The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (69 page)

Bandy drives through farmland and beautiful dairy hills. There are forests and streams, picturesque stone bridges and straw-matted huts. There are no farm animals. The land has been plowed only by armored treads, heavy wheels, and falling bombs.

At the sound of cars, the people of the landscape come close to the road. When they see the red stars on the three Russian vehicles, they swat the air, as if to make the Reds go away. Bandy’s jeep comes fast on the heels of the Soviets, appearing to chase them out of this part of Germany. When the white U.S. star on his hood passes, the people cheer.

A sign says Brandenburg is eight kilometers away. Bandy’s escorts halt. The lieutenant walks back to Bandy’s jeep.

“We take you to show you something.”

“All right.”

“You have film for cameras?”

“Yes.”

“This is Germans. This is what we come to stop.”

“What is it?”

“You follow, Bandy. You see. Take pictures.”

The four vehicles set out again. The lieutenant’s car moves in behind Bandy’s jeep.

He’s led into a small and ancient city of encircling walls, cathedrals, and cobblestone streets. A medieval castle sits on an island in the middle of a river. A bridge sign labels the waterway the Havel, the river that runs through Berlin. All this Gothic architecture stands stolid against the incursions of the twentieth century, when Brandenburg appears to have been turned into an industrial center. The Havel is wide here and apparently deep enough for the city to serve as a maritime terminal for Berlin. Bandy’s convoy drives past shipyards and cranes, a brewery—he smells the hops, they’re making beer even with the Russians in town—and many manufacturing plants where high chimneys once puffed. The chimneys are stubs now, snapped by Allied air raids. But the city remains greatly intact. Apparently the Reds didn’t meet much resistance taking it.

Brandenburg seems to Bandy about the size of Bristol on the Tennessee-Virginia border. Maybe forty, fifty thousand folks live here. Today, Brandenburg is swamped with people, tens of thousands more than the city can handle. Civilian carts stacked with belongings have been pulled to this place by old men or strapping women and are now at a standstill. Families hunker around their possessions and wait, haggard, sitting on suitcases and trunks. The fathers are bearded from travel and neglect, women and children droop from sleeplessness. All of them are unkempt. They pack the city, every median and sidewalk, the fishing lanes over the bridges, church properties, the parks. Clearly these are refugees, the plain and scared Germans who flocked west and south, hauling their belongings as fast as they could ahead of the Soviet advance, hoping to reach the American lines. They’ve been thwarted. Bandy sees not liberation on the faces he passes but the weight of capture.

In a parking lot, a hundred
Wehrmacht
soldiers have been corralled. Seasoning their number are dozens of older men in street clothes and felt hats, the remnants of the local
Volkssturm. This
is the city’s garrison, a last-ditch effort at defense that seems to have ended quickly. Soviet nurses move through their ranks handing out water, dispensing medicine, and inspecting wounds.

Brandenburg is engulfed in Soviet hardware and men. The Reds push through the clogging citizenry, avoiding violence as well as politeness. They brook no reluctance among the Germans to move out of their way. Bandy watches a personnel carrier shove a cart aside, spilling people and baggage into the street. There seems to be a law that only Red soldiers may walk straight and fast somewhere, only the hulks of Russian machines may go unhindered. The rest must sit or stand aside.

The Russians are orderly and restrained, just as the lieutenant said they would be. Bandy spots no pillaging. The locals and refugees are bullied but mostly unaccosted. Likely, Bandy thinks, it’s the same for the Soviet army as it is for the Americans. If you have to battle for a town, you treat it with anger when you take it. If the town surrenders—or, in the case of Brandenburg, if the enemy has fled out of it—then more humane rules apply.

The cars ahead of Bandy turn to the western end of the city. The road runs along the banks of the Havel. The lieutenant stays close at Bandy’s bumper. In minutes, a massive fortified structure looms beside the river. The cars are stopped by Russian guards at a gate. This is not some castle outside the city limits. It’s too new. One of the soldiers in the vehicles in front speaks with the guards. They are waved through. One guard salutes Bandy.

This is a prison. The design is modern and stark. A vast courtyard surrounds the central structure, a four-story rectangle with a high-pitched slate roof. The effect is foreboding. Bandy slows his jeep, ignoring the lieutenant behind him. He will go at his own pace now.

Bandy passes through a perimeter of metal girders cemented into the ground; barbed wire is strung between them. Watchtowers built into the outer walls have at their crests unmanned machine guns lodged behind sandbags. Bandy comes to a stop. The lieutenant pulls alongside and says nothing. The other two cars drive on.

The courtyard is filled with meandering men. They all wear the same ill-fitting outfits, ragged and woolly, with wide, powder-blue vertical stripes. Many wear caps of the same material. Bandy steps out of his jeep.

The lieutenant calls after him.

“Bandy. Your camera.”

Bandy ignores this. What he sees is beyond what a photograph can depict.

The men are like scattered litter. They seem to move not by walking but are blown where they go, drifting on some current unwilling to lift men who’ve not endured what they have. There are a thousand, two thousand of them, tracing the limits of the barbed wire. One by one they reach the fence and lift a hand to touch it, an act that might have gotten them shot down, perhaps even this morning. Bandy approaches one of them.

For the first time in his life, Bandy gazes into living eyes that do not peer out. It’s like looking into a lightless doorway, the man’s visage only beckons Bandy in, into the dark room across its threshold. This is not just a face starved but a mouth that has had emptiness fed into it.

Bandy wants to speak. Others waft by; the barbed wire draws them, brows creased with the defiance of laying a hand to it.

He asks the man, “Are you okay?”

The prisoner looks upward, as if Bandy’s voice has come from above instead of in front. Bandy follows the slow glance to a vacant gun tower on the wall.

The marble eyes return to Bandy. They bring nothing back from their sojourn to the wall.

The man nods.

“Ja.”

The invisible breeze blows and the prisoner strays beyond Bandy.

The lieutenant walks up.

“This is not worst, Bandy. Come. There is more.”

He drives behind the lieutenant down the central lane. On every side prisoners wander the grounds. Bandy is shocked to see them so aimless. To his eye they look alike, ravaged men, frames bent and slender like draughted plants. In the way there is one uniform for the prisoners, there is one gait among their thousands of legs, a slow and stunned march. Every hand and wrist is veined and weak. A single set of eyes is set in every head, the dulled orbs of the one Bandy spoke to. This man is inside all of us, Bandy thinks, the last living creature at the end of the road. What a terrible journey.

The lieutenant pulls up at the front door to the prison. Bandy stops behind. He grabs his camera bag. The building is tall and sheer, a brick cliff of barred windows. They go inside past thick, studded doors. The only light intrudes from the few windows.

More inmates ramble the linoleum floor. The lieutenant tromps fast among them, not letting Bandy pause to take pictures. They speed down a long, bland hall.

The Russian waves his hand. “This is prison, yes?”

“Yes.”

“We took from Nazis two hours ago. They know we come. They should run, yes? They should just go, leave prison alone. We take, set people free.”

“Who are the prisoners?”

“Usual German enemies. Jews, Russians, Poles, Slavs.”

“Was there a fight to take the place?”

“No. Soviet army come too fast. Nazis of this prison had other business.”

With this statement the lieutenant pushes on a thick door. Bandy steps alongside him into a vast cavern of cells, three tiers high. Skylights do not ease the foggy, gray color in here. Concrete catwalks run the length of the building. Bars cross every aperture.

“There are three rows like this,” the lieutenant says. “Prison must take two thousand. Nazis put five thousand in here. Come.”

Bandy follows the Russian into the block. All the cell doors have been flung open. With the first steps he smells the odors of human loss: feces, decay, disease. In addition to the multitude outside on the prison grounds, the hundreds ambling in the halls, there are a thousand more lying in these cells, three or four to a cage, men too sapped of life or too hurt to rise. The hard walls and metal will not soften their groans. Bandy walks past, looking in each open cell. He beholds again the common being in misery, the lone one who can tell five thousand terrible tales.

“These men not fed,” the Russian says. “There is typhus. Tuberculosis. Nazis let them rot.”

Bandy unslings his shoulder pack to take out the Leica.

“Wait,” the lieutenant says. “See everything first.”

The two walk to the end of the row. The Russian shoves open another armored door. In echoed strides he leads Bandy to a small room at the rear of the building. Inside stands a tall wooden contraption. In the floor at the foot of the machine is a drain.

Bandy recognizes a guillotine.

The lieutenant licks his lips.

“Two thousand prisoners put to death in this room.”

Bandy does not walk up to the thing to look down the black drain or feel the wide blade. He keeps his distance, as though this is where the real contagion of the prison is.

The Russian pivots and walks on.

“Where are the Nazis?”Bandy asks, keeping up.”The ones who ran the place?”

The soldier arms open a last door. This lets out onto a courtyard. He lets the metal portal slam with an un ugly clang.

“Take your pictures, Bandy.”

Several dozen corpses lie piled against a high wall. They are so emaciated, the mound looks more like a discarded stack of the gray-and-blue-striped uniforms. Bullet marks dent the bricks where rounds pierced the bodies of these final victims. With the Russians bearing down, the Nazi keepers of the prison made a last, desperate effort to complete their charge. These prisoners were selected for some reason. Bandy wonders, Who were they, not to be allowed to live another hour? He takes a step closer to the heap. No answer comes from it. Whatever lumped these men together or made them different in life, they shared this end. Did there need to be a reason? What could possibly make sense?

Lined along the opposite wall are two dozen German guards. Like the prisoners, they wear a single uniform. Black and merciless in attire, they stand at rigid attention. These zealots stayed behind while the rest of the prison staff fled.

Bandy takes out his Speed Graphic and enough film packets. He unfolds the accordion of the lens and locks it in place. The Russian lieutenant steps back to let the American photographer do what he was brought here to do, record for the United States press the Nazi atrocities of Brandenburg prison.

Bandy considers the bodies. He turns instead to the line of Nazi guards.

He walks close to the first, raising the camera, focusing tight on the man’s face. The Nazi is still as wax.

These are the features of evil, Bandy thinks, not the dead piled at the wall. We’ll see the dead time and again in every war, every conflict. But this wicked man. This is what we have to be on watch for. This is what we must recognize and stamp out of humanity. Bandy levels the viewfinder. It’s a common face, not inhuman and twisted. Not beautiful and mesmerizing. A typical, grocery store, gas station, salesclerk face in Germany, or America. Waiting for the shot, Bandy questions, how to spot them? They look like the rest of us. The Nazi smirks. Bandy thinks, There you are, you fuck, and releases the shutter.