Europe Central (55 page)

But the Jews—

They’re better off, said his friend. After all, they’re unreliable elements. Where could we permit them to go? It’s better to release them from the situation.

Vlasov gazed at him gently.—How does that make you feel about yourself, Wilfried Karlovich?

Never mind that. No, don’t leave just yet. I still have some pretty good cognac here, and now that the Americans control Paris I don’t suppose we’ll be getting any more, so we might as well—here. I seemed to know that you’d ask that question sometime, but . . .

Yes, said Vlasov breathlessly. I know what you’re thinking. You want to know why I didn’t ask you a long time before now.

You did.

I did, but I . . .

Well, I thought of that, to be sure. He’ll ask me, I thought. And then . . . From the very first I tried to protect you, because I knew that you were decent, and as long as you didn’t know too much, you could save yourself, which no matter how one looks at it is a benefit. (Do you think I’ve saved myself? In fact, I ... ) I mean, if a single Russian prisoner of war is saved, that’s a net good, isn’t it? Unofficial sources have told me that three or four
million
have already died in captivity—

Don’t worry, Vlasov said. You’re still my friend. I just . . . But let me ask you something. What you told me about the Katy
massacre, that was—confirmed?

Ha, ha! I can see your fingers moving in your pocket. You must be playing with that Geco shell. Yes, I swear it!

That’s all right then, said Vlasov warmly. Then I don’t care. We’re all murderers. And maybe if I don’t surrender to despair I can still do something good. But what about Heidi? Were you—

Forgive me, my dear fellow. I only wanted to bring you security and perhaps divert you a little. Don’t you care for her? If not, I can—

The radio was shouting:
To freshen our German blood
. . .—He went away to stroke the fair and silky hair of his Aryan wife.

33

I know, said Heidi. Of course it’s difficult to know how to feel. I went through that stage with my first husband. You need to harden yourself, Andrei.

The bombing of Berlin was growing heavier now.

In 10.44, the Russians captured their first German town. Smashing in the heads of babies, nailing naked women to barn doors, they took their joyous revenge. Heidi, who was now wiring ignition systems for Messerschmitt fighter planes, heard on the radio that the men had been made to hold lamps and watch as their womenfolk were raped by hordes of Red Army soldiers. Men who resisted were castrated; women who resisted were disemboweled. When the Germans recaptured the place, they found lines of women and children laid out in a field, with cartridges glittering beside them. So Goebbels made a speech. He warned that we were all going to have to strengthen our wills and harden our hearts . . .

34

In the month of 11.44 the Nazis sponsored a conference in Prague. (Where were the Jews who’d lived there?—
Gone away.
) At the railroad station, a long line of German soldiers accorded Vlasov their best Nazi salutes. He stared back, scratching vaguely at the general’s stripes on his trousers. He’d been almost-promised a command over the criminal remnants of the
Kaminski Brigade (for Kaminski was shot for excessive ruthlessness against the Warsaw rebels). He’d nearly been given authority over a misplaced light-armed detachment; he had a fair chance of becoming Führer of three shattered, demoralized Russian units recalled from the collapsing Westfront. It was up to him to show what he could do. Could he only help the Reich to break out of the Bolshevik trap, why, then, he’d get rewarded exactly as he deserved! Cleaning his glasses, he waited for Kroeger to bring the schnapps. And now, in the citadel, dignitaries gave speeches in commemoration of the new Prague Manifesto, which the
had prepared over Vlasov’s signature. The only part he’d objected to was an anti-Semitic passage. Strik-Strikfeldt, who’d begun to worry about his own postwar career, refused to interpret Vlasov’s remarks at the triumphal banquet, but it seemed that this odd tall Russian didn’t hold it against him, for just after midnight he staggered over to say: Wilfried Karlovich, Washington and Franklin were traitors in the eyes of the British crown. As for me . . .

You need to lie down, my dear fellow. Go back to your table. Where’s your wife? She must be very proud of you . . .

God give me strength! But you’re a god, aren’t you, Wilfried Karlovich?

I beg your pardon? (Excuse me, gentlemen. They get like this when they drink, you know. It’s a racial characteristic.)

Wilfried Karlovich, you’ll escape with the Führer and help him, because you’re a god. You’re Loki. And one day you’ll tell everybody at Valhalla that I wasn’t a traitor . . .

This man led the Fourth Mechanized against us at Lvov! Strik-Strikfeldt said hastily. He also . . .

I’ll explain how we Russians do it, said Vlasov, and as he said
we Russians
he could not forbear his own pride. It’s not only rational; it’s as smooth as an execution of Jews! First, we break through the enemy’s defenses—

That insect is talking about
our
defenses, said an
-man in disgust.

In at least one sector, more if possible. (Kroeger keeps filling up my glass. I suppose he thinks that’s funny.) Second, we launch offensives into the breakthrough areas. Third, we continue these offensives to the enemy flanks. Fourth, we encircle the enemy’s units which have been isolated by the previous measures—

It’s true; he really is the Houdini of breakouts, interrupted Strik-Strikfeldt, looking at the ceiling.

And if you want an example of what I’m talking about, continued Vlasov with a defiant smile, I refer you to the Byelorussian operation of this year, whereby the Soviet army successfully—

This is too much!

Shoot that Slav in the back of the head!

But in the end they decided that “when the time was right” Vlasov would be permitted to fight on Czech soil.

35

Why not now? The front line was approaching like a tidal wave. All our Russian conquests had long since been submerged. As the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
explains,
in this long and bitter struggle, the USSR armed forces proved to be mightier than the mightiest war machine in the capitalist world.
Now the wave curled over the dismembered corpse of Poland: In the former Reichskommissariat Ostland, the former Reichskommissariat Ukraine and even the eastern regions of our General Government, artillery barrages, infantry beachheads and hordes of T-34 tanks roiled, comprising discrete aspects of a sentient metallic liquid. The defenders fell back. When Vlasov read that the Red Army had recaptured Lvov, he could not forbear to think of his own long lost battle there, and he remembered something else, too—namely, that on the day before Lvov fell to the Germans, the NKVD had butchered Ukrainian political prisoners by the hundreds, shooting them right there in their cells . . . And now Russians in their Studebaker trucks came to run over the carcasses of horses in the burnt streets, looted the last stale bread from shops, then passed on, vanishing in the smoky air. Warsaw wouldn’t detain them long, it seemed. Soon the General Government would be completely un-Germanized. Then they’d drown the last territories of what had once been Poland—Katowice, Zichenau, Reichsgau Wartheland and Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia—under a sea of steel which would mask itself as Poland-renewed. (It wouldn’t be Poland at all. It would be a Soviet vassal state.)

Vlasov understood this much better than Himmler, who has been characterized by Guderian as
an inconspicuous man with all the marks of racial inferiority.
Whenever they hid his schnapps, Vlasov sat poring over maps, with sullen destiny circling overhead like an enemy bomber. There he was, condemned to positional warfare again! (Well, even a non-German like you would be eligible for the War Merit Cross, they said, slapping his shoulder encouragingly.)

His men were digging antitank ditches. When he asked them how they were holding up, they said with weary smiles: Never mind, General. It’s not much worse than working on the collective farm . . .

36

On 20.1.45, the Russians crossed the borders of the Old Reich and entered our heartland. On 25.1.45, the despairing, raging Führer appointed Himmler to take command of Army Group Vistula. On 27.1.45, General Guderian (long since in bad odor for having told too many truths about the military situation) was saying at the briefing conference: Vlasov wanted to make some statement.

Vlasov doesn’t mean a thing, snapped Hitler.

And the idea is that they should go around in German uniform! Göring put in, as if to himself. That only annoys people. If you want to lay hands on them, you find they’re Vlasov’s people . . .

I was always against putting them into our uniform, said Hitler, scratching at the red spots on his cheeks. But who was for it? It was our
beloved
Army which always has its own ideas—

The very next day, Vlasov was at last given command of two divisions. Once again he found himself on the front line of a lost war, in possession of a low density of artillery and tanks. At best he could achieve some localized breakthrough into death.

37

And now, when it was once again too late for anything, his troops became ever more various, even fabulous: Great Russians, Ukrainians, Mensheviks, monarchists, murderers, martyrs, lunatics, perverts, democrats, escaped slaves from the underground chemical factories, racists, dreamers, patriots, Italians, Serbian Chetniks, turncoat Partisans who’d realized that Comrade Stalin might not reward them after all, peasants who’d naively welcomed the German troops in 1941, and now rightly feared that the returning Communists might remember this against them, dispossessed Tartars, Hiwis from Stalingrad, pickpockets from Kiev, brigands from the Caucasus who raped every woman they could catch, militant monks, groping skeletons, Polish Army men whose cousins had been murdered by the NKVD in 1940, NKVD infiltrators recording names in preparation for the postwar reckoning (they themselves would get arrested first), men from Smolensk who’d never read the Smolensk Declaration and accordingly believed that Vlasov was fighting especially for them, men who knew nothing of Vlasov except his name, and used that name as an excuse—a primal horde, in short, gathered concentrically like trembling distorted ripples around its ostensible leader, breaking outward in expanding, disintegrating circles across the map of war. When the British Thirty-sixth Infantry Brigade entered Forni Avoltri at the Austro-Italian border, they accepted the surrender of a flock of Georgian officers, no less than ten of whom were hereditary princes “in glittering uniforms,” runs the brigade’s war diary. Suddenly pistol-shots were heard. The Englishmen suspected ambush, but it turned out to be two of the princes duelling over an affair of honor. The victors’ bemusement was increased by the arrival of the commander, a beautiful, high-cheeked lady in buckskin leggings who came galloping up to berate her men for having yielded to the enemy without permission. Leaping from the saddle, she introduced herself as the daughter of the King of Georgia. (Needless to say, no kings remain in our Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, which happens to be the birthplace of Comrade Stalin.) All these worthies considered themselves to be members in good standing of Vlasov’s army. Vlasov, the Princess explained, had guaranteed the independence of Georgia . . .