11. THE SLIPPERY WAY

THE next day we found an empty building, abandoned by a trust, and set up our district government. At first there were ten of us, but by the end of the day there were more than enough people who wanted to do something to help.

My duties were not complicated. Every day people who lived in houses damaged by explosions or fires would come to my office. I was supposed to inspect the damage, determine the materials needed to repair it, and if the materials were available, to issue them. They had to do the repair work themselves. The workmen that I assembled were taken over by Burgomaster Sorokin to repair buildings occupied by the Germans.

I still had little contact with the Germans, although numbers of them had arrived. They were billeted in schools, office buildings, and, in part, in tents on the main square. Some of the officers moved into private apartments. In such cases the people who lived there would either double up or move elsewhere.

About a week after the beginning of my work I was summoned to the kommandatura to see a German lieutenant who spoke Russian. I had heard about this lieutenant, whose name was Lüttich. He was said to be making a lot of money issuing permits to enterprising businessmen to bring food into the city from the surrounding countryside.

The lieutenant was about fifty years old and he had three chins. He waved me into a chair without getting up.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Burgomaster Sorokin tells me that you organized the workmen who are repairing our buildings.’

‘That is correct.’

‘Well, will you please collect twenty or thirty more to fix up the N.K.V.D. building? Do you know where it is?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was somewhat damaged by fire, but not much. It must be repaired in a very short time.’

‘I can find workers all right, but they have to be paid. The city government still doesn’t have enough money.’

‘For this job there will be money,’ said the lieutenant, opening a drawer. ‘Here’s 1,000 marks. Write me a receipt. In two weeks bring me a list of your workmen and I’ll pay them what’s coming to them. That’s all.’

I left, taking the money and a paper that Lüttich had prepared stating that I was charged with directing the repairs of No. 45 Lenin Street.

The next day, after assembling ten workmen, who promised to find more, and paying each of them 50 marks in advance, I set out for the former N.K.V.D. building. On the doors, which were not locked, there was the customary notice that all looters would be shot.

The building had been considerably damaged in the fire. Going from room to room, occasionally asking the help of one of my men to unlock a door, I wrote down in my notebook the extent of the damage and what materials would be needed to repair it.

It seemed strange the building had not been blown up. They had probably been in too much of a hurry. The drawers and closets were open and all the papers had been destroyed: Later I found an enormous pile of ashes in the furnace room. In one drawer I came across a revolver which I stuck in my belt.

Having inspected the upper floors, we went down the cellar. An ironclad door led into a long corridor from which others branched out to the right and left. There were doors along these corridors, also iron surfaced, with peepholes and slots to thrust food through. We went down the dark corridor. The workmen peered into the cells on both sides. All were empty, the doors were open, and only the heavy air of the unventilated cellar spoke of the unhappy life which people had led here.

At the end of one corridor there was still another door, but this one was locked. One of the men said, ‘Let’s open it and see what’s inside.’

I was undecided. Lüttich had only referred to repairs in the office part of the building. But the workers had already begun to pick at the lock. In a few minutes the door was open. We saw a stairway leading downward into total darkness. A repulsive sweetish smell met our nostrils.

We looked at each other and I said, ‘It’s too dark there; we won’t see anything anyway. Another time. Let’s get to work.’

Upstairs the workmen began to knock out charred doors and floors. and I went over to the kommandatura, looking over my notes on the way.

‘Did you inspect the building?’ Lüttich asked me.

‘Yes. A lot of work has to be done on it. If we can get money and materials we can repair it in a month.’

‘That’s too long. It’s got to be done in two weeks.’

‘Then we’ll need more money. To do it in two weeks I’ll need fifty workmen at 50 rubles each per day.’

‘You’re out of your mind!’ Lüttich shouted. ‘Fifty rubles! Don’t you know the order that all wage rates will be the same as under the Soviets?’

‘I know they got about 15 rubles under the Soviets but since then the price of food has gone up tremendously.’

‘I don’t care how much bread costs. I’ll pay 15 rubles and you find the men!’

‘No, on those terms I won’t be able to get anyone. I’m sorry, but I’ll have to refuse the job.’

‘You can’t do that. The city is under martial law and you’ll be punished.’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘I’m ready to work myself. You can make me do that. But I can’t force anyone else to do it. I’m not the police. And even if the police were around the workers would still run off.’

Lüttich began to curse in German and then talked to someone on the telephone.

‘All right,’ he said to me finally, ‘how much money will you need?’

‘About 4,000 marks.’

He leapt up from his chair, sat down again, and made another telephone call. Then he said, ‘You’ll get 4,000 marks but you get the materials yourself wherever you can.’

‘But—’ I tried to object.

‘Don’t argue with me!’ Lüttich yelled. ‘Take it wherever you want; I’ll give you a requisition. In two weeks the building must be ready. You’ve received your advance on the money.’

‘All right. It will be done. One more question: have you been there?’

‘No, I sent a soldier over. Why do you ask?’

‘There are cells downstairs. There was a prison there.’

‘I know that. The N.K.V.D. is never without one. This is my second year in Russia.’

‘Yes, but in addition to that there’s a cellar.’

‘A cellar? Did you go down there?’

‘No, it was pitch dark.’

‘That’s interesting. I’ll be there tomorrow morning at ten and we’ll take a look.’

At exactly 10 a.m. Lüttich appeared with a soldier. I was waiting for him. They had a carbide light and a large flashlight. Taking two of the workmen we went downstairs, through the prison corridors to the stairway we had discovered the day before.

The air grew more suffocating as we descended. On a landing there were two cells. Their doors were locked and had no peepholes. Lüttich ordered the men to break them open. One of the cells was empty.

The second cell contained two corpses, a man and a woman. They were in an advanced state of decay. I felt nauseated and retreated to the stairs. Lüttich and the others followed me.

‘How do you like that?’ asked Lüttich. ‘The interesting thing is we’ve been finding this sort of thing in every city we’ve occupied.’

I did not answer. We went to the bottom of the stairs. The soldier inspected all the corners of the cellar, his lamp held high over his head. We could see nothing, but the air was full of the stench of corpses.

‘There must be bodies here,’ said Lüttich. T know there must be. This is probably where they shot them.’

Suddenly one of the workers found a trapdoor and shouted to us about it. Lüttich raised it himself. I had to jump back. My head began to swim from the smell.

‘See, I told you there must be bodies,’ said Lüttich triumphantly. ‘Your N.K.V.D. always shoots people when it’s in a hurry to retreat. All right, now we can go.’

When we were upstairs he said, ‘This will make good propaganda. I will give orders for those bodies to be pulled out of there. Goodbye.’

The next day, guarded by a few soldiers, about ten prisoners of war from the near-by camp arrived. They were made to carry the bodies from the cellar and lay them out on the sidewalk in view of the crowd which had assembled.

In all they found twenty-eight bodies. Some of them had their arms twisted behind them with wire. All of them had been shot in the back of the head. All had rotted considerably.

One of the workmen who kept running out to see what was going on told us:

‘There were four women among the bodies, young ones, too. A woman in the crowd recognized her husband who had been arrested right after the beginning of the war; she fainted. Someone recognized a neighbour of his who was drafted a month ago. He just couldn’t understand why he had been in the N.K.V.D. jail. And then a girl recognized her brother who had been sentenced to three years, before the war started, for speculation, I think. Nobody knew the others. Probably from the country, or newcomers to town.’

The bodies lay there for two days. Then the Germans themselves took them away somewhere.

We finished the work on time and Lüttich gave me the money to pay the men, swearing heavily as he did so. I was pleased. Until the last minute I had been afraid that he would not pay me and I would be in trouble with the men.

Lüttich came to inspect the repaired building in the company of an officer who wore black insignia on his uniform. On his cap, underneath the eagle with the swastika, he had a skull and two crossed bones. Burgomaster Sorokin appeared and kept talking to the officer in his broken German.

‘Why are you underfoot so much? Don’t bother me,’ said the latter in perfect Russian.

Sorokin mumbled something and withdrew a few paces.

‘He’s the local burgomaster,’ Lüttich explained.

‘A-a,’ grunted the latter noncommittally.

During the inspection the S.S. man (Lüttich identified him to me as such in a whisper) wrinkled his nose occasionally but said very little. I sensed that Lüttich was afraid of him.

‘Do you think this building will be suitable?’ Lüttich asked him.

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s too big, but it doesn’t matter,’ said the S.S. man.

We went out. I asked Lüttich if I could go. He nodded and I started off in the direction of the public bath which had just begun to function again.

In the evening we had the periodical meeting of the district government. Arsov, the district burgomaster, said, ‘A special S.S. unit has arrived in town. We have been instructed to compile a list of all Jews and also a list of the apartments of those Jews who have left the city. All Jewish property is to be under the control of the S.S. The Jews themselves are, too.’

‘Will there be reprisals?’ asked Likhachev, the head of our industrial section.

‘Officially they told us in the kommandatura that the Jews will all be resettled to the Ukraine. But unofficially . . .’

‘. . . they will be shot,’ said Kondakov, the secretary of the district government.

Arsov looked at him uncertainly and then asked him to bring in the book of city-wide directives. When Kondakov had gone out, Arsov said to us in an undertone:

‘I didn’t want to talk about this in front of Kondakov, who approves of it. The thing is that the question of the Jewish rosters was brought up a week ago by the Commandant. Kikin, the burgomaster of the Third District, and I tried to protest from the very first, but Sorokin did not support us and the Commandant confirmed the order. Actually the rosters have been ready for a long time. We could have altered them if the police hadn’t received a copy at the start – and the police are completely in the hands of the Germans. Day before yesterday there was another conference and we did not deliver rosters, making the excuse that they had to be checked. But today the Commandant began to raise hell and say he didn’t want to get into trouble with the S.S. because of our sabotage, and that if the rosters weren’t in by tomorrow each of us would become personally acquainted with that organization . . .

‘So try to warn anyone you can. Do it carefully; the S.S. has a lot of agents around already and it will be bad for you if you get caught. We’ve managed to warn a few people already.’

Thanks to the night pass which the kommandatura had issued me, I was able to visit a dozen of my friends on a bicycle and ask them to tell all the Jews they knew to go into hiding. Many Jews had learned already and managed to leave their old apartments.

I went to see a girl I used to know at school, the daughter of a Jewish father and a Russian mother. She was married to a Russian.

The whole family was assembled there and had already decided on a course of action. The father was to flee to the south, through the thin front lines to the Soviets. He was ready for the road with a leather coat and a rucksack. A document had been forged for the daughter proving that he was her stepfather and that her real father had not been Jewish.

The atmosphere was so painful that I left for home very soon since, there was nothing I could do to help.

The German order was published the next day: all persons of Jewish ancestry were to gather in an appointed place within twenty-four hours, bringing their valuables with them.

When the German trucks, loaded with Jews, were slowly rolling down the street in front of our district government office, Kondakov called me over to the window. About thirty vehicles went by. I recognized an old music professor, a cellist, a tailor whom I had tried to persuade not to register, and two others.

I turned and went away from the window. Kondakov was saying loudly, ‘This is the end of the Jewish lordship over us! The damned parasites have drunk enough of our blood!’

I couldn’t stand any more.

‘Especially your blood, Kondakov, isn’t that right? It seems to me you were a member of the party and spent your whole life in soft spots in various city soviets.’

‘Meaning exactly what?’ said Kondakov challengingly.

‘I mean that your kind are the ones who have been sucking the people’s blood.’

Kondakov came over to me.

‘You watch out, you might have to pay for those words!’

‘Don’t try to threaten me. Your comrade Communists threatened me so much that I’ve stopped being afraid of them.’

Someone was pulling at my sleeve. I turned and saw Arsov. He was trying to draw me into his office.

‘You act as if you want to follow those kikes to where they are going,’ Kondakov was saying with menace in his voice.

Arsov went on pulling at me. I found myself in his office.

‘What’s the matter with you? Are you out of your mind?’ Arsov whispered. ‘Don’t you know that Kondakov is an S.S. agent?’

‘I don’t give a God damn whose agent he is,’ I said loudly.

‘No, please, I beg of you for your own good, be careful with him. He can mess things up for you. I didn’t choose him for this job; he was sent me from the kommandatura.’

‘What are you trying to make me do? I didn’t stay here when the Germans came in order to be afraid of Communists like Kondakov. And I don’t intend to let them scare me in the future. You should fire him!’

‘I can’t. The city government and all the district governments have such “representatives” from the Germans with instructions to watch us. The city government is in a mess. The city is not being supplied properly, and Sorokin and the whole administration bow and scrape to the Germans. This isn’t what we bargained for when we agreed to work!’ Arsov said bitterly.

‘What about the power plant?’ I asked, somewhat calmed down.

‘It’s going to start running next week but the city will get almost no power at all; the plant is only partially fixed. The power will go to the buildings occupied by the Germans. But the water system is going to work again everywhere. At least the people won’t have to go to the river for water any more.’

‘What did you say was wrong with the food supply?’

Arsov waved his hand.

‘German patrols are taking food away from the peasants as usual, so that only half of it gets to market in town. You know yourself what prices are. They are talking about issuing ration cards, but there is nothing to give out on them yet. Things are bad. The only thing is that they’re worse on the Soviet side.’

‘Doesn’t it seem to you that things look quite different now from what you thought, when you were persuading me to go to work here?’

‘Yes, and on a smaller scale we are just as much to blame for it as the Germans are. If some decent people were in the city government instead of this crowd of flannel-mouthed lawyers things might have been different.’

‘You mean, for instance, the liquidation of the Jews?’

Arsov bent his head.

‘Yes, the Kultur bearers are not what we expected. They are about as humane as our N.K.V.D. men. But all this is out of our hands and doesn’t change our responsibility toward the population of the city. Since we took on this job we’ve got to do it properly. We’ve got to fight for everything from the Germans – but instead of that Sorokin crawls in front of them.’

‘We’ve got to change the administration of the city government,’ I said, ‘and put new people in. This is a troubled time and all kinds of garbage like your Kondakov floats to the surface.’

‘That’s right. We must clean out the city government. But how?’

The next few evenings those of us who were dissatisfied with Sorokin and his colleagues worked out strategy and tactics for our fight to change the city administration. It was decided to lay the groundwork: the individual members of our district government who had occasion to deal with the Germans were to discredit Sorokin in their eyes in every possible way. After this we would inform the Commandant officially that a change in the city government was necessary. We decided to put up Likhachev, the head of our industial section, as our candidate for the post of burgomaster. He was a deeply religious person with a great deal of self-control, not too energetic but possessed of a sense of personal integrity which was rare in those times.

Krichenko, the head of the power plant, was chosen as his assistant, and I as his second assistant.

Shortly after this Arsov told me that the Commandant of the city had agreed to receive the three district burgomasters without Sorokin being present, and with them, six people from the district governments. We all went to the kommandatura.

At that time the Commandant was a Captain Schwarz, by profession an artist and musician from Dresden. He was a short man with a great deal of self-assurance, convinced that he understood the Russian problem perfectly. When all of us were seated around a table Captain Schwarz told us through a girl interpreter,

‘Please, gentlemen, speak freely.’

In a short but eloquent speech Arsov outlined the problem. He told of the complete loss of authority by the burgomaster, and stated in the name of all of us that none of us would continue in our jobs unless the burgomaster and several of the other lawyers in the city government were removed from office.

Schwarz listened attentively, asked the interpreter to repeat sentences several times, and then said, ‘All right. I’ll think about it. Whom do you propose as burgomaster?’

Likhachev was named. The Commandant asked to see him privately ‘in order to become acquainted’, and told us that we would have his answer the next day.

The Commandant decided in our favour. Sorokin was told that he was relieved of his position, and Likhachev was appointed in his stead, with Krichenko and myself as his assistants.

That evening I told my mother what had happened. She did not seem pleased at my ‘promotion’.

‘You shouldn’t have taken this position. I don’t think the Germans will stay here long. Then the Soviets will come again, and what will become of you?’

‘Well, Mother,’ I said, ‘it’s a little late to think about that. No matter what I did under the Germans, even if I was just a street cleaner, my fate would be sealed. The devil himself seems to have tied my fate to them. I have no choice; I have to go where they go. There can be no return for me. If they retreat, we’ll have to flee with them.’

My mother lowered her eyes and was silent a moment. Then she said, ‘You, yes, but not I. I’m not going anywhere. And my fate and the fate of my brothers and sisters will depend on what you do now.’

I tried to point out to her that she could not stay in any case. But the conversation was too far from reality. The Germans had penetrated as far as Mount Elbrus and it was hard to visualize them in retreat. So my mother and I came to no agreement. I decided though to find myself a separate room again, so as not to compromise her.

A chance to do this turned up a few days later. Igor and Zina Gorsky, who had fled from besieged Leningrad a year and a half before, received a small house on the outskirts of the city from the kommandatura, because they had agreed to start an inn for German officers. Igor was the son of a childhood friend of my mother’s. He offered to rent me one of the rooms in their house. Collecting my unimpressive baggage, I moved over there.