Author's note: A little more war in this one. Discussion of specific historical crimes against humanity.
Traitress
In the days after my encounter with Heinrich, I swung wildly between despair and normalcy. My section was sent to organize the peasants along the edge of the Pripet marshes. Keeping the villagers loyal meant we could use the marshes to appear from unexpected directions, strike the Germans and flee without consequence.
When we were among the people, setting right the damage of the war, or sowing the winter wheat, or bartering with them for food, I could put aside how I felt.
But when the physical work stopped and the day turned to soft evening, I felt ruined. At night, every night, I dreamed terrible things, no longer specific enough to have names or acts attached, miasmatic terror and dread and a pain that sat deep in my muscle.
It took several days for me to be able to sit comfortably and during those days I could barely eat. Anything I put into my mouth reawakened the bitter taste of Heinrich's cock. The lack of food made it easy to detach from my body and move automatically.
Kiril and Lev tried to convince me to eat. They were both delicate, Kiril because I was one of his charges, Lev because we were the only Jewish soldiers in the unit.
Slowly, I came alive.
In many villages most of the men were gone. They'd signed up at the start of the war, or been pressed into Polizei units, or fled to us, or they lay rotting in ditches with German lead in their skulls. Or they'd gone to Minsk, Gomel, Babryusk, as laborers free or unfree, searching for enough cash to survive the coming winter.
Those who stayed were indolent, drunk, apathetic. The war tore away their world and left them like detritus on a beach after a great storm. Nothing could move them, not even the hate for their neighbors who joined the fascist Polizei.
So we had to talk to the women and the girls to learn the movements of the Germans. I was in the cellar of one house a few days after Heinrich raped me, when I grasped this reality.
They'd harbored a Jewish mechanic who'd fled when the Polizei came to take his house. An informant told the Polizei. They came to the village with four German soldiers and burst into the house. They shot an old man, dragged the mechanic into the street and beat him to death.
The eldest daughter, my age, was home. The Germans raped her. Her grandmother was made to watch. The younger daughter, sixteen, escaped their attentions because she was in the fields.
She now kept a strict watch on the comings and goings of the Fascists. Her sister was nearly catatonic, two weeks after the event. I wanted to speak to her, tell her that there were others who'd suffered dishonor. But she refused to meet my eyes. The younger sister passed us all she knew of the Germans and the names of a score of other girls who kept a similar watch.
News came from Kiev, more than a week late, of the city's fall. No government, no army could sustain such losses and fight on. It took four years of war and a revolution for Hoffmann and Falkenhayn's columns to reach Kiev, and they held it all of a single winter. The Nazi armies took it in three months. They could not be stopped. It seemed that the autumn of that year would be the last twilight of the civilized world.
Though the details of the German Generalplan Ost were still secret, we lived through it. There was only kasha to eat, some spare potatoes here and there, the barest remnants of the harvest. The rest was taken at bayonet for Berlin and Vienna and the Ruhr, to feed the muscles that worked the presses, lathes and furnaces that forged the death machines.
The fall of Kiev cast the weakness of the Soviet Union into harsh light. All that we had sacrificed -- the camps, the purges, the terror, the breakneck industrialization, the great dams, the iron foundries, the railways -- all of it was too little, too late. Twenty years of sacrifice and toil, of tears and horror and hope and this humiliation was our reward.
We were still just peasants, our clothes still rustic, our factories primitive.
Who were we to stand against the Germans?
The Americans had not joined, the British reeled at the loss of their colonies, and Churchill's hatred for the Soviets made it obvious that no help would come from the fifth of the world crushed beneath the heel of his dictatorship.
The sense of general catastrophe made my own suffering feel so small, and gave me some horror onto which I could project my own violations: a second Brest-Litovsk, the fall of Moscow, Swastikas in Astrakhan and Arkhangel.
By the spring we would surely all be dead.
Autumn gripped the land now and rain swelled the streams. Groundwater rose in the dugouts. The Pripet marshes swelled. We lived in mud, marched in mud, fought in mud, worked in mud. In the rare dry days, our clothes stiffened and caked mud fell from them. But it was impossible to stay dry, to stay clean.
One night, after a sunny day, the whole of Kiril's section went down to a stream to wash our clothes in the clear water. It was a comparatively warm evening, one of the last for the next seven months. The mud sloughed from our equipment and uniforms.
Lev gave me a coat to protect my modesty. I took special care to clean my mother's boots, which had endured the marching and the weather with little damage. I wore the coat, then put on my trousers when they were dry and took my underclothes down to the stream and washed them too. But I could not work out the bloodstains Heinrich had left in my underwear.
Then the men sat about the fires. Slowly, one-by-one, they unrolled their bedrolls and dropped to sleep under the clear sky.
From a village a mile distant, came the faint pops of gunfire, but neither Kiril nor Lev stirred.
Lev, by his physical endurance and his generosity, had emerged as Kiril's right hand. At first, the Russians and the Ukrainians in the section belittled him, but he challenged any man to fight him bare knuckle if they thought a Jew weak. A pair of Uzbek brothers, an Armenian, a Tajik and a Tatar joined Lev in something of a bloc against the Russian soldiers and the Byelorussian recruits. These non-Slavs were all survivors of the disasters of July and August, all still proud of their Red Army discipline. In time they won adherents from among the other soldiers trapped behind the lines. They called me little sister.
Lev and his friends played cards naked by the fire as their clothes dried, the Uzbeks already asleep.
"Who is shooting?" I asked.
"Volodya," Lev said, with an edge of disdain for our commander. "He is done with some prisoners."
"Prisoners?"
"Whites."
I nodded. There was another burst of gunfire, four shots, nearly together, then the bark of a pistol a moment later.
I passed the challenge of the sentry, then stalked across the fields. A third volley sounded as I neared.
They'd shot the men in an empty stockpen behind a barn. The bodies lay in the manure. The full moon cast the dead in silver light, their blood a dark stain on their shirts. Vladimir Sergeyivich held a revolver in his hand, half a squad of gunmen nearby. They brought a fourth man from the barn, limping and battered, specks of blood on his clothing.
Vladimir Sergeyivich looked him up and down.
"You sold brother Russians to the Fascists," he said.
"No I didn't," the man protested.
"Have the courage not to lie to my face."
