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Captivity
after victory
He
took Berlin in 1945 and in 1992 he happened to be in Hamburg
Hamburg,
2001
—“Sometimes I seems to me that world has gone crazy.
Listen, boy! I am 72 years
old, and I, who reached Berlin in 1945, now am sitting with you on a bench in a
park in Hamburg. Listen to it, a
pink-cheek Frau serves me a sausage with beer and hearing my hopeless German
mutters something at the immigrants who bred in their kind Fatherland!
This is not normal,” he mumbled sitting in an open cafe not long before
9 May. His German resembled a
babble of a first-form boy, “Frau, bitte, ein Beer.
Danke schon, Frau...”
Suddenly
he threw open his washed-off rag raincoat and demonstrated a whole iconostasis
of battle orders and medals, and this was done with the same gesture a petty
black-marketer would propose covertly to buy an imported shirt twenty years ago...
Carefully, looking around, my company whispered, “I have worn them and
will wear them until I die and I will be buried with these awards.
Did you get it? And let them
in the Jewish community, through which I happened to be here, harp that with
these orders I insult our German masters. Think
of it, they really are masters! Still,
I won’t take off the awards. It’s
true, however, I have to conceal them under these rags... But I will not take
them off!” and the old man cried silently.
Kharkov
region, 1942
Thirteen-year-old Pashka Feinstein several days already has been sitting in a
deserted house, where on a squeaky bed his mother was dying.
Coming back to senses from time to time, she asks, “Pashenka, you could
go to the Germans, maybe they will give you something to eat...
You could also bring something for me...” Later, immersed back into an
impassable delirium, she calls for Pashka’s sister, six-year-old Lisa.
But the mother doesn’t know that Pashka buried Lisa two days ago by
throwing over the tiny body twigs, right behind the house.
She died of hunger... In the
last days Lisa did not ask for food, but was silent, staring into the ceiling
and clasping a rag doll to herself. She
sometimes called father... They
haven’t seen him ever since the day he went last summer to an enlistment
office.
Pashka,
realizing that mother should be fed with something got out of the house and
headed to the neighboring village since in this settlement, which they had been
inhabiting for several months already, he has ransacked every corner---everything
possible was eaten. Soon the lad
had luck and in one of the deserted houses Pashka discovered several withered
potatoes. On the way to his lair he
did not restrain and bit several times off a tough and tasteless potato; he felt
sick. When he reached the house and
entered the room, his mother was dead. He
could not drag his mother’s body to the backyard, where he had buried his
sister, and had to leave her in bed. Pashka
silently ate the potato and, closing the doors, left.
Hamburg,
2001
— “You see, you are a journalist, you travel all over the world,” my
company continued, “So explain to me, for what do I have this pain?
After my sister and mother died on my hands, father died in a
concentration camp in captivity and I have gone through the entire war, I am
forced to hear German speech every day, walk in these streets, fear to put on my
orders and, on 9 May on the sly from neighbors, drink the front hundred grams!
Of course, you can reproach me that I personally handed in an application
for departure and traveled to Germany. But how could I live on those fifty-three rubles in “old”
money that USSR paid me? Of course,
now I realize that I made the silliest thing in my life by leaving to Germany,
but the train is gone and nothing can be reversed---there, at home, nothing is
left. The flat is left for some far
relatives, my passport is German and all my friends have died---they were older
than I was. I was fighting from the
age of thirteen...
The
most awful for me is the necessity to go to the Ordnungsamt.
It is something like our social security department but everything is in
German. You go there, spend half of
the day waiting in a line with Turks, Arabs and Africans, you enter a room where
a German, young and well groomed, in glasses with a golden rim, is sitting.
He spells out my surname and squeamishly asks, “And what do you need?”
And here I am, slipping from German into Russian, explaining him that it
is already spring and the time for me to buy summer clothes. The Germans give pensioners and unemployed five hundred marcs
every year for winter and summer clothes.
Last
time the same German gave me a check for four hundred marcs only and told that
this is already too much for me since I represent no value to Germany.
That’s understandable because everything about the war and the awards
is written in my documents. He
looked through my papers and clicked something in the computer.
He does not raise his eyes at me. He
talks through his clenched teeth. And,
of course, I took the check and make my bows with him, saying, “Danke schon,
Herr...” I edge myself out of the room discreetly.
As long as they don’t take back the money.
Such a shame. And our young
people, who come to Germany after institutes, accept German money with pleasure.
Kharkov
region and everywhere thereafter, 1942-1945
Pashka
Feinstein went through the front-line and managed to get to our tank brigade,
hungry, ragged and resentful. This
is how he became a son of the regiment. He
was injured twice, went into reconnaissance, received five state awards. On Pashka Feinstein’s account were several tens of killed
Germans; the gray-haired boy with clenched teeth destroyed fascists with such a
frenzy that arouse even worried surprise in his comrades.
Those, who were older, understood that the lad was taking revenge for his
mother, father and little sister and those, who were younger, simply dashed
aside from him. In May 1945,
sixteen-year-old Pashka entered Berlin on a tank armor.
He received his last award “For seizure of Berlin” personally from
the hands of the commander.
Later,
Pashka turned out to be in Moscow, spent two years in a children’s home, then
in a work faculty and in the First medical.
He graduated with excellence, worked in military hospitals and special
hospitals for high governmental officials.
A couple of times he happened to consult Brezhnev... Later, pension,
loneliness, empty cold flat, indigence. He
never had a family. Some
subconscious fear of a new war interfered: it is not so painful to die alone. And in 1992, Gaidarov’s reform “ate” even those scanty
savings, which he diligently like other pensioners deposited in the savings-bank
book. Pashka, now, naturally, Pavel
Giorgievich Feinstein, gave up and sent his documents to OVIR (passport service).
He as a Jew, especially who suffered during the war (how do you like the
wording?) was immediately given a residence card in Germany, a minimal pension
and a modest flat in Hamburg. And
he left. There we met each other.
Hamburg,
2001
— “You know, journalist, I am so afraid of...dying here.
Because possibly those, who forced my father into a gas camera and the
children of those, whom a personally “finished off” in Smolensk or in Prague,
could be buried next to me. Cruel?
I know myself that it is cruel but I can’t help thinking about it; it
tortures me every minute, every second this pain is with me.
On general, however, everything is well, mellow here: clean streets, the
pension is quite sufficient not to peg out of hunger, everyone is polite and
smiling. But something bad appears
in the eyes of Germans, when they see my orders.
They hide their eyes.
Son
of the regiment, seventy-two years old Pashka waved me his hand and without
saying goodbye, made his way to the bar stand under a shed.
And I heard his tinkling voice, hardly choosing German words, “Frau,
bitte. Ein Beer...Yes, without change here...Danke schon, Frau!”
P.S.
All
the names and facts cited in this material are real.
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