Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(140)

They were put on a train. A whole train for onlyseven of them? thought Alexander, but it turned out the train was full of Soviet men. Not all of them were soldiers, some were workers, some were residents of Poland. Thousands of such men were on that train. One, a concrete mixer, said he was living with his family in Bavaria, a wife and three children, when he was apprehended. Others echoed that. "I had a family, too. A mother, two sisters, three nieces after my brother died." Where were the family members? Alexander wondered. "We left them, left them where they were," said the man.

"But why didn't you take your family with you?" inquired Ouspensky, who was shackled to Alexander.

The concrete man didn't reply.

The train continued slowly west through central Germany. Most of the road signs had been destroyed, it was impossible to tell where they were. They seemed to have traveled hundreds of kilometers. Alexander saw a small sign that said, Gottinger, 9. Where was Gottinger?

The train was stopped and they were all told to get off. After walking for two hours, they found themselves at what looked like an abandoned POW camp. The NKGB troops--by now Alexander Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

realized they couldn't be Red Army men, since the Red Army men were all roped to each other--requisitioned the grounds and called it a transit camp.

"A transit camp to where?" ask Ouspensky. No one answered him.

Then they changed the camp's name to a screening and identification camp.

In this camp they lived for the last two weeks of April 1945, surrounded by barbed wire, watching perimeter lights being put up and watchtowers being hastily built. Then they heard that the war was over, that Hitler was dead.

The day after Germany's surrender, the fields beyond the electrified barbed wire were mined. Alexander and Ouspensky knew this because they watched at least a half-dozen Soviet men--including the concrete mixer--go to war with those mines and lose.

"What do they know that we don't know?" Ouspensky asked with suspicion, as they watched with a group of others as the bodies of the escapees were dumped into mass graves.

"Not just that," said Alexander, "but what do they know that makes them run across a mined field rather than remain in a fairly innocuous transit camp?"

"They don't want to go home," said another man.

"Yes, but why?" said Ouspensky.

Alexander lit a cigarette and said nothing.

He wondered why the camp was being run under military discipline, despite having so many civilians in it. There was reveille and taps, there was curfew and military inspection of the barracks and clear assignation of duties. It was all peculiar and puzzling.

A few days later, Ivan Skotonov, deputy associate foreign minister, sent straight from Moscow, came to speak to the men. They were not allowed to stand as a crowd; they were made to stand in rows. It was a windy May day; Skotonov, greasy-haired and in a suit, could barely be heard. Finally he took a loudspeaker. "Citizens! Comrades!" he said. "Proud sons of Russia! You have helped to defeat an enemy such as our great nation has never known! Your country is proud of you! Your country loves you! Your country needs you again to rebuild, to reconstruct, to help make once again great the land that our Splendid Leader and Teacher Comrade Stalin saved for us. Your country calls for you. You will come back with us, and your country will greet you as heroes and shower you with applause!"

Alexander thought back to the concrete mixer from Bavaria who had left his wife and children behind and then run across a mined field to get back to them.

"What if we don't want to come back?" someone shouted.

"Yes, we had a life in Innsbruck, why should we have to leave it?"

"Because you are Soviet nationals," Skotonov shouted back amiably. "You don't belong in Innsbruck. You belong back home!" Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"I'm from Poland," the man shouted back. "From Krakow. Why doI have to go back?"

"That part of Poland has been disputed for centuries, and the Soviet Union has decreed that it is part of our Motherland!"

That evening after the speech, twenty-four men attempted to escape. One even unprimed a clean swathe through the mined field before he was stopped by a bullet from the sentry's rifle. "He was wounded, not killed," Skotonov assured the skittish mob the following morning. But the man was not seen again.

There seemed to be three types of people in the camp: refugees from the German occupation of places like Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the Ukraine; forced labor workers who were taken in by the Germans for their own war machine; and Red Army soldiers like Alexander and Ouspensky.

These three groups were separated at the end of May, and quartered and fed separately. Little by little the refugees started filtering out of the camp, and then the forced labor workers.

"Always at night, have you noticed?" said Alexander. "We wake up, they're not here. I wish I could keep my eyes open at three in the morning, I have a feeling we'd see quite a bit going on."

In the yard while on his daily walk, he met a forced labor man who asked for a cigarette and said to him, "Have you heard? Five of the guys I been with the last four years have disappeared last night. Did you hear them? They were taken out and sentenced, right in the common area."

"Sentenced for what?" said Ouspensky.