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Back The One from the Other
Chapters (50)
  1. Praise
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. ONE
  7. TWO
  8. THREE
  9. FOUR
  10. FIVE
  11. SIX
  12. SEVEN
  13. EIGHT
  14. NINE
  15. TEN
  16. ELEVEN
  17. TWELVE
  18. THIRTEEN
  19. FOURTEEN
  20. FIFTEEN
  21. SIXTEEN
  22. SEVENTEEN
  23. EIGHTEEN
  24. NINETEEN
  25. TWENTY
  26. TWENTY-ONE
  27. TWENTY-TWO
  28. TWENTY-THREE
  29. TWENTY-FOUR
  30. TWENTY-FIVE
  31. TWENTY-SIX
  32. TWENTY-SEVEN
  33. TWENTY-EIGHT
  34. TWENTY-NINE
  35. THIRTY
  36. THIRTY-ONE
  37. THIRTY-TWO
  38. THIRTY-THREE
  39. THIRTY-FOUR
  40. THIRTY-FIVE
  41. THIRTY-SIX
  42. THIRTY-SEVEN
  43. THIRTY-EIGHT
  44. THIRTY-NINE
  45. FORTY
  46. FORTY-ONE
  47. FORTY-TWO
  48. EPILOGUE
  49. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  50. Teaser chapter

I remembered the war only too well. That was why I was here. Mostly, I remembered that awful summer of 1941. I remembered Operation Barbarossa, when three million German soldiers, myself included, and more than three thousand tanks had crossed into the Soviet Union. I remembered with an all-too-painful clarity the city of Minsk. I remembered Lutsk. I remembered everything that had happened there. Despite all my best efforts, it seemed I wasn’t ever likely to forget it.

The speed of the advance took everyone by surprise—ourselves as much as the Popovs. That’s what we called the Ivans in those days. On June 21, 1941, we had grouped on the Soviet border, full of trepidation for what was to follow. Five days later we had traveled an astonishing two hundred miles and were in Minsk. Bombarded by a massive artillery barrage and hammered by the Luftwaffe, the Red Army had taken a severe mauling and many of us thought the war was more or less over at that point. But the Reds fought on where others—the French, for example—would certainly have surrendered. Their tenacity was at least in part because NKVD security detachments had checked a wholesale panic with the threat of summary executions. Doubtless the Reds knew that this was no idle threat, for they were certainly aware of the fate that had befallen thousands of Ukrainian and Polish political prisoners in Minsk, Lvov, Zolochiv, Rivne, Dubno, and Lutsk. So swift had been the progress of the Wehrmacht in the Ukraine that the retreating Soviets had no time to evacuate the prisoners held in the NKVD jails. And they hardly wanted to let them fall into our hands, where they could become SS auxiliaries, or German partisans. So before abandoning these cities to their fate, the NKVD set the prisons on fire—with all the prisoners still locked up inside. No, that’s not true. They took the Germans with them. I suppose they intended to swap them for Reds later on. But it didn’t turn out that way. We found them later, in a clover field on the road to Smolensk. They’d been stripped and machine-gunned to death.