War Girls Complete Collection Chapter 191

Chapter 5: Peter

P

eter slumped on the earth in front of his barracks as he observed a dreadful-looking bunch of ragged men unloaded from the nearby train ramp. Actually, those were the lucky ones. They didn’t have to walk the five miles from the main train station in the town of Fallingbostel.

Hunger gnawing at his stomach, he somehow gathered the energy to stand up and trudge toward his table in the reception area, where the supervising German soldiers had already taken up residence. Most of them were more accommodating, but today one of the vicious guards, Müller, was on duty. Peter swallowed a groan as his stomach tightened.

The older guard, a so-called

Landesschütze,

had received a debilitating injury during the Russian campaign in 1942, which confined him to serving his country as a prison camp guard. Müller hated the Russians with a passion and treated them accordingly.

Peter slipped into his seat ignoring the glare Müller sent him, but instinctively ducking his head between his shoulders. The brute liked to make extensive use of his stick and it didn’t take much to attract his wrath.

More Russians. Poor lads,

Peter thought as he started to ask them for name, nationality and unit. Conditions were bad everywhere in the camp, but in the separated area a few hundred yards away where the Russians were held, conditions were inhuman, and Peter often wondered how most of them managed to survive day to day.

Another dirty and disheveled man stepped in front of Peter. He was tall and his face, while still showing evidence of his youth, looked weary. His big, bleak eyes lacked expression.

“Name?” Peter asked in Russian.

“Bartosz Jaworski.”

“Nationality?”

“Polish.”

“What?” Peter all but dropped his pen as he looked at the man in Russian uniform claiming to be a Pole. “Why are you with the Red Army?” he asked, switching to Polish.

“Because those bas—” Bartosz said, but stopped and winced when Müller’s stick hit him on the head.

“What’s that bloody

Rotarmist

saying?” Müller demanded to know.

“He’s in fact a Pole and should be—” The stick flew down on Peter’s shoulders.

“Bloody bastards all of them. Makes no difference to me. Put him in with the rest of the Russians.”

“But—” Another punch knocked the breath out of Peter’s chest and he quickly wrote

Russenlager

besides Bartosz’ name, but made a mental note to try and relocate him later to the Polish barracks.

After processing all the newcomers except for those who couldn’t walk on their own, Peter wanted to drop to the ground and sleep for the rest of his life – that or eat until the incessant gnawing ache in his stomach went away. Unfortunately, neither choice was possible. Instead he walked over to the place where the Russians were gathered waiting to be taken to their area of the camp.

Since he was about half a head taller than most of the others, Peter easily spotted Bartosz and approached him. “Hey! Bartosz! Come here!”

“What d’you want?” Bartosz looked up, confused, but his eyes lit up when he recognized the man who’d processed him earlier.

“Why are you with the Red Army?” Peter came straight to the point.

Bartosz shrugged and lowered his voice. “Making a pact with one devil to fight another one.”

“So you chose to fight with them to liberate Poland?” Peter couldn’t fathom how any patriot in his right mind would join the Red Army, but in this war sacrifices had to be made.

“It wasn’t by choice.” Bartosz spat on the ground. “The bastards forced us to join their ranks, or be shipped off to Siberia. And now I’ll die amidst enemies.”

“First you’ll suffer like an animal.” Peter’s blood boiled with rage for his countryman and his mind seethed with a few choice words for both the Nazis and the Russians who trampled back and forth across Poland as if it were their sandbox. “Are there more Poles in your transport?”

Bartosz’s eyes clouded over. “All were killed in my unit, except for my friend and me. But there could be others.”

“Where’s your friend?” Peter asked, wondering why he hadn’t come across the other Polish soldier during the registration.

“Dunno. He was shot a week ago and was more dead than alive when we arrived here.”

“Hmm. They probably took him to the field hospital.” Peter bit his lip, deciding not to tell Bartosz what they really did with the cases they deemed incurable. “Keep your pecker up and don’t get into trouble. I’ll see if I can get you relocated to the Polish barracks. Not that ours are particularly cozy either, but at least you are considered a human.”

Peter turned on his heel and walked to his barracks, where he flopped onto the ground, heaving like a locomotive. Without proper food for weeks, even a one-hundred-yard walk seemed like running a marathon.

A comrade had saved him a cup of coffee and a piece of bread from dinner earlier. The coffee was some stinking, putrid, brown liquid that tasted more like dishwater than anything else and the bread was a stone-hard, dark piece of something that only became edible when dunked into said

coffee

. He chewed the bread and imagined eating a full meal of roast pork with mashed potatoes and cabbage. The images helped to gulp down the disgusting food.

After dinner he fought for the energy to get up again and walk over to the commandant’s office to try and put in a good word for the Polish prisoners. The conditions in the Russian part of the camp weren’t fit for an animal, let alone a human. If Bartosz’s friend was injured as badly as Peter guessed, he’d be lucky if he had survived the day in the dirty barracks used to house the Russian injured.

He knocked on the commandant’s door and then entered at the man’s request.

“Zdanek? Any problems out there?”

“No, sir,” Peter said, pondering how to best broach the subject. The commandant wasn’t particularly cruel or sadistic, but he still was a Nazi and valued Hitler’s ideas. “Another transport of Red Army soldiers arrived this morning.”

“I know. And I’m aware their quarters are overcrowded already.”

“That is not why I’m here, sir. But some of them aren’t Russians.”

“Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks, they’re all the same. Soviets – that’s what they call themselves nowadays, as if it would make a difference,” the commandant scoffed.

Peter weighed his words carefully. “I agree. The Soviets are as much a threat to Poland as they are to Germany, but there are some Poles among this transport.”

“Poles?” The commandant wrinkled his nose. As members of the Slavic race, Polish people were considered inferior to the Aryan race, but still above the Jews and the Soviets.

“Yes, I personally verified this claim and…” A little white lie would help make his case. “They fought in the Warsaw Uprising before being forced into the ranks of the Soviet Army. And as such they should be treated according to the Geneva Convention, as was promised by Erich von dem Bach in the capitulation treaty.”

The commandant kept quiet for a minute, apparently thinking over the request. Then he shrugged and said, “I don’t care either way. If you wish, have the confirmed Poles transferred to the Polish area.

“Thank you, sir. May I have permission to look over the processing logs from today?”

The commandant waved over to the stack of lists in the corner and seated himself at his desk to attend to whatever work he had to do. Minutes later the secretary brought a glass of water and an apple for the commandant. Peter’s mouth watered and his stomach squeezed painfully with every crunching bite the commandant took from the apple. Peter had almost forgotten how an apple tasted, since the food in the camp consisted basically of stone-hard bread, potatoes and turnips.

Peter did his best to focus on the names on the list, despite the distracting sounds of munching that made him only more aware of his debilitating hunger. He noticed several Polish names, including a Stanislaw Zdanek. His brother’s name. His heart missed a beat or two as he read the name, but he tried not to jump to conclusions and reminded himself that both Zdanek and Stanislaw were very common Polish names. He jotted down the prisoner numbers and presented them to the commandant, asking for permission to verify their nationality and transfer them to the Polish area.

The commandant took the telephone receiver and dialed a number to ask the guard on duty to bring the prisoners to the interrogation room. Then, he took up his apple core and struck out his arm to toss it into the dustbin when he noticed Peter’s hungry stare glued to his every movement.

“You want this?” the commandant asked in disbelief and at Peter’s nod he tossed him the apple core. Peter shoved it into his pocket, unwilling to humiliate himself further and devour the discarded food in front of the other man’s eyes.

When Peter arrived back in his barracks he observed a pack of prisoners arriving from the Russian part of the camp. He counted seven, but there should be eight.

All of the young men looked like ancients, hollow looks in their eyes testifying they had seen things they would never be able to forget. The young man called Bartosz came up to Peter and said, “Thanks for getting us out from hell. But I haven’t been able to find my friend Stanislaw Zdanek.”

Peter’s heart squeezed at the mention of his brother’s name. He tossed the thought aside. It would be too much of a coincidence to meet Stan here of all places – hundreds of miles away from home. “I’ll check the camp hospital to make sure he’ll be registered as Polish,” Peter said and strode off, after assigning the newcomers to one of the barracks.

A new sense of urgency spurred him on and he rushed to the camp hospital in search of the missing prisoner, but the nurse, a prisoner himself, informed Peter they had received no patients with leg wounds in almost a week.

“Whomever you’re looking for isn’t here,” he said solemnly.

“He’s on the wounded list. He has to be here somewhere,” Peter insisted, taking another look at the sick men lying on beds.

“Did you check the dumpster?” the nurse asked.

“Dumpster?” Peter repeated.

“The tent where they take those who’ll die anyways.”

Peter felt a shiver running down his spine. A dumping place for those not worth receiving medical assistance. The Nazis surely stopped at nothing. For a moment he pondered whether he should go to the tent. Until this moment he hadn’t even known such a place existed, but he pulled himself together and trotted off to the farthest corner of the camp.

The sight and stench that greeted him made him gag. Outside the tent lay naked corpses piled up, waiting to be hauled away on carts to the nearby mass grave the next morning. Corpse disposal was a penal labor detail reserved for the Russians, but apparently the famished and enfeebled men hadn’t been able to complete their work before darkness set in and they were locked into their barracks again.

Peter closed his eyes for a moment to send a prayer skyward and held a kerchief in front of his nose and mouth before he entered the tent. It took a while until his eyes adjusted to the dimness, the only light coming from the spotlights outside.

The skeletal, filthy men infested with lice didn’t move to look at the visitor. They lay motionless on the ground, side by side, the dark shadow of death hovering over their heads. None of them would survive this night. Not in this tent.

He moved along the small path further into the room, with groaning and whimpering the only noises he could hear until the agonized scream of a man in pain reached his ears. At least his man was still well enough to scream. He followed the sound and soon squatted down next to a big man who wasn’t as emaciated as the others.

“My leg…my leg…” the man whimpered in Polish.

Peter’s chest constricted. He’d found the missing soldier. In the darkness he couldn’t see the sick man’s face. He murmured soothing words for the injured soldier. The man shifted at the sound of Peter’s voice and Peter’s heart plummeted as he recognized the pain-ravaged features that bore a faint resemblance to the boyish face of the brother he’d last seen five years ago. “Stan? Is this really you?”

“Piotr…” Stan whispered before his crazed eyes rolled back and he murmured incoherent words.

“God, Stan. Stan. Stan.” Tears threatened to spill and Peter willed them down. Now wasn’t the time to get emotional. If he wanted to save his brother he had to get him out of here immediately. “I’ll get you into the hospital.” Peter reached for his brother’s arms, fear like he’d never known before racing through his mind, as he heaved him up and across his shoulders to carry him to the camp hospital.