David Benioff - City of Thieves

My father would have known what was happening in that farmhouse the moment he looked through the window, even at seventeen. So I felt like an idiot when I finally realized why these girls were here, who was feeding them and making sure they had enough firewood stacked beneath the eaves.

The blond girl glared at Kolya, her nostrils flaring, her skin flushing beneath her freckles.

“You… ,” she said, and for a moment she couldn’t say anything else, her anger was too intense to articulate. “You walk in here and condemn us? The Red Army hero? Where have you been, you and your army? The Germans came and burned everything, and where was your army? They shot my little brothers, my father, my grandfather, every man in my town, while you and your friends cowered somewhere else…. You come here and point your gun at me?”

“I’m not pointing my gun at anybody,” said Kolya. It was a strangely meek comment coming from him, and I knew he had already lost the fight.

“I would do anything to protect my sister,” she continued, nodding at the chubby brunet. “Anything at all. You were supposed to protect us. The glorious Red Army, Defenders of the People! Where were you?”

“We’ve been fighting them—”

“You can’t protect anybody. You abandoned us. If we don’t live in the city, we can’t be important, is that it? Let them have the peasants! Is that it?”

“Half the men in my unit died fighting for—”

“Half? If I was the general, all of my soldiers would die before we let a single Nazi into our country!”

“Well,” said Kolya, and for several seconds he said nothing else. Finally he pocketed his automatic. “I’m glad you’re not the general.”

Despite the rough start, it didn’t take us long to make peace with the girls. We needed one another. They hadn’t spoken to another Russian in two months, they didn’t have a radio, and they were desperate to hear news about the war. When they heard about the victories outside of Moscow, Galina, the young brunet, smiled at her sister, Nina, and nodded, as if she had predicted such a thing. The girls asked about Leningrad, but they weren’t interested in how many people died in December or how much ration bread was now allotted per month. The little country villages they were from had suffered even more than Piter, and stories of the unconquered city’s misery only bored them. Instead they wanted to know if the Winter Palace still stood (it did), if the Bronze Horseman had been moved (it had not), and whether a certain shop on the Nevsky Prospekt, apparently famous for selling the finest shoes in Russia, had survived the attacks (neither Kolya nor I knew or cared).

We didn’t ask the girls too many questions. We knew the story well enough without the details. The men from their towns had been slaughtered. Many of the young women had been sent west, to work as slaves in German factories. Others fled to the east, walking hundreds of kilometers with their babies and their family icons, hoping they could move faster than the Wehrmacht. The prettiest girls were not allowed to follow their sisters east or west. They were reserved for the invaders’ pleasure.

We all sat on the floor near the fireplace. Our socks and gloves rested on the mantel, getting warm and dry. In exchange for information, the girls gave us cups of scalding hot tea, slices of black bread, and two baked potatoes. The potatoes had already been split open for us. Kolya took a bite and looked at me. I took a bite and looked at Galina, sweet faced and plump armed. She sat with her back against the stone ledge of the fireplace, her hands tucked under her bare legs.

“Is that butter?” I asked her.

She nodded. The potatoes tasted like real potatoes, not the sprouted, shriveled, bitter lumps we ate in Piter. A good potato with butter and salt could buy you three hand grenades or a pair of leather-and-felt boots in the Haymarket.

“Do they ever bring eggs?” asked Kolya.

“One time,” said Galina. “We made an omelet.”

Kolya tried to make eye contact with me, but I only cared about my buttered potato.

“They have a base near here?”

“The officers are in a house near the lake,” said Lara, the girl who looked Chechen but was actually half Spanish. “In Novoye Koshkino.”

“That’s a town?”

“Yes. That is my town.”

“And the officers definitely have eggs?”

Now I looked up at him. I had decided to chew the potato very slowly, to make the experience last. We had been lucky for dinner two nights in a row, the Darling soup and now these potatoes. I didn’t expect our luck to last for three nights. I chewed with precision and watched Kolya’s face for any sign of stupid intentions.

“I don’t know if they have them right now,” said Lara, laughing a little bit. “You’re really hungry for eggs?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling back at her, dimples creasing his cheeks. Kolya knew which smile flaunted his dimples best. “I’ve been craving eggs since June. Why do you think we’re out here? We’re looking for eggs!”

The girls laughed at this strange joke.

“Are you organizing the partisans?” asked Lara.

“We can’t discuss our orders,” said Kolya. “But let’s just say it’s going to be a long winter for Fritz.”

The girls glanced at one another, unimpressed by the swaggering talk. They had seen the Wehrmacht at closer range than Kolya had; they had formed their own opinions about who was going to win the war.

“How far is Novoye Koshkino?” he asked.

Lara shrugged. “Not far. Six, seven kilometers.”

“Might be a good target,” he said to me, chewing a slice of black bread, self-consciously nonchalant. “Pick off a bunch of Wehrmacht officers, leave them with a headless brigade.”

“They’re not Wehrmacht,” said Nina. Something about the way she spoke made me look up at her. She was not a fearful girl, but what she was saying frightened her. Her sister, Galina, stared into the fire, chewing on her lower lip. “They’re Einsatzgruppen.”

Russians had gotten a crash course in German since June. Dozens of words had entered our everyday vocabulary overnight: Panzers and Junkers, Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, Blitzkrieg and Gestapo, and all the other capitalized nouns. Einsatzgruppen, when I first heard it, didn’t have the same sinister tang as some of the others. It sounded like the name of a finicky accountant in a bad nineteenth-century stage comedy. But the name no longer seemed funny, not after all the articles I’d read, the radio reports, and the overheard conversations. The Einsatzgruppen were Nazi death squads, killers handpicked from the ranks of the regular army, the Waffen-SS, and the Gestapo, chosen for their brutal efficiency and their pure Aryan blood. When the Germans invaded a country, the Einsatzgruppen would follow behind the combat divisions, waiting until the territory was secured before hunting down their chosen targets: Communists, Gypsies, intellectuals, and, of course, Jews. Every week Truth and Red Star printed new photographs of ditches piled high with murdered Russians, the men all shot in the back of the head after they had dug their own communal graves. There must have been high-level debates in the newspapers’ editorial offices on whether or not to run such potentially demoralizing pictures. But as morbid as the images were, they crystallized matters: this was our fate if we lost the war. These were the stakes.

“It’s the Einsatzgruppen officers who come here at night?” Kolya asked.

“Yes,” said Nina.

“I didn’t know they bothered with artillery,” I said.

“They don’t, not usually. It’s a game they play. They make bets. They aim for different buildings in the city and the bomber pilots tell them what they hit. That’s why we asked about the Winter Palace. That’s the one they all want to hit.”