David Benioff - City of Thieves

“I do love this country. Beautiful land.” He lowered his head and gave another apologetic shrug. “All this talk, you are thinking, but we are still fighting a war, aren’t we? The truth is, my friends, we need you. Each of you will serve the cause. In your hands you hold copies of your illustrious regime’s printed lies. You know how honest these papers are! They told you this war would never happen, and here we are! They told you the Germans would be expelled by August, but tell me”—and here he gave a stage shiver— “does it feel like August to you? But never mind that, never mind. Each of you will read aloud one paragraph. Those we judge literate will come with us to Vyborg, where I can promise you three meals a day while you translate documents for the provisional government. Working in a heated building! Those who fail, well… The work will be a little rougher. I have never been to the steel mills in Estonia, but I hear they can be dangerous places. Still, we’ll give you better grub than whatever slop the Red Army was handing out—and I will not even try to guess what you civilians have been eating these past few months.”

Some of the older peasants groaned and shook their heads, making eye contact with one another, exchanging shrugs. The Einsatzkommando nodded to the Gebirgsjäger translator and within seconds the two Germans began testing the prisoners. They needed to hear only a few sentences to judge the Russians’ literacy. I looked at my copy of Pravda . Atop the lead article was a bold-faced exhortation from Stalin himself. COMPATRIOTS! COMRADES! ETERNAL GLORY TO THE HEROES WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES FOR FREEDOM AND THE HAPPINESS OF OUR NATION!

The old peasants shrugged and handed their copies back to the Germans without looking at the text. Many of the younger men from the collectives struggled to form a few words. These prisoners took the test seriously, frowning as they tried to decipher the letters. The Germans laughed kindly at the mistakes, slapping the illiterates on their shoulders, joking with them.

“You never bothered with the books, did you? Too busy chasing the girls, eh?”

Soon the prisoners relaxed and shouted at their friends on the other end of the line. They laughed along with their captors when they stuttered out the words. A few made up their own articles, pretending to read while inventing accounts of battles outside Moscow or the bombing of Pearl Harbor, doing a passable job of imitating the reporting style they’d heard on the radio. The Germans seemed to enjoy the ruse; both sides knew nobody was fooled.

The Germans asked each failure to step to the left. The first few men to stand there looked embarrassed about their public humiliation, but they cheered up as the ranks of the unlettered grew.

“Ah, Sasha, you too? I thought you were the bright one!”

“Look at him squirming over there in front of the officer! Come on, come on, it’s the steel mills with us! What, you thought you might get the office job? What a joker; look at him, still at it!”

“Old Edik, you think you can walk all the way to Estonia? Eh? Come on, cheer up, we’ll give you a hand!”

The men who could read wanted to impress the Germans. They recited the lines like actors delivering monologues. Many of them kept going after they were told to stop, giving little flourishes to the bigger words, demonstrating their ease with the vocabulary. They stepped to the right, proud and beaming, nodding to their educated fellows, pleased with how the day had gone. Vyborg wasn’t so far, and working in a heated building with three meals a day was a better deal than sitting in a trench all night waiting for the mortars to drop.

Kolya rolled his eyes, watching the literates congratulate each other. “Look at them,” he muttered under his breath. “They want a prize because they can read the newspaper. And look how condescending those Fritzes are. Maybe I’ll give them the first chapter of Eugene Onegin . Think that would impress them? Sixty stanzas, rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. They think they’re the only culture in Europe? They really want to match Goethe and Heine against Pushkin and Tolstoy? I’ll give them music. It’s closer than they think, but I’ll give them music. And philosophy. But literature? No, I think not.”

The black-capped Einsaztkommando was only two men down the line from Kolya, who stood to my left. I felt a gloved hand squeezing my right hand and I turned to see Vika, her pale face tilted up toward mine, her fierce eyes unblinking even through the slanting rays of sunlight. She had taken my hand to alert me of something, but she did not let go as quickly as she might have—or at least this is what I told myself. I could make her love me. Why not? So what if her general attitude toward me was bored disgust?

“You don’t read,” she informed me with that practiced whisper, too quiet for anyone else to hear. She kept watching me to make sure I understood. For once in my life, I didn’t need an explanation.

The Einsatzkommando, as patient and benevolent as a professor, stood listening to the Red Army man beside Kolya.

“Soon, Europe will fly the great flag of freedom for the nations—”

“Good.”

“—and peace between the nations.”

“Good, good. To the right.”

I elbowed Kolya’s arm. He glanced at me, impatient, ready to show this patronizing Fascist the real face of Russian letters. I shook my head once. The Einsatzkommando walked up to him. There was no chance to say anything. All I could do was stare into Kolya’s eyes and hope he understood.

“Ah, here’s a fine-looking man of the steppes. Have a bit of the Don Cossack in you?”

Kolya stood straight. He was taller than the Einsatz man and for a few seconds he looked down at the German without opening his mouth.

“I wouldn’t know. Born and bred in Piter.”

“Beautiful city. Seems a shame calling it Leningrad. Ugly name, isn’t it? I mean aside from all the politics. Just seems wrong to me. Saint Petersburg, that’s a name that resonates. All the history! I’ve been there, you know. Moscow, too. Expect I’ll visit them again before too long. Now, show me what you can do.”

Kolya held up the newspaper and studied the print. He took a deep breath, opened his mouth to begin—and laughed, shaking his head, offering the newspaper to the German.

“I can’t even fake it, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize! Shoulders like yours would be wasted at a desk. Good man, you’ll be fine.”

Kolya nodded, smiling at the officer like a handsome idiot. He was supposed to join the group of illiterates, but he lingered next to me, his hands in his pockets.

“I want to see if my friend can do any better,” he said.

“Well, he can’t do any worse,” said the Einsatzkommando with a smile of his own. He stepped in front of me and looked me over. “How old are you? Fifteen?”

I nodded. I didn’t know if it was safer to be fifteen or seventeen; I lied on instinct.

“Where were your grandparents from?”

“Moscow.”

“All four of them?”

“Yes.” I was lying automatically now, not even thinking about the words before I said them. “My parents met there.”

“You don’t look Russian to me. If I had to guess, I’d say you were a Jew.”

“We call him that all the time,” said Kolya, ruffling my hair and grinning. “Our little Jew! Makes him crazy. But look at that nose! If I didn’t know his family, I’d swear he was a Yid.”

“There are Jews with small noses,” said the German, “and Gentiles with large ones. We can’t be careless with our assumptions. I saw a Jewess in Warsaw a few months ago, her hair was blonder than yours.”

He gestured at Kolya’s bare head, smiled, and winked.