War Girls Complete Collection Chapter 349

Chapter 16

T

he next morning a messenger rushed up to Johann. “You shall report to the office immediately.”

“What for?”

“Don’t know, but you’re not the only one.” The messenger dashed off to bring the order to more men.

Johann sighed and walked to the office building. What could they want from him now? His stomach clenched as he stepped into the office, where two Soviet officers waited for him. They took his personal data and compared it against the list lying on the desk.

“Take off your new returnee clothes,” the younger officer said.

Johann’s heart plummeted into his shoes. “What?”

“Over there are other clothes, but hurry up, we don’t have much time.”

It didn’t make sense to oppose their commands, so Johann took off his clean and shiny new clothes and slipped into the old, stinking, bug-infested rags they’d laid out for him. In the last moment he remembered to rescue Lotte’s photograph and the wooden knife from his pockets.

When he was ready, the senior officer showed him a piece of paper and read the text to Johann – in Russian. The younger officer translated, “You are arrested.”

Johann was rendered speechless. How could they arrest him, since he already was a prisoner? The translator hadn’t mentioned on what grounds they were arresting him, and Johann didn’t dare ask.

“

Davai, davai

,” they rushed him on.

Outside in the yard, his joyful comrades didn’t dare wave or even look at him. None of them wanted to be affiliated with him, for fear of being taken away, too, and losing the ticket to the transport home.

Johann had never felt more humiliated or abandoned than while running the gauntlet past his former comrades. Only Helmut, who lingered near the exit gates, caught Johann’s gaze for a moment and voiced a silent, “God help you”.

He balled his fist. God had long ago abandoned him. Him and every other man rotting away in the Russian camps.

The Soviet officers shoved him into the back of a police car where other

plenni

with desolate expressions on their faces were already waiting. Two soldiers with rifles and two snarling and growling bloodhounds guarded them. The dogs growled at the slightest movement of the men and he had no doubt they’d mangle him to shreds.

The police car drove at breakneck speed into the center of Voronezh. Johann recognized some of the buildings that he and his fellow

plenni

had constructed with little more than their bare hands. The car stopped in front of the prison building. Johann and his fellows were shoved out and taken inside.

Even after so many years in captivity, a shiver of fear ran down Johann’s spine at the sound of the door falling shut behind him. His legs filled with lead and he could barely drag himself along.

The camp had been hell, but the concrete prison building with barred windows invoked instant claustrophobia. Two guards pushed each of the prisoners into an empty cell and locked the door behind them. Johann was left alone with his fear-stricken thoughts.

It didn’t take long until the door opened again, and two female guards entered his cell. One of them stood by and watched, while the other one thoroughly shook him down.

She found the wooden knife in his pocket and seized it. Then her fingers reached the picture in his breast pocket and his heart stopped beating. The Russians had a thorough disdain for paper in the hands of the prisoners, afraid they could write down something negative about their great country. Paper was always confiscated when found and if the guards found scribbled notes on a

plenni

, they often punished him for the transgression.

The guard removed Lotte’s picture and gazed at it, asking, “Woman, you?”

“Yes, this is my girlfriend,” he answered and then pleaded, “Please, don’t take it away.”

The two guards conversed in Russian, and turned over the picture several times, scrutinizing it. When they didn’t find a single word written on it, the older one nodded and said, “He can keep it. Give it back.”

A stone the size of the Ural Mountains fell from his shoulders when the guard who’d shaken him down returned Lotte’s picture to his breast pocket. He all but sagged in relief. But the search wasn’t over yet.

The guard standing to the back ordered, “Take off your clothes.”

Having experienced the embarrassing ass-squeezing medical exams on a regular basis, he didn’t even hesitate to follow her commands. There wasn’t much dignity left that the Russians hadn’t violated already.

He hadn’t seen himself in a mirror for years, had even avoided glancing down his limbs, terrified of the horrific sight.

All the

plenni

in the camp looked like walking skeletons, the leathery skin hanging down in flaps. There was no flesh to round out the skin, no muscle to stretch it. The skin of every man in the camp had a different shade of gray, from the pale whitish-gray of ashes in winter to the darkened gray of those working outside all day in summer. The sick had varying shades of yellow-gray or green-gray. And the dead turned a black-gray if they weren’t buried fast enough.

He undressed in front of the women and neatly folded the rags that were his clothes, before he put them on the floor. The guard searched his naked body with the same diligence she’d searched his clothes. Did she expect him to be hiding something between the loose flaps of his skin?

She looked into his ears, checked his nose and his mouth. Then she continued her search with his private parts. For a moment, anger flared up in his tired bones, but the emotion disappeared as fast as it had come. During his years in captivity he’d learned to save his energy for things that mattered. Someone checking beneath the uncut hood of his penis wasn’t worth losing precious calories over.

He stood like a puppet on strings, enduring whatever they did to his body. It didn’t make sense to protest, or even to feel humiliated. In the eyes of these women he wasn’t a man. He was but a

wojenno plenni

, a prisoner of war, the lowest kind of prisoner. Even the pigs, the mules and the cows stood way above him in the hierarchy.

Germany had lost the war. Surrendered unconditionally. The Soviets belonged to the winners and could treat him however they wished.

“You can dress again.”

The command gave the awaited redemption and Johann dressed again under the vigilant eyes of his two guards. They led him to another cell that was already occupied by nine bedraggled men. Some of them he recognized from the camp, but others seemed to be common Russian criminals.

Johann found a space against the wall and huddled into a ball. He had no desire to talk to anyone. Worries whirled around his head and he tried hard to push them away. It didn’t work. After a while, he glanced up, annoyed. The breathing, coughing and groaning of the other men was a nuisance.

By now he should have gotten used to the lack of privacy, but alas, that wasn’t the case. He wished for just an hour to himself, with nobody present to witness his misery.