‘They want your watches,” Dr. Hahn said. “Give them up.”
Hildegaard and Herta Falkenstein nervously took them off and put them on the center table. The leader snatched them, listened to the movements, and attached them to his left arm, where he already wore a dozen watches.
He jabbered an order to the one with the submachine gun, who smiled through brown and yellow decaying teeth as he separated Dr. Hahn and Falkenstein from the women, leveling a gun barrel at their chests and motioning them to turn their faces to the wall.
“Kurmm frau,” the leader said, advancing toward Hildegaard Falkenstein.
“Listen,” Dr. Hahn said rapidly, “it is useless to struggle. They might kill you. Do as they say ... don’t resist.”
“Mother!” Hildegaard shrieked, and clung inside Herta’s inept protective grasp. “Mother! Tell them I’m sick! Tell them not to make me do it!”
Herta Falkenstein held her daughter tightly for an instant, and then they pried her loose and flung her onto the cot under which Ernestine was hidden.
“Animals! Bastards!” Bruno screamed as he turned and lunged. He caught the barrel of the guard’s gun over the bridge of his nose, sending his glasses to the floor, smashed. Another crack on his jaw with the gun butt sent him sliding in slow motion to the ground, now on his hands and knees, pawing around senselessly. One last blow flattened him and a pool of blood began to form under his face.
The leader tore the clothes from Hildegaard’s body. This sent the other three soldiers into spasms of laughter as the girl screamed, tried to shield herself, prayed, and cried. He knocked her flat, and mounted her. Another of the soldiers shoved Herta Falkenstein onto another cot. Her fat, flabby body and immense hanging breasts delighted the Mongols. They chortled and whooped as they forced themselves on her.
The two women lay rigid and unprotesting. When the first two assailants were done, they traded women. The other two became angry and pushed their comrades off and took their own turns. All of this went on as the leader began vomiting from liquor and the others urinated and moved their bowels on the floor. Each new disgusting act was considered terribly humorous, causing them to scream with laughter.
Two hours after they arrived, they shot up the shelves in the cellar in a last burst of vandalism and left.
As Dr. Hahn went to the women, Bruno Falkenstein crawled toward his cot, took his pistol from under the mattress, and stuck the barrel in his mouth. The doctor leaped on him and kicked the pistol from his hands. He writhed on the floor weeping.
“You idiot! Help me with your women!”
“Why did you stop me? What is there to live for? We are all ruined!”
Old Dr. Hahn stood in this chamber of horrors with the fetid smell reaching deeply into his nostrils. He saw the agonized man beating the floor with his fists, and he saw the shambles and heard the three women groan.
Frau Herta Falkenstein crawled from her cot and knelt beside her prostrate husband and touched his head. He pulled away from her. “Bruno,” she moaned, “go to Hilde. Tell her you love her. Please go to Hilde and tell her you love her.”
“Ruined,” he wept. “We are ruined.”
Chapter Four
HEINRICH HIRSCH WALKED ALONE and unarmed in the middle of a street still smoldering from battle in the Neukölln District of Berlin. He stopped before a three-story building on Geyer Strasse 2. A bullet-pocked sign, “Backerei,” groaned back and forth. The window was smashed and boarded. He looked up to the second floor. A window box held petunias that drooped wearily.
The young man was tall and slender. He had thin Semitic features revealing he was half Jewish, from his mother’s side of the family. He wore shiny new boots, semimilitary garb, and a red star on his arm band.
He walked the creaking steps to apartment four at the front of the building, second floor, and knocked. The door was opened slowly by a frightened old woman. Upon seeing his Russian attire, she paled.
Heinrich shoved the door wide and entered the room. The old woman flattened herself against a wall and watched his movements as he came to the center of the room and let his eyes play everywhere. “Don’t worry, old woman,” he said. “I lived here once. I only want to look around.”
Was it only ten years ago? ... ten years, nearly to the day. He remembered walking into the room and seeing the grim faces of the comrades. He was ordered into his room to go to sleep.
Heinrich walked to a small hallway and shoved open a door to a tiny bedroom. He lay there that night ten years ago listening to the arguments of the comrades. He had lain awake many nights in those days listening. The comrades were confused about the Nazi stampede. What to do? Where to hit back? How to fight?
One by one important party members disappeared. Names of the concentration camps, the Oranienburgs and Dachaus, began to be heard.
And then ... it came his father’s time. They had talked that night until late. When they left, his mother and father went to sleep in the next room in their big soft bed with its great down comforter.
He remembered wakening to the sound of whistles in the street ... then footsteps racing up the steps and angry thumps on the apartment door ... and last... his mother’s scream!
Much of what followed was in blurs. For several days he and his mother hid in the home of comrades in Spandau in a basement. The news came back that his father, Werner Hirsch, a Communist official, had been spiraled into martyrdom, beaten to death in Gestapo headquarters.
Heinrich remembered a wild drive in the middle of the night to Rostock on the Baltic Sea and hiding in the hold of a stinking old fishing boat that stole over the straits to the sanctuary of Sweden, where other comrades kept them hidden.
After three weeks his mother told him, “The comrades have decided that we should go on to the Soviet Union. We will be safe at last.”
The Soviet Union! From earliest memory his mother and father had labored, lived, struggled for the dream of a socialist state in Germany. The Soviet Union was the womb, the mother. It would be almost like coming home for the very first time.
Heinrich remembered the swell of tension in the gray Finnish morning as they boarded the train for the ride to Leningrad. Tears fell from his mother’s eyes as she first saw the great stone buildings of this mighty fortress of socialism. ... They would soon be in Moscow.
In 1935 Communist refugees from Germany were treated as heroes, for they were the living symbols of the struggle against Hitler. The son of Werner Hirsch was to be a student at School #78 in Moscow, which had been established exclusively for the children from Germany, Austria, and German-speaking countries. School #78 was given great attention. It was a modern four-story building; the children lived in and were given special diets of German food, the best uniforms, tours about the country; were given special seats in cultural events and the most superb health supervision. Outside school a League of German Communists coordinated their activities.
For fifteen-year-old Heinrich Hirsch it was the most wonderful life he had ever known. The dank meeting halls in Berlin, the shabby life, the terror were all behind him.
School #78 was spared that drab, lusterless place called Moscow. The children were only allowed to see a few gems in its sea of dejection.
Heinrich’s mother worked as a translator of German documents in one of the political bureaus. He was allowed to visit her one day a week. The two had been exceedingly close, and their weekly meeting brought on an uncomfortable situation. There was scarcely a place where they could be alone to talk; surely not in the German Culture Center, for they would not have a moment’s peace; even in the parks there was a constant blare of loudspeakers eulogizing Soviet life, playing nationalistic music, or reporting the news.