Underground Soldier (16 page)

The death of Martina left me beyond desolate. It was like a part of me had died. The scent of pine resin reminded me of her. Each time I saw a fellow fighter, or the sky, or a Soviet bomber, I thought of her.

The NKVD seemed furious that our villagers had escaped. They set fire to the forest, then circled the area with troops, who shot anyone fleeing. They bombed our mountain, then executed everyone they found.

Even though our mountain encampment was spread over a large area and was mostly hidden by treetops and camouflage, we were all at grave risk. The Soviets seemed intent on killing every one of us.

For months I buried myself in work — not to forget Martina, but as a tribute to her. “You are a healer, not a fighter,” she’d told me more than once. And with the Soviets pummelling us, I was in constant demand to set broken limbs, stanch blood and stitch wounds. If only broken hearts could be mended so simply.

I cannot even guess at the number of people I treated over the rest of the year.

Then, as spring of 1945 approached, we got astounding news: the war had ended. Hitler had committed suicide.

I felt like cheering. One less madman, one less crazed empire builder. But there was still Stalin, still the NKVD.

“You are to leave,” Petro told me one day. “We will be starting a different kind of fight now.”

“But I want to help you,” I told him, outraged that he didn’t consider me essential.

“You’re young, and you’ll have a different job,” he said. “The UPA will stay and fight to the death, defending our country’s right to live in freedom. But if we all die, then who will tell our story? Stalin?” He spat on the ground. “You will bear witness for us, Luka. For all those who have been silenced by death.”

Petro’s words echoed Martina’s own.

“But how will I do that?”

“Get away from here alive. Go west. When the time is right to tell our story, you’ll know it.”

I thought about Petro’s words and I did agree with them, but I had a more immediate goal. If I could no longer fight for my country, the time had come for me to go east, to find my father. I packed up my meagre belongings, and before I left for Kyiv, I confronted Petro once more.

“I will tell our story, Petro,” I said. “But before I do that, I must go back to Kyiv and find my father.”

He gave me a strange look. “Isn’t your father in Siberia?”

“He was. But now that the war is over, surely he’ll be let out. Kyiv will need pharmacists, and he is one of the best.”

“Luka,” Petro said, “if only it were that easy.” He rested a hand on my shoulder. “It is unlikely that your father is alive. The Siberian camps are as bad as the Nazi concentration camps. Few people manage to survive. And we’ve had no intelligence reports of prisoners being released.”

I crossed my arms. “I cannot simply forget my own father.”

“I’m not telling you to forget him, Luka. I’m telling you to wait until the time is right.”

“I’ve served the Underground faithfully,” I said. “And I’ve delayed finding my father for two years. I cannot wait any longer.”

“Get a hold of yourself, Luka,” Petro said. “We don’t always get what we want.” He sighed deeply. “There may come a time in the future when you can search for your father. But now …” He looked me in the eye. “I have family too,” he said. “Do you think I don’t understand what you’re going through? But right now, it’s your duty to stay alive. I’ve ordered you to be a witness.”

More than anything, I felt like punching Petro. I knew what he said was right, but it didn’t make it any easier for me to accept. I clenched my hands. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll go west. For now.”

I turned and walked away from him. The first tree I came to I punched hard, bloodying my knuckles.

* * *

Who could have foreseen that I would be retracing my route and going back through the mountains and foothills and forests to get back to where I had escaped from?

Petro made sure that I was outfitted with sturdy clothing, and he gave me plenty of food, but he did not give me a gun.

“You’re a civilian now,” he said. “For you, the war is over. Your brains and heart are all you’ll need.”

As I trekked back through the now familiar mountains and forests, memories of Martina would catch me off guard. I found myself weeping at the sight of a squirrel or a rushing creek, the sound of rain or a snapping twig. So many memories, all filled with Martina.

When I was well beyond the foothills, I saw another traveller, a young man like me, dressed in homespun. His shoes were held together with rope and his only possession was a small cloth bag slung over his back. I followed behind him as Martina had done with me at first. At night, I’d creep up into a tree close to his encampment and I would breathe in the scent of roasted rabbit. Even though I didn’t talk to him, I wondered if he had a sense of me. I would see him stop suddenly sometimes and just listen.

I stayed hidden and watched as he met up with two more travellers — a man and a woman. These weren’t mountain people. The man’s feet were bloodied and bare and his shirt and trousers hung in shreds. The woman’s head was shaven and there was a rip in her shirt where a badge used to be. Had it been an OST badge from a labour camp or a yellow star from a death camp?

The three of them camped together, the first one showing the other two how to snare and cook a rabbit, how to gather berries. As I crouched in the tree above them, my stomach grumbled from the scent of sizzling meat. I had been living on dried food and water. I hadn’t wanted to light a fire and give my position away. I swallowed back my hunger and bided my time.

They encountered six more refugees, but I still stayed hidden. These ones were different yet again. They were adequately dressed and better fed, and if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say they were ethnic Germans. Unlike the mountain boy with his single cloth bag, or the escapees with nothing, these six carried large sacks filled with food. At night, when the mountain boy started the fire, these Germans drew out cookies and sausage and passed them around. It nearly drove me mad, the scent of so much food.

When they bedded down for the night, I snuck down from my tree and stole three links of sausage. The dry chunks were hard to swallow. I thought of Martina and her taking my crackers when she was hiding from me.

One thing I learned from following these refugees was that what had been the Reich was now broken up into various zones, each administered by a different Allied nation. The area where Helmut and Margarete’s farm had stood was now part of the Soviet zone. I didn’t want to go there, and from the sounds of the refugees, none of them wanted to go there either.

There was a large American zone to the southwest of us — just beyond the Czechoslovakian border. That’s where they decided to go and I was happy to shadow them.

By May of 1945, the group had swelled to a dozen, but soon there were new clusters of people as well. When it grew to hundreds, there was no point in me still hiding. One day I simply stepped in behind and kept on walking.

We travelled on open roads through Czechoslovakia, through the rubble of bombed buildings and destroyed German tanks and trucks. More people joined us every day. People who had been captives — labourers, prisoners of war, death-camp survivors. Mixed in were escaped Soviet and German soldiers, and civilians. I stayed alone, though I walked with thousands. I listened in on conversations and was struck by the variety of languages. Most I didn’t understand, but for the few that I did, the conversations had a theme. Finding loved ones, getting to someplace safe.

Once, while warming my hands over an open fire with many others, I heard a familiar accent peppered in amidst the chatter — a woman’s voice — and she had to have come from Kyiv. I looked up and listened, trying to figure out which person the voice had come from. And then I saw her, a bone-thin woman who was nearly bald, although tufts of grey hair sprouted out wildly here and there. She held a potato on a stick over the flames.

I walked around the fire until I was beside her, then crouched down.

She looked at me warily. “I’m not sharing my food.”

“I don’t want your food.”

She looked at me again. “You’re from Kyiv too,” she said. “I can hear it in your voice.”

“I am. But I left long ago. How about you?”

“I was there until the bitter end,” she said. “One of the few who actually walked out alive.”

“I was thinking of going there,” I told her. “To see if I can find my father. He was in Siberia. Or my mother. She was taken as an Ostarbeiter to Germany.”

The woman studied my face in silence, then looked at her potato, turning it slowly so it would cook evenly. “Your mother would never go back to Kyiv,” she stated.

“She would,” I said. “My whole family will go back. Otherwise, how will we find each other?”

“The Soviets are running Kyiv now,” she said, her eyes still on the potato. “They’d punish your mother for her Nazi sympathies.”

Poor woman, the war must have made her mad. “My mother doesn’t have Nazi sympathies. She was a
victim
of the Nazis.”

“Do you think that matters to Stalin?” said the woman. “He’s made it clear: Anyone who survived the Nazi occupation is to be punished for not fighting hard enough.” She turned to me then. “Why do you think
I’m
fleeing west?”

“But how will I ever find my father?” I asked.

The look she gave me then was almost motherly. “Who knows?” she said. “But you won’t find him in Kyiv.”

I didn’t entirely believe her, but didn’t want to argue. I got up, leaving her and her precious potato. Maybe it wasn’t possible to go back right this moment, but I wasn’t about to give up so easily. For now, I would keep going west. Perhaps I’d find Lida and Mama first, but I’d definitely be going back to be with Tato, even if they said it was dangerous. I couldn’t stand the thought of Tato going back home and finding his wife and son missing.

* * *

Hordes of ragged people walked along together. There was safety in numbers, that was certain, but there was also misery. The devastation of Martina’s country wrung my heart. And it made me wonder what might be left of Kyiv.

After weeks of walking, we arrived at a vast cluster of American army trucks, refugees milling around, soldiers frantically passing out items of food, medics circulating among us to see who needed help.

An American soldier reached into a bag and drew out an orange. “Eat,” he said to me, pointing to his mouth.

I had seen oranges in the display window at the special grocery store in Kyiv where high-ranking party members shopped, but I had never tasted one. I was overwhelmed by this soldier’s generosity. I took a huge bite and nearly gagged.

The soldier shook his head, took out another orange and bit into it just like I had, but then spat that small part out. He dug his thumbs into the hole he’d made and pulled back the skin. Then he popped a chunk from inside the orange into his mouth. I did the same. It was so tasty that I sat right down and devoured the rest of it.

The American soldiers were trying to get all of us refugees into lineups. I walked up and down to figure out what was going on. At the front of the line was a series of desks, each with an American officer ready with pen and paper. Each officer had an interpreter; beyond that was a closed-in area with more refugees milling around.

I got into the line of people speaking Ukrainian, then waited for hours until it was my turn, still thinking of that orange.

“Where are you from?” the interpreter asked me in Ukrainian.

“Kyiv.”

“Your name?”

“Luka Barukovich.”

The officer wrote that down.

“Age?”

“Thirteen.”

“What did you do in the war?”

I was about to tell him about the UPA, but then I stopped. The Soviet Union was an Allied nation. Did this American soldier share information with the Soviets? What about the interpreter? Everything I did during the war would be regarded with suspicion by the Soviets, so I erred on the side of caution and answered with part of the truth. “I was in a work camp.”

The interpreter said something to the officer in English. Then the officer stamped a paper and handed it to me. “Go through.”

Chapter Twenty-Three
Safety

Once I stepped beyond the partition, they made me strip and have a shower, then dusted me with lice powder. That brought back strong memories of my first day at the work camp with Lida, but this time when I came out, there was a set of soft new clothing for me to wear, and a pair of shoes that actually fit. It felt so good to be clean.

It was safe in the displaced persons’ camp, and there was food — plenty of it, although it was sometimes strange. The Americans had quite a challenge feeding so many people, so we’d have baked beans for days on end, then other times warmed-up beef stew out of cans, then maybe nothing but bread and cheese. It didn’t bother me. After so much hunger over so many years, I could have eaten a well-salted shoe.

The medics were having trouble keeping up with all of the refugees’ problems, mostly malnutrition, eye diseases, lung infections. But they also had to protect against things like cholera and typhus. Through an interpreter, I offered my help, but the Red Cross nurse just smiled. “We are here to help
you.
”

That same nurse came up to me later as I leaned against a demolished truck, eating a piece of white bread. “Family. Find?” she asked, mispronouncing the Ukrainian words.

I had no idea what she was trying to tell me. She took me by the elbow and guided me to a different Red Cross building. Another snaking lineup.

“Stay,” she said. Then left.

I waited in the lineup, eavesdropping on the conversations around me. Everyone in my line spoke Ukrainian.

“What is this place?” I asked the woman in front of me.

“The Red Cross,” she answered. “Surely you know that.”

“Yes, it’s the Red Cross, but this isn’t a hospital.”

The woman smiled. “This office isn’t to heal your body. It’s to heal your soul.”

“What do you mean?”