“Sure, sure. Let’s talk about Königsberg. You were taken prisoner at Königsberg.”
“Don’t rush me. I have to tell this in my own way. When something has been asleep for this long, you don’t just shake it by the shoulder and shout in its ear.”
“Take your time. You’ve got plenty of time.”
24
Königsberg is, was, important to me. My mother was born in Königsberg. When I was a child, we used to go on vacation to a seaside town near there called Cranz. Best vacation we ever had. My first wife and I went there on our honeymoon, in 1919. It was the capital of East Prussia—a land of dark forests, crystal lakes, sand dunes, white skies, and Teutonic knights who built a fine old medieval city with a castle and a cathedral and seven good bridges across the River Pregel. There was even a university founded in 1544, where the city’s most famous son, Immanuel Kant, would one day teach.
I arrived there in June 1944. As part of Army Group North. I was attached to the 132nd Infantry Division. My job was to gather intelligence on the advancing Red Army. What type of men were they? What condition were they in? How well armed were they? Supply lines—all the usual stuff. And from the German civilians who fled their homes ahead of the Russian advance, the intelligence I had was of well-equipped, ill-disciplined, drunken Neanderthals who were bent on rape, murder, and mutilation. Frankly, a lot of this seemed like hysterical nonsense. Indeed, there was a lot of Nazi propaganda to this effect that was designed to dissuade everyone from surrendering. And so I resolved to discover the true situation for myself.
This was made more difficult when, at the end of August, the Royal Air Force bombed the city to rubble. And I do mean rubble. All of the bridges were destroyed. All of the public buildings lay in ruins. So it was a while before I was able to verify the reports of atrocities. And I was left in no doubt as to the truth of these when our troops retook the German village of Nemmersdorf, about a hundred kilometers east of Königsberg.
I’d seen some terrible things in the Ukraine, of course. And this was as bad as anything we’d done to them. Women raped and mutilated. Children clubbed to death. The whole village murdered. All seven hundred of them. You’ve got to see it to believe it, and now I believed it and I could have wished I didn’t. I made my report. The next thing, the Ministry of Propaganda had it and was even broadcasting parts of it on the radio. Well, that was the last time they were honest about our situation. The only part of my report they didn’t use was the conclusion: that we should evacuate the city by sea as soon as possible. We could have done it, too. But Hitler was against it. Our wonder weapons were going to turn the tide and win the war. We had nothing to worry about. Plenty of people believed that, too.
That was October 1944. But by January the following year, it was painfully clear to everyone that there were no wonder weapons. At least none that could help us. The city was encircled, just like at Stalingrad. The only difference was that as well as fifty thousand German soldiers there were three hundred thousand civilians. We started to get people out. But in the process, thousands died. Nine thousand died in just fifty minutes when a Russian submarine sank the Wilhelm Gustloff outside the port of Gotenhafen. And we kept on fighting, not because we obeyed Hitler, but because for every day that we fought, a few more civilians managed to escape. Did I say it was the coldest winter in living memory? Well, that hardly helped the situation.
For a short while, the artillery and the bombing stopped as the Ivans prepared their final assault. When it came, in the third week of March, we were thirty-five thousand men and fifty tanks against perhaps one hundred fifty thousand troops, five hundred tanks, and more than two thousand aircraft. Me, I was in the trenches during the Great War and I thought I knew what it was to be under a bombardment. I didn’t. Hour after hour the shells fell. Sometimes, there were as many as two hundred fifty bombers in the sky at any one time.
Finally, General Lasch contacted the Russian High Command and offered our surrender in return for a guarantee that we would be well treated. They agreed, and the next day we laid down our arms. That was fine if you were a soldier. But the Russians were of the opinion that the guarantee had never applied to Königsberg’s civilian population and the Red Army proceeded to exact a terrible revenge on it. Every woman was raped. Old men were murdered out of hand. The sick and wounded were thrown out of hospital windows to make room for Russians. In short, the whole Red Army got drunk and went crazy and did what it liked to civilians of all ages before finally they set on fire what remained of the city and their victims. Those they didn’t kill they let fend for themselves in the countryside, where most of them starved to death. There was nothing any of us in the army could do about this. Those who did protest were shot on the spot. Some of us said this was justice—that we deserved it for what had been done to them—and this was true, only it’s hard to think of justice when you see a naked woman crucified on a barn door. Maybe we all deserved crucifixion, like those mutinous gladiators in ancient Rome. I don’t know. But every man who saw that wondered what lay in store for us. I know I did.
For several days we were marched east of Königsberg, and as we walked we were robbed of wedding rings, wristwatches, even false teeth. Any man refusing to hand over an object of value in a Russian’s eyes was shot. At the railway station, we waited patiently in a field for transport to wherever we were going. There was no food and no water, and all the time more and more German soldiers joined our host.
Some of us boarded a train that took us to Brno in Czechoslovakia, where at last we were given some bread and water; and then we boarded another train headed southeast. As the train left Brno we caught sight of the city’s famous St. Peter and Paul Cathedral, and for many men this was almost as good as seeing a priest. Even those who didn’t believe took the opportunity to pray. The next time we stopped we got out of the cattle cars, and finally we were given some hot soup. It was the thirtieth of April, 1945. Twenty days after our surrender. I know this because the Russians made a point of telling us the news that Hitler was dead. I don’t know who was more pleased to hear this, them or us. Some of us cheered. A few of us wept. It was the end of one hell, no doubt. But for Germany and us in particular, it was the beginning of another—hell as it really is, perhaps, being a timeless place of punishment and suffering and run by devils who enjoy inflicting cruelty. Certainly, we were judged by the book that was open, and that book was Mein Kampf, and for what was written in that book we were all going to suffer. Some more than others.
From that transit camp in Romania—someone claimed it was a place called Secureni, from where Bessarabian Jews had been sent to Auschwitz—there was another train traveling northeast, right through the Ukraine, a country I had hoped never to see again, to a stop in the middle of nowhere where MVD guards drove us from the cattle cars with whips and curses. Standing there, faint from lack of food and water, blinking in the spring sunshine like unwanted dogs, we awaited our orders. Finally, after almost an hour, we were marched along a dirt road between two infinite horizons.
“Bistra!” shouted the guards. “Hurry up!”