10. Heinrich
10
Heinrich
I t was a closely held secret that, at the beginning of the war, Hitler and Stalin reached several carefully constructed agreements, the most sweeping of which kept the Soviets out of our eastern front as long as our armies respected the Russian border. 1
The West knew of the public pact and suspected private ones also existed, though it was years before they would learn the detailed agreements.
Few knew how closely our military and intelligence teams coordinated efforts.
Prior to my assignment in Poland, I worked closely with Sergei Petrovich. To most, Sergei was a political officer. I was one of the few who knew his true masters, the Soviet intelligence service.
Our partnership was designed to enhance the flow of information between our two governments. On paper, my role was to assist the Soviets in their understanding of troop positioning, aerial surveillance of Allied movements, and projections of American and British force allocations. Sergei would, in return, offer whatever information the vaunted Soviet secret services gathered that might impact decisions made at the highest levels of the Reich.
In practice, I was Sergei’s monitor while he worked in Berlin.
I was his babysitter.
Sergei lived and worked in Berlin, one of many foreigners camped on our doorstep to keep an eye on our progress or fulfill some other hidden purpose. We were used to spies. Our Abwehr was adept at tagging and rooting them out, usually in the form of a bullet to the back of the head.
Soviets were different.
They were never our allies, not really.
We needed them to behave while our troops replaced striped flags with bloodred ones. A tenuous partnership, if that was even the right word, was mutually beneficial. We agreed to stay out of Stalin’s backyard if he looked the other way when we marched through Europe.
Détente was a better word for our arrangement.
Tenuous was an understatement to describe how it actually functioned.
The Führer never liked Stalin much. He greeted him with a warm smile and hearty embrace, but the cameras only captured what he wanted them to. Those in the inner circle spoke of Hitler’s ambitious plans, his desire to spread the German banner across the globe. Any leader who showed the slightest inclination toward territorial domination made Hitler’s mustache twitch.
And few Russian leaders throughout history—be they communist, imperialist, or otherwise—had ever been satisfied sitting quietly behind their own borders.
Understanding this, Hitler sought to buffer our eastern border from the bear’s reach. We would eventually break our pact and roll toward Moscow; but, for the moment, we played nice and let Stalin believe we saw him, and all Russians, as distant cousins whose welfare was dear to our hearts.
The thinly veiled truth was simple: We never trusted them.
We never would.
My job was to watch everything Sergei did, report back to High Command, and, if necessary, take action to prevent him from using information that might cause harm to the Fatherland or our plans.
I was his shadow.
And he was mine.
Along the way, I wouldn’t say we became close. Our business, especially during a time of war, didn’t allow for closeness, but it was impossible to spend as much time as we did together and not form some sort of bond.
I should have known something was amiss when he vanished. I should have seen the very clear writing on the wall when all his countrymen also vanished from our capital.
The Soviets knew Hitler was ordering an invasion across their blasted, frozen lands. Somehow, they knew before most of our middle ranks were informed. Looking back, they probably knew before Hitler had even dreamed up his plan.
They were frighteningly prescient in that way.
In the fall of 1944, it became painfully obvious the war was coming to a close—and not in the Führer’s favor. It was also well understood that those who wore an officer’s rank would pay for the liberation he’d inflicted on his neighbors.
With this in mind, and with a healthy concern for my own safety, I abandoned my apartment and fled to the eastern sector, taking over a cobbler’s shop, one of the few buildings on the block without damage from the rainstorm of bombs that preceded the Allied overthrow of the Reich. A small apartment above the shop gave me a comfortable place to live, and tradecraft learned in my early days kept my face unrecognizable as I worked in the shop below.
When I first arrived, the shop and apartment looked untouched, as if the prior owner and his family had simply walked away or left on holiday. Dust gathered on the long counter where the cobbler would meet with customers, and a few pair of shoes in mid-repair lay strewn about the work table.
Upstairs, clothing still hung in the armoire.
A teacup sat on a side table, where remnants of a lemon lay shriveled among the stains of a long-dried drink.
A few dishes remained in the kitchen sink, unwashed but long past the moldy stage.
The whole place smelled musty, an odd combination of abandoned building and elderly couple.
I had no clue where the Jews who owned the place had gone.
In reality, they’d likely been taken on a train to a work camp a year or two before the city fell. They might return any day. Parents with squirming children might walk through the door at any moment, eager to reclaim their old lives, no longer fearful of the Reich’s attitudes toward their lineage.
In my heart, I knew the truth was far darker.
Still, grateful for a place to hide from those who might cause me harm, I settled into the daily routine of false mustaches, fake glasses, and mending soles for my new masters.
With the Allies battering at our door, and the Reich teetering on collapse, it was a wonder that Sergei and I remained in contact, but we did. Messages would arrive, slid beneath my door, the same door I swore no Soviet knew belonged to me. Twice, as I sat in a café around the corner, a young man in a serving uniform deposited a cocktail napkin on my table. Perplexed at how stiff the paper was, I opened it to find a note, coded in the language only Sergei and I used.
My Russian spy and his sneaky red ways were beyond astonishing.
That our bond lived through the darkest of days was even more so.
It was on that bond I gambled my future.
“I have something our uncle would very much like kept private. Help me, and he will love you dearly. Should I die before receiving safe passage and a new life, the Keeper’s knowledge will become known to the world. Others control the clock. We must move quickly.”
Those were the first words I ever penned on a cocktail napkin.
The same server who had appeared in the café twice in all the time I’d lived nearby magically reappeared a day after I left a mark on the street sign that stood only yards from the café’s window. He didn’t make eye contact. He didn’t speak. He simply removed my glass and the napkin on which it rested and vanished into the ether.
A few months later, our beloved café was destroyed, one of many to die beneath the hailstorm of Allied bombs. The sign on which we left our mark was little more than scrap littering the equally devastated street. I was certain any hope of surviving the coming Soviet retribution lay among the rubble.
More months passed.
The war ended.
The Soviets became governors of the sector, and my home became a vassal of the Soviet state. I had never dreamed of living on Russian soil or earning a steady income as a cobbler; but, as it turned out, Soviets were quite particular about having well-maintained boots.
The Russian winter gave one a unique perspective on such things, I supposed.
Still, there was no reply to my napkin blackmail, no acknowledgement, nothing.
Had my note even made it through?
Had the server or spy or courier—or whatever he was—been killed before he could deliver my missive?
Had the Soviets received the note and grown angry at my attempted extortion?
That last thought rattled me to the core. No sane man would poke the bear. No one with any desire to live would make an enemy of Stalin and his henchmen.
Had I done just that?
Had I survived one cataclysm only to hurl myself headlong into another?
I lay on my bed staring up at the ceiling. It was well past curfew, so the streets were dark and quiet, almost eerily so. My eyes flitted about the room, landing on the wooden statue of the rabbi reading his book. All I had was the film, my carved friend, and the slender hope that the Soviets were as omnipotent as I had come to believe.
A large vehicle, likely a Russian tank, rolled by. The entire city block vibrated with its passing. Debris dribbled from my decrepit ceiling.
Paper slid across the wooden floor, scooted with obvious force from the other side. Someone had picked the lock on the downstairs door, crossed the cobbler’s shop, picked the inner door’s locks, climbed the stairs, and delivered a message.
They could’ve entered my apartment. They could have kicked in the door. They could have—
I bolted upright and dove to retrieve the missive. When I read the one word scrawled on the folded paper, my heart stopped.
“Run.”
1. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin made a secret agreement known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed on August 23, 1939. This pact, officially called the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, included a public commitment to not attack each other and a secret protocol that outlined their plans to divide Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.