He stuck the pad into his breast pocket again. “You will come with me,” he said. “You will follow my orders. You will follow all orders. You will learn Russian as fast as you can, so you can follow orders in it. We have no time to waste on special talk for reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries.”
He and the other guards took them to the closest building, a large one. A sign was mounted above the door. Luisa had no idea what it said. Not only did she not know the language-even the alphabet in which it was written meant little to her.
“You will be made clean before you enter the camp,” the officer said loudly. “Your hair will be cut. Remove all your clothing and proceed into the disinfection chamber.”
“But-but-” One woman finally managed to get out what Luisa and the rest had to be thinking: “But all you men are still here.”
“Ja,” the officer agreed. He nodded to one of his flunkies. The lesser guard clouted the woman who’d objected with the butt of his submachine gun. That got the rest of the new camp inmates moving. Luisa tried to pretend all this was happening to someone else, that she wasn’t really here in what looked too much like Siberia, that she was back in Fulda going on about her everyday business.
She didn’t believe any of that. She knew too well where she was and what was happening to her. But pretending that way let it happen as if to someone else. She wasn’t pulling her filthy dress off over her head or taking off her even filthier underwear. No, it was some other person. No guards were peering at her naked body the way only Gustav should have. And if they weren’t peering at somebody else, then this was all a bad dream. Pretty soon she’d wake up.
The tub was enormous and stank of some strong, nasty disinfectant. Luisa didn’t care. Hot water was wonderful after so long without. She scrubbed and scrubbed, trying to get off as much dirt as she could. If she’d had a wire brush, she gladly would have used that.
Worse was to come. The guards drove the women out of the tub. They marched them along, still naked and dripping, to a room where barbers-male barbers with numbers on their shabby clothes, men who had to be prisoners themselves-waited with scissors and clippers. Luisa wasn’t one of the very first ones to meet them. She got to watch what happened before she had to go through it herself.
Those barbers sheared their victims convict-close. That, Luisa could almost have lived with. To the Russians, they were convicts. But the men didn’t stop at the head. They clipped underarms and crotches as tight to the skin as they did with scalps.
If they liked the way a woman looked, they did more than crop her. They felt her up, brazen as you please. When one German slapped a hand away, the barber slapped her in the face, hard enough to stagger her.
Luisa had time to see all that before she had to walk up to one of the men. Her dark-blond hair tumbled from her head and fell to the floor to lie with other locks of assorted colors. The barber gestured for her to raise her arms. She did. He clipped that hair, too. His barber tools weren’t all that moved between her legs.
“Stop that, you filthy little man!” she hissed in German-she was five or six centimeters taller than he was.
She didn’t expect him to understand her, but he did. “Bitch, you better find somebody to look after you,” he answered. “Might as well be me, huh? You’ll be sorry if you don’t got no connections.” He had a thick accent and must have learned the language from somebody uneducated.
She just shook her head. He laughed, gave her a stinging swat on the butt, and pointed down the hall. She told a convict clerk who also spoke German after a fashion her name. He assigned her a number: Г963. Then he sent her on to get new clothes at last.
Only they weren’t new. The padded trousers and quilted jacket had seen hard use. So had her shoes. The strips of cloth they gave her instead of socks had old bloodstains on them. Someone had to show her how to wrap them around her feet. Someone else painted over the old numbers that had been on her jacket and pants and applied Г963 with a stencil.
It was official. She wasn’t Luisa Hozzel any more, so maybe this truly hadn’t happened to her. She was this new thing with a number whose initial character she couldn’t read.
They took the new thing and her fellow prisoners to the women’s barracks, which was separated from the men’s by a barbed-wire fence. She wouldn’t have kept chickens in the place, much less people. The bunks went up five and six high. She got one. The mattress was thin and stuffed with sawdust. No one bothered giving her a blanket-it was August.
A tough-looking Russian woman who knew some German greeted the newcomers: “Get used to it, cunts! You’ll be here a fucking long time! Tomorrow we go out and chop down some trees. Have fun!” She laughed and laughed.
–
Harry Truman and George Marshall dolefully studied a map of Western Europe in the Secretary of Defense’s office. Holes in the map showed where red pins had been a day or two before. The pins themselves almost all sat farther west now.
“Good God in the foothills,” Truman said. “It can’t get any worse than this.”
“Sir, you can’t be sure what will happen next,” Marshall said. “I was still in uniform, of course, when Hitler invaded Russia. Three weeks into that fight, I was sure Stalin wouldn’t last another month. So was every other military man I talked to. Shows how smart we were, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but Stalin looks to be on the winning side this time, too, damn him,” Truman said.
“It’s taken him as long to get across West Germany as the Nazis needed to go from the border to the suburbs of Moscow, Mr. President,” Marshall replied. “He isn’t having an easy time of it-not even close.”
“Well, neither are we. In spite of everything”-by which Truman meant all the A-bombs the USA had dropped on Russia and her satellites-“the Red Army’s just about to the borders of Luxembourg and Holland. If it keeps heading west, that’s not a disaster. It’s a catastrophe.”
“Sir, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Germany was ready and Stalin wasn’t. But the Russians still won. They were on the side with more resources and more manpower. They just had to buy the time so they could use them,” Marshall said. “I didn’t think they could, but they did. We’re in the same situation now. We and our allies have more men than the Russians and our industry is more productive than theirs. And our bombs have hurt them worse than theirs have hurt us.”
“Every word you say is true, George.” Truman had to resist the impulse to call the Secretary of Defense General Marshall. Having resisted it, he went on, “Trouble is, I’m not sure how much that matters. Stalin wasn’t going to surrender to Hitler no matter what. I don’t have nearly so much confidence in our allies in Western Europe. If Russian soldiers start roaring over their frontiers, they’re liable to decide they’ve been invaded often enough, thank you kindly, and cut a deal with dear old Uncle Joe.”
Marshall weighed that with his usual deliberation-and with his usual poker face. He and Vyacheslav Molotov owned two of the deadest pans Truman had ever run into. Marshall knew the countries, and the people who ran them, too. He’d worn five stars on each shoulder during the last war. Before he ran the Defense Department, he’d been Secretary of State. The aid plan that had been helping Western Europe recover bore his name, and with good reason.
“There is that, Mr. President,” he said at last, sounding reluctant to admit it but too honest by nature to deny it. “The Dutch and the Italians are as shaky as a big bowl of Jell-O right now.”
Truman glanced toward the map again. The Dutch could see-could practically smell-the Russians coming. The Italians were already up to their eyebrows with them. The Red Army held most of the Po Valley, the richest, most industrialized part of Italy. It wasn’t pushing south, into the rest of the boot. No: it was heading west, to give a possible invasion of France two prongs, not just one.