Echo of the Past

Полина Руссу  ©Echo of the Past, 2005,Polina Roussou ©Echo of the Past, 2005



‘Line up in pairs!’ a German officer shouted at the prisoners who had been urged out of the barracks into the late autumn morning with loud, impatient shrieks. ‘Hurry up, quickly!’
The prisoners scurried one after the other, weak to the point of collapsing; driven with a vicious punch or a blow from the butt end of the rifle from behind. The dull look in their eyes showed their hopelessness. By the end of 1944, about 400 men including a few teenagers were still alive in that Nazi D Concentration camp.
‘Why in pairs?’ a thirteen-year-old Jewish teenager tugged at the sleeve of the young man standing beside him. ‘They are not going to shoot us in pairs, are they?’
‘Shh, Ben, shh, they will if they hear your question.’ The young man was a Soviet pilot, whose plane had crashed on Polish territory occupied by the Nazis.
‘What are they going to do with us this time?’
The boy’s voice trembled and his wide-open dark eyes were filled with panic. By the time Gvozdev was brought into the camp, Ben had been there for two years. At the beginning of the war, the Nazis occupied the Western part of the Ukraine and drove all the Jews into a ghetto. In 1942, the ghetto was destroyed and a small group of the surviving Jews were sent to a concentration camp that provided living material for Nazi medical scientists. Men and women were separated. Ben’s mother and his younger sister Sveta were on the other side of a barbed wire fence, shut out of sight by a high wall. His grandmother had died in the ghetto.
A Nazi lieutenant with a red scar across his cheek ordered the prisoners to march around the camp. He walked down the length of the column scrutinizing every one of them. Three or four officers were standing in the center watching them through binoculars. After a while, one of them, a tall young officer waved his hand to stop the column. He beckoned to the lieutenant and pointed out four or five prisoners of different physical build. They were taken to a waiting truck at the entrance of the camp. Nobody ever saw them again.
The rest of the prisoners were ordered into the kitchen, a large room with bare cracked walls and long tables where the cooks gave them a portion of barley gruel, a piece of bread and a mug of weak tea. The Nazis watched as the hungry prisoners devoured their meager ration. A slow eater or a man who lacked appetite was assessed as sick and shot like a horse unfit for work. After breakfast, the prisoners were taken outside the camp to dig trenches.
Ben looked around. On the left there was a vast barren field. On the right there was the camp with watchtowers at every corner equipped with machine-guns and searchlights. The guards were on the alert to shoot if somebody tried to escape.
‘Where have they taken them?’ the boy asked.
‘There are rumors that the Nazis are experimenting on people,’ Gvozdev said shrugging his shoulders and not wanting to give away what he knew. There was a laboratory hidden away in a forest near the concentration camp where German scientists carried out experiments using humans as their guinea pigs. His squadron had been ordered to locate the laboratory and destroy it. They managed to find it but were attacked and hit by the Nazi Messerschmidt.
‘What kind of experiments, Gvozdev?’ The boy stopped digging for a moment and stared at the young man. ‘Is it possible to use people instead of animals?’
‘What do you know about it, boy?’
The boy knew.
‘My father was a medical researcher.’
‘Where’s your father now?’
Ben didn’t answer. His mother had forbidden him to tell anybody that his father had been arrested by the KGB and incriminated with propaganda against the USSR and espionage in favor of Germany.
After arriving home from a conference in Munich, his father had praised the high standard of living in Germany and the remarkable development of science there. His wife had warned, don’t talk like that. You keep forgetting where you live. Think of the children.
Then his father began to receive letters from Germany. Reading them, he would become silent and spend a lot of his time alone in his study, avoiding the family. Ben recalled quarrels his mother had with his father, as she reprimanded him for not telling her something that Ben couldn't understand.
All of this ran through his mind now like a flash of lightning and he stood with wide-open eyes looking nowhere. ‘Can they take my mother and Sveta for their experiments?’
Gvozdev felt the teenager’s consternation. Since the beginning of the war he had lost many of his friends and faced death every day. He knew what fear was.
‘Forget it.’
Gvozdev shifted the spade to his left hand for a second and patted Ben’s shoulder. It felt thin and bony.
A Nazi soldier patrolling their lines stopped beside them. He hit Gvozdev on the back with his rifle so hard that he fell into the trench. The men tensed. When somebody fell in, the guard usually shot him on the spot. Luckily this one was not in the mood to shoot. He moved on and muttered through his teeth with disgust, ‘Lazy Russian swine!’
Gvozdev struggled to his feet, his face without a drop of color. He went on digging without lifting his head. Ben sensed the feeling of indignity the pilot must have been suffering and burst into tears.
‘Don’t!’ said Gvozdev. ‘Be a man.’

The barracks where the prisoners slept had been built on the eve of the war; they were drafty and cold as a fridge. After a day of physical work and little food most of the men fell asleep with exhaustion soon after they lay down on their plank beds. Some would not wake up, they froze in their sleep; some developed severe pneumonia and were shot, as they were considered not fit to work. Some were killed just for fun when the guards got drunk.
The life of the prisoners hung by a thread every day, and as they pulled the one thin blanket over their bodies to sleep, they committed themselves to memories of family and friends, bidding them farewell.
Gvozdev’s dreams were often of the girl he loved. They had arranged to get married after he graduated from the Air Academy but WWII interrupted their plans. He remembered the softness of her lips as they kissed for the last time. He held her gently to his chest and they stood as if charmed. Gvozdev felt warmth flow through his body and relaxed. Is it real? He opened his eyes.
A warm fluid was dripping from the planks above where Ben slept. Urine! The boy had wet his pants in his sleep. Gvozdev wondered with bitterness, what would the future hold for this boy?
It was late autumn and the winds were icy. The man and the teenager had to dig out in the open in wet clothes. Ben shivered. His face was blue with cold but he wouldn't complain. Ashamed, he didn't’ dare lifting his eyes. With his head down, he repeated, ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry.’
‘It happens.’ Gvozdev looked into the boy’s eyes and gave him a smile. It comforted Ben and brought back memories of his father who had always cheered him up when he was upset with something. Many years had passed since he had heard a kind word. The number of prisoners was constantly shrinking. Every week the Nazis came to the camp for another selection.
Ben would scrutinize the officers. There were usually three or four, new faces every time except for the tall young man with the fair complexion. Though he seemed the youngest of them all, it looked as if he was higher in rank with the power to select the right men.
Ben traced no hatred in the officer’s demeanor even when their eyes met. The young man was calm and confident. He never raised his voice, never shouted orders except the once when a guard mistook Ben for some other man and pushed him out into the centre of the camp. ‘Leave the boy out,’ he had yelled angrily, ‘take the one who was beside him on the right.’ Ben’s relief lasted for only a second. He looked at the man who had to take his place and who might have rejoiced that he would be able to see the sun at least for one more day, and felt guilt stricken. But he knew it would be his turn when there were no more adults and speculated as to what the Nazi doctors could do to him. His imagination haunted him with grizzly pictures of his bodily parts mutilated.
One Sunday night, when most of the prisoners had already been taken, Gvozdev reached up to Ben saying he had a premonition that he would be next to go. He gave Ben his address, the names of his fiance and close relatives and asked him to repeat the details, making sure he memorized them. If Ben survived and found the family in Byelorussia, Gvozdev’s loved ones may receive some comfort in their loss.
It happened a week later. Gvozdev squeezed Ben’s hand as a sign of farewell when a guard pushed him with his rifle butt in the direction of the truck.
‘Be a man! Never give up.’ Ben imprinted in his mind the tall figure of his friend with his head proudly up as he proceeded to his last earthly destination. He memorized his last words and vowed to live by them in Gvozdev’s honor.

Some weeks later, the Soviet artillery and a squadron of fighter planes approached the area and began to unload their high explosives. The whole region was churned up. There was panic and turmoil in the camp and Ben was frozen with fear. He sat cross-legged on his left side upper plank bed listening to the gunfire, unable to move. His heart stopped beating every time he heard an explosion. The men near him were silent, too. Everybody was waiting for the worst. Suddenly they heard a long, sharp whistle and then a roar. They dived to the floor. An elderly man whose bed was next to Ben’s screamed, ‘Get off there, get down!’ The force of the explosion raised the roof before Ben had had a chance to move, and in the next moment it fell, crushing the plank beds and most of the men who lay on the floor. A few left side planks remained unaffected. Ben climbed down from his plank and scrambled to his feet. All around him were dead, disfigured bodies. Russian bombs had dropped on the camp and killed the prisoners and the Nazi jailers as well. In the middle of the turmoil, those who were still alive and able to run fled in different directions. The few Nazi survivors made no attempt to restrain them. Now they struggled to save their own lives.
The wall that had divided the camp into two parts was now just a mountain of stones. In the hope of finding his mother and sister, he raced to the other side. He found them among other women and children, though it was hard to recognize their faces after the two years of separation. They lay on the ground in a pool of their own blood. The Nazis had shot them before retreating. Ben knelt beside them and patted their cold faces. He shed no tears. He couldn't move. A few hours later, the Soviet soldiers who liberated the camp found him there, paralyzed with grief.
to be continued on this site on demand...


© Copyright: Полина Руссу, A2014, Polina Roussou© 2005, Canada
Свидетельство о публикации №214010500974