But to where? To what? Would any of us ever see home again? Out there, so far away from any sign of human habitation, it seemed unlikely; even more so when those who had only just survived the journey found they could walk no farther and were shot where they fell at the side of the road by mounted MVD. Four or five men were shot in this way like horses that had outlived their usefulness. No man was allowed to carry another, and in this way only the strongest of us were permitted to survive, as if Prince Kropotkin had been in charge of our exhausted company.
Finally, we arrived at the camp, which was a selection of dilapidated gray wooden buildings surrounded by two barbed-wire fences, and remarkable only because next to the main gate was the steeple of a nonexistent church—one of those sharp, metallic-roofed Russian church edifices that looked like some old Junker’s Pickelhaube helmet. There was nothing else for miles around—not even a few huts that might once have been served by the church to which the steeple had once belonged.
We trooped through the gate under the silent, hollow eyes of several hundred men who were the remains of the Hungarian Third Army; these men were on the other side of a fence, and it seemed we were to be kept separate from them, at least until we had been checked for parasites and diseases. Then we were fed, and having been pronounced fit for labor, I was sent to the sawmill. I might have been an officer, but no one was excused from work—that is, no one who wanted to eat—and for several weeks I spent every day loading and unloading wood. This seemed like a hard job until I spent a whole day shoveling lime, and returning the next day to the sawmill, half blinded by the stuff blowing in my face, and blood streaming from my nose, I told myself I was lucky that a few splinters in my hands and a sore back were the worst I had to suffer. In the sawmill I befriended a young lieutenant called Metelmann. Really he was not much more than a boy, or so it seemed to me; physically he was strong enough, but it was mental strength that was needed more and Metelmann’s morale was at a very low ebb. I’d seen his type in the trenches—the kind who awakes every morning expecting to be killed, when the only way of dealing with our predicament was to give the matter no thought at all, as if we were dead already. But since caring for another human being is often a very good means of ensuring one’s own survival, I resolved to look after Metelmann as best I could.
A month passed. And then another. Long months of work and food and sleep and no memories, for it was best not to think about the past and, of course, the future was something that had no meaning in the camp. The present and the life of a voinapleni was all there was. And the life of the voinapleni was bistra and davai and nichevo; it was kasha and klopkis and the kate. Beyond the wire was the death zone, and beyond that there was another wire, and beyond that there was just the steppe, and more of the steppe. No one thought of escape. There was nowhere to go, that was the real communist pravda of life in Voronezh. It was as if we were in limbo waiting to die so that we could be sent to hell.*
But instead we—the German officers at Camp Eleven—were sent to another camp. No one knew why. No one gave us a reason. Reasons were for human beings. It happened without warning early one August evening, just as we finished work for the day. Instead of marching back to camp, we found ourselves on the long march somewhere else. It was only after several hours on the road that we saw the train and we realized we were off on another journey and, very likely, we would never see Camp Eleven again. Since none of us had any belongings, this hardly seemed to matter.
“Do you think we could be going home?” asked Metelmann as we boarded the train and then set off.
I glanced at the setting sun. “We’re headed southeast,” I said, which was all the answer that was needed.
“Christ,” he said. “We’re never going to find our way home.”
He had an excellent point. Staring out of a gap in the planks on the side of our cattle car at the endless Russian steppes, it was the sheer size of the country that defeated you. Sometimes it was so big and unchanging that it seemed the train wasn’t moving at all, and the only way to make sure that we weren’t standing still was to watch the moving track through the hole in the floor that served as our latrine.
“How did that bastard Hitler ever think we could conquer a country as big as this?” said someone. “You might as well try to invade the ocean.”
Once, in the distance, we saw another train traveling west, in the opposite direction, and there was not one of who didn’t wish we were on it. Anywhere west seemed better than anywhere east.
Another man said: “‘Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the sacred heights of Troy. Many cities of men he saw and learned their ways, many places he endured, heartsick on the open sea, struggling to save his life and bring his comrades home.’”
He paused for a moment and then, for the benefit of those who’d never done the classics, said, “Homer’s Odyssey.”
To which someone else said, “I only hope that Penelope is behaving herself.”
The journey took two whole days and nights before, finally, we disembarked beside a wide, steel-gray river, at which point the classics scholar, whose name was Sajer, began to cross himself religiously.
“What is it?” asked Metelmann. “What’s wrong?”
“I recognize this place,” said Sajer. “I remember thanking God I’d never see it again.”
“God likes his little jokes,” I said.
“So what is this place?” demanded Metelmann.
“This is the Volga,” said Sajer. “And if I’m right, we’re not far south of Stalingrad.”
“Stalingrad.” We all repeated the name with quiet horror.
“I was one of the last to get out before the Sixth Army was encircled,” explained Sajer. “And now I’m back. What a fucking nightmare.”
From the train we marched to a larger camp that was mostly SS, although not all of them German: There were French, Belgian, and Dutch SS. But the senior German officer was a Wehrmacht colonel named Mrugowski, who welcomed us to a barrack with proper bunk beds and real mattresses, and told us that we were in Krasno-Armeesk, between Astrakhan and Stalingrad.
“Where have you come from?” he asked.
“A camp called Usman, near Voronezh,” I said.
“Ah yes,” he said. “The one with the church steeple.”
I nodded.
“This place is better,” he said. “The work is hard, but the Ivans are relatively fair. Relative to Usman, that is. Where were you captured?”
We exchanged news, and like all the other Germans at K.A., the colonel was anxious to hear something about his brother, who was a doctor with the Waffen SS, but no one could tell him anything.
It was the height of the summer on the steppe, and with little or no shade, the work—excavating a canal between the Don and the Volga rivers—was hard and hot. But for a while at least, my situation was almost tolerable. Here there were Russians working, too—saklutshonnis* convicted of a political crime that, more often than not, was hardly a crime at all, or at least none that any German—not even the Gestapo—would have recognized. And from these prisoners I began to perfect my knowledge of the Russian language.
The site itself was an enormous trench covered with duck-boards and walkways and rickety wooden bridges; and from dawn until dusk it was filled with hundreds of men wielding picks and shovels, or pushing crudely made wheelbarrows—a regular Potsdamer Platz of pleni traffic—and policed by stone-faced “Blues,” which was what we called the MVD guards with their gimnasterka tunics, portupeya belts, and blue shoulder boards. The work was not without hazard. Now and then, the sides of the canal would collapse in upon someone and we would all dig frantically to save his life. This happened almost every week, and to our surprise and shame—for these were not the inferior people that the Nazis had told us of—it was usually the Russian convicts who were quickest to help. One such man was Ivan Yefremovich Pospelov, who became the nearest thing I had to a friend at K.A., and who thought he was well off, although his forehead, which was dented like a felt hat, told a different story from the one he told me: