This however was not triumph enough and with his gun in my back, he forced me upstairs. I really thought that my time had come and that I was to be ‘honoured’ with a quick death, a bullet in the back of the neck under a waving Red Cross flag. In daylight we took stock of one another. He looked at me, and I looked at him. He was a little man, short and stocky. His bow legs ended in leather boots. A grey fur cap, with its red star, was sloppily slanted on his head and sat atop a pockmarked face, which was not shaved and a stubble of red hair which didn’t hide the deep pits of his skin. Not a pretty sight! An array of colourful medals adorned his brown shirt, and because there was no gold to be seen on his shoulder epaulette, I guessed that he must have been a sergeant. Upon seeing my own medals he suddenly grasped me to his breast in a bear-hug saying “good soldier”. Then, releasing me, he laughingly pointed firstly to his own medals and then to mine. Then this bear of a man kissed me on both cheeks, declaring “Vaijna kaput?, i.e. war has ended, and “Hitler kaput?, i.e. Hitler is dead.
In contrast to his own dark suntan, I must have appeared rather pale. I swallowed the frog in my throat and tried in my depressed state, to grin at him. He must have seen the runes on my collar, but they did not seem to bother him. As one of the ‘victors’, when only of a lower rank, even he must have known that my runes distinguished me from the others as ‘one of those’. If I am honest it did not, at that moment, occur to me either that this would most definitely distinguish me in future.
I then had to go with him once more into the cellars, like a fox in a chicken-run, frightening some women who screamed in panic and fled. It amused him and he let loose a shot or two into ceilings, walls and the tiles in the Monopol kitchen. I was happy that he had not shot at me. Taking a bottle of vodka, he took a long swig, he turned to me and said “Cheers! war has ended, now you can go home”. I didn’t need to be told a second time and returned to my comrades.
They looked at me in utter surprise thinking that I had risen from the dead, certain that in hearing the shots, that I had ‘knocked on heaven’s door.’ Who can explain this experience? Who understood the Russian character, this almost infantile mentality, spiced with brute-force, naivety, good-heartedness and unpredictable arbitrariness? Later I was to have plenty of time to learn about the unreasonable and contradictory characteristics of the Russians.
We were most certainly never in doubt as to the influence that alcohol played in the day-to-day routine of the Russians. But we were about to be given undoubted proof it and at first-hand. For our sins, we were much too close to the wine cellar of the Monopol, this treasure-chest being found soon enough by the roaming Reds. We were witnesses to the utter depredation of men, in a uniform, who called themselves soldiers, who drank themselves into unconsciousness, or started punch-ups and then, in their stupor, were uncontrolled in the use of their revolvers. They behaved like animals. We were often collected and forced to drink with them. We used to be landed in ‘bau’, i.e. close arrest, for misuse of alcohol when we were caught legless. After that excess, we were nearly all self-confessed teetotallers.
One evening we were forced to witness the raping of one of our nurses. Three drunken Reds tottered down the cellar steps, with their caps sitting crookedly on top of their shorn heads, in search, so we thought, of more alcohol. That was not what they were looking for. With “woman, come here!” they caught hold of Angel, the pretty nurse, with the lovely smile and who laughed so easily. With her cries of protest, her fiancé, a sergeant medic, sprang at the three, regardless that they were armed with machine-pistols, and who beat him to the ground. He was lucky, for they did not shoot him.
We had all been standing in the ante-room immediately behind the outer cellar door and now the machine-guns were trained on us, as they threw ‘Engelchen’ on to the table. She tried desperately to defend herself, to no avail. We had to witness the shameful scene of rape, from the three, with our hands in the air. Just a few days before, we had been armed and had shown no mercy to such beasts. Now we had no choice but to witness those so-called human beings in face and form. They did not earn the title and we were not able to help. The agitator Ilya Ehrenburg would have been proud of the students of his propaganda. After that sexual gratification, the three then disappeared. ‘Engelchen’ disappeared during the night too, for the shame and degradation, in front of witnesses, was just too much for her. We never saw her again.
We were sold and delivered, we were ‘wares’ for the ‘victors’ and we, our lives, were of no worth. We could live today, but die tomorrow, today or in the next few minutes. We lived with that realisation, day after day. One roaming Red suddenly appeared, and just as suddenly shot at us so that we had to hit the ground or dive for cover under the bunks. Fortunately, no one was hit on that occasion, it was a ‘game’, a game with only a hair’s breadth chance.
We also had visitors who, in comparison, were relatively harmless, such as the up-and-coming ‘speaker’. He wanted to practise and needed an audience. So he appeared, waving his revolver nonchalantly in the air and politely asked us walking wounded, to go with him into the ante-room. There he stood on a chair and started to deliver his speech, in Japanese, for all that we knew. He must have not iced that his words were falling on barren ground, for we only understood the words, Communist, Lenin, Stalin and Russian culture, without showing any resonance. He asked for a translator and one of our chums from Upper Silesia was given the job of translating his preaching of political propaganda. He waited in the pauses, wiping the sweat of stress from his brow and taking strong swigs from his bottle of vodka.
Our Silesian friend gave us an evening that we could hardly forget, for he translated the very opposite of what was being said. We listened, we applauded at the achievements of the Communists in their Soviet paradise. We laughed, and our speaker thought that he had the audience of a lifetime and why not, for he had been very polite in asking us to attend. We were a very patient audience and we let him speak, until he fell off his chair, full to the brim with two kinds of Russian spirit, the intellectual and the liquid sort. There he stayed until the next morning. He was then found by one of the officers, and with a leather whip forced into consciousness, on to his feet and then outside, being brutally beaten as he went. In comparison, we thought that a couple of days in German ‘bau’ was not so painful and we could feel sorry for him.
For some time I ignored the well-meant advice of my chums, to discard my uniform, not wanting to march into POW camp in hospital clothes. As more and more of the Russian soldiers began to take a closer look at my runes however, I exchanged my SS-Untersturmfiihrer’s uniform, for that of a Wehrmacht NCO. At the same time and with a very heavy heart, I burned my pay-book, with all of the entries of my army career in it, plus details of close-combat activity within the city. I was not only thankful to have survived those battles, but was also more than a little proud to have been a part of them, to have made my contribution. Therefore, I kept my medals.