A couple days after I moved in, the Soviets appointed Arthur the mayor of Wustrow because he was the only obvious antifascist in the area. Proud as a peacock, Arthur strolled through the village wearing a red armband that Mrs. Novak made. Sarosta, the Russian word for “mayor,” was stitched across it. He was the liaison between the residents and the garrison, but his title didn’t impress the drunken gangs of Red Army looters who tore through Wustrow night and day. Not being able to speak their language, he would show them his armband when they stumbled and banged through his house.
“Sarosta! Sarosta!” he would scream.
The thieves would answer with dismissive laughs.
When helping Arthur and Mrs. Novak clean up after such a visit, I asked him, “When you paraded through the streets of Berlin with your fist in the air, didn’t you yell ‘All for one and one for all’?
Wasn’t that your motto?”
“Yes, but pretty soon I won’t have anything left.”
“You’re only a bourgeois trying to protect your property. When you have only one ragged shirt on your back, when you have nothing more to lose, then you’ll be a good communist again,” I teased.
“You snotty brat. You sure think you know a lot about politics.”
“That’s right, and most of it I learned the hard way.” To steer the conversation away from me, I asked Arthur why he became a communist. “You owned property and you were self-employed.”
“Anyone who had their eyes open could see the Nazis were thugs and Bavarian beer-swilling hoodlums. The communists were the only ones willing to take the brown shirts head on, fist to fist, gun barrel to gun barrel. But when the army backed Hitler, we were done for. Who knows how many of us they locked up or killed.”
He paused. “I don’t think a real peace will ever be possible on this planet. There’s just an overabundance of hate and greed.”
“You know, the one thing I realized in the last eighteen months is that we should take handfuls of healthy kids from every country, raise them with one language, no religion, and sterilize the rest of the world.”
Arthur eyed me incredulously. “Are you saying you want to create a master race?”
“No master race, no race at all—just mongrels. Beautiful mongrels with plenty of Lebensraum” (space to live).
Arthur sucked air through pursed lips. “You’ve been quite mute about your time in that camp, Pierre.”
I shrugged. “I don’t want to sound like a cry baby.”
I was hesitant to utter a word about Auschwitz or Dora. I had no desire to revisit the brutality and death I had barely survived.
The moments I did want to relive I fought to keep the furthest from my memory because I knew I would never get another chance to press my lips against Stella’s red hair. And although he had been locked up in Oranienburg, Arthur had no idea of the extent of the mass murder in Auschwitz and the other extermination camps. Because a few wealthy Jews had been released from Oranienburg after obtaining visas, he thought that all German Jews had safely left the country. I was flabbergasted when he asked if I had seen any Jews in Auschwitz.
“Yes, mostly going up in smoke.” The unsettled look in his eyes when I explained myself made me wish I had kept my mouth shut.
I should have wished harder, because at dinner the next night my conversation with Mrs. Novak got my tongue wagging on the maladies Häftlinge had to endure. “We had all kinds of abscesses, cysts, and tumors in the camp and we were always operating on one another. We only went to the infirmary for grave emergencies and then reluctantly because of the ‘selections.’”
“What’s a ‘selection’?” she asked.
I cringed. I had unwittingly dropped Pandora’s box onto the dinner table. I kept silent. Mrs. Novak repeated her question. I looked over to Arthur, who nodded his consent.
“A ‘selection’ is when they picked a whole bunch of us to be executed.”
“Why?”
“Because they were judged too weak and worthless to do any more good for the Reich.”
“Diese Biester sind mit Menschenhaut überzogen!” (Those beasts coated with human skin!) Mrs. Novak spit. Yet it was the look in her eyes that made me feel like an interloper who had proved that her God was dead.
While I was getting ready to go to sleep, Mrs. Novak came out to the greenhouse with a glass of Danziger Goldwasser liqueur.
Sitting on my bed, I reluctantly accepted it, bracing myself for more questions about Auschwitz. She would get no answers. No more stories, no more recollections. I had learned my lesson. Perplexed, she just stood over me, silent. I took a sip, then watched the gold flakes swirl about the clear liqueur. She laid her hand on my head.
“You brave boy,” she whispered.
I looked up at her. Mrs. Novak had tears in her eyes. She bowed her head and quickly left. Don’t pity me, I thought, I’m still alive.
As the liqueur brought on its desired effects, I couldn’t help but question what bothered her more—the realization that it was our bodies, Häftlinge bodies, that fueled the Nazi war machine, or the embarrassment that it was her countrymen who ground our bones into that fuel. When I woke up the next morning I still didn’t have the answer. What did it matter, though? Wasn’t Mrs. Novak a victim of the Nazis, too?
Since the only boat dock was on Arthur’s property, the underfed Soviet soldiers were constantly using his boat for fishing expedi-tions. They would row to the middle of the lake, toss hand grenades, then calmly wait until the stunned fish floated to the surface. They netted all the fish they could, from the largest carp to the smallest minnows. Arthur was in despair. The lake would soon be empty, and fish was the staple food of Wustrow since the Soviets had taken all the cattle. When a drunk Kalmuck soldier blew himself and Arthur’s boat into guts and splinters, the Red Army declared a ceasefire on the fish.
Arthur was greatly relieved when the Soviets finally set up a mayor’s office for him. Since his appointment, a multitude of women had been knocking at his door at all hours. Not only were they looting, the Soviet soldiers were raping any female they could get their hands on. The Soviet officers shrugged their shoulders at Arthur’s reports, saying that the Nazis did it to their women first; but it was former female Häftlinge and non-German refugees who were also being sexually molested. So Arthur kept a record of all the victims in a leather-bound ledger.
Many German women were in hiding, in the woods, attics, haylofts, and cellars. Since the Soviets’ arrival, Arthur’s niece had barely left the attic. I would see Trautchen once in a while in the kitchen, but our conversations never got past hello. One stormy night, the soldiers discovered the attic door, forcing Trautchen to climb out a window and hide in the woods. She returned the next morning wet, pale, and coughing badly.
“The girl can’t stay up there any longer,” Mrs. Novak declared.
Arthur decided that she would stay with me.
Nestled in an overstuffed armchair, Trautchen fell off to sleep at once, worn out from her adventure the previous night. I looked at her for a long time in the thin moonlight filtering through the dusty glass roof. It had been a long, long time since I had been alone with a woman in a bedroom. Trautchen would breathe heavily for a while, then stop suddenly to move or mutter a few incoherent words, her golden hair shimmering against the red velvet of the chair.
On the third night I was awakened by the grinding of truck brakes and drunken singing. With one leap, Trautchen jumped into my bed and hid underneath the quilt. She was just in time. A Russian began kicking at the greenhouse door, which wasn’t even bolted. The door flew open and the soldier fell flat on his face, his gun crashing down next to him. Petrified, I sat up in the bed as Trautchen flattened herself against the mattress. I brought my knees to my chest to tent the quilt. If the rest were as inebriated as the one lying motionless on the floor, then I was going to be spared witnessing Trautchen’s rape. The soldiers that filed in burst into roars of laughter when they saw their comrade. Every one of them must have bathed in a trough of vodka. The beam of a flashlight played on the wall, then struck me full in the face.