Forgotten Soldier (20 page)

I can still remember the look of the Donets Valley, and the river, with its wide sand banks stretching some eight or ten miles back from the water. The thunder of guns reached us from the front, which was about twenty miles to the south. The German attack was moving from the north and west. With their left wing protected by the Donets, the Panzer assault was driving into the Russian artillery, which had rapidly crossed the river in an attempt to follow up their counter-offensive. Now these batteries had been driven back to the river, and were unable to re-cross it, as all the bridges were out. In effect, the Russians had just made the same mistake as the Germans at Stalingrad, although not on the same scale. In their haste to drive us out, they had overextended their supply lines and underestimated the forces pitted against them. A hundred thousand Russians, of whom fifty thousand were killed, were caught for over a week in the Slaviansk-Kiniskov pocket.

Of course, I didn't know what had happened around Kharkov until months later. For me, the Donets battle, like the battles of the Don and of Outcheni, was a smoking chaos, a wellspring of continuous fear, alarm and rumor, and thousands of explosions.

I had just been reassigned, and was waiting for further instructions with a handful of other filthy, shaggy men, when a policeman handed me a scrap of paper. The police, like the Kommandos, were authorized to organize strays, and the scrap of paper purported to give us the route we must take to return to our company. It seemed that the 19th Rollbahn was operating in the neighborhood, and the three other fellows also belonged to it.

We cleared out as quickly as we could. The fear of being incorporated into an impromptu battalion lent wings to our feet. I have never had a very strong sense of direction, but here in this chaos of mud and ruin even a migratory bird would have lost the north. Our scrawled note only gave us the principal points to look for, which might have been recognizable to regiments camped on the spot. To us, however, in an entirely new landscape, it was almost impossible to distinguish one point from another. The rare signposts that remained on the battered streets had been twisted in the fighting, and had to be disregarded.

After a thousand false leads and a thousand delays, we finally found our company two days later. In the meantime, we had been pressed into service unrolling telephone wire for an S.S. regiment which was mounting an attack. I still remember a railway embankment which some very young S.S. were charging under heavy machine-gun fire.

We huddled in a drainage pipe which had been uncovered in a bombardment, waiting for the S.S. to take the area-which they did, with heavy losses. Beyond the two cement walls, the flash of mortar fire and red-hot metal fragments streaked through the air. Then the same regiment used us to supply a Haubitz battery, which had been engaged for several days in an artillery duel with the Soviet guns on the east bank of the Donets. We were moving the heavy projectiles from their distant depot when we ran into some men from our company, repairing a collapsed bunker.

The first familiar face I saw belonged to Olensheim.

"Hey!" I shouted, running to my friend, followed by the three others. "It's us!" Olensheim stared, as if he'd been struck by lightning. "Another four!" he shouted.

"God must be with us! Laus scratched you off the list long ago. There are still thirty who haven't showed up. We thought you must have been put in one of the scrap units."

"Don't mention bad luck," I said. "Where's Hals?"

"That fellow has all the luck. Right now, he's in Trevda, being taken care of, while we dig up this damn dirt."

"Was he wounded?"

"A fragment in the neck. Absolutely nothing. But he was collected along with the seriously wounded. He said he was unconscious for two hours. But he always exaggerates."

"And Lensen?"

"He's fine. He's changing a tread over there." Laus arrived, and we instinctively saluted.

"Glad to see you, boys. Really glad." He shook each of us by the hand, his old soldier's face filled with emotion. Then he took a few steps backward. "Announce yourselves clearly and intelligibly, the way I taught you."

We conformed to the prescribed pattern with a good will that came from a deep sense of comradeship. But, apart from this encounter, everything looked dark. The sky was filled with lowering clouds which threatened rain, and at the four cardinal points white flashes preceded geysers of damp earth and rubble by fractions of seconds.

A short time later, Lensen, who was heavier and stronger than I, lifted me bodily from the ground in his delight at seeing me again. Despite the heavy labor we had to perform, the day was colored by the joy of this reunion.

Two days later, I managed to get to Trevda, which was some twenty-five miles from the front. Another fellow gave me his place in the D.K.W. he was supposed to drive, and I was able to visit Hals. I found him in a swarm of wounded men, singing at the top of his lungs. Spring had arrived at last, and the heavily wounded were cavorting between two avenues of wild pear trees.

Hals was unable to curb his delight at seeing me. I was carried in triumph by men who had lost arms, who were powdered with sulfanilamides and smeared with unguents. I was made to finish the remains of all the bottles they had opened, and accordingly was not able to keep the appointment I had made with the fellow who had brought me out. After waiting for a while, he grew bored, and left without me. I was taken back much later by a driver attached to my camp. Hals made me promise to visit him again, but I never had the chance: a few days later, the doctor found him fit, and he rejoined us.

Hals detested the squalid cellar where we were established, and following his lead, I volunteered for service in the motorized infantry. We were fed up with digging and acting as maidservants to the rest of the army.

This decision almost cost us our lives many times, but even now, looking back on everything that happened, I cannot regret having belonged to a combat unit. We discovered a sense of comradeship which I have never found again, inexplicable and steady, through thick and thin.

Part Two

"The Gross Deutschland"

Spring 1943 to Summer 1943

LEAVE

Berlin -- Paula

On a beautiful spring morning, we were assembled at Trevda, where Hals had spent such an enjoyable time. Two other companies joined us on a hillside covered with short, velvety grass-the kind which thrusts up so thickly that each blade seems to be fighting for space, and which becomes a tall savannah within a month. There were about nine hundred of us. A group of officers standing on the platform of a half destroyed truck addressed us from the top of the hill. About twenty flags and regimental pennants had been propped around the base of the truck. The speeches were very courteous. We were even congratulated for our attitude in the past-an attitude which made us feel ashamed whenever we heard any bulletins from the front. We stared at the officers with enormous eyes. They said that because of our attitude they were prepared to honor any one of us who might wish it by transferring him to a combat unit. About twenty men volunteered at once. The officers, recognizing our "timidity," tried to put us at our ease, and went on talking in the same style. Certain heroic actions were described in detail. Fifteen more volunteers stepped out of the ranks, among them Lensen, who was clearly born for trouble. Next, the officers mentioned a fortnight's leave, which produced at least three hundred volunteers.

Then several lieutenants stepped down from the platform. They threaded their way through our ranks, selecting individual men and inviting them to take the three fateful steps forward, while a captain maintained the tone of eloquent pressure.

The men chosen were always among the largest, healthiest, and strongest. Suddenly, an index finger sheathed in black leather was pointing, like the barrel of a Mauser, into the ribs of my best friend, my war brother. As if hypnotized, Hals took three large steps, and the sound of his heels as he snapped them together was like a door slamming shut, a door which threatened to separate me-perhaps forever-from the only real friend I had ever made and from the friendship which was my only incentive for life in the midst of despair.

After a moment's hesitation, I joined the group of volunteers without any further pressure. I looked confusedly at Hals, whose face was glowing like the face of a child who has just been given a delightful surprise, and who doesn't know what to say. Henceforth, my identification would be Gefreiter Sajer, G. 100/1010 G4. Siebzehntes Bataillon, Leichtinfanterie Gross Deutschland Division, Sud, G.

In the evening, we went back to the squalid shelters we had already occupied. Nothing seemed to have changed. The fact that our names had been added to the infantry recruitment lists was the only difference between the life we had led yesterday as truck drivers and our new life as combat troops. We felt somewhat confused as to the attitude we should adopt, but our noncoms allowed us very little time for meditation. They kept us busy cleaning up, and restoring to good condition the weapons which had taken a beating during the last battle -a job which took several days. Everything seemed to have quieted down, although strong Soviet counter-thrusts had started several fires to the northeast, at Slaviansk. We were also used for the revolting chore of burying the thousands of men who had died in the battle for Kharkov.

We were officially designated "burial squad" one morning at dawn.

The light was so faint it was still almost as dark as the middle of the night. Laus informed us that our new job would take the place of the fortnight's leave we had been promised, and were so much looking forward to. As a rule, the Russian prisoners were used to bury the dead, but it seemed they had taken to robbing the bodies, stealing wedding rings and other pieces of jewelry. In fact, I think the poor fellows many of them wounded but designated fit for work-were probably going over the bodies for something to eat. The rations we gave them were absurd-for example, one three-quart mess tin of weak soup for every four prisoners every twenty-four hours. On some days, they were given nothing but water.

Every prisoner caught robbing a German body was immediately shot. There were no official firing squads for these executions. An officer would simply shoot the offender on the spot, or hand him over to a couple of toughs who were regularly given this sort of job. Once, to my horror, I saw one of these thugs tying the hands of three prisoners to the bars of a gate. When his victims had been secured, he stuck a grenade into the pocket of one of their coats, pulled the pin, and ran for shelter. The three Russians, whose guts were blown out, screamed for mercy until the last moment.

Although we had already met birds of every color, these proceedings revolted us so much that violent arguments broke out between us and these criminals every time. They invariably became furious and abusive, shouting insults at us. They said they had escaped from the camp at Tomvos, where the Russians dumped German prisoners, and they told us how our countrymen were being slaughtered. According to them, the infamous Tomvos camp, sixty miles east of Moscow, was an extermination camp. Rations as ludicrous as those we handed out to Russian prisoners at Kharkov were served once a day to men reporting for labor. Men who did not work received nothing. One bowl of millet was provided for every four men. There was never enough, even for the prisoners who could work. The daily surplus were simply killed: a favorite method of execution was to hammer an empty cartridge case into the nape of the prisoner's neck. It seemed that the Russians often distracted themselves with this type of sport.

I myself can well believe that the Russians were capable of this kind of cruelty, after seeing them at work among the pitiful columns of refugees in East Prussia. But Russian excesses did not in any way excuse us for the excesses by our own side. War always reaches the depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.

We spent hours digging out a long tunnel which had been turned into an emergency hospital during the fighting. The surgeons had been so overloaded that the wounded had almost certainly been abandoned. A line of rough triple-decker beds extended some hundreds of yards down the corridor, each containing three blackened, stiff, and mutilated bodies. From time to time, an empty space marked the final flight of a dying man.

There was no light in this charnel house, except from the electric torches which some of us had fastened to our tunics. These threw beams of horrifying illumination on the thin, swollen faces of the cadavers, which we had to pull out with hooks.

Finally, one delicious spring morning, incongruous in that sad, ruined landscape, a muddy truck drove down the track to the new barracks we had moved into the day before. After a brisk half turn, it stopped about ten yards from the first building, where a group of men which included myself were busy removing a heap of gravel and small stones. The back flap of the truck was kicked open, and a plump little corporal jumped down and clicked his heels. Without saluting or saying a word, he rummaged in his right breast pocket, where all military instructions were supposed to be kept. He pulled out a sheet of paper which had been carefully folded four times, and read out a long list of names. As he read, he indicated with a wave of his hand that the men named should step to the right. There were about one hundred names on the list, among them Olensheim, Lensen, Hals, and Sajer. Feeling somewhat anxious, I joined the group on the right. The corporal told us we had three minutes to climb aboard the truck with our weapons and packs. Then he clicked his heels again, saluting this time, and turned his back without another word, striding off as if he were suddenly going for a walk.

We ran frantically to collect our things. There was no time for conversation. Three minutes later, a hundred breathless soldiers were packed into the truck, whose bulging sides threatened to collapse. The corporal was also on time. He threw a withering glance at the eccentrically bulging packs some of us were carrying, but said nothing. Then he bent down to look at something under the truck.