Ellie Midwood - Of Knights and Dogfights

The morning came and with that, the death. They lay next to each other, the families, content and already gray-blue, just like the sky above them. Carrying them to a nearby ditch under a commissar’s black muzzle, he wondered with some numb curiosity how they did it so quietly; how did the men strangle their wives and daughters so softly that no one heard a thing; how did they manage to slash their throats and not awaken anyone before slicing into their own necks with a rusty nail… how did those women keep so quiet, after they’d screamed so loudly, the night before?

The Soviet Union. The Gulag, Summer 1945

You’re being transferred soon. The Commandant’s order .

Johann looked intently at the swamp. He stared at it long and hard, for the first time pondering the idea of walking into its silent murkiness and surrendering to it and to hell with it all. If he weren’t so delirious from hunger, he would have indeed found it fascinating, how a few short weeks of the infamous NKVD captivity could break any man’s spirit and he had always considered himself the most resilient of them all.

He was the one who was cheering the men up when it became clear that they were not going to Vienna like the Soviet commissar in charge had initially promised, luring them, the fresh POWs, onto the train. He was the one that kept their spirits up when they were advancing into the Russian steppes, further and further into the alien vastness, only not as conquerors this time but as slaves, with whom their new masters could do as they pleased. It was he, who organized the sleeping schedule on the train, where there were so many of them that only a third could lie down and rest for two hours and then stand for four. It was he who, by his own example, showed them that ranks and distinctions didn’t mean anything any longer if they wanted to survive. Now, they were not company commanders and former privates; they were the strong ones and the weak ones and the strong ones picked up the hardest work to look out for the weak, for it was the only human thing to do. The only thing that still kept them human, after they had been stripped of all else.

Such order didn’t last long though. The NKVD knew just how to instill their own order. The first camp was the worst one in this respect. The thing was, it wasn’t even a camp when they had first arrived there and were given some wooden planks and primitive tools to build the first barracks. Johann found it amazing, the low number of guards who were set there to supervise them. Then it all became clear; the entire area, as far as the eye could see, was surrounded by swamps and therefore anyone who wished to try and escape was more than welcome to try. The men did start escaping, as soon as the back-breaking work and lack of food got the better of them, driving them to desperation. They simply walked into the rotting water and let it drown their misery. The guards didn’t mind those escapes, just looked the other way.

And then the commissars began their work among them, subtly and cunningly. They didn’t beat anyone, no. They influenced them in a far more artful way, making an appearance in the barracks and offering a doubling of portions to everyone, who wanted to come to a political meeting on Sunday and hear the commissar talk. An enterprise that was quite successful; the barracks that served as a meeting hall was stuffed with men who stared at the podium with starved eyes. For an extra ration, they didn’t mind listening to some communist propaganda for a couple of hours.

Then, the psychological warfare got worse. We’re looking to fill positions in the new kitchen. Our soldiers won’t be in charge anymore; you’ll be cooking for yourselves. Former members of the German Communist Party step forward, please . Johann watched in stupefaction when several men strode forward with resolution.

“That’s Müller,” Johann heard one of his fellow inmates mutter. “He was in the SS!”

“And that’s our Gruber,” another voice chimed in, as confused as the first one. “He was the biggest Nazi around.”

But none of it mattered to the commissars, as long as those former SS men “embraced” the new Soviet ideology and began parroting their doctrines to their former comrades while measuring watery soup into their respective bowls. Those “kitchen communists” began growing nice and fat fairly quickly while the others were working outside and dying in their tens. All this was making less and less sense to Johann, who was much too honest to know what was good for him and was also growing gaunter and weaker simply because he couldn’t bring himself to repeat the words in which he didn’t believe, just like he’d refused to do back in Germany. It was all wrong, the National Socialism, the Communism and so very strikingly similar at the same time. Well, with one difference; here, the prisoners weren’t beaten because the Soviet people had some strange morals on that account. It’s not right, beating someone who’s already down, such was their new ideology. During the war, such moralistic trifles didn’t seem to bother them, Johann thought to himself gloomily.

And then the news came; transfer. Nothing else could be pried out of the commandant who had put the paper in front of Johann and moved a pen toward him.

“Sign it.”

“It’s in Russian. I don’t understand what it says.”

“It says that you’re agreeing to be transferred to a better camp.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Johann signed the paper. After all, there couldn’t have been possibly a worse camp after this swampland, could there?

It was about fifty of them on the train◦– all officers◦– and this time they were moving westward and this already cheered them up. When they spilled onto the platform, hollow-eyed and depleted, they were taken into what indeed appeared to be a palace compared to their previous place of confinement.

“Welcome to Camp 5093!” A camp commandant received them personally, a cane in hand, strangely resembling an SS officer in his jodhpurs and tall, shiny boots. “An officers’ paradise.”

It was, for a few days at least. Johann was given an “office job,” which was typing the reports for the camp’s accountant, a young man in round glasses who hardly spoke two words with him except for actual work matters. He was a former accountant in a concentration camp, prior to his superiors shipping him off to the front during the last months of the war, it turned out. In response to Johann’s astonished look as to how he was still alive, Klein only shrugged with wonderful nonchalance. “They wanted an accountant more than they wanted to execute another Nazi. And I have a lot of experience.”

Johann stopped asking questions right after that. He suddenly had nothing else to talk to the fellow about.

The camp consisted of two parts, separated with a stream in which the POWs were allowed to swim whenever they wanted. Carrying his books from the accountant’s office to the Kommandatura, he still couldn’t believe that there was a soccer field and a field for gymnastics, with a volleyball net, stretched between two poles; that there was a barrack which housed a movie theater and another one with a concert hall. But as soon as he started inquiring about all those places, the response that he got suddenly made a lot of sense.

“Those are all for the Party members, sonny. The League of German Officers and National Committee Freies Deutschland, ” an elderly man with a weary look in his eyes and a head full of gray hair, replied. “Indulge all you like; just hand them over your dignity first.”