When the Doves Disappeared (34 page)

We were given soup at lunch. It was good, a little better than usual, and it calmed the other prisoners, but not me. The Untersturmführer walked past me talking in a loud voice, almost yelling, telling the cook to leave some soup for the three hundred who’d been taken to the woods. Said they would need it after a hard day’s work.

The prisoners were ordered to line up again. Standing made me dizzy, although I’d just eaten.

The gates of the camp were clogged with trucks.

We weren’t going to get out of this alive.

The afternoon advanced. Six men were chosen from the rows of prisoners. Two oil barrels were rolled onto a truck. The guards ordered us to sit in front of the barracks. They were restless, pale. One of them was so nervous that he couldn’t get his paperossi lit and just threw it on the ground, from where it was immediately snatched up. The guards looked more frightened than the prisoners.

The next fifty were ordered to the front of the lines. The evacuation would be done in groups of fifty, at most a hundred at a time. Up to that point they had called only for Jews. Alfons whispered that the Estonians would soon have work to do—they would kill the Jews first, the Estonians afterward. The Germans were leaving to escort the prisoners. That was when Alfons made his move. The cook stumbled as he walked past us. The guards turned to look. The cook whimpered and rubbed his ankle. We were ordered to carry the cook and push the soup cart. The kitchen was deserted, but the cook was suddenly lying on the floor with a broken neck. The guard was still at the door, looking out at the yard. Alfons made a signal. Suddenly we were out the kitchen window, in another window, going up stairs to an attic, and from there onto a roof.

There was a bustle at the gates. We tried to be as invisible as possible.
It wasn’t difficult, we had become very thin. The guard in the kitchen doorway dashed back and forth and yelled for assistance. They were searching the kitchen, opening and closing cupboard doors.

Alfons whispered, “They’ll give up soon enough. Looking for missing prisoners would arouse attention, make people restless. They’re supposed to act calm.”

He was right. The guards left the kitchen, and the cook’s body, and went back outside. I watched them march across the yard. Suddenly I spotted a familiar profile among them, and almost fell off the roof, but managed to keep my composure and my balance.

“Have you ever seen that man here before? Working as a guard or anything?”

“That one?” Alfons said. “I’m not sure.”

The prisoners were being driven toward the women’s barracks. I could see the camp barber and shoemaker. Circulating among the troops was an unmistakable figure. That bouncing walk, unlike any other.

I was too far away to see his expression clearly, but I could tell that my cousin was not overcome by panic like the guards, not to mention the prisoners. His pulse may have been racing from excitement, but not from fear.

He held his head high.

Fighting had never suited him.

Evidently this did.

Reval, Estland General Commissariat, Ostland National Commissariat

E
DGAR KNOCKED ON
the SS-Hauptsturmführer’s door again, harder this time. The sound echoed through the corridor. He listened. The building was still. The only sound was a dog’s bark downstairs. There wasn’t a German to be found in the Roosikrantsi neighborhood these days. The commissary doors had been torn open, the shops had been emptied, the patients had disappeared from the hospital. Edgar took a lock pick from his pocket. He’d made it himself, and it had proved very useful. The lock clicked open. The apartment was deserted, the servants gone. The living room was a mess. A dried-up ficus lay among fragments of its broken pot, the soil strewn around the room. The carpet was crumpled, the curtain torn half off its rod. Edgar glanced quickly into each room. The office cabinets were open, the drawers empty. In the bedroom he could smell Juudit’s perfume. A few dresses still hung in the wardrobe. The dressing table drawers gaped open. Empty. Kitchen cupboards, empty. Edgar checked the windows. Aside from some cracks, they were intact. There was just dust on the bureau and windowsills, no ash from a bombing. The potting soil was dry as a bone, on the cocktail cart there were glasses whose contents had evaporated, and on the smoking table an April issue of
Revaler Zeitung
. Edgar found a bottle of juice in the cold
pantry, opened it greedily, and sat down to think. The chaos of the apartment wasn’t from the Germans’ departure. It happened longer ago than that. If Juudit was arrested, she hardly would have been allowed to pack. Had the servants emptied the apartment after she left? But why such a mess? What was the hurry? The dining chairs were gone. There were signs of more haste than in other Germans’ homes he’d seen. Had there been a fight? Was the mess the aftermath of the arrest, or something else? Had Hertz kept Juudit’s part in the ring secret, or delayed its discovery so that the spotlight wouldn’t be shone on him? Had Hertz himself been in trouble? Perhaps Juudit and her lover both were already on their way to Germany.

When Edgar had finally gotten away from Klooga and made it to Tallinn, the city had already been emptied of Germans. His stomach had started to gnaw at him, but he didn’t let desperation get the better of him, didn’t allow himself to break down, even though he guessed that all the ships had already sailed. An Opel Blitz full of harried Germans had pulled into Klooga the morning before the camp liquidation and disappeared the moment it was over. He should have escaped then, or spent the night with the guards who’d run away from the camp, instead of waiting for permission to get in the truck that brought the last of them to the harbor. But it was too late for regret. Everyone was gone. The Germans’ medical stores and clinics were empty, the army barber and shoemaker vanished, nothing left of the Soldatenheim but the sign, the washbasin built into the floor of the laundry on Vene Road. The Estonian flag was flying from the pole at Pikk Hermann. He had stopped to stare at it. A kid running down the street had told him that Admiral Pitka’s men were meeting to defend Estonia’s new government. “And Captain Talpak is here, too! All the good men of Estonia are arming themselves! The Russians will never get in here again!”

He was too late. He would never get to Danzig. This was confirmed when he reached the harbor.

THERE WAS
no time to think it all through. He got up too quickly from the table and his head spun from the hunger and the vomit from the camp that clung to his boots. The smell hadn’t hit him until now. After wiping
them with a dampened towel, he went into the bathroom to freshen up, without looking in the mirror. He knew himself well enough to realize that he now had the same look on his face as the other people who’d been in the truck that brought him to Tallinn. When the truck broke down, the others had turned their back on the harbor, the German army, the Germans’ orders. They started walking toward home. Edgar headed toward the harbor.

Water still came out of the bathtub faucet and he allowed himself a quick wash, tried to shake the sleepless fog out of his brain, and went into the office. He didn’t find any valuables, no gold, no silverware. All that was left of the desk accessories were a few ink stains on a blotter. He should have acted sooner, made Juudit tell him where things were hidden, where the most important papers were, the gold and other valuables, should have arranged a time to clean out the apartment while the refugee ring was being arrested, but he’d been optimistic, naive. Too late again, even when it came to this. But this was no time to stagnate. He fetched pillowcases from the bedroom and started to fill them with the papers that were left. For a brief moment he wondered whether the Germans had left these files on purpose, and if they had, whether the files might be fakes. Could it really be that the apartment of a Hauptsturmführer working for the Sicherheitsdienst hadn’t been searched and purged, or that Hertz himself wouldn’t have taken confidential papers with him? Edgar couldn’t believe the Germans would be that careless when it came to their documents, but it didn’t matter. Papers were papers, whether they had been left there on purpose or not, and if the haul was too skimpy he could add a bit of juicy information of his own to the files. He stuffed unused forms, empty envelopes, and blank paper into the pillowcase for good measure. He found a couple of rubber stamps, too. After a moment’s thought, he packed up all the office supplies that had been left behind, including the typewriter, ribbons for it, and some unopened bottles of ink at the bottom of the desk drawer. Among the reports were some he recognized, lovingly composed by him—these he burned, along with Eggert Fürst’s identification papers, his OT-Bauführer armband, and his evacuation permit, which had a short time ago given him such great happiness. He closed the stove door with his right hand. First he would hide the treasure
he’d found. He had to manage it even though the pillowcases were heavy, had to get back to Klooga quickly, so he could look through the piles of clothing for something that fit and let the Bolsheviks find him there, Edgar Parts, a prisoner made to witness horrors, but rescued in the nick of time by the Red Army.

Klooga, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

T
HE CAMP WAS DESERTED,
even of Germans.

We heaved ourselves along the rooftop and back into the attic. In it were creatures reduced to skeletons, horrified looks glued to their faces. I tried to pull one of them to his feet but he pushed away from me screaming, couldn’t understand what I was saying, and I couldn’t understand the language he was speaking. I repeated that the Germans were gone. I worked out the German words—
keine Deutsche, keine Deutsche, kein mehr
—not really knowing German, not wanting that language coming out of my mouth, but still trying to make it clear that the Jerries had left. The words didn’t get through. His screams were filled with animal terror. He was empty of humanity, the remains of a human. There was something menacing about all of those men. I was afraid to turn my back on them. Alfons started slowly backing toward the door. I followed his example and we got to the stairway and bolted outside.

The camp gates were open. There was no one to be seen. We took off at a run. I was weak, my running more like dragging. I tensed my muscles to clear my thoughts. Hunger hadn’t yet started to eat my brain. The Germans might still come back. No one from the attic had followed us.