Under the protection of the CO, and with the connivance of other troops during the few weeks after the Americans moved into their occupation zone, the Ukrainian children were also moved several times. They were being cared for by one of the few remaining orders of Catholic nuns Hitler hadn’t decimated. Most of the GIs who’d been helping the children initially had moved on, losing track of them.
Kurt Brenner hadn’t thought of them at all, too preoccupied with how to speed up his pending discharge. He’d already been admitted to Harvard Medical School, but there was a problem. He wasn’t due to be discharged for three more months—October 1945—and classes began in late August. Harvard had made it clear that if Brenner couldn’t start with his class, he’d have to wait until the following academic year.
Like hell I will.
“Medic!” a voice shouted.
Brenner finished his sandwich, tossed a half-full can of beer into the muddy river, and watched as the swift current sent it spinning downstream. He hurried up the steep incline of the riverbank to Glienicker Bridge, where the American Corps of Engineers, aided by liberated Ukrainian workers, had floated an unstable pontoon bridge across the Havel River.
Permanent repair work was progressing well. At nearby Ceceilienhof Palace in Potsdam, GIs were replanting hedges. A line of slow-moving 21/2-ton Army trucks, loaded with building materials, headed for the Palace to repair walls, ceilings, and moldings. Brenner had been detailed to the general area as a medical corpsman—by then, mostly treating GIs with construction injuries.
He wrinkled his nose.
I wish they’d repair the smell around here.
It was going on three months since Berlin had fallen, but the stench of open sewers and the occasional dead body still permeated the air. It was an ongoing complaint with the GIs. The goddamn Krauts had emptied their cesspools into the Havel River.
“Medic! Where the hell are you?”
Still here, unfortunately, he brooded.
Brenner stepped over planks and stray pieces of iron, keeping carefully to the side of Glienicker that was propped above the water line by wooden pedestals parallel to the pontoons.
At the bridge, while he attended to a soldier’s cuts and bruises, he fell into a conversation with a Russian officer he knew, but whose job was a mystery to him. He and Major Dmitri Malik had played chess a few times. While Brenner could beat the man with his eyes shut, he usually let Malik win against the day Brenner might want a favor. Then, too, there was the profitable black market business that the two of them were engaged in.
Launching into his usual complaint, Brenner mentioned that he was going to miss the start of medical school and lose an entire year. That guys who’d arrived in Europe—mostly infantrymen—were rotating home before he was.
They had been speaking English. So when the major suddenly looked around, lowered his voice, and switched to German, Brenner was startled.
“Tell me, Doc, what do you need to get orders moving you out sooner?”
“That’s what frustrates the hell out of me, Major. It takes next to nothing. Just a clerk at division—probably a corporal—who inserts an earlier date on my transportation orders and sticks them in some box. Why do you ask?”
“I have friends everywhere,” Malik said, dodging the question.
Of course you do, Major.
They ran into each other on the bridge a few days later. After the usual pleasantries, Malik said, “How would you like to leave Berlin in a week or so, Kurt?”
Brenner thought he hadn’t heard right. After a moment he said, “You can pull it off that quickly?”
An eloquent shrug. “That depends on you,” Malik replied.
“Anything, Major! Penicillin. More medical supplies. Petrol. Dope.”
Malik looked bemused.
“If it’s money,” Brenner said, his mind racing, “I’ll send you some as soon as I get back to New York—within reason, of course. A few thousand? Maybe five?”
“I have something else in mind,” Malik said, his smile enigmatic. “You’ve always wondered what my position was but never had the nerve to ask. I’m NKVD—Soviet Intelligence. My work is with Operation Keelhaul.”
Chapter 22
It was dark as Brenner left Soviet headquarters in East Berlin and picked his way gingerly through brick-littered streets, stopping only to show his pass to a pair of Russian soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie before crossing from the Soviet zone back into the American.
It was all arranged. Tomorrow morning the Ukrainian kids would be picked up by Soviet authorities, including the Communist version of the Red Cross. Malik had assured Brenner that under Operation Keelhaul, the children would be well taken care of.
His young subordinate, Lieutenant Aleksei Andreyev, had reinforced Malik’s assurances. “We have a great deal more to offer these children than placing them in foster care—or worse, stuck in some displaced-person camp,” Andreyev told Brenner.
“Come now, Kurt,” Malik interjected, picking up on Brenner’s skepticism. “If at the Yalta Conference, the President of the United States—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, no less—and now his successor, Mr. Truman, promised to ‘encourage’ repatriation for some larger political end, who are you to question the judgment of two American presidents?”
An unanswerable argument, Brenner told himself. Besides, why would anyone want to harm a bunch of kids?
It hadn’t been easy finding them—not at first. Eventually, Brenner had tracked down First Sergeant Al Rosen, who remembered him from when the Red Cross guy had rescued the children. A couple of drinks loosened Rosen’s tongue. The children had been moved from place to place until they’d ended up with the nuns, he told Brenner. Arrangements were being made to have them moved to a DP camp in France.
After leaving Malik and his aide, Brenner walked aimlessly for hours, concentrating on the formidable obstacle course typical of post-war Berlin: broken pieces of pavement, mounds of rubble, collapsed buildings, gaping holes camouflaged by a thin layer of gray-black dust—
And came to an abrupt halt at the sound of angry voices. He realized he’d ended up practically at the main gate of the nunnery.
The criminal automatically returning to the scene of the crime?
It was where the Ukrainian children would spend their last night before being repatriated in the morning. So why was a Soviet truck parked in front right now? Brenner wondered.
So much for “tomorrow’s” arrangements.
The Russians always kept one step ahead of you, he thought. It was worth remembering.
Ducking into the shadows, Brenner watched a group of Russian soldiers emerge through the nunnery gates led by—no surprise—Major Dmitri Malik. Ten whimpering children were hustled into the back of a truck. Brenner watched the truck pull away headed, no doubt, for Potsdam in East Germany.
An American jeep roared out of the shadows. Brenner almost jumped out of his skin. Joe Cherner flung open the door on the opposite side of the jeep. “Good timing, Kurt,” he said tightly. “I’ve been watching the nunnery off and on for weeks. Figured something like this might happen. Hop in. Let’s see where the Russkies are off to. What are you doing here so late?”
“Same as you, Joe,” Brenner said quickly. “I’ve been keeping an eye out from time to time. The Ivans are good at staying one step ahead of you,” he added as an afterthought. It was true enough.
Keeping well behind the Soviet truck, Cherner followed until he was pretty sure where they were headed. “Glienicker Bridge,” he muttered.