“Look sharp there,” Corporal Shewchuk warned. He pointed ahead and to the right, where a T-34’s machine gun fired into a tidy German farm building. Splinters flew but there was no returning fire, and Maurice wondered if the tank gunner was just having fun.
He heard more gunfire and felt a shove. “Down, boys!” Shewchuk shouted. Maurice threw himself to the ground, banging his nose against the butt of his rifle.
More gunfire followed, the zipping buzz of the German heavy machine gun. Behind him, he heard the slower Russian guns answer.
He dared to raise his head just enough to see, about a hundred metres away, a slight rise in the ground. A bunker, he thought. Fritz made a bunker and some SS fanatics have hidden there, waiting for the second echelon to walk into their trap.
Two Red Army soldiers sprinted across the field for the slight shelter of a leafless tree, carrying a mortar between them. The German gun buzzed again and both of them fell, wet snow splashing. Every Soviet rifle and submachine gun opened up, trained on the low opening of the bunker. Two men in Maurice’s unit knelt behind the Maxim gun, and sent a stream of bullets toward the bunker.
To no effect. At that range, the Soviet soldiers could not hope to send a bullet into the low, narrow loophole the Germans fired from.
Until another group came from the side, taking advantage of the covering fire. “Hold your fire, boys!” Sergeant Nikolaev called out as two Red Army men tossed grenades inside. Twin explosions blew the earth-and-concrete roof off and smoke rose into the sky.
The Soviets stayed on their bellies, watching the bunker. After several minutes, they saw something moving in the billowing smoke. A dirty cloth that might have once been white waved and a man emerged, holding a hand over his face. Another came behind him, holding the cloth aloft. They both wore the flared helmets of the wehrmacht.
Then someone fired a three-round burst, followed by another. Both the German soldiers fell, and Maurice spun to see Koval behind the shield of the Maxim.
“They were surrendering,” said Taras Kuchnir.
“Bastards both still had their guns, didn’t they?” Koval retorted. “They were tricking us. I told you, I’m not giving the fucking Germans any mercy.”
A group of men approached the remains of the bunker cautiously, their rifles and submachine guns in front of them. They fired a few rounds into the holes in it, just to make sure anyone left inside was dead.
Maurice waited until everyone else in his unit was standing again before rising to his feet. Only then did he realize he had been holding his breath for—how long, he could not say.
They entered a small town along a road whose pavement had been thoroughly chewed up by tank treads and peppered with craters. A small house at the edge of the town smoked, and more smoke rose from what looked to be the central square.
Captain Baranov pointed at another house, this one intact. On the porch stood a middle-aged man in a white shirt, glaring defiantly at the passing Red Army. A corporal led three soldiers through his garden gate and up his steps. “What are you looking at, old man?” Corporal Shewchuk demanded. The resident said nothing, but continued to glare at the passing parade. “Answer me when I talk to you, you Nazi dog,” the Corporal yelled.
The homeowner continued to ignore the soldier on his porch until Shewchuk punched him in the face. The man staggered back, but still refused to look at his assailant. The corporal picked up his rifle and smashed the butt into the German’s stomach, then pushed him over the railing of his porch. A woman inside the house screamed and opened the front door, but Shewchuk shoved her back inside.
He pointed at his men, who picked the German up and pulled him to the street. He spat blood onto the snow as he stumbled behind the marching soldiers.
His wife opened the door again, calling after him. Corporal Shewchuk smashed his rifle butt into her midsection, sending her to the floor. He walked down the path and caught up with his captive and his men in the parade ahead of Maurice’s unit.
Maurice found Commissar Sorkin in the group. He was looking at the corporal and his captive. But he said nothing.
They reached the town’s central square. Black smoke poured out of the town hall’s windows.
At the corner of the square, a shop’s door lay on the ground among the glass shards of its shattered front window. Maurice saw three Red Army soldiers, privates, standing inside as the bare ass of a fourth man rose and fell between the spread legs of a woman on the floor. She didn’t even scream, just whimpered. Maurice saw the man on the ground rise, and another got down to take his turn.
Commissar Sorkin looked into the shop, too, and walked faster. “After what the Germans did to us, what can you expect,” he said, and walked on.
As the Red Armies moved through East Prussia, Maurice saw the character and behaviour of the “boys” change. Groups of men smashed into large, wealthy homes and took what they wanted, including women.
Political officers put posters on walls and poles that read “Red Army Soldier: You are now on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!”
Marshal Rossokovsky, head of the First Belorussian Front, signed an order to shoot looters and rapists on the spot. Occasionally, the officers and commissars would enforce the orders. But most of the time, officers not only turned away, but took part themselves.
Historians would later report Stalin responding to critics of the Red Army by asking “Can’t he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?”
Maurice walked past, looking straight ahead when another Soviet soldier would beckon him toward a house where others streamed out with treasures, or where he heard the whimpers and cries of young girls as their mothers lay bloodied in the snow.
Keep your head down, Maurice, he told himself over and over. You’re heading west. To Berlin, and if you’re still alive when this ends, you’ll keep going west until you’re back home at last.
In Montreal, Canada. Not in the USSR.
I am not going back to the USSR.
Approaching Berlin
Prussia, April 1945
An April sun warmed Maurice’s chenille as the unit woke from the first real sleep they had had in weeks. Where the war had not blackened the landscape, wild flowers bloomed white and yellow and red in the new, green grass. A gentle wind ruffled his clothes and hair.
Maurice felt uplifted. He felt hope, for the first time in a very long while.
“The war will be over soon, Maurice,” said Mykhailo, rolling up his chenille. “Even the Germans know it.”
As if to remind them it was not over yet, cannons boomed in the west. “We still have some fighting to do,” Maurice replied.
Sergeant Nikolayev strode up, helmet fastened, chenille rolled and tied across his back, submachine gun slung over his shoulder. “Keep your eyes sharp,” he said. “Fritz is just waiting for us to get careless.”
Junior officers blew whistles, tanks rumbled ahead and the men began walking westward, “mopping up” stray Germans. Soviet planes crisscrossed the sky, and a phalanx of trucks lurched across the fields behind them.
“There’s no fight left in these Germans,” Mykhailo said, walking a few metres to Maurice’s left.
“Remember those boys yesterday?” said Oleh Vovk, next to Mykhailo. “They ran out of that bunker, waving their hands? They begged for mercy.”
Maurice remembered. They could not have been more than 16 years old. But they were wearing the black uniform of the SS. The boys had fallen to their knees, weeping, their hands high over their heads. A commissar had come up. “Names and unit,” he said. Before the boys could finish telling him, he drew his sidearm and shot each one in the head.