The Devil's Blessing Page 6

  “And the west?”

  “With them, we will live in a world where Jews can tell us what to do, and where no one is equal but those with money. But we will live.”

  It all started making sense now. While being under Soviet control was the more appealing option when one looked at it in terms of the end game, getting there was another thing altogether. Their only option for survival was to embrace the west.

  “So what happened?”

  “What do you mean, what happened?”

  “This morning. The explosion. The gunfire. What happened? Where is everyone?”

  Ingersleben nodded. He wasn’t being aloof so much as he was already forgetful, his mind on escaping the Eastern Front.

  “You saw the men’s eyes when Haas told them the plan. They had no plan to go with it at all.”

  “So?”

  “So?” Ingersleben shrugged. “So we killed them.”

  “What do you mean, ‘we killed them’?”

  “Exactly that. We killed them. What would you have us do? They were not going to go along with Haas’s plan. They would rather have had us die than live. No. That was a wrong option then, and it’s the wrong option now.”

  “And Haas? Why kill Haas if he was right?”

  “To buy us time. The men were about to turn on him and those who were with him, including me. I needed to distance myself from him and his plan. For a while, anyway. Once the hounds were at bay, then we could get rid of them, too.”

  “Your own men?” Otto said incredulously. “How could you kill your own men?”

  “How could I not?” Ingersleben said. “They were going to kill me. They made me do it. They left me no choice.”

  The worst part of everything he was saying, Otto thought, was that he sounded as if he truly believed it, as if those men he had sworn to keep under his charge had forced his treacherous hand. This was why men like Ingersleben made it far in the Reich, and Otto wouldn’t.

  “So what next?”

  “Next, we free those Russian animals. Hopefully they will buy us some good will if we are ever captured. And then, we run.”

  Otto nodded in agreement. “We run.”

  Chapter Eleven

  When Otto and Ingersleben came out of the tent, there was a howl in the wind and the snow had begun to fall more steady, crunching beneath their feet.

  Otto saw that Ingersleben had propped his collar up over his neck, and Otto did so in kind.

  The work of cutting the wire on the prison had already been done, and the prisoners slowly began to make their way out. Nothing seemed different. They went from one huddle inside their cage into another one outside of it.

  “Do you speak Russian?” Ingersleben asked Otto.

  “No. Only a few men can. The only one who can speak decent Russian is Wolter, and he’s—” Otto strained to find the right term.

  “He’s not available anymore. Come. Let’s try to see what we can get out of these vermin before we let them go.”

  As they walked the few feet over from the tent to the collecting men, a thought that had rambled inside Otto’s head but dared not speak until now made its voice heard.

  Why am I still alive? Why didn’t they kill me? It made no sense to Otto, especially when the Unteroffizier asked him if he spoke any Russian. He did technically know a few words and phrases, but then again, who didn’t? No, there was another reason he was spared, but he didn’t know why.

  Wernher and Lafenz were Ingersleben's lap dogs. No, wolves, he told himself. They did everything their master commanded them to do with a vicious commitment. And then there was him, who was nothing to Ingersleben. Otto was nothing to anyone. Why had he been spared? Or had he been spared? Perhaps he was as dead as the other men; his time just wasn't up yet.

  “Line up!” Ingersleben barked. After a moment’s confusion, he waved his hands in a line and repeated, “Line up!” Slowly, the prisoners did as they were told.

  The four Nazis lined up to face the dozen or so prisoners. Although the numbers were heavily in the prisoners' favor, the slinged machine guns around their captors kept the majority at bay.

  As Ingersleben prepared to speak, he noticed that there was only one man that wasn’t armed on their side. Otto. He quickly grabbed his sidearm and handed it over to him.

  Why would they arm me if they are about to kill me? Otto thought, pausing for a moment before finally grabbing the gun, holding it at his side. He didn’t know what to do with it. Whether to point it at the prisoners or just hold it at his side. He did the latter, since none of the other men were pointing their weapons at the Russians, not even young, newly gun-happy Lafenz. After that was sorted, Ingersleben began again.

  “We are releasing you,” he said, looking towards his right to get the translation that never came. He persisted, and Otto and Wernher quickly huddled and began to whisper to each other, trying to find the right words. Finally, Wernher began to say a broken sentence in Russian that they hoped was understood. The Russians looked on as if nothing had been said to them; the only response was the gentle howl of the whirling wind.

  It was all that really needed to be said, as far as the logistics of what was happening were concerned, but Ingersleben had one more message that he wanted them to know.

  “If our paths cross again, show us the same mercy we’ve shown you.”

  Again, Otto and Wernher began to caucus, trying to find the right words. They were more butchered this time, since neither man knew the word for mercy, but it looked as if the Russians finally understood.

  The prisoners began to whisper amongst themselves, motioning with their arms and giving shrugs—approving or disapproving, Otto wasn’t sure.

  “Is that it?” Wernher asked Ingersleben. Ingersleben gave a smug nod.

  “Okay, then. Go. Go!” Wernher said, motioning to the Russians to move. Slowly, they did, in a single file line out towards the distant field where the outlying forest was.

  As they reluctantly moved, Wernher shoved the side of his machine gun into the men, forcing them to hurry up. “Go!” he said to the mostly shoeless men; they seemed to have no sense of what freedom was anymore.

  Just then, one of the Russians began to cry, begging and pleading to Wernher. Did he want to stay? No, that wasn’t it. He must’ve thought that it was some type of cruel ploy, that they were going to be shot in the back as they left.

  But slowly the prisoners kept going, kept walking away in the tall dead grass towards the tree horizon.

  All four men stood and watched as the men that had been under their charge for so long did the one thing they were expected not to let them do: escape.

  The Russians kept walking and kept looking back, waiting for a trap to spring that never came. The ones that could run did as they got closer to the tree line, disappearing for good.

  One of the prisoners continued to walk and look back to the four Nazis in anger. It was the Cougher, no longer hacking since his body was too preoccupied with rage. Even in liberation, these men were not able to forgive, and it was at that moment that Otto thought they might have made a mistake. But before he could say anything, they were all gone.

  ❧

  Through all this, Otto did not know where he stood. It made no sense—none—as to why he was kept alive. The job of helping the prisoners escape was likely his last, and the reason he had been spared.

  They made their way to the self-described forest, the small island of trees the bifurcated the real forests to the north and south. He had heard the noises, the explosions, and, remarkably, the lack of yelling or screaming. He knew that all his comrades were dead, but that wasn't why he was afraid to see them. It was the feeling that he was about to lay down with them forever.

  As they made their way through the trees, the three men were at varying times ahead and next to him. He could have run. Part of him thought he should have run—a big part. But instead he pushed forward as he was told, because that’s what Otto did: he listened.

  As soon as the tr
ees stopped, the horror of what had happened began.

  If Otto hadn't been careful, he would’ve have fallen into the pit. The men held on to branches as they navigated around the long trench of death.

  For the most part, to Otto, it looked as if many of the men had drowned. He wasn’t sure why, but many lay there, dead, mouths wide open, like fish frozen in an eternal last gasp for air.

  The snow had started to make strange, small mounds on the men that Otto had never seen before. He realized he had never seen it because a man’s normal reaction to snow falling on him would be to brush it away. But in the strangest of nooks and corners, small pockets of snow had started to fill, at fingers'-length deep.

  Elbows and folds in shirts became growing homes for budding patches of snow. Noses became small ledges and eye sockets became pools for the snow to settle. Perhaps hell wasn’t hot after all.

  There were at least two men who had been split in half, right at the waist. One looked as if he had been climbing out of the hole with both hands only to find no body below him.

  One man lay almost comfortably, with an arm to one side, leg gently bent under the other, as if he was asleep. He would be the spitting image of a person at rest if it wasn’t for the gore that had replaced his head. One could not call it a face, because there was nothing there. Just bits of meat, teeth, eyes without eyelids. There was probably bits and pieces of the men all around him, and it gave him a shiver, like being in a dark room full of roaches.

  “Begin to place them in. We’ll get the one that nearly got away,” Ingersleben said.

  “Place them in?”

  “Yes, you idiot,” Wernher said, as he kicked and shoved a body that was laying outside the hole back down into it. “Place them in. How else are we to bury them?”

  Otto knew that, if it had been up to Wernher, he would have been in that hole, as dead as the men in front of them. So why would Ingersleben want him alive? He wanted to know so that he could continue living, of course, but a larger part of him was just dying from the curiosity.

  As Ingersleben and Wernher went to go retrieve the man from the field, Lafenz stayed behind without being told. It seemed as if the young man did not want to have any part in what had happened in the field. More likely, he was there to make sure that Otto didn’t run. Whatever the case, Otto was both happy and a little afraid to have the young killer with him.

  But having him did prove to be an asset right from the start. Otto, notorious for being unable to take the lead on anything or knowing where to start, followed Lafenz as he grabbed the men, or what was left of them, and began pushing the bodies into the hole.

  It seemed as if they were pieces of luggage to Lafenz. He would just grab the nearest part, usually an elbow or a wrist, and pull the body that way. He even grabbed the dead by their skin, something that Otto wasn’t willing to do. He would grab the bodies only above their clothes. He wasn’t sure why, but he would not touch the skin of the dead, no matter what someone told him.

  It was a sad sight to see as Ingersleben and Wernher make their return.

  They were carrying a dead comrade, something he had seen several times before. Ingersleben had him from under the armpits, while Wernher had him by the ankles. It was as if they were carrying someone they loved and cared for, but Otto knew it not to be so. They had killed the man in cold blood and were now going to bury him in a grave, never to be seen again, like some sort of sick dog on a farm.

  They casually tossed the man onto the top of the heap of bodies. It looked as if he had been shot once in the head, and there were bullet holes in the back of his jacket.

  After catching his breath, Wernher looked at Otto.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” he said. “Let's bury what happened.”

  Truer words had never been said. They weren’t burying people, per se, so much as they were burying a crime, a crime that Otto was now a part of. But better to be on the side of the crime where one breathes than to be on the side of those who don’t.

  Ingersleben was using a small shovel, while the others used their hands to shove the long mound of dirt back onto the corpses. Otto was having a bit of a harder time than the rest of them, and Wernher noted why.

  “Put the gun down!” he said. Otto had kept hold of the gun as he moved the dirt. He hadn't realized he was even doing it.

  “Don’t worry,” Ingersleben said. “If we wanted to kill you, we would have killed you.”

  For some reason that made Otto feel equal parts relieved and terrified.

  Chapter Twelve

  The burial was more exhausting than originally thought, and they decided to take the rest of the day off. They all agreed to the plan to go west and to turn themselves over to Allied Powers as soon as they came across them, but for now, for them, in the east, that might as well have been on the other side of the planet.

  When they awoke the next morning, the ground was covered in an even deeper snow. It had stopped now, but the fact that they were being hounded by monsters from all sides, even the sky itself, was a reminder of how dire their situation was.

  The world was covered in a deep, morning fog, almost as if they had just been gassed, as in the previous war.

  Since Haas’s arrival, the shift in mood and actions had been swift, so much so that Otto hadn’t even had the time to digest the different events that had put them in this situation. As they prepared to leave, grabbing as much as they needed and putting it all in large sacks to carry on their backs, Otto finally had time to think. Upon reflection, he actually did wholeheartedly agree with the plan, much to his surprise.

  Staying and fighting was stupid, plain and simple. It was accepting death for no reason whatsoever. He understood dying for a cause that was winnable, but that wasn’t the case. They were on the losing side. Maybe it was time for the German people to get wiped off the face of the earth, and maybe he was just delaying the inevitable. Nonetheless, Otto knew that the only real option was to survive and live.

  They had one transport vehicle, but it was of no use. Not only had the loan mechanic been killed off, they were also out of fuel. There was nothing to eat. Not for the men, the vehicles, or the rifles. Berlin had wanted them to fight without food, gas, or bullets. The next time they saw this vehicle again would probably be with a smiling Russian behind the wheel.

  The walk out West was a strange one.

  Leaving made for a bit of mixed emotions for Otto. Since he'd first been assigned there, there had been nothing more he'd wanted than to leave that place, and now that his wish was finally being granted, he regretted ever thinking it. It had become his home. A sick, disgusting, gray home, but his home nonetheless. It was filled with prisoners and death, guarded over men who hated him, but at least that was a known to him. He knew where he stood, for the most part, and the days were predictable. A small, predictable hell, but better a hell he knew than one he didn’t. Now, he was leaving that comfort, the comfort of knowing, all for a world that he didn’t know.

  But there was one thing this brave new world did promise, and that was a better chance at life. Not a guarantee. No one said it, but most understood: they were unlikely to survive what they were about to attempt, but they had to try. They had no choice.

  Another reason that Otto was left alive, he thought, was to help carry supplies. Every man had his own bag with his own needs, which, in a time of war, wasn’t that much, but they had also split the other things that they needed to share. The pots, the ammo. The radio, and Ingersleben’s tent.

  After an hour’s walk, Otto nearly forgot about his home, and turned to give it one last look. He could barely even see it. The small group of trees that was their forest was nothing more than a mirage to his eyes. He would remember the site until the day he died, which he hoped was a long while from now.

  The walk from the campsite was a terrifying one for another reason: they were put in the open with nowhere to hide. The plan was to take as many side roads and to walk inside the trees as much as possible. The pla
n was to head to Hanover. Varying reports had placed the Allied troops in or around there, but it was, at the very least, westward. They had to make sure to go around Berlin, either north or south, but there was no way to go through the capital. Even now, between where they were and Berlin, there were areas already taken over by the Red Army.

  They avoided detection for only a day.

  After spending nearly the entire day inside the ridge of a tree line that followed the road, it ended in an open field with nowhere to hide.

  It seemed to them that they were in the free and clear, since they were walking in a valley, and it gave them the false feeling that they were alone in the world. But before anyone could react, they saw a solitary figure standing directly in front of them.

  The outline of his helmet was clear: he was one of them, a Nazi, and therefor a friend. But if their friend was to find out what their real motive was, he would quickly become their enemy.

  Even from the distance that they were at, he was something of an oddity. He waved to them like a man who was stranded on an island and was happy to be found.

  Was he alone? Probably not, since the motorcycle next to him had a passenger cart next to it, and meant that there were more.

  “Heil Hitler!” the man said as they approached. He was still too far to make out a decent look at his face, but his enthusiasm was hard to contain.

  “Heil Hitler,” Ingersleben said, as well, giving an almost lazy salute, not raising his voice.

  “Grenadier Matthias Althaus!” the man said, smiling, extending his hand. His teeth were dark and stained.

  “Unteroffizier Erich Ingersleben,” Ingerslben said, hoping that his title might cause an impression on the young man. It did. He quickly straightened up.