Freedom Bridge: A Cold War Thriller (9 page)

Chapter 21

P
lush white carpeting swallowed footsteps. Billowing silk drapes fluttered noiselessly in the air-conditioned space. Chairs of glove-soft leather encircled the room. The soothing notes of piano music distracted the room’s occupants from the repetitive sounds—part whine, part growl—of taxiing jets somewhere beyond the drapery.

“This is so much nicer than the regular waiting areas!” enthused Dr. Max Brenner.

“It’s Pan Am’s first-class VIP lounge,” Kurt Brenner told his father, amused.

“For very important persons like my son,” Max countered with unabashed pride.

“Just following in your footsteps.”

“Ah, but you sped past my footsteps long ago.”

Max Brenner looked around. “All these people—they’re here to see you off?”

“Most of them. Matter of fact, I ought to be circulating.”

“Go right ahead, it’s your party. And Kurt, don’t be upset about your mother. You should know by now that her refusal to attend your two symposiums isn’t personal. She won’t set foot in Germany—period.”

“At least you had the good grace to see me off,” Brenner snapped, his good humor evaporating. “When are you joining her in Zurich?”

Max glanced at his watch. “I have a connection from New York to Switzerland in about three hours. Plenty of time to get ready for a wedding,” he said brightly. “The granddaughter of some very old and dear friends. I’d wish you luck in your symposiums, East
and
West, son, except that I’d be doing you a disservice. It wasn’t ‘Lady Luck’ that brought you to the pinnacle of your profession. You earned it with hard work and perseverance.”

“How can I be impatient with my greatest fan?” Brenner said, cracking a smile. “Thanks, Dad.”

“Hungry?” Adrienne asked her father-in-law as Kurt went off to mingle with his guests. “Since you have a few hours to kill, the rubber-chicken meal you’re likely to be served on Swiss Air won’t be able to compete with Pan Am Deluxe. How about a plate of hors d’oeuvres and a glass of wine? What’s your pleasure, a glass of Chardonnay?”

“Just what the doctor ordered. But shouldn’t you be circulating too?”

“Probably. The truth is, I’d much rather be with you.”

He squeezed her arm. “I hope my son realizes just how lucky he is.”

Adrienne managed a smile.

If you knew the truth, Max dear, it would break your heart.

After Max left, Adrienne lost track of time as Kurt mixed with the crowd, spending brief calculating minutes as he moved easily from person to person. From one small gathering to another.

When it was time to leave, Brenner helped Adrienne into her cape, took her arm, and led her out. “As much as I enjoy this sort of elaborate sendoff,” he confessed,
sotto voce
, “I’m eager to board and get the hell out of here.”

Adrienne was so fatigued that, with the aid of a sleeping pill and a comfortable seat pushed as far back as it would go, she fell asleep.

Brenner, in no mood for small talk, let alone arguments, was relieved. He had a lot to think about, starting with the only reason he was going to East Berlin.

He’d been summoned like a schoolboy, he thought with a flush of anger. He rang for the stewardess. When she appeared at his elbow, he ordered a gin and tonic. “Make it a double, will you?” he said.

Staring moodily as the liquid in his glass swayed torpidly with the plane’s vibrations, he was reminded of the lethargic waters of the Elbe River as it wound its way past the camp where he’d spent the last days of the war ministering to the sick, the wounded. And the dead.

* * *

“Medic! Medic!”

By March 1945, three years after he had enlisted in the United States Army to avoid being drafted, twenty-three-year-old Kurt Brenner, with a B.S (pre-med), an M.A. (biology), and a Ph.D (microbiology), had become Staff Sergeant First Class Kurt Brenner—
“Doc”
to the American soldiers he had served with in Germany since the invasion of Europe nearly a year earlier.

Brenner raced across an open field, dropping to his knees beside the mangled body of a soldier who had stepped on a land mine. He held one eyelid open. The pupil stared back, unseeing. Removing the young man’s dog tags from around his neck, Brenner walked away, swamped by emotion.

Months and months of blood and guts—literally. How much more can I take? The brass keeps saying the war will be over anytime now, but it’s already April, and we’re still not in Berlin! We’re still taking casualties!

He was thinking about the latest intelligence—die-hard Nazis concentrated in and around Berlin—when the usual cry for help sounded.

“Medic! Medic!”

Shaking off his reverie, Brenner took off running toward yet another mangled GI.

By early April, when American forces were roughly 120 miles from Berlin, Staff Sergeant Kurt Brenner was still grousing. Once Berlin was taken, he figured, the war would be over and he’d be on his way home. Time for the next step in the career he’d carefully planned before the war, he thought with a flood of relief.

But all American units heading for Berlin were stopped in their tracks. Held back by General Eisenhower’s orders from his Commander-in-Chief to allow the Soviets to take Berlin, Brenner and tens of thousands of others waited. Toward the end of April, the waiting appeared to be over. On the 22nd, the Soviets were in the north and east suburbs of Berlin. The next day, they had surrounded the city. A week later, the Red Army had taken most of the city, although fierce fighting continued at the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. On April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide. In Europe, World War II was officially over.

But not for Doc Brenner. Although the Yalta Conference had provided for the Americans, British, and French to have occupation rights in Berlin, the Communists did not allow them to enter until roughly July 4, 1945.

* * *

On their drive from the blood-soaked beaches of France to the former Nazi capital, American soldiers were exposed to scenes that conjured images of hell. The bloated bodies of GIs who’d stormed French beaches. The sightless, the limbless, the lame and the halt. Nor was the detritus of war limited to combatants. Dead civilians—men, women, children—were strewn about like rag dolls. GIs tripped over carcasses of dogs and horses. Churches had lost their roofs. Homes were flattened, as if the Devil’s fist had smashed them into rubble. But the camps were an unmatched chamber of horror. Prisoners more dead than alive. Rigor mortis giving corpses the look of stacked firewood. Mountains of human bones. Piles of personal items, from eyeglasses to hair.

To these blistering images, burned into their consciousness, the advance parties of the American military added the fate of Berlin. During the war, American and British pilots had dropped 75,000 tons—1,500,000 pounds—of bombs on the city. Before the war there were a million-and-a-half dwellings in Berlin; by the end, 300,000. Of Berlin’s huge fleet of buses, only thirty-seven were serviceable, and less than one tenth of the city’s subway cars were of any use. As for Berlin’s many canals, virtually every bridge that spanned them had been destroyed by the Nazis. Worse, raw sewage was turning canal water into cesspools covered with scum that became favorite haunts for billions of flies and mosquitoes.

Shallow graves dotted city streets, parks, and public squares. Dead bodies lay unburied under the rubble. Edible food, if any could be found, was at a huge premium. Venereal disease was rampant. Thousands of women, raped by Soviet troops, had been abandoned by their families and cast out to fend for themselves.

Into this surreal city in early July 1945 came Kurt Brenner’s outfit. Setting up camp in the woods on the outskirts of the American zone across the Havel River from Soviet-controlled East Germany, the men were tasked with providing security for American staff personnel who were starting to move into the American zone. It took a long time before Brenner’s battalion began to achieve some degree of normalcy.

* * *

“Yo, Doc! The CO wants you on the double!”

Brenner sighed but took off running. He passed bedraggled German civilians headed toward the American zone as they tried to put distance between themselves and the Russian troops occupying the East. He’d seen endless streams of the poor bastards in the last few weeks as they plodded along, their miserable possessions wrapped in dirty sheets. The lucky ones were pulling wagons, household items piled high.

“Hop on the truck, Doc,” the CO said with a cursory wave toward a canvas-roofed vehicle the GIs called “a deuce-and-a-half” because it could carry a 2½-ton load. A couple dozen soldiers were in the process of climbing into the rear. First Lieutenant Joseph Cherner stretched out his hand to pull Brenner aboard.

“Where to, Joe?”

“Recon close to Potsdam this side of the river,” Cherner said. “Regimental commander’s orders.”

“What’s the CO want with
me
?” Brenner groused.

“Best guess? The CO figures we could meet up with some Wehrmacht die-hards. We’d need a medic.”

“Hope not. I’m asleep on my feet,” Brenner said with a yawn. “After these guys get off the truck I’m crapping out. Wake me if I’m needed.”

“Roger.”

When Brenner opened his eyes, it was dark.

“Joe?”

“It’s okay.” Cherner was standing just outside the truck. “There’s nothing going on. The CO just got orders to pull back.”

“So where is he?”

“Down the road a piece.”

“Cherner, you speak Russian, right?” First Sergeant Al Rosen bellowed. “Move your ass, soldier!” he said without waiting for a reply. “You too, Doc. And don’t forget your stuff.”

The two of them double-timed it up the dark road, straining to make sense of the silhouettes clustered about a small truck with its headlights switched off. “International Red Cross” was stenciled on both doors.

The flames of a small bonfire illuminated the scene. “Cherner? Brenner? Over here,” the CO called out. Next to the fire stood a man in a shabby civilian overcoat with curly red-blond hair. “Mr. Johannsen here is with the Red Cross. Take a look at these kids, Brenner,” the CO ordered. “See what you can do for them.”

“
Kids,
sir?”

“Yeah, kids.” The CO turned on his flashlight and moved its powerful beam about five yards further down the road. The light paused when it fell on a pair of tiny bare feet, and then moved up to the huddled form’s nearly skeletal body.

Then another child. Another . . .

There were ten of them. The oldest looked to be about twelve. She was holding tightly to the hand of the youngest, who couldn’t have been more than three. The rest seemed to be between four and ten years old. Brenner bent down for a closer look, and then gingerly examined them one by one. Girls with stringy matted hair. Boys whose heads had been shaved. Their tattered clothes and swollen stomachs, their enormous eyes staring out of bruised emaciated faces, gave them the look not of children, Brenner thought uneasily, but of aging dwarfs.

The CO, a stubby man with sharp probing eyes, angrily stuffed his hands into the pockets of his field jacket. “Talk to the older child, Cherner. She seems to be in charge of the others. Tell her we’re here to help them.”

“Мы здесь помочь вам,” Cherner translated.

The child stared. Then, “Нет не разговаривать русский,” she replied. “I not speak Russian.”

Cherner took a closer look at her. The same Nordic coloring as his own—blond hair, blue eyes. Before his parents had emigrated to America and their name, Chernovsky, had been shortened to Cherner, his mother said people wrongly assumed they were Norwegian . . .

Cherner cleared his throat. “Зробіть ви розмовляйте Українською?” “Do you speak Ukrainian?”

“Так.” “Yes.”

He turned to the CO. “They’re Ukrainian, sir.”

“Talk to them. Find out what this is all about.”

Cherner spoke to the girl in quietly reassuring tones. After a few minutes, she answered him haltingly.

As soon as Brenner did what he could medically, Cherner steered the kids to First Sergeant Rosen, where GIs began feeding them Army rations. Spam, sausages, biscuits—and the most popular item—chocolate bars. It was obvious the children had never tasted anything like chocolate in their lives. The First Sergeant was beaming. Some of the GIs were teary-eyed.

Cherner glanced at the stenciled words—International Red Cross—on the doors of the small truck. “How were you able to rescue the children?” he asked Johannsen.

“You know about the camps?” Johannsen asked.

Cherner and Brenner glanced at each other. Cherner nodded grimly.

“A concentration camp called Sachsenhausen is not far from here—about 22 miles north,” Johannsen said. “Back in April, it was directly in the path of a fast-moving Russian armored column. The Nazi commandant, an SS Colonel, had standing orders from Himmler to ‘evacuate’ the camp before the Russians got there. I tried to persuade him to release the survivors—especially the children. He just smiled and began moving everyone out in two seemingly endless columns. Sick, starving, half-dead creatures. They were prodded along by bayonets. Those who couldn’t keep up were shot and left where they fell . . .”

Johannsen shuddered at the memory.

The older girl, still holding the three-year-old, sidled over to Cherner.

“I ran my truck beside the line of march next to the commandant who was in the lead,” Johannsen continued. “I implored him to free at least some of the children. That perhaps he had children of his own. When he smiled too, I figured he was about to move on without answering. Damned if he didn’t look down from his horse and say, ‘Mr. Johannsen of the International Red Cross, I can see that these ten children are together. Consider them a parting gift to your fine organization as a token of my good will.’ The older girl, here, took me for an American,” he continued. “I don’t speak her language, but it was obvious from the start what she and the older kids were terrified of. ‘Nyet Russkies. Nyet Russkies,’ they repeated over and over.”

Cherner turned to his CO. “They have good reason to be terrified, sir,” he said in a voice choked with emotion. “The Russians consider it a sport to kill Ukrainians—at least the ones they don’t use as laborers or cannon fodder.”

“What did you find out from the girl?” the CO asked.

“Her name’s Irina. Their parents are dead. She as much as said it’s up to her, now, to protect the others. Little Mother,” he said softly as the girl, eyes partly hidden by her matted hair, hugged the three-year-old to her chest. “What shall I tell her?”

“That we’re Americans,” the CO said tightly. “That we’ll find a place to hide them where they’ll be safe from the Nazis
and
the Russians.”

“I have to go back,” Johannsen told the CO. “There may be wounded survivors in those ditches,” he said bleakly. Johannsen shook the CO’s hand, nodded his thanks at the GIs, got into his small truck, and drove off.

“Go get the deuce-and-a half, Cherner,” the CO ordered. “You and Brenner take the kids. The rest of us will walk. There’s a deserted farmhouse a few miles back, not far from the river. Wait for me there. And Cherner?”