Europe Central (72 page)

2

In those days, neutrality meant friendlessness at best, while allegiance to either side invited a capital sentence from the other. Moreover, these punishments usually visited themselves upon the innocent. For every German soldier killed by the Partisans, between fifty and a hundred civilian hostages got stood against the wall. Accordingly, it was no “traitor,” but a reasonable conclave of the villagers themselves, who went to report Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, member in good standing of the Moscow Komsomol, to the Field Police. If somebody had to go to the gallows for what appeared to have been a rash, even absurd action, then why not the perpetrator, who’d endangered them all without their consent? Indeed, they were just in time. The S.D. lieutenant sat looking out the window of what had once been the school. (He’d had the teacher hanged in the very first batch of hostages. One of her high heels fell off at the very end; he remembered that.) Making a vague gesture at the huts across the street, he said: Arrest all that scum.—Just then the delegation of villagers came in.

In a photograph which a peasant soldier, hopeful of sausage or a wristwatch, found on the body of a battle-slain Fascist, we see Zoya (whose
nom de guerre
was Tanya) with downcast head as she limps through the snow to her execution, wearing already the self-accusing sign around her neck. It is 29 November 1941. Her eighteenth birthday was in September. A crowd of young Germans escort her, gazing on her with the sort of lustful appraisal which is common currency in a dancehall.

Now she has arrived. The snow is hard underfoot. A dark oval wall of spectators—Fascists whose double columns of buttons gleam dully on their greatcoats; kerchiefed village women, whose faces express the same pale seriousness their grandmothers would have worn for any camera or stranger; small, dark, hooded children in the front row—encloses the scene. Beside the sturdy, three-legged gallows, which rises out of sight, a pyramidal platform of snow-covered crates allows one party, the hangman, to ascend, while a tall stool awaits the other. Zoya stands there between two tall soldiers. Clenching her pale fists, shaking her dark hair out of her eyes, she swings her head toward one of the soldiers, who draws himself up stiff and straight to accept her gaze. She says: You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us.

Some say that it was General Vlasov’s soldiers who found her at the beginning of the Moscow counteroffensive the following month. I myself can hardly credit that, for Vlasov, who commands my sympathy, if not my imitation, would surely have hesitated to collaborate with the Fascists had he found such early and striking proof of their cruelty. No doubt he saw the final photograph (taken, so I’ve read, by the
Pravda
journalist Lidin), the one which presents to us her naked corpse in the snow, her head arched back as if in sexual ecstasy, her long-lashed eyes frozen tightly shut, her lips clenched, as if to protect her broken teeth, and that noose, now hard as a braid of wire cable, still biting into her neck, her face swollen with blood into a Greek mask. Perhaps Vlasov convinced himself that this image was a propaganda fake, or even that she could by some sufficiently draconian interpretation of military law have been construed to be a fifth columnist worthy of death.

It was the night before they retook Solnechnogorsk. Vlasov was pacing a riverbank like the frozen, snow-crusted defile between Zoya’s breasts. Beside him strode a scout who’d just returned from the Fascist lines. The two men had finished discussing the enemy dispositions. Now they were talking about Zoya.

What they did to her will make us all fight more fiercely tomorrow, I guarantee it, Comrade General.

So would you say that she distinguished herself?

Why, she’s a national heroine!

And that’s what’s strange. Why on earth would the Fascists want to give us a national heroine?

They returned to camp in silence. Vlasov was still considering how best to deploy his three hundred and eleven mortars and heavy guns. Back in ’36 he’d attended a lecture given by the late Marshal Tukhachevsky, who’d aphorized that
the next war will be won by tanks and aviation.
He was correct, and Vlasov possessed neither. What could he do, but expend men like bullets?

His Siberians were waxing their skis with plunder taken from a half-burnt beehive. They’d already masticated every trace of honey from the comb. The antitank riflemen in the breakthrough echelon were lubricating their rifles one last time, and two beardless boys were singing in a loud pretense of bravery:
Into battle for our nation, into battle for our Stalin.
On the radio, Beria and Zhukov were threatening all defeated generals with death. At the edge of the sunken, snow-rimmed fire, the commissar was scribbling out a speech of which Zoya would be the subject, reminding everyone that the goal of partisan activity was to do
anything,
however much or little, which might hinder the movement of enemy reserves toward the front line. By this rather lenient criterion the girl had succeeded; and the restive troops, who longed to believe in something, would be, he hoped, inspired into emulation.
He
knew that every Soviet battle-death was worth it! Who am I to call him stupid, cynical, incurable? Most of Vlasov’s men would end up killed or in the German prison camps, where they could look forward to being the subjects of experiments involving poisoned bullets, Zyklon B, decompression or freezing. (When Russian inmates died, no death certificates were required.) Well, if murdering them delayed a few thousand Fascists from manning the front line, then one had to keep calm and—

General Vlasov stood gazing down at the frozen river. The pincers of despairing, hopeless responsibility gripped his heart until he almost groaned. But suddenly peace came to him, and he muttered, not quite knowing what he was saying: Between the breasts of Zoya.

3

Here is what I imagine he meant by these words.

Because he was an outstandingly charismatic commander who never failed to make his men feel that they were brothers, and because he did everything honestly, we can assume that Vlasov already possessed the sense, which for the past quarter-century Communism had done everything possible to destroy, that the Soviet Union really
was
a union, that it comprised a single desperately embattled organism whose long chance for survival could be improved only through a selfless coordination
(Gleichschaltung,
his Fascist counterparts called it) of every cell, tentacle, cilium and internal organism, that the overstimulated endocrine secretions of hatred which had half poisoned and half crazed the organism for so long could now finally be usefully concentrated in fangs and stingers to be discharged against Germany, whose defeat, because Germany had struck first, could even be called a noble purpose.

As for the masses, they needed Zoya’s dead breasts to drink from. They drank. Then they became likewise poisoned with resolve.

Zoya’s fate stained and hardened the women night bomber pilots who laughed and smoked cigarettes, the peasant boys who shot rifles at the Fascist tanks, and even Comrade Stalin himself, whose speeches now invariably ended:
Death to the Fascist invaders.
Zoya’s frozen blood, darker than steel, strengthened the upraised sabers of Cossacks galloping into the heavy grey photographic plates of myth. Her death became a movie (“Soyuzdetfilm,” 1944), with a score composed by Shostakovich. Decades after the war, memories of Zoya reincarnated themselves in the witch Loreley, who sings an irresistible song of suicide in the same composer’s “Death” Symphony. By then, Zoya’s corpse had become the Russian landscape itself, and I don’t just mean that streets and tanks were named after her, which they were; Russia actually became Zoya, and when General Vlasov studied the map, preparing to thrust his breakthrough echelon against the Fascist Army Group Center, he seemed to see the body of a young giantess lying there beneath the snow, her arms and legs the ridges whose loved and familiar contours would help him, her thousand lips the antitank ditches which were delaying and exhausting the Fascists, her womb, silvergold with the sparkling sheen of snowy trenches, a bunker from which unending new divisions, airplanes and T-34 tanks would be born—yes, she’d died a virgin, but she was now literally the Motherland!—her hair the frozen thickets from which the partisans could ambush the enemy forever and ever, her breasts the points of strategic concentration whose investiture would save the Red Army—and between the breasts, between the breasts of Zoya, there lay the valley of perfect whiteness and smoothness; it was here, when Vlasov’s striving finally ended, that he could lay his head. ‣

CLEAN HANDS

...
every attempt to present altruism as a route to the transformation of an antagonistic society on nonegoistic principles leads ultimately to ideological hypocrisy, masking the antagonism of class relations.

—Great Soviet Encyclopedia

1

They said to him: An idealist like you should make a fanatical Party member.

He smiled quickly, a smile which lacked three teeth. Rage outstretched its wings within his chest.

So he became a Nazi. He raised his right arm. The next step was to apply to the
That too went as smoothly as rounding up the nearest Jew. Everybody welcomed Kurt Gerstein. Blond and blue-eyed both, this young man also received perfect marks for his genealogical chart: one hundred percent Aryan! Moreover, he was educated (a mining engineer), quiet-mannered, and accustomed to working in organizations. Until we coordinated all groups, clubs and affiliations into a single expression of our Führer’s will, Gerstein served on the national council of the Young Men’s Christian Association, a position simultaneously responsible and harmless. Although he’d lacked occasion thus far to demonstrate the “cadaver obedience” of our Old Fighters, he was more than just another cigar store clerk.

So he trod the road of fate whose pavement consists of standing bodies; he joined the hundreds repeating the oath. Torches and arches inspired the night. His squat dagger was engraved: MY HONOR IS MY LOYALTY. From a distance Himmler smiled upon him, and in the darkness that smile resembled sunlight on a murderer’s shoulder, a blotch of brightness on a fat, shrugging, wool-skinned shoulder with an eagle and a swastika on it; sun on the diamond shoulder-tab, sun on the pale, cruel cheek of the chinstrapped, helmeted face.

They couldn’t have imagined what impelled him: His sister-in-law Berthe had been euthanized at Hadamar. He wished to discover what else was being done in the Führer’s name; he desired the power to open those dark folders stamped with the word
Geheim,
which means
secret
; he longed to read the documents whose circular stamps bear swastika-gripping eagles.

Ironically, they placed this impure element in the Department of Hygiene. No one disliked him. He improved procedures for disinfecting soldiers and prisoners-of-war.

2

On 17.8.42, three months after the assassination of Deputy Reich Protector Heydrich, Gerstein stood before the desk of Hans Günther, who was assistant to Adolf Eichmann himself. It was time to write a new chapter in each and all of those multitudinous books entitled
Historia Polski.
“Clever Hans” Günther was one of those people who never stop believing that pure energy will solve the question of the day. When this method fails, the optimist turns angry. Such bosses are feared and respected. Our Führer loves them.

Gerstein, do you like to travel?

I’m ready, Herr Captain.

That’s the answer I like! We’re going to Poland tomorrow. Are you acquainted with Dr. Pfannenstiel?

Of Marburg? Naturally, Herr Captain. He’s a professor of hygiene; we’ve corresponded—

Good. He’ll also be taking part in this. Get a hundred kilograms of prussic acid without fail. Do you need a requisition?