[2019] Citizen 865 by Debbie Cenziper

Author:Debbie Cenziper [Cenziper, Debbie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2019-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

IF IT WEREN’T for a sugar plant and a railway station, there may never have been a thriving Polish settlement in Trawniki. Traders and craftsmen migrated to the area at the end of the nineteenth century, turning the sprawling countryside fed by the Wieprz River into a small village, with thatched-roof houses and farms that in the summer months grew bright-yellow canola flowers.

A hundred Jewish families from a nearby congregation had settled on land near the sugar mill, and even after the mill closed a few decades before the war, the modest village of Poles and Jews on the outskirts of the Lublin District maintained a tiny industrial core, linked to the rest of Poland through the rail lines.

An ideal place to train and deploy a makeshift army.

In late summer 1941, Jakob Reimer arrived at Trawniki in a convoy of seventy captured Soviet soldiers, altogether surprised that he was still alive. The Germans had overrun his platoon in Minsk, and Reimer had been taken to Stalag 307 in eastern Poland.

He was an ethnic German, captured as a Red Army officer with the 447th Soviet Infantry Regiment. If the Germans discovered his rank, Reimer knew there would be no mercy. Hitler had instructed the high command of German armed forces to summarily shoot officers and Communist officials at the time of capture, and word of the order had spread among Red Army soldiers.

Reimer had been sure to destroy his papers, but in Stalag 307 it had seemed only a matter of time before the Germans identified him, an artillery lieutenant who had commanded a platoon of Russian men.

But he had been recruited, not killed, a startling twist of fate, and now he stood in a barrack in the training camp Trawniki, posing for a service photo as a newly dubbed German police auxiliary. Black hair, gray eyes, the lines of his mouth drawn into something of a grimace.

Did he ever belong to the Communist Party? Reimer said no. Was he racially pure? Did he have Jewish ancestors? Reimer knew quite well that Germans routinely shot Jewish soldiers of the Red Army. No, he said again. He was given a declaration in German and Russian:

I declare that I am of Aryan descent, that there were no Jews among my forefathers, that I was neither a member of the Communist Party nor the Communist Youth Organization.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.