I awoke surrounded by children. They formed a wide circle around us, dozens of them, looking at us in silence. They were in rags, dirty, their hair disheveled; many of them wore scraps of German uniforms, a jacket, a helmet, a coarsely cut coat; some were clutching farm tools, hoes, rakes, shovels; others, rifles and submachine guns made of wire or cut from wood or cardboard. Their gazes were sullen and threatening. Most of them looked between ten and thirteen years old; some of them weren’t yet six; and behind them stood a few girls. We rose, and Thomas greeted them politely. The tallest of them, a blond, lanky boy wearing a staff officer’s coat with red velvet lapels over a tank-driver’s black jacket, stepped forward and barked: “Who are you?” He spoke German with a thick Volksdeutscher accent, from Ruthenia or maybe even the Banat. “We are German officers,” Thomas calmly replied. “And you?”—“Kampfgruppe Adam. I’m Adam, Generalmajor Adam, and this is my command.” Piontek burst out laughing. “We are from the SS,” Thomas said.—“Where are your insignia?” the boy spat out. “You’re deserters!” Piontek stopped laughing. Thomas didn’t lose his calm, he kept his hands behind his back and said: “We are not deserters. We were forced to remove our insignia for fear of falling into Bolshevik hands.”—“Standartenführer!” Piontek shouted, “why are you talking to these brats? Can’t you see they’re nuts? We should give them a thrashing!”—“Shut up, Piontek,” Thomas said. I didn’t say anything, I was beginning to be horrified at the fixed, insane gaze of these children. “Well, I’ll show them, I will!” Piontek bellowed, reaching for the submachine gun on his back. The boy in an officer’s coat made a sign and a half-dozen children rushed Piontek, hitting him with their tools and dragging him to the ground. A boy lifted a hoe and split his face open, crushing his teeth and flinging an eye out of its socket. Piontek was still screaming; a blow from a metal pipe caved in his forehead, and he fell silent. The children kept hitting until his head was nothing but red pulp in the snow. I was petrified, seized with uncontrollable terror. Thomas wasn’t moving a muscle, either. When the children abandoned the corpse, the tallest one shouted again: “You are deserters and we are going to hang you like traitors!”—“We are not deserters,” Thomas coldly repeated. “We are on a special mission for the Führer behind Russian lines, and you have just killed our driver.”—“Where are your papers to prove it?” the boy insisted.—“We destroyed them. If the Reds captured us, if they guessed who we were, they would torture us and make us speak.”—“Prove it!”—“Escort us to the German lines and you’ll see.”—“We have other things to do besides escorting deserters,” the child hissed. “I’m going to call my superiors.”—“As you like,” Thomas said calmly. A little boy about eight years old came through the group, a box on his shoulder. It was a wooden ammunition crate with Russian markings, on the bottom of which were fixed a number of screws and nailed several colored cardboard circles. A tin can, tied to the crate by a wire, hung from the side; clamps held a long metal rod in the air; around his neck, the boy wore real operator’s earphones. He adjusted them on his ears, put the crate on his lap, turned the cardboard circles, played with the screws, brought the tin can to his mouth and called: “Kampfgruppe Adam to HQ! Kampfgruppe Adam to HQ! Answer!” He repeated this several times and then freed one ear from the earpieces, much too big for him. “I have them on line, Herr Generalmajor,” he said to the tall blond boy. “What should I say?” The blond boy turned to Thomas: “Your name and rank!”—“SS-Standartenführer Hauser, attached to the Sicherheitspolizei.” The boy turned back to the little boy with the radio: “Ask them if they confirm the mission of Standartenführer Hauser of the Sipo.” The little boy repeated the message into his tin can and waited. Then he declared: “They don’t know anything, Herr Generalmajor.”—“That’s not surprising,” Thomas said with his incredible calm. “We report directly to the Führer. Let me call Berlin and he’ll confirm it to you in person.”—“In person?” the boy in charge asked, a strange glint in his eyes.—“In person,” repeated Thomas. I was still petrified; Thomas’s boldness froze me. The blond youth made a sign and the little boy took off the helmet and passed it with the tin can to Thomas. “Speak. Say ‘Over’ at the end of each sentence.” Thomas brought the earpieces to one ear and took the can. Then he called into the can: “Berlin, Berlin. Hauser to Berlin, answer.” He repeated this several times, then said: “Standartenführer Hauser, on special assignment, reporting. I have to talk to the Führer. Over…Yes, I’ll wait. Over.” The children surrounding us kept their eyes riveted on him; the jaw of the boy who went by the name of Adam was quivering slightly. Then Thomas stiffened, clicked his heels, and shouted into the can; “Heil Hitler! Standartenführer Hauser from the Geheime Staatspolizei, reporting, mein Führer! We have met Kampfgruppe Adam and request confirmation of our mission and our identity. Over.” He paused again and then said: “Jawohl, mein Führer. Sieg Heil!” He handed the earpieces and the can to the boy in the officer’s coat. “He wants to speak to you, Herr Generalmajor.”—“It’s the Führer?” the boy said in a muted voice.—“Yes. Don’t be afraid. He’s a kind man.” The boy slowly took the earpieces, put them to his ears, stiffened, threw an arm into the air, and shouted into the can: “Heil Hitler! Generalmajor Adam, zu Befehl, mein Führer! Over!” Then: “Jawohl, mein Führer! Jawohl! Jawohl! Sieg Heil!” When he took off the earpieces to return them to the little boy, his eyes were moist. “That was the Führer,” he said solemnly. “He confirms your identity and your mission. I’m sorry for your driver, but he had an unfortunate reaction and we couldn’t know. My Kampfgruppe is at your disposal. What do you need?”—“We need to rejoin our lines safe and sound to transmit secret information of vital importance for the Reich. Can you help us?” The boy withdrew with some others and conferred with them. Then he returned: “We came here to destroy a concentration of Bolshevik forces. But we can accompany you as far as the Oder. To the south there’s a forest, we’ll pass under the nose of those brutes. We’ll help you.”
So we started off with this horde of children in rags, leaving poor Piontek’s body lying there. Thomas took his submachine gun, and I picked up the bag of provisions. The group included almost seventy kids in all, including a dozen girls. Most of them, as we gradually learned, were orphan Volksdeutschen; some came from the region of Zamosc and even from Galicia and as far as Odessa. They had been roaming like this for months behind Russians lines, living on what they could find, picking up other children, pitilessly killing Russians and isolated Germans, whom they regarded as deserters. Like us, they marched at night and rested during the day, hidden in the forests. On the march they advanced in military order, with scouts out front, then the rest of the troupe, girls in the middle. Twice, we saw them massacre little groups of sleeping Russians: the first time it was easy, the soldiers, drunk, were sleeping off their vodka on a farm and had their throats cut or were hacked to pieces in their sleep; the second time, a kid shattered a guard’s skull with a rock, then the others rushed the ones snoring around a fire, near their broken-down truck. Curiously, they never took their weapons: “Our own Germans weapons are better,” the boy who commanded them and who claimed his name was Adam explained. We also saw them attack a patrol with amazing guile and savagery. The little unit had been spotted by the scouts; most of the group withdrew into the woods, and twenty or so boys advanced onto the path toward the Russians, shouting, “Russki! Davaï! Khleb, khleb!” The Russians weren’t suspicious and let them approach, some even laughed and took some bread out of their bags. When the children had surrounded them, they attacked them with their tools and their knives, it was an insane butchery, I saw a little seven-year-old boy jump onto a soldier’s back and plant a big nail in his eye. Two of the soldiers still managed to fire off a few volleys before they collapsed: three children were killed on the spot and five were wounded. After the fight, the survivors, covered in blood, brought back the wounded, who were crying and howling in pain. Adam saluted them and himself finished off, with his knife, the ones who were hit in the legs or stomach; the two others were handed over to the girls, and Thomas and I tried as well as we could to clean their wounds and bandage them with rags from shirts. Among themselves they behaved almost as brutally as with the adults. During the breaks, we had time to observe them: Adam had himself waited on by one of the older girls, then led her off into the woods; the others fought for pieces of bread or sausage, the smallest had to run to pilfer from the bags while the big ones clouted them or even hit them with shovels; then two or three boys would grab a girl by the hair, throw her on the ground, and rape her in front of the others, biting her neck like cats; some boys openly jerked off as they watched; others would hit the one on top of the little girl and shove him aside to take his place; when the girl tried to run away, they caught her and knocked her down with a kick in the stomach, all this in a racket of shouts and piercing screams; several of these barely pubescent girls looked pregnant. These scenes shattered my nerves profoundly; I found it very hard to bear this demented company. Some of the children, especially the older ones, scarcely spoke German; whereas, at least until the previous year, they all must have gone to school, no trace of their education seemed to remain, aside from the unshakeable conviction that they belonged to a superior race. They lived like a primitive tribe or a pack, cleverly cooperating to kill or find food, then viciously fighting over the booty. The authority of Adam, who was physically the tallest, seemed uncontested; I saw him strike against a tree, till it bled, the head of a boy who had been slow to obey him. Maybe, I said to myself, he has all the adults he meets killed so he can remain the oldest.
This march with the children lasted for several nights. I felt as if I were gradually losing control of myself, I had to make an immense effort not to hit them in turn. Thomas still kept his Olympian calm; he followed our progression on the map and with a compass, conferring with Adam about what direction to take. Before Gollnow, we had to cross the Kammin railroad, then, in several compact groups, the road. Beyond was nothing but an immense, dense forest, deserted but dangerous because of the patrols, which, fortunately, kept to the paths. We also began again meeting, alone or in groups, German soldiers, who like us were headed toward the Oder. Thomas stopped Adam from killing the isolated ones; two of them joined us, including a Belgian SS man, the others went their own way, preferring to try their luck alone. After another road, the forest became a marsh, we weren’t far from the Oder; to the south, according to the map, these swamps led to a tributary, the Ihna. Moving became difficult, we sank up to our knees, sometimes our waists, the children almost drowned in the bogs. It was very warm now, even in the forest the snow had disappeared; I finally got rid of my coat, still wet and heavy. Adam decided to escort us to the Oder with a smaller troupe and left part of his group, the girls and the smallest ones, under the guard of the two wounded children, on a strip of dry land. Crossing these desolate marshes took most of the night; sometimes we had to make considerable detours, but Thomas’s compass helped guide us. Finally we reached the Oder, black and gleaming beneath the moon. A line of long islands seemed to stretch between us and the German shore. We couldn’t find a boat. “No matter,” Thomas said, “we’ll swim across.”—“I don’t know how to swim,” the Belgian said. He was a Walloon, he had known Lippert well in the Caucasus and had told me about his death in Novo Buda. “I’ll help you,” I said. Thomas turned to Adam: “You don’t want to cross with us? Go back to Germany?”—“No,” the boy said. “We have our own mission.” We took off our boots to tuck them into our belts and I shoved my cap inside my tunic; Thomas and the German soldier, whose name was Fritz, kept their submachine guns in case the island wasn’t deserted. At this spot the river must normally have been about three hundred meters wide, but with the thaw, it had risen and the current was strong; the Belgian, whom I held under the chin as I swam on my back, slowed me down, I was soon carried away and almost missed the island; as soon as I managed to get my footing, I let the soldier go and pulled him by the collar, until he could walk on his own in the water. On the bank, I was overcome with fatigue and had to sit down for a while. Opposite, the marshes barely rustled, the children had already disappeared; the island on which we found ourselves was wooded, and I didn’t hear anything here, either, except the murmuring of the water. The Belgian went to find Thomas and the German soldier, who had landed farther up, then came back to tell me that the island seemed deserted. When I could get up I went through the wood with him. On the other side, the shore was also silent and dark. But on the beach, a pole painted red and white indicated the location of a field telephone, protected beneath a tarp, whose wire vanished into the water. Thomas took the receiver and made the call. “Hello,” he said. “Yes, we’re German soldiers.” He gave our names and ranks. Then: “Good.” He hung up, straightened, looked at me with a big smile. “They say we should stand in a row with our arms out.” We scarcely had time to get in place: a powerful spotlight on the German shore came on and aimed at us. We stayed that way for several minutes. “Good idea, their system,” Thomas commented. An engine noise started up in the night. A rubber dinghy approached and landed near us; three soldiers examined us in silence, holding their weapons until they were sure we were indeed German; still without a word, they herded us into the boat and the dinghy set off, bouncing through the black water.