“The white handkerchiefs had been all confiscated before the battle,” one of the Wehrmacht infantrymen explained to a hawk-eyed commissar who conducted the usual interrogation. “By the Feldgendarmerie… to prevent surrender…”
But knowing what was good for them and that all was lost at any rate and that it would have been rather idiotic to die right before the end of this entire affair, the resourceful Wehrmacht landser had still squirreled away a few leaflets, dropped before the battle, by the 7th Department of Propaganda, attached to the First Belorussian and hid them inside their uniforms. Starved, filthy, unshaven, the Germans held those papers in front of themselves now and searched the Russians’ faces, with their wary, mistrustful eyes, desperately hoping for mercy and not really expecting it, at the same time.
“The only promise Hitler has kept is the one he made before coming to power,” one of the newly-surrendered men uttered with a lopsided grin, as he was being patted down for hidden weapons. “Give me ten years and you will not be able to recognize Germany. What do you know? The old sod did not lie.”
Files and files of the POWs began trudging toward the rear of the frontline, where the NKVD detachment awaited them with open arms. Many of the Germans were mere boys, with legs fully covered by much-too-long trench-coats and with helmets sitting so low on their tense faces, gray with fatigue, that they obscured their sight. Some still tried shooting, prior to their foxholes being overrun but dropped their weapons as soon as the Ivans came close; screamed the inevitable and already-familiar, “Hitler kaputt, Stalin gut!” and scrunched up their little, pitiful faces, expecting a beating. The Soviets ordinarily dealt them a kick in the backside and sent them over to the rear, trembling and harmless. For them, the war was finally over. Tadek was amazed at how relieved they all looked, his former enemies.
By the evening, the air around smelled of burned cordite and churned animal flesh. In their zeal, the artillerists and the tank crews had obliterated every construction as far as the eye could see, in case one of them turned out to be a command post. However, all such posts had long been abandoned by the fleeing company commanders and all that the artillerists had burned was, in fact, innocent farms. The Germans regarded the charred corpses of the animals tragically and Tadek, in his turn, stared at their sorry company assembled in a makeshift pen by the commissars and was suddenly overcome with such profound disappointment, he thought he’d fall over with grief.
Wrong people; this entire time he was fighting the wrong people. It was the SS that took his family away from him and he was shooting and slashing with his bayonet at the regular Wehrmacht, the pitiful lot, munching the unexpected bread rations distributed by the Soviets and grumbling their hopes that “that one” in Berlin would off himself before he’d take more innocent lives with him and someone from the administration would sign a surrender already and they would all go home at last. Some even gathered enough courage to ask the commissars what sort of administration they would have, as though the entire Berlin-taking affair was a finished matter. The NKVD interrogated them for their own purposes – a few lucky ones would even be released and sent back to Berlin to explain to the population that they had nothing to fear from the Ivan and that further fighting was senseless – but even without that incentive the Germans appeared to be glad just to talk – about their families, about the regime, and this time truthfully, without holding anything back for the Feldgendarmes, the German Gestapo, were far behind the lines and there was nothing to fear from them any longer. And Tadek regarded them and wondered what it was that he had to do to right all the wrongs, for slaughtering each other certainly didn’t appear to be the answer.
Within a couple of weeks, Berlin had surrendered. On Tadek’s chest, the medal for taking it sat right next to the one for courage. A new political commissar (the old one had lost his head during the taking of the Reichstag and was hastily buried somewhere near it) sat across the table from him, smiling almost kindly at the Polish warrior.
“Why don’t you stay with us? There’s plenty of work to be done in your native Poland now that the war is over.” The commissar was playing with a box of matches but wouldn’t light up his cigarette for some reason.
“There’s nothing left for me in Poland,” Tadek responded truthfully. “The SS took it all.”
“Where to then?” The commissar smiled even kinder, only his eyes remained cold, like ice on the Oder in the middle of April. “To the American sector?”
“Perhaps, I should rejoin my people, if there are any left.”
Tadek purposely said my people and not Jews but the commissar had understood. For some time, he sat opposite Tadek silently and considered something. Tadek wasn’t his Soviet property, a volunteer only. Not a communist, not a dissident either. Just a man who helped them win the war and now there was no need for him any longer. Tadek saw it all in the commissar’s eyes before the Russian even uttered a word. He expected the commissar to release him from his duties and dismiss him at once but when the Russian spoke, Tadek was suddenly caught off guard by the unexpected question.
“Do you truly think it’ll make you feel better? Among the liberated camp inmates?”
Outside, the air was full of lilies
