"Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily."-Napoleon Bonaparte
The sound came first like a whip of thunder. Then another. Then all of them at once, overlapping, rolling into one continuous roar.
Richter felt the bullets hitting him. Three times. Four times. He lost count. But not the tearing agony he'd expected. He had been shot before, once in Russia and once in France. He knew what bullets felt like.
His legs gave out.
He was falling backward, the wall scraping against his uniform as he slid to the damp ground. The sky tilted above him. Dark clouds were spinning.
He couldn't breathe.
His chest was tight. Like someone had stacked a hundred bricks on top of him. He tried to inhale, but his lungs were empty. His mouth opened and closed. Still nothing.
I'm dying, he thought.
But there was not much pain. Shouldn't there be more pain? He'd seen men die before. Seen them scream and writhe and clutch at their wounds. Splitting blood everywhere. Agony in their faces.
His vision was blurring. The sky above was darkening at the edges. Closing in. He blinked hard, trying to clear it, but the darkness kept pressing closer.
Voices shouted in Russian. Someone laughed.
He lay still. His body wouldn't move anyway, even if he wanted to.
This is it, he thought. This is how it ends.
He waited for the darkness to take him. Waited for everything to stop.
But his heart kept on beating. He could feel it. Slow and heavy in his chest.
He wasn't dead.
Not yet.
Time stretched out. Seconds felt like minutes. Minutes felt like hours. Richter lay on the ground, staring up at the grey sky, listening to the Soviet soldiers talking among themselves. He just couldn't understand the words.
Footsteps approached. Someone stood over him, blocking out the sky. A Soviet soldier. The soldier prodded His leg with his boot. He didn't react. Well, he couldn't react.
The soldier said something to his comrades and walked away.
More time passed.
Then a rough pair of hands grabbed Richter's arms. They dragged him across the ground. His head bumped over stones and debris. His uniform caught on something and tore. The hands didn't care and just kept dragging.
They threw him on top of something soft. Was it a mattress? It felt like it. No, not a mattress. Bodies! He was lying on top of a pile of bodies! Steinmetz, Vogel, Brandt, and Fischer, among them. He could feel them beneath him. Still warm. Still soft.
Richter wanted to scream. Wanted to thrash and fight and get away from the dead men pressed against him. But his body wouldn't move. He just lay there, draped over corpses, staring up at the sky.
A shadow fell across his face.
Richter opened his eyes just a bit. Just enough to see through his lashes.
A man stood over him. Not a Soviet, but a German. He wore an old, patched army tunic with a Volkssturm armband. Gray-haired, thin, and old, at least in his sixties. He wasn't looking at him. He was looking at the Soviet soldiers a few yards away, smoking and talking.
The man bent down. Pretended to check Vogel's body, pulling at his uniform. His hand moved to Richter's collar. His fingers touched his neck and undoubtedly felt his pulse. The deception was over.
Yet Richter kept perfectly still.
The man's lips barely moved as he said, "Don't move. Don't make a sound."
Richter's heart hammered. He wanted to respond, to ask what was happening, but he forced himself to stay limp and play dead.
The man stood and called out something in German to another worker nearby. They lifted Fischer's body and carried it toward a truck. Then they came back for Brandt. Then Steinmetz.
When they lifted Richter, the old man's grip was firmer than necessary. Strong. Deliberate. They carried him to the truck and threw him in the back. Richter landed hard, his head hitting against the metal bed.
More bodies landed on top of him. The weight was crushing. He couldn't see. Could barely breathe. The odor was overwhelmingly strong.
Something pressed against his side. A hand. The old man's hand. The hand slipped a piece of paper into his pocket and then withdrew.
Paper. A piece of paper.
The old man's voice whispered, so quiet Richter almost didn't hear it. "We have swapped the firing squad rounds to blanks. You're just bruised, but you will be fine. Play dead. The truck will take you outside the city. When it stops, they'll leave the bodies for burial. That's where you escape. The paper has instructions. Follow them exactly."
Richter nodded to indicate that he heard and understood.
Richter's mind raced. Blanks? That didn't make any sense now did it? How on earth did they manage to do that? And why risk it? And why was he the only one who caught blanks, and none of the others? How strange? How very peculiar?
Then again, he'd taken five shots and come away with nothing worse than bruises.
Maybe some German officers have created a resistance that gives us any chance to slip out of the Red Army's grasp. Or maybe it's simpler and crueler: I'm the only one they could manage to spare, and that's the only reason I still breathe.
He heard the old man moving away. The truck's tailgate slammed shut. Everything went dark.
The truck's engine roared to life. The vehicle leapt forward, and Richter felt his body shift with the movement. The corpses around him settled, pressing tighter. He adjusted himself, reached into his pocket, and took out the piece of paper. It was too dark inside to read, so he carefully put it back inside. He was feeling much better now.
The truck meandered through the streets, avoiding piles of debris left behind from the air raids and artillery attacks from last month. He heard distant shouts. The occasional burst of gunfire. There is still resistance, he thought. A small flicker of hope.
Then the sounds changed. Fewer voices. Less rubble. It was getting much darker now. The truck was leaving the city, heading toward the outskirts of Berlin.
The truck drove for what felt like an hour. He had lost all sense of time in the darkness. Lost track of everything except the weight on top of him and the pain in his chest and the piece of paper in his pocket.
Finally, the truck slowed down and pulled over.
The tailgate opened. Two pairs of hands grabbed the bodies on top and started pulling them out. One at a time.
Then they reached him.
Soviet soldiers grabbed his arms and yanked him from the pile. They carried him a few meters and dropped him on the ground. His face hit the dirt. His mouth filled with dust.
Still, he kept his eyes closed. Kept his body limp. Playing his part as well as he could.
More bodies landed beside him. It was nauseating now. The two Soviets worked quickly and efficiently.
The truck's engine started again. The vehicle drove off, the sound fading into the distance.
Silence.
He waited. Daring not to open his eyes. He counted to one hundred. Then to two hundred.
No voices. No footsteps. Just wind and the distant sound of birds.
He opened his eyes.
He was lying at the edge of a pit. A mass grave, already half full of bodies. The smell was terrible, the sight was worse. Richter turned his head and saw Steinmetz's face inches away. The major's eyes were still open. With the greatest difficulty, he closed the eyelids with his hand. The least he could do for the man he'd known and served under for so long.
Richter forced himself to move again. His arms trembled. His legs didn't want to work. But he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, gasping with the effort.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the paper. His hands shook as he unfolded it. It was written in German. It was a bit smudged with dirt. But still, readable.
Head south toward Potsdam. Stay off main roads. At the edge of town, there is a burned church with a blue door. Go to the basement. Others will meet you there. They will take you to the river crossing. From there, follow the route to Hamburg. A ship leaves for Argentina on the fifteenth. You must be on it.
Destroy this note. Trust no one. Move only at night.
-88
He read it twice. Then a third time. His mind struggled to process it all. Argentina. A ship. This wasn't just a lucky break. This was an organized evacuation plan.
The sympathetic channels. The ones the officers used to whisper about. The rumored networks that smuggled Nazi officials, mostly SS and higher officers out of Germany before the Allies caught them.
It was real after all.
He looked around. The mass grave site was deserted. Trees on one side, open field on the other. No Soviet soldiers around. No one was watching.
He was free, at last.
He tore the note into a hundred pieces and scattered them around the mass grave. Then he stood, wobbling, and started walking. Away from the pit. Away from the bodies. Away from the bloody smell of death.
South. He needed to go south. But first…
First, he needed a weapon and some means of transport.
And he needed to see Greta.