet and sending messages to each other on homemade sets. Just for fun…”

My aunt jumped in. “Oh yes, my late husband was a physics professor, and I gave my nephew some of his equipment a few months ago.”

One of the SS men interrupted brusquely, “Where are the sets?”

I led them to my room and pointed to the corner.

“These sets are hereby confiscated and a report will be filed.” With that the two began dismantling and carrying everything away.

It wasn’t until some time after they had left that our hearts began beating normally once again. My mother looked at me and then finally just shook her head, saying, “That could have turned out so much worse.”

I had lost track by now of how many Jews altogether had passed through our attic, most staying for only short periods. All of the family was involved in one way or another, but it was my mother who took the greatest risks, and both my parents could have been shot as traitors if the Jews had been discovered.

*   *   *

I must have fallen asleep. When I awoke I had the feeling that the train had already been standing still for some time. The tired rays of the November sun shone through the open sliding door, where the other soldiers sat dangling their legs.

I stood up and went over to join them, laying my hand on Haas’s shoulder.

“All slept out?” he asked, turning his head toward me.

Others were standing below us on the railway embankment, and when I stuck my head farther out the door, I could see large numbers of soldiers sitting next to the train or walking up and down beside the track.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

An older man from Augsburg named Bolder answered, “The approaching train ran over a land mine. The Pioniere [Army Corps of Engineers] are pushing the locomotive and six of the cars over the slope. We’ll be cooling our heels for half the day here until they get everything organized again.” Then he added, “There were dead and wounded, too, over a hundred, I think.”

“We don’t want to hear anything about that,” Haas snapped. “There are always dead and wounded in a war. You’re just scared silly that we won’t make it to the front, either.”

“We’re all scared,” said Bolder. “That isn’t going to stop until it’s all over and we’re home again—until this stupid war is finally lost.”

“Ah, but if you’re too scared,” said Haas, “then you can’t really function, and if you’re not functioning, you don’t have your wits about you. If you don’t have your wits about you, then comes that critical moment when you’re not on your guard and zap! It gets you.”

“You have an answer for everything, Haas,” grumbled Bolder. “There are some like you who sail through the war, have incredible luck, and come to depend on it, believing they are untouchable. Then there are the others, afraid or not, who just happen to be ten centimeters too far to the left at the wrong second and they get it through the head.”

A messenger ran past calling out, “Three men from every car to the rear to pick up rations.”

I volunteered and went back with two others to the last cars, where the ammunition and cold rations were transported. We waited until the number of our car was called, then went up to receive the sacks containing half a loaf of bread and a tin of sardines per man. When we returned we were greeted with calls of “Here comes Santa Claus” or “Not fried chicken and potato pancakes again!”

Meanwhile, someone had placed on our stove a big pot filled with so-called
Kaffee.
In reality, this was not coffee but a mixture of roasted barley, cubes of dried figs, and chicory, cooked up without the slightest hint of sweetener. Some of the men maintained that it also contained bromide to lessen our sexual needs. I poured myself a cup and sat down in my corner, where Haas was already busily eating. Since my sardine tin had no key, I opened it with my bayonet and ended up pouring half the oil all over my pants.

Haas looked at me with a sympathetic smile. “Your table manners could stand some improvement,” he joked.

“Ha, when it comes to manners, I’ll bet I could put you to shame,” I replied. “I had to learn them the hard way.”

“What do you mean?”

“For example, when my sister and I were little, we had to eat with a piece of paper stuck under each arm. If one of the pieces fell down, there was no dessert.”

Haas raised an eyebrow. “Hmmm, why don’t you tell me more about that to make the time go by a little faster?”

During the following hours, until the train finally started up again and slowly chugged its way past makeshift repairs on the explosion damage, I told Haas where and how I had grown up, making no secret of my Jewish blood. It didn’t seem to impress him one way or the other. Of course, I didn’t mention the hidden Jews.

Haas described to me his life growing up on the outskirts of Stuttgart. His house was connected to a butcher shop, where he had worked with his father since he was sixteen. He painted colorful images of the yearly carnival and of the various girlfriends that he had never quite gotten around to marrying and of his membership in the Hitler Youth. All the uniforms, flags, parades, and political propaganda hadn’t impressed him very much. After a couple of months he had found it boring and reduced his participation to a minimum, just enough so as not to attract negative attention. I admired the way he had maneuvered through all that, simply by using his instincts and good common sense.

These hours with Haas were good for me. Telling him about my prior life somehow seemed to balance the books. I felt almost ready now for whatever was to come.

The eastbound train rolled on. During the next day, the sixth since our departure, we passed more and more burned-out railroad cars next to the tracks. Trenches, riddled army vehicles, exploded tanks, and small knolls topped with primitive crosses and rusty helmets became more constant features of the landscape. It was on that evening that I heard for the first time a deep and sinister rumbling that continued without pause.

It was the front.

INTRODUCTION TO THE TRENCHES

The train jolted over an endless net of switches, then stopped. Amid shouted orders of “Faster! Faster!” everyone gathered up his belongings and jumped down onto the dark ground. A cloud-covered sky, faintly illuminated by the distant moon, shed the only light.

A command rang out. “Cars 18, 19, and 20, follow me!” and then, “Hurry up, don’t lose contact, and don’t leave anything behind!”

I stumbled through the night toward the silhouettes of numerous multistoried buildings. These had formerly housed railroad workers but were now evacuated. We scrambled up the stairs to take any room that was empty and installed ourselves on the bare floors for the night. That distant hum and rumbling never ceased, and I was afraid.

Shortly after dawn the next morning, we all assembled in an area between the house where we had slept and the narrow trenches that served as bomb shelters. An officer arrived, accompanied by a few sergeants. One of them shouted us to attention, and we clicked our heels together wherever we were standing. “At ease,” barked the officer. He passed a piece of paper to one sergeant, and the latter began reading off our names in alphabetical order. It was a list of about 120.

When the sergeant had finished reading, the officer addressed us. “You all belong to Division Number 282, Regiment 158, Second Battalion, First Company. I am your company commander, Oberleutnant von Fritsch.”

After also being told the names of the battalion commander and the accompanying noncommissioned (noncom) officers, we were permitted to fall out.

At the noon hour we lined up to draw our rations. At first, my mouth dropped open in disappointed surprise when I received a chunk of raw horsemeat, three large potatoes, and half an onion. I could tell my companions were obviously as surprised as I was. Even though I was skinny, I had always been famous for my enormous appetite. From earliest childhood the kitchen had held a certain fascination for me, and the fact that I was usually there inspecting the pots long before mealtime arrived earned me the name
Haeferlgucker
, or pot-peeker. At home and on my many teenage bicycle tours in the Austrian mountains I had developed a considerable talent for cooking that was to prove most valuable, a lifesaver in more ways than one.

Remembering one of my mother’s favorite sayings, “Hunger is the best cook,” I began to take stock. Hmmm, wasn’t that an old blackened frying pan that I had seen hanging on the wall of the otherwise empty kitchen in the apartment where I had spent the night? What’s more, my piece of horsemeat had quite a considerable portion of fat attached to it. In the apartment next to ours, I had happened to notice an old cookstove and some pieces of coal on the floor next to it. There was salt in my bread tin and a lighter, too. My mouth began to water.

While the rest were still standing around looking perplexed, I was already on my way to find that frying pan. The rest of the undertaking was child’s play. Not more than ten minutes had elapsed before I was standing in front of the stove, skillet in hand, while the luscious aroma of frying meat, onions, and potatoes filled the room.

From my third-floor kitchen I had a perfect view of the train station where we had arrived and the town of Znamenka, which lay a little farther off. These were surrounded by flat, untilled fields and then by the black earth of a plain that stretched away into the distance.

I kept turning the meat and potatoes with the tip of my bayonet, and the smell became more and more tantalizing.
Just about five minutes more, and it will be ready,
I was thinking, when suddenly the air-raid siren on the roof of the adjoining building began to howl. Soon other sirens joined it, and I could hear shouted commands down on the ground below.

Little clouds of smoke from antiaircraft guns began appearing above the town, looking as though a painter’s brush had swiftly stippled them there, one after the other. Then I heard the droning of airplanes, increasing steadily in volume, accompanied by the explosions from antiaircraft guns and four-gun turrets.

What to do?
If I run down to the shelter now, I’ll have to eat my food half-raw, because the coal will be all burned out by the time this is over. What a shame for this lovely food!
I decided to wait a little longer. Just a few more minutes.

Now I saw the airplanes, at first just specks on the horizon but rapidly turning into streaks that seemed to be heading right in my direction. Then it dawned on me. The train station. An important target. Of course, that was why there were so many bomb craters all around. These planes weren’t coming for the first time.

One of the planes dived, trailing smoke as it crashed, and was followed by a second. Now I discovered smaller fighter planes carrying on dogfights in the midst of the larger bombers, all of them approaching rapidly.

“Just one minute more,” I pleaded silently. I leaned out the window for a second and saw that there wasn’t a soul in front of the house, but the trenches were full of helmeted heads, little steel spheres pressed tightly together.

It finally sank in that I was acting like a total idiot. At that same moment the droning noise became terribly loud and the floor under my feet began to shake. All at once, in the wall in front of me, a crack opened up from ceiling to floor, and a spray of mortar sailed through the air. I crammed my helmet onto my head and took off down the stairs, holding the frying pan handle with both hands.

I heard an enormous crash, and either from air pressure or movement of the house, I was thrown against the stair railing and showered with mortar and cement. I could see daylight through the cracks that were appearing everywhere in the walls.

Staggering drunkenly down the remaining stairs and out to the trenches, I managed to jump in just as the last of the planes roared over us and disappeared.

When I arrived the other soldiers, still holding their mess kits with the raw meat and potatoes, were just beginning to stretch their heads up out of the ground with relief. They laughed at me, pointing and saying what a hilarious sight I had made as I appeared out of a cloud of dust and powder, covered with mortar and wielding my steaming skillet.

I was their comic relief, but I also had the last laugh. Crawling back out of the trench, I sat down on a pile of artillery ammunition, where I scraped my pan clean—not at all bothered by the pieces of mortar.

It rained all that night, and the next morning we pulled out. Since we would be walking through heavy mud, we were ordered to lighten our gear. I didn’t know whether to feel dismayed or relieved as we handed in our extra pair of shoes, our change of underwear, our food (all canned), and one of the two packs of emergency rations. In those early days of winter the Ukraine was a broad, forsaken land, sprinkled only occasionally with a few houses or trees. The untilled fields of black dirt were often partially flooded, reflecting the overcast sky. Here and there we passed a small village in ruins.

I noted that no field kitchen accompanied us, and there were no trucks with additional weapons or ammunition. A few of the stronger men carried machine guns instead of rifles, and others hauled heavy iron boxes with the belts of ammunition.

We slogged along to the slow rhythm of a smacking sound each time a boot was pulled out of the mud. In spite of the cold wind blowing into our faces, we were soon dripping with perspiration. The heavy leather straps that supported our belts and gear cut into my shoulders, and the thought of cattle on their lumbering way to the slaughterhouse passed through my mind.

Sometimes we were met by small groups of wounded soldiers, smeared with blood and muck, supporting themselves on each other. Now and then a fast-moving vehicle full of the wounded would speed past, spraying the mud wide on both sides.

Suddenly a call rang out: “Low flyers!”

Up front where the ragged ribbon of a road disappeared on the horizon, two fire-spitting dots were speeding our way. I followed the example of the men in front of me, who dropped almost everything and threw themselves to the left and right in the softened dirt of puddles at the sides of the road. A few seconds later the plane roared over us, blazing fire from every gun.