Sapphire Skies (28 page)

A soldier near the gate turned and looked at me. I collapsed to my knees and he rushed towards me. ‘Wait!’ he said, helping me up. ‘You’ll freeze to death.’

He took me back to the hospital barracks, informing one of the nurses what had happened. The nurse took my pulse and my temperature, then made me remove the coat so she could feel my arms and legs.

‘What made you think that you’d have the strength to walk to Katowice?’ she asked. ‘You’re malnourished and dehydrated. Stay here another week and rest. Then you can go.’

Over the next few days, I helped the volunteers in the kitchen by peeling potatoes and chopping cabbage for the vats of soup they made for the hospital patients, staff and soldiers.

‘It’s just as well the nurse stopped you from heading out on your own,’ one of the cooks told me. ‘They are driving some of the hospital patients to the railway station this afternoon to evacuate them to Katowice. You’d best go with them. The army unit stationed here is well disciplined, but there are other units that are roaming the countryside and raping any women and children they find. Their officers can’t seem to bring them under control. They target mainly German women for revenge, but they’ve also raped Russian women and Jewish women liberated from the Nazi camps.’

The cook’s news filled me with dismay. Being in Auschwitz had confirmed that I’d fought on the side of right in this war. But the behaviour of these Russian soldiers meant that we were brutes now, just like the Nazis.

The trucks in which we were driven to the station were crowded and uncomfortable, but the volunteers made sure each person had plenty of food and water.

‘Eat only small amounts,’ a nurse reminded a male patient who was no more than skin and bones. His eyes were enormous globes in his head. ‘If you eat too much or too quickly your digestive system won’t be able to take it,’ she warned him.

As we exited the main gate, I glanced back at the ironwork sign that I had seen that first day:
Arbeit macht frei.
I looked at the emaciated man the nurse had spoken to and felt sure that whatever life threw at me, it could never be worse than what we prisoners had endured at Auschwitz. What could be worse than the very depths of hell?

I
n Katowice we were met by Polish Red Cross volunteers and billeted in public buildings. Inside the school, where I was to stay with other former inmates of Auschwitz, we were led to a dining hall and given soup to eat. It was nothing like the foul-tasting muck at the camp. The soup was flavoured with onions, pickle and dill and I relished every piece of carrot, potato and parsnip in it. Mama made a similar dish and the taste reminded me that I would see her again soon.

While we were eating, some women arrived. They explained that they were Polish Jews who had been hidden by sympathetic neighbours in Katowice. One woman showed me a picture of a mother with two young children. ‘Did you see my sister and her boys at the camp?’ she asked in German, which was the common language between us all now. ‘She was given up by a work colleague.’

I took the photograph from her and studied it, then shook my head and handed it back. How could I tell her that her sister and her nephews were surely dead? I didn’t have words for what I had witnessed at Auschwitz. When later I took a bath I soaped myself vigorously, scrubbing behind my ears and between my toes, as if I could cleanse off the horror. But when I dried myself, it seemed that the stench of burnt flesh still clung to me. I was distressed that I might never be rid of the smell.

The following day a doctor examined me, and afterwards I was interviewed by a Red Cross official. She was assisted by a Russian interpreter. The woman was brisk and efficient in her manner but the interpreter made me uncomfortable. When he spoke to me his lips curled back, exposing his yellow teeth. It gave me the impression of a dog about to attack.

The official took down the number that was tattooed on my arm. ‘The guards destroyed most of the registers before they fled Auschwitz,’ she said through the interpreter. ‘You have to tell us who you are.’

I hesitated. I had been a number for so long that I’d almost forgotten my name and who I was along with it. The memory of the NKVD officer staring at me across the sunflower field came back to me. Was it better to go on pretending I was Svetlana? But I was not as scared of the NKVD as I had once been. Now that the Soviet Union was on the brink of victory, I doubted that they would persecute me when I had fought for the Motherland and had ended up in Auschwitz for my trouble.

‘I am Natalya Stepanovna Azarova.’

I gave my rank and regiment details. My name meant nothing to the official, but the interpreter frowned. ‘I want to rejoin my regiment,’ I told them. ‘I can be useful to the Soviet Air Force when they enter Berlin.’

The interpreter translated my remark for the official but it seemed to me that he added some comment of his own.

‘I admire your courage,’ the official told me, ‘but according to the doctor’s report you are suffering from malnutrition. The Soviet government has ordered all prisoners of war to be sent to Odessa for repatriation. The train won’t leave for another week, however, so why don’t you take the opportunity to recuperate here? The medical officer in Odessa will be able to judge if you have improved enough by then to rejoin your regiment.’

I was disappointed at not being returned to combat immediately but disobeying the order to go to Odessa would have been regarded as desertion.

At the end of the interview, the official gave me a notebook and a pen. As soon as I returned to the dormitory I wrote letters to Mama and Valentin. I didn’t tell them that I had been in Auschwitz, only that I’d been captured. I poured out my love for them, and wrote out the words of ‘Wait For Me’ for Valentin
.

When I boarded the train for Odessa the following week, I was buoyant with joy. I would soon be back among my people and flying again! The other Russian women in my carriage were mostly nurses who had been captured, or civilians who had been taken to Poland to work in the labour camps for the German Reich. There were a couple of tank drivers but no other pilots.

A young woman sat down next to me and introduced herself as Zinaida Glebovna Rusakova. We started talking and I learned that she was from Moscow too. She had been in her final year of medical school when the war broke out and had enlisted as a field doctor.

‘I was captured when the Germans encircled the Soviet Army in Vyazma,’ she told me. ‘I was kept in a prisoner-of-war camp until I was brought to Poland to work in a German armaments factory.’

‘You were captured in 1941!’ I exclaimed. ‘How did you survive so long?’

Zinaida leaned towards me and whispered, ‘The prisoner-of-war camp was pure hell, but at the armaments factory we weren’t treated badly. I ate better there than I had when I was growing up in Moscow!’

I was taken aback by Zinaida’s story. It made me wonder whether I might have ended up in a camp like hers instead of Auschwitz if I hadn’t tried to escape. ‘The thing that kept me going,’ Zinaida continued, ‘was that I made sure every twentieth shell I produced was a dud. That way I was still assisting the Motherland.’

I was filled with admiration. Zinaida could have been hanged or burned alive for doing that. I’d seen it happen to inmates in Auschwitz who had tried the same thing. She reminded me of Svetlana in many ways: she had the same bright, cultivated energy.

The memory of Svetlana’s death came back to me. I’d had to shut it out in order to survive, but now it returned like a nightmare. My heart ached and I excused myself to go out into the corridor so I could shed the tears I should have cried back then. But even though I wept my heart out, I felt no relief. I tried to recall the good things about Svetlana — her pretty face, the sound of her voice, her gentle touch, but they were blurred. I’d lost the essence of my friend when I’d shot her. How could I ever live with myself?

As the train moved through the Ukraine, I was sickened by the destruction I saw. Entire villages had been reduced to ruins. The people who remained were living in holes in the ground, like rabbits in burrows.

The women and I were travelling in passenger carriages but attached to the train were some cattle cars like the ones the Germans had used to transport prisoners to Auschwitz. When we stopped, I saw men climbing out of those cars to stretch their legs and go to the toilet, always under the watchful eyes of the guards.

‘Who are those men?’ I asked Zinaida.

‘They are soldiers who were captured by the Germans and agreed to fight on their side in special Russian units,’ she replied. ‘They will certainly be tried as traitors when they’re repatriated, but I guess it was either that or starve.’

Although Odessa had been bombed and parts of it lay in ruins, the station was decorated with garlands of flowers and a band played the Soviet anthem when we alighted from the train. There was a giant portrait of Stalin with a message written underneath it:
Our great leader, Comrade Stalin, welcomes his children home
. I stared at the portrait and recalled my last conversation with Valentin when he had told me Stalin had personally signed my father’s execution order. Now, as much as I hated Stalin, I could never show it. I had to think of Mama. We were directed by soldiers to walk to the port on foot. A New Zealand warship had arrived from Marseille and Allied soldiers were supervising the disembarkation of troops of Soviet soldiers.

The passengers from our train were led towards a warehouse. Outside it, Soviet officials examined the passenger lists from both the train and the ship. We were divided into two groups. The first group of repatriated men and women, including Zinaida, were ordered to enter the warehouse. As part of the second group, I remained outside. I had an eerie flashback to the selection process at Auschwitz, but in my anticipation of getting back to my regiment I pushed the memory away.

‘What’s going on?’ an Allied officer from the ship asked one of the officials in Russian.

‘Don’t worry,’ the official told him. ‘We are dividing people into groups to make the processing easier.’

The Allied officer nodded and shook hands with the official before returning to his ship.

A truck arrived from the station with the belongings of those who had come by train. It was a shabby assortment — mainly bundles of clothing and other personal items. Everything I owned I now carried in my pocket: the notebook and pen the Red Cross official had given me, and the toothbrush, toothpaste and comb I’d been issued with in Katowice. The possessions were dumped in a pile. A soldier came along with a can of petrol and poured it over the goods before setting them alight. Those of us who saw what happened gasped but nobody dared protest. I searched my mind for an explanation. The only one I could think of for this callous act was that many of the camps had been plagued by typhus-carrying lice. Fire was the only way to destroy them.

Two Ilyushin bombers appeared and circled over the harbour. The sound of their engines was deafening. What were they doing? I heard a sound like a volley of gunshots. Feeling uneasy, I looked around, but nobody else seemed to have noticed.

About half an hour later the planes left and two men wheeled a mobile sawmill into place next to where we stood. The piercing scream of the saw hurt my ears. Was there some purpose in creating this noise? Then the doors to the warehouse opened again and our group was ordered inside.

I was following my companions when an official grabbed my arm. ‘Natalya Stepanovna Azarova?’

I nodded.

‘Come this way,’ he said.

He led me along the length of the warehouse towards a waiting car.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ I asked.

‘I have orders that you are to be sent directly to Moscow,’ the official said. ‘I know nothing further.’

The driver opened the door for me. Before getting in, I noticed four men flinging what at first I thought were sacks onto a truck. Then I realised that they weren’t sacks. They were bodies. The men misjudged the distance with one corpse and it toppled to the ground. Its head flopped back and its eyes stared straight at me. I recognised the face and my blood turned cold: it was Zinaida.

As soon as I was put on the train to Moscow I knew a hero’s welcome was not what was in store for me. The train compartment was divided into wired cages. Several prisoners shared the other cages but I was placed in one by myself, with nothing more than a plank bed. The window was barred and had been painted over so I couldn’t see outside.

When we arrived in Moscow, my fellow prisoners were bundled into a prison truck but I was shoved into a baker’s van with gold lettering on the side:
Bread, Rolls & Cakes
. I had seen hundreds of these types of bakery vans around Moscow before the war. Now I realised that they hadn’t been carrying bread at all. It explained why the food stores were always empty and the prisons so full.

As the van bumped and jerked along the streets, I heard the sounds of Moscow around me: the rattle of the trams; car horns; construction workers calling out to each other. After a short while the van stopped and I was ordered out. I found myself in the courtyard of a massive building, which felt oddly familiar. Then I realised I was in the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the NKVD. It was where my father had been taken the night he was arrested. Two guards armed with machine guns escorted me inside. I was thrown into a brightly lit cell with green walls and a parquet floor. The window was boarded up. The only furniture was an iron-framed bed and a slops bucket that gave off the sickly sweet odour of carbolic acid. There was nowhere for me to sit except on the bed, but as soon as I approached it a square window opened in the door and a guard looked in at me.

‘Stand up!’ he whispered. ‘No sleeping!’

Why was he whispering? The window closed again and I waited, expecting something to occur, but hours passed and nobody came to the cell. All I could hear was the sound of my own frantic breathing. Papa’s face flashed before me. Everything that was happening to me had happened to him. The thought that my cheerful, playful father had suffered the mental anguish that I was now enduring made me weep.

Sometime later, the guard opened the door. A man wheeled in a trolley on which sat a silver serving platter covered by a dome. Was I being brought some sort of elaborate dinner? The man lifted the dome to reveal two pieces of black bread and a mug of hot water.

Although I hadn’t eaten for days, my nerves had destroyed my appetite. I forced myself to swallow the food and water. When I’d finished I sat down on the bed.

The guard immediately entered the cell and whispered, ‘Get up! No resting for you!’

‘Why are you whispering?’ I asked him.

‘Shh!’ he said. ‘It is not permitted to speak loudly here.’

I assumed that I wasn’t allowed to rest because I was about to be interrogated. I paced the floor but still nothing happened. Finally, a long time later, a different guard opened the door and ordered me into the corridor. I was taken down several flights of stairs to a basement where a woman in a military uniform ordered me to take off all my clothes and lay them on the table. She went thoroughly over each item, snipping the buttons off the dress with a pair of scissors, emptying the pockets and feeling along the seams. She threw my brassiere and stocking garters into a bucket, then cut the elastic out of my underpants and set it to one side along with my coat, stockings, boots, hat, gloves and scarf. She made me remove my hairpins so she could search through my hair.

‘Now get dressed,’ she said.

I pulled on my slip and tied a knot in my underpants so they wouldn’t fall down. Without the buttons I couldn’t fasten my dress so I held it closed with my hand. I waited for the woman to give me back the other items but she didn’t. In my dishevelled state I was marched to another room where I was photographed and had my fingerprints taken. After that I was returned to my cell.

It was cold in the cell without my coat and boots. I lay down on the bed and curled up into a ball. The guard appeared at the window in the door and whispered that if I was going to sleep I had to keep my face turned to the light. I rolled onto my back and fell asleep. I was jolted awake by a bloodcurdling scream. I sat up. What sort of animal had made the sound? A few seconds later the howl sounded again and I realised it was a man crying out. He screamed again, just once, then made no other sound. A few minutes later the guard came into my cell. ‘Hurry!’ he whispered. ‘The interrogator is ready.’