Armageddon - Leon Uris

This was the formal opening of his religious studies. Denied the God of his mother, he adopted Communism as his religion. Karl Marx was god, Lenin the son of god, and Stalin the great disciple.

Their writings were studied as meticulously as a Jesuit studies Christianity, and under greater discipline. Like all religions, this one, too, promised a heaven that seemed beyond the reach of the living.

The first time Heinrich Hirsch knew mortal fear it came in the form of Nazis and Brownshirts marching in jackboots.

This time it came on a knock on the door in the middle of the night. The purges!

There were new banner headlines and inflamed speeches and the loudspeakers harangued: SPIES! TRAITORS! FASCIST HIRELINGS! AGENTS! SPECULATORS! SWINDLERS! DEVIATIONISTS! PROVOCATEURS! TROTSKYITES! MUTINEERS!

There was advice to FIND THEM! SHOOT THEM! DESTROY THEM!

And each new blast ended with a solemn prayer: LONG LIVE COMRADE STALIN AND OUR GLORIOUS COMMUNIST PARTY!

Things began to change at School #78. Almost overnight the food became gruel, like that of the rest of the Russians, and the pampering stopped. One by one teachers disappeared; the parties, the weekend dances, the fun and laughter stopped.

On a Saturday, eighteen months after his arrival in Moscow, Heinrich Hirsch went one day to the room of his mother. The door was sealed and padlocked. Frantically, the boy tried to open it, then ran through the house pleading with everyone, one by one, to try to find out what had happened. No one heard anything, saw anything, knew anything.

Three weeks later he received a postcard. The message was printed. The signature might have been his mother’s. It read: “I have been guilty of provocations and confessed to treason against the Soviet Union and have voluntarily accepted deportation to Siberia. Forget about me.”

Mother a traitor of the Soviet Union! Impossible! Impossible!

Then, other children of School #78 went out on weekends and found sealed doors and received postcards from parents confessing to treason.

The teachers were too frightened to speak about it, but after a time the students talked among themselves. Each one knew that his own parent was not guilty, but the intense indoctrination paid off. They each came to justify the fact there would be a few mistakes of justice under the urgencies of the times.

Despite this black mark against him, Heinrich Hirsch had shown such great skill in political studies that he came to the second stage in his career as a Communist. He was called for an interview with the possibility of joining Komsomol, the Young Communist League.

He recited his new duties flawlessly:

“To study the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and our beloved Stalin; to encourage the masses toward our ideals; to carry out all resolutions, proclamations, and edicts of the Supreme Soviet and the Communist Party without question; to protect our great socialist heritage with sacrifice; to acquire knowledge, culture, and develop physically and never cease working for the Motherland against its enemies and to never cease the struggle until all peoples are freed of fascist and imperialist bondage through International Communism.”

“What is the principle upon which Komsomol is founded?”

“The principle of democratic centralism.”

He was admitted to higher institutions for languages, then Marxism, and then International Communism. Heinrich Hirsch closed his mind to the things happening around him. Names of men who were heroes of the Revolution yesterday became the names of traitors today. Marshals of the Red Army, members of Lenin’s Politburo, members of the Central Committee all fell under the ax of the purge. Suicides of great names often took the place of official confessions. One had no choice but to study and keep his nose clean.

At Institute #16 for advanced studies of foreign Communism Heinrich again saw Rudi Wöhlman, titular head of the German Communists in the Soviet Union. Wöhlman had come to Institute #16 for a series of lectures on German Communism.

He remembered Heinrich as a little boy of five in Berlin and, of course, remembered his martyred father, Werner Hirsch, very well. Often times Heinrich heard his father speak of Rudi Wöhlman as the great hope of the German Communists.

Wöhlman had left Berlin for special schooling in Moscow in the mid-1920s, but never returned. It was a great disappointment for the German Communists. After his training in Moscow, Wöhlman was assigned as a commissar of the Soviet Union’s German-speaking Volga Republic.

No wonder Heinrich looked forward to his lectures with great anticipation. Here at last was the link between Moscow and Berlin. What followed was a terrible disappointment. Rudi Wöhlman’s speeches were a recitation of the current political line; he delivered them with parrot-like perfection, the words a rehash of a hundred speeches Heinrich had listened to before.

Rudi Wöhlman showed himself to be a shrewd politician rather than a man of thought. He had a sheen of glibness which hid the lack of depth or intelligence. He used the same verbal acrobatics all the teachers used. Wöhlman kept it safe, worked around the core of delicate problems, kept clear of personal opinions, and sidestepped pointed questions by having the students argue them, then placing himself as a final judge. A man of slight build with an immaculately trimmed goatee and darting eyes, each thought and word was calculated to keep him out of trouble.

By the end of the third lecture, Heinrich came to the conclusion that Rudi Wöhlman was a German in name only. He had not suffered during the Nazi era, nor did he show any allegiance to the German working class. Wöhlman was another of those “foreign” comrades whom Moscow kept because they had meaningful names in their former native lands. In fact, they had no grasp of the struggle in the countries they pretended to represent, but merely carried out Moscow edicts.

Heinrich’s own father, although a devout Communist, was nonetheless a devout German. He had impressed in the boy that Marx and Engels and the Communist idea were all German. The Soviet Union had merely borrowed them. Wöhlman’s lectures left no doubt that Moscow now was the mecca of Communism.

The first disasters of the campaign against Finland and the vulnerability of the Red Army threw him into a quandary.

The great shock came with the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. Barrages of written and verbal explanations came from the propaganda organs to “prove” that the pact was a scientific treaty consistent with socialist aims. But, explain as they might with all of their persuasive forces, the complete reversal overnight of Soviet foreign policy and avowed Communist goals had a lasting effect upon him and thousands of others. Heinrich Hirsch could not remember when he was not fighting Nazis. These Nazis, now in pact with Russia, were the very same who had murdered his father.

The recourse? There was no way to either question or protest—only justify. He reasoned that if there were flaws it was not in the system, which was scientifically perfect, but with the mortals who ran it and the pressures of the outside. After all, if the Western imperialists had not placed the Soviet Union in such circumstances, he reasoned, we would never have made an agreement with the Nazis.

The German panzers spilled into the Russian motherland in June of 1941, canceling the Pact. The words “fascist,” “Hitlerite,” and “Nazi,” which had not been heard in Moscow for the nearly two years of the treaty’s life, now poured out again in damnation of the aggressors. And all newscasts, speeches, writing ended with the cry, “Death to the Nazi enemy.”

On a night in September of 1941, three months after the German invasion, Heinrich Hirsch was awakened by a knocking on his door. Four NKVD men gave him ten minutes to gather a few personal items in a single bag. At secret-police headquarters his papers and Komsomol card were revoked. He was issued a new identification paper stamped with the words GERMAN and JEW, placed into a waiting truck filled with others who had been processed, and driven in the predawn hours to a barbed-wire enclosure on a rail siding on the outskirts of Moscow. A train of eighty-odd cars, some of them freight and cattle cars, stood by.