When the Doves Disappeared (33 page)

Hellmuth didn’t answer. Juudit sat down. Roland was already lost. That must be how it was. A broken spring pressed against her leg. She would never fix this chair. She would never again dress in front of this table to spend an evening at the Estonia. The hatpin sweated in one hand, the cigarette trembled in the other.

“I was given a job. I was supposed to get to know another person, not you,” Juudit said. “At Café Kultas. I was supposed to strike up a relationship with this other person. It was something that my friend’s fiancé thought of, not me. But then you were there.”

The ash from the cigarette fell to the floor. Juudit pressed the calfskin sole of her shoe on it, then slipped her shoes off her feet and took off the
bracelet Hellmuth had given her and dropped it on the dressing table. It shone like thirty pieces of silver.

“I didn’t dare tell you. And I didn’t want to not meet you.”

“They must have been very pleased with you. Excellent work. Congratulations.”

Juudit got up and started taking off her dress.

“What are you doing?” Hellmuth said.

“This is yours.” She folded the dress carefully and laid it next to the bracelet. The splotches of sweat had spread from her sides to her back and hips. “I understand what this could mean for you,” she said.

“Are you listening to me? They’re coming to get you right now, at any moment. You have to leave.”

“But if I’m the only one who isn’t arrested, the others will suspect I’m a traitor.”

“That’s not my concern. The prisoners won’t know who was arrested. They were picked up separately.”

“Do you think they’ll believe you had nothing to do with this? That you didn’t know? Hellmuth?”

“Don’t say my name.”

Hellmuth looked past her. His hand was raised, his palm toward her as she tried in vain to catch his eye. He got up, took two quick steps, grabbed her by the arm, and started to push her toward the door. She resisted, wrapped her foot around the leg of the chair, clung to the door frame. Her hatpin fell on the floor. Hellmuth shoved her against the doorjamb, toward the front door, still not looking at her.

“Come with me,” Juudit whispered. “Come with me away from here, away from everything.”

Hellmuth didn’t answer, just pulled as she struggled, and Juudit’s feet caught on the drawing room chairs and tables and the chairs fell over, the rug buckled, the folds of the fossilized curtains fell apart, the vase fell to the floor, the ficus fell, everything fell, Juudit fell, Hellmuth fell with her, their bodies fell together and their tears carried them away.

Vaivara, Estland General Commissariat, Ostland National Commissariat

N
ARVA CAMP WAS
the first to be evacuated; two days later, Auvere and Putki, then Viivikonna. The prisoners were all sent to Vaivara. Because of the lack of space the Vaivara children and the sick barracks were moved to Ereda, and the Viivikonna command center to Saka. Edgar ran from place to place, cursed the weather and the scarcity of the provisions, received evacuees staggering from their long journey on foot, directed the Wehrmacht trucks that brought the prisoners who were too exhausted to walk, organized more men to take care of the horses carrying the sick, sent some of those in a weakened condition to the civilian hospital, refusing to pause, to return to that desperate moment when his work detail was ordered to prepare to receive the evacuees from Narva camp. The Germans kept stubbornly repeating that this was just a temporary measure, but who could believe that? The production facilities they’d built were probably already being demolished. It was only a matter of time before the front collapsed.

When Edgar’s courier brought his monthly order of Manon tobacco straight from the Laferme factory, Bodmann came to pick up his share and shook his head—these evacuation plans weren’t realistic. The prisoners would never be able to walk all the way to Riga. Why did they
ask his opinion and then not listen to it. Edgar lay awake at night considering his options. The opportunities the camp offered in the cigarette business would soon be lost. He hadn’t been to Tallinn in months. The operation to eliminate the refugee transport ring had been successful but he didn’t even know who had been arrested. What had been a very simple plan in the beginning had proved complicated, although Auntie Anna had understood immediately that the saboteurs and army deserters who had wormed their way into the packs of refugees had to be caught or they would weaken Germany. Anna and Leonida had done their best and hadn’t revealed the true purpose of the extremely confidential plan. Juudit, on the other hand, had behaved contrary to expectations. She got angry and left, cut off contact completely. Edgar had made a mistake when he imagined that he knew his wife’s way of thinking and acting. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. In the end he thought of a solution. He sent two women pretending to be refugees, with children in tow, to the place on Roosikrantsi. They rang the doorbell when Juudit was at home and she had no choice but to let them in, then take them to the way station. Edgar had sent his man to report the address of the refugee way station to SS-Hauptsturmführer Hertz. He didn’t mention Juudit’s name. Hertz had promised to take care of the matter, after which he never contacted Edgar or came to Vaivara. He’d been transferred. The liquidation of the ring hadn’t brought Edgar the recognition he’d hoped for and his mind was plagued with forebodings—not only was all the work he’d done at Vaivara a waste of time, he had also apparently gone to a lot of trouble for nothing in his other operations as well. Now his hands were tied.

IN MAY
the Führer ordered a halt to all evacuations. The front was stable. Immediately afterward there was an order to begin construction of a new production facility. The news would have been encouraging if Edgar’s tobacco courier hadn’t told him the rest—the fighters from Tartu, who were in the thick of it, were certain that the Germans were preparing to evacuate children and women by force and send the men to the camps. Tallinn was in complete chaos. The highways were crowded with people fleeing from the city to the countryside and other people trying to make it into the city to get to the harbor. The Germans, however, were sending
out propaganda supporting legal means of escape—you could go to Germany, although no one seemed to be interested in heading in that direction. The Reichsführer had pardoned all draft dodgers and any Estonians who’d fought with the Finnish forces if they returned to fight against the Bolsheviks and clear their traitorous records. Amid all this, Edgar was stuck in the Vaivara mud, but a new opportunity arose when the men from B4 came to make an inspection and told him about the problems at the Klooga camp. The laborers were already evacuated from Klooga, and because the trains were full they hadn’t been allowed to take any luggage with them, and there were heaps of their belongings on the ground that the guards were picking through like crows. The local people had seen the abandoned piles of clothes and now there was a rumor spreading that the evacuees were being drowned by the boatful, so these men had been sent to investigate what was happening at the other camps. Edgar was ordered to show them around Vaivara to prove that they didn’t have any such problems. That was when a new plan formed in his mind. Bodmann had said that Klooga had the best conditions and the highest-quality results of any camp in Estonia—the laborers were housed in stone buildings, and the food portions were sensible because food distribution was done through the Waffen-SS’s Truppenwirtschaftslager. The work was also cleaner—manufacturing depth charges and lumber. The most attractive aspect of Klooga, though, was that it was closer to the evacuation points in Tallinn and Saaremaa, and farther from Narva and the Soviet border. Edgar decided he had to get there. While he was giving the B4 men the tour, he offered them some tobacco and told them about his career in B4, making clear that he would happily continue working at the camp, but … He gestured at his surroundings and received knowing nods in response. They promised to get back to him. An evacuation order interrupted the tour. The order was canceled two hours later. The following weeks were equally chaotic: the commandant making telephone calls all night, one day’s instructions retracted the next, workers sometimes ordered to the harbor, sometimes to their normal work in oil production, sometimes ordered to evacuate, and Edgar finally sent to Klooga. He left his entire stash of Manon tobacco to Bodmann out of sheer relief.

Klooga, Estland General Commissariat, Ostland National Commissariat

A
MACHINE GUN HAD APPEARED
next to the barracks.

Roll call.

SS-Untersturmführer Werle strutted to the front.

The prisoners were to be evacuated to Germany.

SS-Hauptscharführer Dalman started calling out men who were physically strong to prepare for evacuation.

Another roll call.

I was used to the constant control and roll calls, but something was different this time. I recognized a few Estonians among the prisoners. Most of them were Latvian and Lithuanian Jews. I waited for my own name. It hadn’t come yet. It would soon, I was sure. Just as sure as I’d been when I got into the truck at Paterei that I was being taken away for execution. But I was alive; I’d been brought here. I peered around, looking for other Estonians from the same transport, not daring to turn my head, but I saw only three. Alfons, the mail girl’s fiancé, was still next to me. He’d been brought from Patarei, too. He’d deserted from the German army and gotten caught. My name would be called soon. I was sure it would.

They had added new guards to the camp the day before.

Work was interrupted. We weren’t sent to our posts, and no workers
came from outside the camp, not even the Finn who sometimes gave us a little bread. Connections between the prison camps were good. Messages were hidden among the cargo sent from one camp to another. I’d even found a list of names marked with where the prisoners were from and where they’d been sent. I asked about Juudit. I’d asked about her in Patarei, too. No one had heard anything, not even our trusted Estonian guard. Maybe she’d paid her way in gold onto some ship, posing as a German. I hoped she had. Or that she’d been shot immediately.