In those days, a Red Air Force engineer slept little. Igor was involved in the building of a half-dozen small airstrips to attempt an airlift of supplies. The plan fell woefully short.
When Lake Ladoga froze he and the other engineers performed the perilous feat of cutting roads over the top of the ice to keep the meager convoys of trucks and sleds moving. There was that grim day when all the wooden homes in Leningrad were ordered dismantled for firewood and the peat bogs around the islands had to be worked by battalions of women under German artillery fire.
Yet, somehow, the people bore it. The Russians demonstrated their limitless capacity to endure suffering. In Leningrad, as in all of Russia, practically no civilian goods were produced. The workers were compelled to labor unbelievable numbers of hours for the meagerest existence. In the hinterland twenty million men and women were armed and trained in the nation’s singular dedication to survival.
In Leningrad ration cards became the key to life and the means of controlling the masses and inducing more labor from them. Inside every factory, labor battalion, and army unit was the political commissar, the party member, political intelligence, and the informer to apply unrelenting pressure and fear tactics. There was a shortage of almost everything except slogans and portraits of Stalin. The news of German atrocities was pounded into the brains of the masses day and night. There was no respite even in this hell. As coal reserves diminished, power failures stopped industry, transport, light, and heat.
The dagger of death in 1941 was an icicle and the dagger struck 400,000 civilians dead. The sight of frozen corpses in Leningrad’s gutters became as common as the sight of the slogans. Starved, bombarded from within and without, frozen, half crazed with fear, the people of Leningrad clung to the thread of life and were driven to exert yet one more ounce of energy.
As the siege guns pounded, the unyielding stone of Leningrad began to crumble away, bit by bit. The casualties in hospitals, schools, and factories were appalling. Stukas and Messerschmitts screamed down from the skies ... days ... weeks ... months ... years....
In the spring of 1942 a recovering Red Army broke through from the south to open an eight-mile corridor in the siege ring called the Schlusselberg Gap. Karlovy’s engineers and hordes of women laborers built a rail line through the Gap and constructed bull-dog defenses on either side of it. The Germans were never able to close this thin bottleneck. Hitler continued in the belief that he could starve the Russian into submission, but from the first trainload of supplies through the Schlusselberg Gap to Leningrad, the city was destined to hold.
Despite this lifeline opened to the rest of Russia, the saga of the siege was still being written. The hunger, disease, artillery, air raids, and cold of two more Russian winters would claim yet another half-million lives.
DEATH TO THE NAZI BABY MURDERERS!
Yes, a million dead. That was the price for Leningrad.
Igor was standing on the Sovietsky Prospekt when Children’s Home #25 crumpled under a shell hit. He ran toward it with the screams of the children drumming in his ears. “God! My baby is in there! My baby! Yuri! Yuri!” Yuri Karlovy was born, lived and died during the siege.
At dawn the Russian guns were white-hot and warped from firing. Boris and Feodor still slept. The thrice-decorated hero of the Soviet Union, holder of the Lenin Order for Courage, gathered his boys up and drove back to Eberswalde as the mighty Red Army stormed the gates of Berlin.
Chapter Three
THE STAGE WAS SET for the grizzly playing out of the German death wish. From the chancellory bunker, Adolf Hitler brought on ultimate self-destruction by a deliberate decision to fight to the last. Indeed, it was all in the tradition of the fiery deaths of the idols of Teutonic legends; this was, however, no myth.
Like Berwin of Rombaden, he exhorted his warriors to perform superhuman feats. However, unlike the Aryans of the legend, Hitler’s “Aryans” existed in name only, and they could not respond. He commanded nonexistent paper armies to come to the rescue and counterattack. He went through an odious ritual of a marriage ceremony with Eva Braun, a woman as stupid and dull as Emma Stoll. And, in the last moments, he ranted that all of Germany had betrayed him and was unworthy of his genius.
The Russians, whom he had declared subhumans, followed their monstrous barrages by frontal assaults into the bowels of his kingdom. As the tortured city gurgled in its death throes, he waited until the enemy was within touching distance, and then he ordered the torch set to his body.
Children and old men of the People’s Army, disorganized military units, and frantic Nazis bloodied the Russian intruder mightily. The final bath of blood was a fitting sacrifice to the end of the pagan gods. The German fought from the bunkers and the rooftops and the street corners and the windows. Berlin was a city of mighty stone and steel, as was Leningrad, but unlike the Germans, the Red Army did not shy away from a street fight.
In the last days of April Russian victories were counted in inches, casualties in tens of thousands. No siege, this; batter it out foot by foot, room by room; isolate it house by house, street by street, section by section; reduce it to shambles. Artillery and tanks fired down great streets at point-blank and walls grotesquely buckled and crashed. Human fodder, bearing bayonets and flamethrowers, gutted and gored its way forward. Rivers of blood spilled into the gutters. The back of the Nazi was being broken by unstoppable sledge-hammer blows. The German committed suicide, fought, bled, escaped, surrendered. The civilians cowered and starved and became dehydrated from anguished thirst.
The magnificent Unter Den Linden and Siegesalee with their immense boulevards and great massive structures were reduced to hideous shells. Sizzling bridges collapsed into the Spree and the Brandenburger Gate was riddled to a sieve; the castles and Reichstag smoldered and the factories that somehow lived through the months of bombing crumpled under short flat hits of cannon and the incessant tattoo of machine guns, grenades, and mortars. This violent racket went on without respite until exhaustion beyond exhaustion overcame the defenders. And then they were systematically cut off and their ammunition fell to the zero point.
By the first day of May white flags sprouted by the tens of thousands and the upraised hands of surrender followed. The sound and the fury diminished as lone fanatical suicide units made the final futile gesture.
On the second of May Red Army vehicles rolled freely through those places not blocked by wreckage. They controlled a city that had undergone more damage at the hands of man than any single place on earth. Berlin was obliterated from one end to the other and a hundred thousand dead civilians lay beneath the mountains of brick.
Months before, as the Red Army began the final offensive, Russian journalists, with official blessings, promised the soldiers that Berlin and all in it would be spoils of the victors.
As the combat troops gained complete control they were suddenly and strangely withdrawn from Berlin, battalion by battalion, and replaced by garrison forces of inferior quality. The replacement troops contained a great number of Asians from distant Soviet Republics. They began the final chapter of horror on the beaten enemy.
During the last days of April the Falkenstein family and all their neighbors locked up in their cellars as SS officers from a nearby camp made a last-ditch stand in the Dahlem District. The whine of bullets, the crash of mortars, and the burst of shell made them flinch and cover through the pitched battle.
Fear made them forget hunger. In the Falkenstein cellar there was a new sound, unheard for years—the voice of Bruno Falkenstein praying.