Beyond the Shadow of Night(35)

The entourage slowed to a halt. The Germans looked up, at first astonished, then gritting their teeth in anger.

Mykhail squinted to look more closely. The lower halves of the soldiers hung up in the trees were charred and shrunken.

“What happened?” Mykhail whispered to a soldier next to him.

“You don’t know about Stalin’s socks?” the man said.

Mykhail looked at him quizzically, then back up at the trees.

“Captured German soldiers. They tie their hands together over the branches, douse their feet in gasoline and . . .”

Mykhail’s stomach turned as he looked up. His weakened heart struggled to pump harder. He dragged his eyes away from the wizened forms hanging from the trees and looked down, a dribble of cold fear escaping from his mouth.

Then there was shouting. The Red Army prisoners turned to see the normally unflappable German soldiers arguing with each other as they pointed up into the trees. Scuffles broke out, some of them even raised their rifles to one another.

Then their weapons turned, and instinct took control of Mykhail. By the time he was conscious of what was happening he’d already hit the ground. Submachine guns had been let loose, powering vengeance into the Red Army. A body fell onto Mykhail’s legs, cracking his knees onto the concrete below. Another fell on his right arm and shoulder. He turned his head and met a face at close quarters. It belonged to a lifeless corpse, eyes bursting from its sockets in shock, blood pouring out of a neck wound.

And the shooting continued.

A shout rang out. “For Stalin’s socks!”

Mykhail closed his eyes and started crying. The gunfire continued. For a few seconds he considered getting to his feet—even charging at the German troops. At least that would end it. But even if he wanted to do that he couldn’t—he was pinned to the ground.

And then there were shouts in German, desperate and unrelenting. Voices were fighting bullets. Even Mykhail understood that they were ordering their troops to hold fire—and within thirty seconds the shouting had beaten off the gunfire.

Jackboots approached Mykhail.

“Those who are able, stand up.”

Mykhail didn’t move.

Louder: “Stand up if you can. It’s safe.”

Mykhail struggled at first, pulling his legs from under one corpse, pushing away the other. The German soldier grabbed his arm and helped him to his feet, but Mykhail stepped back—back toward the bigger mass of Red Army prisoners who had escaped the initial flurry of gunfire.

The Germans still argued, pointing and shouting. The prisoners steeled themselves to fall to the ground again. But no. Even the angriest of the German soldiers eventually breathed deeply, nodded agreement, and relaxed their weapons.

A few of them approached the prisoners.

“Wounded, come away,” they shouted.

Men holding their blood-soaked arms or limping from bullets to the leg went where they were directed, moving themselves to a grassy area to one side. “On the ground,” they were then told. “Face down.”

There were more whispers from the Germans. Some lined up in front of the main body of uninjured prisoners and pointed their weapons at them, holding them steady. Others approached the wounded.

In a short burst of gunfire all the wounded soldiers were shot dead, and below them the blades of grass were soon poking through pools of blood.

“We can’t carry any injured,” the German soldiers said, then picked their way through the mass of bodies lying on the ground, putting a bullet in the head of any that showed signs of life.

For a moment Mykhail envied those comrades. Perhaps he should have stayed on the ground.



A few days later, the men were behind barbed wire.

This was a POW camp, but it was hardly a prison, merely an encirclement of fencing and armed guards. No buildings. No shelter. No sanitation. Food came only every other day, water only when it fell from the skies.

The sea of bodies at least provided a little warmth, much needed in the October chill. When the prisoners turned into corpses, their clothes were plundered. Occasionally those too weak to defend themselves were victims of the same crime.

Mykhail was lucky. A man next to him had a thick field coat but no boots. In the cold and wet, his feet got diseased, rotted, and soon afterward took him with them.

Mykhail took the man’s coat and covered his whole body up in the increasingly cold nights that followed. A youth of eighteen, his body seemed more resilient than most. Whenever food appeared at the gates he was one of the first to react. He was like the sturdiest of the litter: better suited to surviving, hence stronger, and hence more likely to stay stronger. Self-preservation was everything.

Yes, he was weak, permanently chilled to the bone, infected with scabies and God knows what else, but in a sea of rotting flesh he was strong—as strong as a farm horse.





Chapter 13

Warsaw, Poland, 1941

The night after Asher’s mama gave him permission to invite Izabella for a meal, he’d hardly slept for excitement, but still managed to find her within a half hour of leaving home the next morning. She was a couple of streets away from where she’d been before, and when they met this time, the timid numbness of his mind parted to make way for a confidence that surprised even himself.

At first he stood back for a few minutes, just watching her play that same tune. This time there was no vacant grin: his face held the smile of a young man simply enjoying the moment.