Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [109]
Was it only ten years ago? ... ten years, nearly to the day. He remembered walking into the room and seeing the grim faces of the comrades. He was ordered into his room to go to sleep.
Heinrich walked to a small hallway and shoved open a door to a tiny bedroom. He lay there that night ten years ago listening to the arguments of the comrades. He had lain awake many nights in those days listening. The comrades were confused about the Nazi stampede. What to do? Where to hit back? How to fight?
One by one important party members disappeared. Names of the concentration camps, the Oranienburgs and Dachaus, began to be heard.
And then ... it came his father’s time. They had talked that night until late. When they left, his mother and father went to sleep in the next room in their big soft bed with its great down comforter.
He remembered wakening to the sound of whistles in the street ... then footsteps racing up the steps and angry thumps on the apartment door ... and last... his mother’s scream!
Much of what followed was in blurs. For several days he and his mother hid in the home of comrades in Spandau in a basement. The news came back that his father, Werner Hirsch, a Communist official, had been spiraled into martyrdom, beaten to death in Gestapo headquarters.
Heinrich remembered a wild drive in the middle of the night to Rostock on the Baltic Sea and hiding in the hold of a stinking old fishing boat that stole over the straits to the sanctuary of Sweden, where other comrades kept them hidden.
After three weeks his mother told him, “The comrades have decided that we should go on to the Soviet Union. We will be safe at last.”
The Soviet Union! From earliest memory his mother and father had labored, lived, struggled for the dream of a socialist state in Germany. The Soviet Union was the womb, the mother. It would be almost like coming home for the very first time.
Heinrich remembered the swell of tension in the gray Finnish morning as they boarded the train for the ride to Leningrad. Tears fell from his mother’s eyes as she first saw the great stone buildings of this mighty fortress of socialism. ... They would soon be in Moscow.
In 1935 Communist refugees from Germany were treated as heroes, for they were the living symbols of the struggle against Hitler. The son of Werner Hirsch was to be a student at School #78 in Moscow, which had been established exclusively for the children from Germany, Austria, and German-speaking countries. School #78 was given great attention. It was a modern four-story building; the children lived in and were given special diets of German food, the best uniforms, tours about the country; were given special seats in cultural events and the most superb health supervision. Outside school a League of German Communists coordinated their activities.
For fifteen-year-old Heinrich Hirsch it was the most wonderful life he had ever known. The dank meeting halls in Berlin, the shabby life, the terror were all behind him.
School #78 was spared that drab, lusterless place called Moscow. The children were only allowed to see a few gems in its sea of dejection.
Heinrich’s mother worked as a translator of German documents in one of the political bureaus. He was allowed to visit her one day a week. The two had been exceedingly close, and their weekly meeting brought on an uncomfortable situation. There was scarcely a place where they could be alone to talk; surely not in the German Culture Center, for they would not have a moment’s peace; even in the parks there was a constant blare of loudspeakers eulogizing Soviet life, playing nationalistic music, or reporting the news.
They spent their time in her room. It was a single small room in the apartment of a comrade from Berlin in an abominable old wooden house. The foundation had sunk and the outer walls were propped with timbers