I'll Never Go Back by Mikhail Koriakov Nicholas Wreden

Author:Mikhail Koriakov, Nicholas Wreden [Mikhail Koriakov, Nicholas Wreden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789120400
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Eschenburg Press
Published: 2018-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight—PRISONER OF THE AMERICANS

I awoke in the middle of the night. Someone was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw Stasia, the Polish girl with the thick black eyebrows who worked in the kitchen of the Kriegsberichterkompanie.

“They are leaving, Captain....”

The street and the yard were teeming with lorries and buses that were being loaded. None of the soldiers had any interest in Government property: the typesetting equipment, countless typewriters, boxes containing complete files of the newspaper, and posters prepared by the propaganda company. They were about to become prisoners of war. Why should they care? But officers scurried hither and thither, making sure that everything was loaded; Untersturmführer Otto was determined to surrender his company to the Americans in perfect order and with a complete inventory.

Arguments over seats were raging in the buses. The men might not be interested in Government property, but they were concerned about their personal belongings; the Army belonged to the past, but the suitcases packed with civilian clothes, dresses, and lengths of cloth they had picked up here and there were a part of the future. Otto moved from bus to bus ordering out the German women who wanted to join in the flight; among them was Parshin’s friend and the old woman who had been selling beer in the kitchen. He flung their suitcases outside into the dirt. Quietly I took a seat in one of the buses and wondered whether I too should be thrown out. Otto gave me a quick glance and, without saying a word, slammed the door.

The sky was getting lighter. Green fluffy branches were pressing against the wide, plate-glass windows of the bus, which had been parked under a tree. The stalks and leaves, moist with the dew, were permeated with the pure freshness of a spring morning. May 7, Holy Easter morning....Large bundles of newspapers were piled along the fence; these were The Voice of the People, with Parshin’s Easter leader that was no longer needed. I did not want to think about Parshin, or about anything else; all I wanted was to inhale the Easter morning. It seemed so strange! The War had begun on June 22, 1941, the Day of All Saints, and it had come to an end on Easter....I was saying “Christ has risen” to all my people: to my mother, who had remained in Siberia by my father’s fresh grave; to my brother, who was fighting somewhere in East Prussia; to my father, who was already in the other, shining world. I asked my mother’s blessing as I prepared to start on a new journey to freedom that Easter morning. All my unexpressed hopes and my silent joys in everything beautiful blended quietly and floated through my soul.

The sun was coming up as the line of buses and lorries got under way. We crossed the Elbe and moved between the hills that sat in a blue haze. Seen at a distance, through the windows of the bus, the villages scattered

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