The school took up most of their time now and Tadek was thankful for the distraction. The Wehrmacht Squad, as they’d been baptized by the class, invariably selected Tadek to be on their team during the PE classes and for the after-school soccer games. He was reluctant to tell them at first that it was his fellow Sonderkommando inmates who taught him how to play and how to lose to the SS. But then one day it suddenly poured out of him in torn, ragged sentences – all about the soccer field behind the crematorium, the SS men’s white undershirts, their laughter when they’d score a goal, the animalistic fear of accidentally tripping or bumping into one of them during the game, and the oddest sense of dog-like gratitude, mixed with revulsion, at the sight of the beer crates both teams shared after each game. SS vs SK. They even had a board with scores pinned to the wall of the cremation facility.
The Wehrmacht Squad men listened and smoked, pensive and grim and nodded from time to time – sympathetic, not hostile as he had half-expected. Clapped Tadek on his back and told him about the Ivans gouging their comrades’ eyes out on the Eastern Front and the SS setting fires to barns full of partisans. It was all rot, they said, the entire war affair. And beasts were everywhere and ordinary people competed in outdoing each other in violence.
“But at least we had guns,” Wirths wistfully noted.
“We had guns too, even before the liberation.” For the first time, Tadek looked up at him with eyes that shone with pride. “We revolted and shot whoever we could and blew up that one crematorium to the devil.”
He didn’t have to say how many of his fellow Sonderkommando men the SS machinegun had mowed down that fateful day in retaliation; the Squad fellows knew what such revolts resulted in. They shook his hand instead, firmly and with respect – one soldier to another and Tadek suddenly felt stronger; a fighter, not a victim any longer, even in his own eyes. Even his joining the Red Army they openly approved. We’d do the same, they admitted. Seeking revenge was the only logical thing to do in his situation. And the SS were bastards – they agreed upon that also. The Feldgendarmerie hanged their Wehrmacht lot on the slightest of provocations closer to the end of the war. There was no love lost between the two army branches.
“We began shooting at them sometime in early spring, slyly and in the back,” Wirths admitted, pulling on his cigarette and smirked when he saw Tadek’s astounded face. “What are you looking at me like that for? To a dog – a dog’s death.” He shrugged indifferently and without any remorse.
“No, it’s not that. It’s just I never suspected that you…”
“Weren’t all pigheaded fascists?” Wirths supplied with the same wry grin.
“Let’s put it that way.”
For some time, Wirths pondered something, plunged into silence. “Perhaps, you won’t believe me if I tell you this but only half of Germany actively supported Hitler and his policies. The other half didn’t give a brass tack and simply existed. The economy was flourishing and they may not have approved of his severe measures against the Jews or the Catholic church or the homosexuals or his political opponents or his views on the role of women in society but they kept quiet because what could they really do? That was my mother’s favorite phrase, what could one really do? There were the outspoken types but only at the very beginning, who couldn’t tolerate the slightest injustice and tried to speak out but they were taken care of by the Gestapo at once. And after such outspoken ones disappeared, one thought twice and thrice before voicing unpopular opinions, let alone acting upon them. And then the war came and that other half of the population, which never actively supported Hitler and perhaps even sympathized with the victims of his regime, only realized what had hit them when it was much too late. They used to satisfy themselves with thinking that it wasn’t really their trouble and that it was only communists that are being jailed, or the Jews, or the homosexuals, or the political dissidents, and it had nothing to do with them whatsoever because they were not any of these things and therefore were safe from any catastrophe… And then the first Allied bombers dropped their load over German cities and they realized that they were being slowly boiled to death like that proverbial frog and that the catastrophe, which they so thoroughly tried to ignore, was their business now and that the bombs didn’t differentiate between communists and national-socialists and between homosexuals and ‘good family men’ with ten children.”
Tadek listened and nodded to Wirths’s words. “I never thought about it from an ordinary German’s point of view.”
“One felt helpless, that’s how one felt. When I got conscripted, it wasn’t much better than it was for you when they rounded you up and sent you to the ghetto. The only difference is that they gave me a gun and put a few Feldgendarmes behind my back to ensure that I don’t desert or surrender. I know what some people are saying about us. Why haven’t you resisted actively? Why didn’t you say anything? Because we wanted to live; how about that for one very inconvenient reason?” His voice turned harsh and bitter. “Yes, I chose to shoot at the Amis instead of being strung up on a rope by the Feldgendarmes for refusing to fight, because I wanted to live. And I surely should like to see
