War Girls Complete Collection Chapter 357

Chapter 24

O

ne day Johann realized two years had passed since his trial and sentencing. Twenty-three years left to go. It felt like a hundred forevers. On days like this one, hope seeped from his body in rivulets, leaving nothing but emptiness behind. His mind clogged with bleakness and despair, crowding out every memory of happier times.

If he started to forget the world he’d left behind, did that mean they’d forgotten about him, too? He worried there wouldn’t be anyone left remembering him, should he ever return home. A dry sob erupted from his throat as he tried to ground himself.

The grief over losing his beloved Lotte still weighed heavily on his heart, even after such a long time. Thoughts of her had kept him going in Voronezh, but after his trial he’d been determined to let her go, not wanting to mourn what would never be.

Recently, though, he’d started dreaming about her at night. They weren’t good dreams, because every time he reached out for her, her face became blurry and faded away. He ran after her and shouted,

Wait! Lotte, wait for me!

but the faster he ran, the quicker she disappeared into the mist. Then he jolted awake with a thundering heart, and cold sweat covering his body.

He stared into the darkness, conjuring up her face with his mind. It never worked. Ever since her photograph had fallen victim to one of the frequent purges, he had started losing her – bit by agonizing bit. First, her sweet face seeped from his memory, then the sound of her voice, the smell of her hair, the feel of her soft lips on his.

The only trace of her existence was the heartache when he pronounced her name.

Charlotte. My sweet darling Lotte

. He so hoped she’d moved on and led a happy, fulfilled life. At the same time he so hated to imagine she’d moved on to lead a life without him.

“Have you written home yet?” Igor asked Johann. The prisoners were allowed one letter every three months, but foreigners had to do so on a special form, which incidentally never was available.

“Very funny.”

“No, really. I just delivered my letter and saw a small stack of the foreigner forms in the culture barracks. You’d better rush before they’re all gone.”

Igor had barely finished his sentence by the time Johann dashed out of the barracks. Upon arriving at the library he asked the guard in charge about the form and was given the last one. He held it against his heart.

Tears pooled in his eyes and he blinked them away. Once it was his turn to use the pen, he settled at one of the tables, suddenly unsure what to write. Would she even remember him?

Giving a deep sigh, he wrote:

Dear Lotte,

I hope this letter finds you well and that you received my last note. Things in Vorkuta are… well, cold. But I’m doing fine and don’t want you or anyone else to worry about me. Please.

If it’s not too much trouble, I would like to ask you to send a package to me with essentials via the Red Cross (instructions are on the back of this form). And please, tell me about your life.

I still love you with every fiber of my soul, which is the very reason why I’m urging you not to wait for me. You deserve to live a life filled with joy and happiness. Knowing how stubborn you are, I can see you pout, but do me a favor and listen to me just for once.

There’s no way I’ll allow you to wait for another twenty-three years. You must enjoy your life, because I cannot. Do everything with so much joy that it’s enough for both of us.

Johann

Three months later

“Have you heard?”

Kurt and Thorsten stormed into the barracks, where Johann was unraveling thread from his blanket.

“Heard what?” He barely looked up, because he needed to collect enough material to knit socks for winter.

“They’re bringing an entire train wagonload of letters and packages into the camp as we speak.”

Johann dropped the blanket and gathered the loose threads into his pocket. Rushing past his comrades who stood with hanging jaws, he shouted, “What are you waiting for? Let’s go.”

Together they jogged all the way to the culture barracks where a huge crowd of prisoners had gathered and were waiting for the gift giving. The atheist communists didn’t celebrate Christmas but getting a care package was even better.

A joyous tension hung in the air that Johann had never sensed before. The drab dullness of the camp and the apathy of the prisoners had been blown away like dust in the storm. Thousands of pairs of eyes sparkled with elation, still not comprehending the miracle that was about to unfold in front of their eyes.

Some of the Russian prisoners had received letters before – carefully screened words from their families. But none of the German

plenni

had ever received so much as a single word of news from home.

And a box full of goods? Unthinkable.

Johann kneaded his fingers. He’d told Lotte to move on, but now he hoped she’d found enough fondness in her heart to send him a package… or at least a letter. A postcard, perhaps. Anything?

He waited for more than an hour while name after name was called. But not his. There was still a stack of boxes left when the guard in charge announced, “Bedtime. Go to your barracks. We’ll distribute the rest tomorrow after dinner.”

Johann folded up like a pocketknife, all energy sapped from his body.

“Hey, your name could come up tomorrow,” Thorsten tried to console him, holding his own box pressed tightly against his chest.

The next evening a considerably smaller number of men gathered to await the distribution of packages. Johann had all but given up hope when only one medium-sized box remained. He turned around to return to his barracks with slumped shoulders, when someone elbowed him.

“Hey, aren’t you Hauser?”

He nodded.

“They called your name!”

My name

? In his profound despair he hadn’t heard it, but now, he turned around and rushed toward the guard. After verifying Johann’s identity, the guard handed him the box. Johann recognized Lotte’s handwriting on the address label and for a moment he believed to smell her scent and feel her love for him. He swallowed down the lump forming in his throat and pressed the package to his heart.

In the barracks he put the box reverently onto his bunk and traced his fingers along the smooth cardboard. It would make a great barrier against the wind when put between his shirt and jacket in winter. Or he could use it to mend the hole in his shoe… there were endless possibilities.

He untied the cord that kept the box closed and immediately wrapped it around his waist. A piece of cord was a coveted possession one had to closely guard at all times or risk it being stolen.

When he was ready to open the box, his fingers were trembling and his heart fluttering. He closed his eyes for a moment to take a deep breath before he lifted the lid. It was full to the brim with goods he hadn’t seen, tasted, or smelled in years.

Two pairs of woolen socks. The softest undershirt hand-knitted from angora wool. Worker’s gloves made from sturdy canvas. His fingers carefully took out the robust dark yellow gloves and tried them on. A sigh of utter content escaped him, because wearing the gloves made the next work shift seem like a piece of cake.

But there was even more in the box. He found durable brown bread, a salami the size of his forearm, slightly shriveled carrots, lentils, chocolate and a pound of sugar carefully stacked. He couldn’t believe his good luck. Sugar was as valuable a commodity as gold in the camp and an excellent bartering currency.

Only when he was done sifting through the goods did he pick up Lotte’s letter. A photograph of her fluttered out. Her smile lit up her face and instantly he remembered the sound of her laughter. He traced his finger down the picture, caressing her rounded cheeks, her stubby nose and her wonderful, fiery red curls.

For a moment he was surprised, because she looked much older than he remembered her. Then he gave a snort; time for her had passed, too.

She must be…

He had to calculate her age.

Twenty-four

!

How much she must have changed from the eighteen-year-old girl he once knew to the woman she must have become. The thought stabbed at his heart. He pocketed the photograph and lifted the letter to his nose, inhaling deeply, memories of her scent rushing back to him as the smell of roses and a hint of spice reached deep into his heart and ignited a fire in his soul.

Her handwriting was generous, swinging, like the upbeat girl she was. But the line through the “t” was so strong and powerful, it made the entire word somehow belligerent, poised to attack whatever stood in her way.

He smiled. That was his Lotte. Always out to fight whatever she believed unjust.

She’s not your girl anymore

, he reminded himself.

With bated breath he mustered the courage to unfold the letter, smoothing out the creases before he began to read –

Dearest Johann,

I received your postcard two years ago. It made me cry. I cried for two full days. First I cried out of sadness and grief, then out of rage. Don’t you dare tell me to forget you! This is not how it works.

Without you, I wouldn’t be alive today, remember that? So, even if I didn’t love you with all my heart, I would still wait for you to return to my side.

So stop telling me to forget all about you, because it’s an incredibly selfish, inconsiderate and cold-hearted thing to say. I’ll forgive you this time, because I know the sentence must have been disturbing for you, but you’d better not mention this topic ever again! Are we clear on that?

He couldn’t stop the tears rolling down his cheeks. That was his Lotte, in the flesh. Only she could scold a man imprisoned in the hell of the Arctic Zone for telling her to move on.

But his tears were happy ones. Knowing she still loved him caused a flood of joy to sweep his body. It was enough to forget his dire condition for a short while, enough even to hope for an early release. He furtively glanced around and wiped the tears away. Nobody needed to know about his emotional turmoil.

Now that the Soviets have allowed letters and packages, I will send you one every three months. If you can, write back to me and tell me what you need most.

I do have some idea, because – and you will hate this – I’ve been in contact with several of your friends and grilled them about every little detail that can help to make your life easier.

Again, he paused reading. Memories of Karsten stormed him. The man had been a good friend, back in his first months in Voronezh. He wondered whether one of the friends Lotte mentioned was Helmut. With every fiber of his soul he hoped Helmut had made it back home.

Lotte’s letter continued with mundane facts about her life, her family, her recent trip to America to visit her sister Anna, and her graduation. She was a lawyer now and had started to work for a well-known law firm in Berlin.

Again, feelings of inferiority crept into his heart. For the rest of the world, including Lotte, life had moved on, while he was captured in an infinite loop of wretchedness. Absolute, pure, unadulterated misery.

He was a nobody, not even considered a human being, for he had none of the rights other humans possessed. He’d been reduced to a means of production. According to Marxist theory he and his fellow prisoners were nothing more than the abstract mass of labor exploited for the good of the people. Because they did not form part of the

people

.

The ever-present hatred for the Soviets and their wicked, corrupted interpretation of communism swept over him, tightening his stomach. He spat out, muttering a curse, determined to survive the unjust sentence, simply to show them that he was still a person.

He kept on reading Lotte’s letter, four pages of tiny handwriting that was sometimes hard to decipher, and at the end of it, he felt almost as if he were together with Lotte in Berlin, anxiously awaiting her upcoming move to Bonn, the new capital of the Western part of Germany. Memorizing her new address, he paused again to think.

Johann had become quite adept at reading between the lines of

Pravda,

and Lotte’s letter confirmed his suspicions. The Soviet-controlled Eastern part of Germany, the GDR, wasn’t the worker’s and farmer’s paradise it was painted out to be.

It seemed that everyone, except for the staunchest supporters of communism, was looking for a way to

rübermachen

, to leave the East for a better future in the capitalist-controlled FRG. Nobody but the Soviet administration believed that

Capitalism

was an insult.

“Bedtime!” someone shouted, and Johann quickly finished the letter, before crawling under his scratchy blanket.

There are constant diplomatic talks about returning all the prisoners of war, even convicted ones like you. So, keep your chin up!

I’ll do whatever is in my power to ammeliorate your life over there, and never forget that I love you with every cell of my body and every fiber of my soul. I will not – I repeat: I will not – move on! The day you return to Germany, I will be there to wrap you into my arms.

With love and gratitude,

Lotte

He folded

her letter and put it next to his heart, and for the first time in years he fell asleep with a smile on his face.