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176 D Chapter Fifty-Two d War’s end The battle of Berlin would officially end three days later. It dawned on me that I must have left only hours before the iron clamp closed around the city and its three million inhabitants . Steadily and forcefully, the gigantic Russian tanks, with thousands of miles behind them, made it forward, mercilessly attacked by furious but futile German attempts to hold back the enemy. The tanks’ monstrous size, preventing swift and effective movements, made them easy targets for the German anti-tank weapon, the“Panzerfaust,”small enough to be operated by the children now drafted into the Wehrmacht. The Red Army did not enter Berlin in an orderly formation; they had to conquer it street by street, house by house. While dead Russian soldiers would be buried at once by the roadside, Germans were left lying where they fell. Of the 135,000 German soldiers still stationed in the Berlin garrison, 70,000 survivors were captured and marched East; only a handful would eventually return. A last minute offer by the Wehrmacht to negotiate peace vastly amused the Russians.Wasn’t it a little late for negotiations? When the battle was finally over, Stalin offered his heroic soldiers the battered Nazi capital as a free-for-all on a silver platter, a well-deserved reward for years of unspeakable suffering. Now the Germans, men, women, and children, the very old and the very young, the guilty and the innocent, Nazis and anti-Nazis alike, got a taste of what it meant to be invaded by an army that, through dogged determination, under inhuman conditions, and after four long years, had triumphed over the devastators of Russia, forcing the enemies to their knees on their own turf. The red flag displaying a hammer and sickle now flew from the Brandenburg Gate. It was just before dawn; I had fallen asleep on the floor of a farmhouse when a knock at the window awakened me. Oh God, what now? Had they gotten wind of our evil deed after all? Then I heard Pawlee’s voice:“Open, pasholsk, open!” “Thank you, Lord!” I said aloud. Pawlee’s red-rimmed eyes peeked in from the outside, his nose flattened on the glass. What the hell did he want? When I opened the window,he put a finger to his lips and whispered !“Gitler kaput, war kaput, SS kaput, krkrkrk, boomboom, bangbang, karasho!”Grinning from one ear to the other, not without admiration, he threw a significant glance at little Ortgies on the table. So the rascal knew what had happened by the Dosse River after all! With Fyodor like a shadow behind him, Pawlee began to mumble in a mixture of German Destruction unlimiteD 177 and Russian until I finally grasped that “Russian brothers” were close, and he and Fyodor would like to join them. No longer prisoners, but instead soldiers again in the Red Army. I had to suppress a fit of hysterical laughter at the utter absurdity of the situation; two Soviet POWs about to be liberated asking a female German, with the rank of an officer, for permission to escape. I just could not believe it! “Go,” I told them.“Go, run fast, don’t turn back, and be very, very careful. Hurry up, scram, what are you waiting for?” But Pawlee wasn’t through with me yet. They were both hungry, he signaled, and his longing look went to the large loaf of black army bread next to the Ortgies on the table. Through the window, I handed him the entire loaf, not without stern instructions to share it with Fyodor, because otherwise I would—“da, da, da,” Pavlik ended my unfinished sentence.“You make puppenlappen, rag doll, of Pawlee.” He took the words right out of my mouth! Both gave me a smacking kiss on the cheeks and—spassiva, dasvidaniya—I watched them disappear into the fog, suddenly horrified at the thought of never seeing them again. I almost cried, but I decided it would have to wait; there was no time for tears now.30 At roll call on the last morning of our journey,the Nazi captain noticed the disappearance of two Soviet subhumans. Foaming with rage, he promised to personally massacre them. But in order to do that he would have to catch them first! The sun was just about to rise in the east when, moving slowly across the marketplace of the deserted village, we noticed white...

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