فصل پنجم

5

Winter, 1944-45

WHEN THE EASTERN FRONT collapsed, the Russian Army rolled like lava across Eastern Europe, leaving behind a landscape of smoke and ashes, peopled by the starving and the dead.

From the east and from the south the Russians came, up toward the Baltic Sea from the 3rd and 2nd Belorussian Fronts, driving ahead of them broken and retreating units of the Waffen-SS, desperate to reach the coast where they hoped to be evacuated by boat to Denmark.

It was the end of the Hiwis’ ambitions. After they had faithfully killed and pillaged for their Nazi masters, shot Jews and Gypsies, none of them got to be SS. They were called Osttruppen, and were barely considered as soldiers. Thousands were put in slave labor battalions and worked to death.

But a few deserted and went into business for themselves….

A handsome Lithuanian estate house near the Polish border, open like a dollhouse on one side where an artillery shell had blown the wall away. The family flushed from the basement by the first shellburst and killed by the second, were dead in the ground-floor kitchen. Dead soldiers, German and Russian, lay in the garden. A German staff car was on its side, blown half in two by a shell.

An SS major was propped on a divan in front of the living room fireplace, blood frozen on the legs of his trousers. His sergeant pulled a blanket off a bed and put it over him and got a fire going, but the room was open to the sky. He got the major’s boot off and his toes were black. The sergeant heard a noise outside. He unslung his carbine and went to the window.

A half-track ambulance, a Russian-made ZiS-44 but with International Red Cross markings, rumbled up the gravel drive.

Grutas got out of the ambulance first with a white cloth.

“We are Swiss. You have wounded? How many are you?”

The sergeant looked over his shoulder. “Medics, Major. Will you go with them, sir?” The major nodded.

Grutas and Dortlich, a head taller, pulled a stretcher out of the half-track.

The sergeant came out to speak to them. “Easy with him, he’s hit in the legs. His toes are frozen. Maybe frostbite gangrene. You have a field hospital?” “Yes, of course, but I can operate here,” Grutas told the sergeant and shot him twice in the chest, dust flying off the uniform. The man’s legs collapsed and Grutas stepped over him through the doorway and shot the major through the blanket.

Milko, Kolnas, and Grentz piled out of the back of the half-track. They wore a mix of uniforms— Lithuanian police, Lithuanian medics, Estonian medical corps, International Red Cross—but all wore large medical insignia on their armbands.

There is much bending involved in stripping the dead; the looters grunted and bitched at the effort, scattering papers and wallet photos. The major still lived, and he raised his hand to Milko. Milko took the wounded man’s watch and stuffed it into his pocket.

Grutas and Dortlich carried a rolled tapestry out of the house and threw it into their half-track truck.

They put the canvas stretcher on the ground and tossed onto it watches, gold eyeglasses, rings.

A tank came out of the woods, a Russian T-34 in winter camouflage, its cannon traversing the field, the machine gunner standing up in the hatch.

A man hiding in a shed behind the farmhouse broke from cover and ran across the field toward the trees, carrying in his arms an ormolu clock, leaping over bodies.

The tank’s machine gun stuttered and the running looter pitched forward, tumbling to fall beside the clock, his face smashed and the clock’s face smashed too; his heart and the clock beat once and stopped.

“Grab a body!” Grutas said.

They threw a corpse on top of the loot on the stretcher. The tank’s turret turned toward them. Grutas waved a white flag and pointed to the medical insignia on the truck. The tank moved on.

A last look around the house. The major was still alive. He gripped Grutas’ pants leg as he passed. He got his arms around Grutas’ leg and would not let go. Grutas bent to him, seized the insignia on his collar.

“We were supposed to get these skulls,” he said. “Maybe the maggots can find one in your face.” He shot the major in the chest. The man let go of Grutas’ pants leg and looked at his own bare wrist as though curious about the time of his death.

The half-track truck bounced across the field, its tracks mushing bodies, and as it reached the woods, the canvas lifted on the back and Grentz threw the body out.

From above, a screaming Stuka dive bomber came after the Russian tank, cannon blazing. Under the cover of the forest canopy, buttoned up in the tank, the crew heard a bomb go off in the trees and splinters and shrapnel rang on the armored hull.