He passed groups of soldiers drinking beer. Along one less-damaged street, more GIs smoked at open-air cafés and bars, chatting up pretty young girls with haunted eyes.
Two weeks had passed since Hitler had committed suicide and the Germans had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, after the Red Army had conquered half the city and killed most of its defenders.
Fighting continued after the formal surrender. Fanatics continued to fight from isolated bunkers or defended positions. Stubborn German occupiers continued to fight the Canadians in the Netherlands until May 5, and even a day later opened fire on celebrations in Amsterdam. In Czechoslovakia, resistance fighters rose up against the German occupiers as the Red Army began the Prague Offensive. Colonel-General Carl Hilpert only surrendered to the Soviets in the Courland Pocket, near Memel, Lithuania on V-E Day, May 8.
The war was over, and the occupation began. The Red Army set about burying the 18,000 men it had lost in the Battle for Berlin.
Walking back to his unit in eastern Berlin, Maurice remembered how his commanders had given their men almost completely free rein in Berlin. The commissar—Maurice still hadn’t learned his name—had said, “We were strict about respect for civilians in Lithuania and Poland. But now, we have defeated the German pigs.” He held up a poster depicting a proud Red soldier. The caption read “The hour of our revenge has struck!”
“Take what you need from the Berliners. Take what you want.”
Two hours after leaving Charlottenburg, he arrived back at his unit’s camp in the eastern suburbs of the city. A disorderly array of small tents gathered around the mobile mess kitchen—really a large horse-drawn wagon—all set up in a field that bore more than one bomb crater. He had missed lunch, so he went to the kitchen, and one of the cooks gave him a bowl of soup and some bread. He made himself a cup of tea. No one asked him where he had been most of the day. The captain and the other officers had been drunk on German wine and beer for days.
“Hey, Maurice, give us a hand!” It was Danny, a friendly lout who was always in trouble with the sergeants because he always joked too loudly and was never any good at aiming a rifle. But he knew how to keep his head down, attached to his shoulders.
Danny and his friends had commandeered a horse and cart from some poor farmer. Two of the soldiers sat in the back, laughing. Maurice noticed they also had their rifles.
“What’s going on, Danny?”
“I need you to speak to a German for us,” Danny answered, slapping Maurice on the back as he climbed into the wagon. The cart jerked and rolled out of the camp. “This is Peter, and the one with the reins, there, is George.”
“Where’d you get the wagon?”
“Liberated it from a farmer down the road. He’s rich—or he was. You should see his house. Separate houses for the animals, indoor plumbing, the works. God, these Germans knew how to live, eh?” He passed Maurice a bottle of liberated German liquor.
Maurice didn’t ask whether the German farmer still knew how to live.
The cart eventually rolled to another farm. Peter hopped down to open the gate and George steered toward the stables. The farmer and his wife, two hungry-looking blonds, came out of the barn, sullen and fearful. “Ask them where they keep their stores,” said Danny.
From the look of them, Maurice doubted they had anything left, but asked anyway in his best German. “Where is your stored food?”
The farmer didn’t reply. He gave Maurice a look full of sullen hate. Then he looked at Peter and Danny and the rifles in their hands. He jerked his head toward a silo attached to the barn.
George and Peter opened a low door in the side of the silo. “Hey, Danny, get a load of this!” Peter called.
Danny looked in the silo. “Tell him to get some sacks,” he said. Maurice translated for the farmer. He stared at Maurice for a few seconds, then went into the barn. George picked up his rifle nervously, but the farmer returned, carrying empty burlap sacks. George and Peter took the bags and started filling them with grain from the silo—probably the last of the farmer’s food.
“Help them!” Danny ordered the farmer, and even though he did not understand their language, he complied. “Come with me, Maurice,” Danny said and went to the stable. Six milking cows stood, chewing their cuds. Danny beckoned Maurice, and they led the two biggest cows out and tied them to the back of the wagon.
“Not two cows!” said the farmer’s wife.
“Shut up, Gerta,” said the farmer without taking his eyes off Maurice. He watched silently as the four soldiers loaded eight sacks of grain and a few bales of hay onto the wagon. They climbed on and slowly trotted back down the path to the road without saying another word to the farmer. They passed the wine bottle until it was empty and Danny pitched it beside the road.
After a couple of jostling miles, they turned onto a narrow track through a thin screen of trees. Maurice heard the noise of hundreds of thousands of people, and smelled cooking and latrines and general uncleanliness—a smell Maurice had come to know over months and thousands of miles of marching with an army.
There was a high wire fence with two Red Army soldiers at the gates. The soldiers nodded the wagon through into a huge camp of tents and low shacks made of discarded metal and wood. And people—thousands of dirty, weary people staring at them.
It was a “displaced persons” camp, filled with people who had fled destroyed homes, along with Nazi slaves freed from factories, farms, and the homes of senior officers and bureaucrats.
Peter drove the wagon to one side of the camp where a small, dark-haired man greeted them. Danny jumped off the wagon and embraced him. “Hey, comrade, here you go!”
He explained to Maurice: “These fine people are from Lithuania, and they want to go home.” Peter and George climbed down from the wagon as Danny introduced them to a gathering crowd. “These are the Lynisses,” he said, indicating Mr. Lyniss, the small man, and his wife, a tiny, thin woman with a sharp nose and a weak chin. There were two dirty children and a bent old woman who pulled her shawl tight around her and shivered. Two cows, a load of hay, eight bags of grain and a wagon made them wealthy in the D.P. camp.
The Lynisses lost no time in loading their few belongings onto the wagon and driving it out of the camp. The guards said nothing.
Danny explained as the four soldiers walked back to their camp. “I met the old lady shivering on the side of the road yesterday, and helped her to get back here to this shitty D.P. camp. She told me they were from—oh, I don’t remember, somewhere near Vilnius. They ran from their farm when the front came through there. The Nazis put them to work and they’ve been here in Berlin for months.”
It was getting close to dinnertime and they were still far from their own camp. They were in the middle of a small suburb, a few houses with all the windows blown out. At a crossroads was a little collection of shops, including a café. They sat down and Danny banged on the table until the owner, a short, portly and bald older man, came out.
“Four cups of tea and a bottle of wine, and make it fast!” Danny demanded in rough German. The owner went back in without saying a word and returned with four cups, four glasses and a bottle of white wine. Danny snatched the wine and poured. “To victory!” he shouted and drained the glass in one gulp. The others did the same, and Danny refilled the glasses. The proprietor nearly ran back into the café.
Danny raised his glass again. “To the return of all refugees to their homes!” Again, they all downed their wine, and Danny refilled again, but the bottle was empty by the time he got to his own glass. “Hey, grandfather! Another bottle, and fast! Bistro!” The owner hurried out with another bottle. He had trouble pulling the cork because his hands were shaking.