Armageddon - Leon Uris

Every few moments another truckload of deportees arrived. By morning they had been crammed into the train cars. The windows were barred. Obviously these very cars had made other excursions with “suspect elements.” The shades were drawn, the doors locked and guarded. The train left Moscow in a southeasterly direction toward an unknown destination.

There were seventy persons packed into Heinrich’s car. He found himself to be one of the few true Germans in the lot. For the most part they were made up of persons of German ancestry from the Volga Republic. Rumor spread, even through locked cars, that the entire Volga Republic was being deported en masse; some had a German mother or father ... some had Germanic names ... some had no idea why they were there.

It was a tortuous trip of stop and go. The car stank from the lack of air. Rations and water were thrown in once daily as one feeds a pack of animals in a cage. The only way one could relieve himself was through a twelve-inch hole cut in the floor in the center of the car.

Ten days and a thousand miles later they were allowed to lift the blinds for the first time and leave the train for a stretch. There were dead to be removed from the car, and seriously ill to be left to die. The station was a mob scene of refugees. Tens of thousands of homeless persons who had fled in the face of the German assault were wandering aimlessly, unfed, desperate.

From the signs and the appearance of new guards and rail workers with dark eyes and yellow-brown skins and stubby legs, Heinrich reasoned they had passed beyond the Volga River into the foothills of the Urals in the faraway Soviet Republic of Kazakh.

They continued their journey south, far far past the Urals to Lake Balkesh, at that place where the borders of Siberia, Mongolia, and China meet, and then swung north to the remote city of Karaganda and even beyond that for several hundred miles.

On the twenty-sixth day of this nightmare, the train came to a halt at a wooden shed at a siding of a village bearing the name: Settlement #128. The passengers debarked. Dozens of horse-drawn carts awaited them. The roll was called:

“Bloss. Settlement #89.”

“Hauser. Settlement #44.”

“Bauer. Settlement #123.”

Heinrich Hirsch watched them trudge off to the carts with only a small bundle of their belongings. So this was it, the land of the exiles! Villages without names a thousand miles from nowhere. Here were the survivors of the Kulaks, the independent farmers whom Stalin exiled in his drive to collectivize agriculture at the end of the twenties. Here were the political survivors of the purges. Here were German prisoners from the first war who had never been returned. No doubt his mother was in one of those nameless villages. He dared not inquire.

The odyssey of Heinrich Hirsch could have ended with him going off in the back of a cart down a dirt road into oblivion except that the regime had other uses for him. He was returned to Karaganda.

Heinrich had heard about the city. Karaganda, built under the first five-year plan, was praised in meeting after meeting.

Karaganda could disillusion the most stalwart servant of the party. This planned city of a quarter of a million, the epitome of the Soviet pioneering spirit, turned out to be a dirty, dilapidated hole beyond description, with an evil film of coal dust infecting it.

On the outskirts Heinrich Hirsch saw thousands of large holes in the ground. These were covered with rags, wood, and tin. These oversized graves served as homes for the less fortunate Kulaks who had not been resettled in the nameless villages. A great number of them were aged, crippled, and helpless. In this place they lived on scraps and awaited merciful death from the final horror of “People’s Socialism.”

There were a few modern buildings in Karaganda. They belonged to the NKVD, the Town Soviet, District Committee of the Communist Party, and the Educational and Cultural Institute. In this forsaken hole, Heinrich Hirsch assumed new duties as a reinstated Komsomol member of the Agitation and Propaganda Corps.

There were two objectives. First, the entire German Volga Republic had been deported, many into this district. He had to continue to enlighten the exiles, and keep up their agricultural and manufacturing quotas.

The second objective became more apparent as the war wore on. Trainloads of German prisoners arrived and were encamped. Heinrich Hirsch was on one of the teams to reeducate them. He found German defectors, obtained signatures for petitions against Nazi Germany and used them for broadcasts and newspaper articles.

He retrained them as Communists. Repentant German prisoners could become members of the “anti-Fascists” who were slated to become important in Russia’s postwar occupation plans for Germany.

Hirsch did his job well. In 1943 Rudi Wöhlman traveled to Karaganda and assigned many Germans to new duties. Among the appointees was Heinrich Hirsch, who had undergone his third redemption.

Once again he crossed the great Kuzkah desert. This time he traveled on an unguarded train and with new papers without the damnations GERMAN and JEW stamped on them. His destination was the city of Ufa in the Autonomous Republic of Bashkir, some eight hundred miles east of Moscow.

As the Russians evacuated citizens and machinery into their vast lands certain cities received certain types of evacuees with similar characteristics; Alma Ata and Tashkent became wartime centers of artists and scientists; others drew manufacturing complexes and became transport or training points.

Ufa became the center of International Communism. Under agreement with the Western Allies, the International Comintern had been officially dissolved. But in remote Ufa, it continued to operate under a different set of titles.

Heinrich Hirsch was attached as a member of the International Society for the Aid of Class War Prisoners. In Ufa he joined the cream of foreign Communist trainees.

Like most Soviet cities in the hinterlands, Ufa was jammed with starving refugees and the horrible privations of wartime. However, this did not affect the Comintern trainees who continued to live splendidly.

His particular school was known as Technical School #77 for Industrial Economy. In this institute Germans, Czechs, Austrians, Spaniards, Bulgars, Poles, Italians, French, South Americans, and Africans all trained for the singular purposes of infiltrating, subverting, and destroying their former homelands.

In this inner sanctum of hard-core trainees the tactics of keeping the imperialists on the defensive were emphasized by use of constant, prodding harassment and pressure. Lenin remained the infallible source of inspiration. “Push out a bayonet. If it strikes fat, push deeper. If it strikes iron, pull back for another day.”

In order to learn how to counter imperialist propaganda the students were exposed to Western books, newspapers, speeches, broadcasts. For in Ufa, the enemy, the true enemy, was everyone who was not a Communist. This meant the temporary American and British allies just as it had meant the Nazis during the Non-Aggression Pact days.

During the meticulous courses in counterpropaganda Heinrich Hirsch, for the first time, was exposed to Jefferson, Lincoln, and Paine and Western thought. All of the Anglo/American ideologies were thoroughly dissected and destroyed in the classrooms, but at the same time, a new flood of thought opened.

For the first time in his life he was able to read that all of the world’s ideas were not discovered by Marx, Lenin, or Stalin. Added to his earlier confusions and disillusions, Hirsch knew that he could become an agent of the revolution only through the fear of power and the silencing forever of his own voices of inquisitiveness.

Something else happened to him in Ufa. Heinrich had reached his twenty-third year without ever having sex with a woman. He had always been too tired from his studies and too dedicated to indulge in such nonsense.