The Rats of Barska Street

September 22, 1939

         “It doesn’t make sense, Lieutenant.”
         “What’s that?” Wolfgang asked from the passenger seat of the Opel Blitz truck.
         Sturmann Erich Hoppe stared attentively at the road ahead of him. The bleak hills of western Poland rolled by in his periphery, shaking with every bump the truck tires encountered on the pot hole-eaten roadway. To Hoppe, it seemed like every piece of Poland got more disgusting the farther into the country they drove.
         “Herr Eicke. Why isn’t that lazy prick joining us on the trip into this rat hole?”
         Wolfgang examined his maps carefully, checking the location of his squad. He was hoping the ignorant private would stop opening his mouth and just do what he was told. The SS didn’t need him to think; Private Hoppe was more dangerous that way.
         Wolfgang answered nonchalantly, “Private, I’m sure whatever Theodor Eicke is doing in Berlin is fifty-times more important than what we’re doing here.”
         “With all due respect, sir, I don’t know why we’re even here. I mean, we’ve been following Blaskowitz and the rest of the Eighth for the last fifteen days and the only shots we’ve fired have been at civilians.”
         Wolfgang continued to ignore his driver. He ran his finger over the thick black and red lines and pencil-thin topographical markings on the map. Where they currently were, the map was nearly blank. But they weren’t far from their next location – the bundle of black lines skewered by the Vistula River marking the city of Wloclawek. Their mission was simple: evacuate every Jew and Communist from the city using any means necessary. Most of the Poles were scared out of their wits and wanted to do anything but infuriate the MP-40 submachine gun-wielding SS-Death’s Head Unit that was shoving them out of their homes. But there were the few heroes who tried to resist the evacuation. A few morons with knives were easy to deal with though – one shot in the head at point-blank range and the problem was solved. That’s exactly what Colonel Nostitz meant when he said “by any means necessary”.
         “What do you think, Lieutenant? Are we wasting our time here? Should we have just stayed home and practiced our shooting on our prisoners instead?”
         “Private,” Wolfgang spoke deliberately, “if you speak so much as one more word for the remainder of this drive, I will shoot you. Is that understood? Turn left up here.”
         Wide-eyed and fear-stricken, Private Hoppe spun the wheel to the left and the cityscape of Wloclawek came into view. The concrete structures were short but not nearly as run-down as Wolfgang had expected. If he hadn’t known any better, Wloclawek could have easily been mistaken for a German city – until its citizens came into view at least.
         Compared to the stoic, chiseled faces of Germans, Poles looked like disgusting rodents. Their pointed noses, tiny chins, beady eyes, and grizzled skin disgusted every Nazi. And the Polish Jews? They were the only ones in the country who were worth the resources they used. They were the reason Poland could be called a country in the first place. Without the Jews, Poland would be no better than one of those African tribes that acted like a pack of starved dogs. Wolfgang supposed that was the biggest reason why Hitler wanted every Polish Jew evacuated: to rip the heart, brain and lungs out of the country’s body.
         Word of the evacuations was spreading across Poland like the Black Plague, increasing Nazi resistance with every step the Death’s Head took. In the last city they’d evacuated – Inowroclaw – a maniacal Pole ran out of the crowd of evacuees wielding a Russian-made Nagant M1895 revolver and managed to wound one of Wolfgang’s men. The crazed evacuee’s brains were quickly splattered across the pavement like a mosaic.
         Wolfgang didn’t want to think what was to come in Wloclawek.
         Darkness swam across the sky by the time Wolfgang and his squad were neatly assembled on Barska Street. They were surrounded by small shops and apartment units tightly crammed next to each other like sardines. All twenty men, MP-40’s or K98 rifles in-hand, stood anxiously in the trash-littered street. The previous evacuation had stretched the soldiers’ nerves and patience thin, and they were exhausted, having not gotten a decent night’s sleep since the invasion began. Wolfgang had no control over sleep though. In fact, he had little control over anything his squad did. He was simply a megaphone for the high-ranking SS officers, carrying out their orders while they sat in their luxurious offices smoking expensive cigars and drinking fine wine.
         “Gentlemen. You all know what your duties are. We’ll work street-by-street, gathering men, women and children in the avenue for Third Squad to round up. Efficiency is the primary objective here. Do not tolerate resistance – is that understood? You’re carrying those weapons for a reason.” Wolfgang paused, scanning his men like an obsessive-compulsive sweeps a kitchen floor. Their faces looked anxious, fearless, and fierce. “Let’s do our duty. Heil Hitler!”
         “Heil Hitler!” The call vibrated the shop windows, the heel clicks echoing like machine gun fire. The men dispersed in an organized, professional manner – just as they’d been trained to do.
         Two men approached Wolfgang. The first was a stout sergeant named Oskar Simon. The other was Corporal Franz Hauck, a fanatical soldier who was three years older than Wolfgang. Hauck and Simon were always together, the sergeant taking the corporal under his wing partly to train him to be a good N.C.O, but mostly to keep Hauck’s incredibly short temper in-check. It was evident that the majority of soldiers coming from the Hitler Youth were short-tempered and impulsive. Wolfgang certainly had been that way until a year ago when he met Elfriede, who helped him shed that ugly cloak.
         “Sir, same way as always?” asked Simon.
         Corporal Hauck glared sinisterly at Wolfgang as if he knew something devious his commanding officer did not. Hauck was incredibly jealous of Wolfgang’s position in the SS and he hid that jealousy poorly.
         “Yes. We will clear together, Sergeant. We need to be aware, gentlemen, that tonight is the Day of Atonement for the Jew – Yom Kippur.”
         “The menace is certainly going to be pissed when we rain fire on his celebration,” added Hauck.
         “Nothing changes. Command with an iron fist, a rifle butt across the back if necessary. Do not get carried away though. Our orders are not to exterminate all of the Jews.”
         “At least not yet,” added the colonel.
         The three stepped onto the sidewalk and entered through a rundown doorway. People had already started stumbling into the streets, the women and children softly weeping with fear and confusion, the men humble with the reality of the situation.
         “Why do you say that, Colonel?” Hauck asked.
         “It’s no secret that the ghettos are beginning to bulge at the seams like indulgent priests, Corporal. We’ll either have to build more ghettos – waste resources and manpower – or ship the savages off to Guatemala or the Galapagos.”
         “Why do you think I said tolerate no resistance?” asked Wolfgang, his black boots stomping heavily on the wood stairway. “This is an evacuation, but only of those who are of use to us. If they are worthless, weak or resistant, we are to ‘accidently’ exterminate them. Any of those three count as ‘acts of violence’ against Hitler’s soldiers. Understood?”
         “Yes, sir.”
         At the top of the stairs was a small corridor with three doors fit snuggly on the wall. Wolfgang banged on the first door twice with his fist, waited a few moments, and slammed his boot against the door. The doorjamb tore from the wall as the door whipped open. Corporal Hauck entered first, followed by Simon and Wolfgang.
         The room was small and dark, lit only by candles in the corner. Three men stood in the room’s center wearing white kittel robes and tallits on their heads. The Jews were softly chanting the Kol Nidre prayer.
Immediately, Hauck fired four shots from his MP-40 into the ceiling above the men. The Jews fell to the floor in fright, the fragments of plaster and wood sprinkling down on them like snow.
         “Get the fuck down. Now!” Wolfgang yelled.
         The Jews quivered on the floor, continuing to chant their Yiddish prayer.
         “You better stop that jabbering or I’ll blow your head straight out your ass,” yelled Hauck. The corporal approached the men to search them for weapons.
         “Don’t shoot. For the love of God – schüβ nicht.”
         “Don’t give us a reason then, you filthy rats.”
         Hauck quickly frisked the three men. When he was finished, he replaced his submachine gun in the crook of his shoulder and joined Simon and Wolfgang at the doorway.
         “Corporal, escort them into the street. When you’re finished, get back up here and help Sergeant Simon and I clear these remaining two rooms.”
         “Yes, sir.”
         Hauck stomped his foot on the dusty floor, “On your feet. Let’s go you fucking Shylocks.”
         The three Jews scrambled to their feet and shuffled past Simon and Wolfgang. Wolfgang grabbed the last man by the arm, forcing the Jew to stare into his icy eyes. The Jew stunk like mold and body odor, and his face was covered in sweat and soot.
         “Who else is up here?” Wolfgang asked with a quiet, stern tone.
         The man stared at him with confusion, pretending not to understand the German being spoken to him.
         “Don’t act like you don’t understand me you rat.” Wolfgang smashed the butt of his MP-40 into the Jew’s gut. The man doubled over gasping for breath. “One last time – who else is up here?”
         The man coughed and gasped for breath. “A few women, sir. I don’t know who else.”
         Wolfgang motioned to Hauck, and the Corporal led the men out of the room.
         “Check the second door.”
         Sergeant Simon left the room.
         Wolfgang walked around the dim room, examining the filthy quarters where the Poles lived. Spider webs clung to the ceiling and walls, and the wood floor was chipped and cracked. A stained mattress lay on the floor in the far corner, two rags of blankets were disgustingly folded on its edge.
         BANG! BANG!
         “Fick! Lieutenant!”
         The pistol shots vibrated down the narrow hallway. Wolfgang turned on his heel quickly, seeing a figure running past the open door and down the stairway. Wolfgang ran after the figure, skipping two steps at a time as he bounded down the stairs. He saw the man fleeing into the street.
         “Stop! Stop!” he yelled at the man.
         The man wouldn’t stop though, sprinting down the crowded sidewalk with his kittel flapping in his wake. Frightened men and women jumped out of the fleer’s way.
         Wolfgang raised his gun, sighting the fleeing Jew with the muzzle.
         “Halt!” he yelled one last time, his finger quivering on the stone-cold trigger.
         The Jew continued to run. Wolfgang squeezed the trigger hard, and instantly, the weapon kicked back into his shoulder. One – two – three – four – five. The crowd fell to the ground, huddling and covering their heads from the gunshots. Women screamed as the fleeing Jew’s body jerked and stumbled in the air, collapsing in a heap on the sidewalk. Blood poured from the holes in his back, staining the cement a dark maroon. The terrified evacuees gawked for moments after the shots screamed over their heads. Stunned, they remained on the dusty ground, not daring to test the Nazi officer’s anger more.
“Move!” Wolfgang yelled, firing three more shots above their heads. “Don’t make me turn you into the next corpses, you fucking kykes.”
         Still shaking with terror, the evacuees leaped to their feet and joined the mass of people waiting in the street.
         Wolfgang turned and saw Sergeant Simon escorting two women out of the apartment building.
         “What the hell was that, Sergeant?”
         “Sir, the sons of bitches came after me. I shot one, but the other bolted before I could slam a slug in him.”
         Wolfgang pointed down the sidewalk to the lifeless body bathing in the thick pool of blood.
         “Looks like you got the bastard, though.” Sergeant Simon released a guttural laugh and shoved the two women out into the street.
         “Where’s Third squad? This is gonna turn into a goddamn riot before too long.”
         Wolfgang wiped his sweaty palm on his pants, removed his canteen from his hip and took a swig. The water relieved the dry scratchiness in his throat instantly.
         “They’re coming. Don’t worry.”
         “You want us to move to the next street?”
         Wolfgang nodded.
         The Sergeant gathered three SS men standing in the street looking more like spectators than soldiers, and led them around the corner to the next block.
         Wolfgang approached the corpse on the sidewalk slowly as if it carried an awful infectious disease. The blood had already started drying, and a reeking cloud of feces and urine hung around the body. Wolfgang brought his sleeve to his face, stifled a cough and examined the body more closely.
         Number five …
         Wolfgang had his first kill twelve days earlier, a moment he excitedly waited for like a child waits for Christmas morning. The victim was a Communist – a filthy prisoner who’d enlisted with the Russian Army in the early thirties and was being carted away to Dachau for crimes against the German nation; he murdered a Nazi officer. Wolfgang’s squad was to escort the degenerate out of Gostyn and exchange him with Squad Six. His squad got complacent though, and the man freed himself of his guards momentarily. Out of sheer reaction, Wolfgang whipped his Luger from its holster and fired one shot into the prisoner’s spine and another into the man’s skull. A moment Wolfgang should’ve enjoyed – after all this prisoner was a filthy Communist pig – only made him nauseous. He saw the blood spray through the cloth of the prisoner’s shirt and heard the high-pitched squeal that escaped the man’s mouth. The body thudded to the ground like a sack of flour, and Wolfgang’s men cheered loudly “First kill! First kill!” Pats on Wolfgang’s back soon followed as if he’d just scored a goal in schoolyard soccer. This wasn’t soccer though. This was a man – a dead man – Wolfgang had just murdered. For the last five years he’d been taught to crave death, to seek it out like an alcoholic seeks booze. He finally got his first taste of death and he hated it. He hated it more than the worst hypocrisy in the SS ranks. Death, his job, was now disgusting.
         Killing was part of the game though. Kill or be killed was the saying.
         Except in this case, it was your own country and not your enemy killing you.
         Kill or be killed.
         The growl of diesel engines roared from a distance, dragging Wolfgang out of his trance and tossing him back into surreality. He looked down at the corpse one last time. A dead body like so many before it.
         Squad Three was the evacuation specialist team – Einsatzgruppen. Made up of four Opel Blitz trucks, Three had one job: efficient evacuation. Originally, the trucks hauled twenty to thirty prisoners to nearby ghettos and work camps. This came to be incredibly expensive and wasteful though, two characteristics unfit for the Third Reich. Over half of the prisoners seized were unfit for work anyways and died within a few days of arriving to the crude prisons.
         So someone had the bright idea of killing these “unable bodies” on-site, saving both time and fuel. Firing squads came first; but these too were inefficient and wasteful, not to mention psychologically exhausting for the soldiers. There had to be a better way to quickly slaughter hundreds of vermin in a single day.
         Einsatzgruppen – mobile killing units – a colorful name to match an equally colorful and simple tactic. Crudely welded pipes were attached to truck exhaust systems and wound into the truck bed chambers that housed the prisoners to funnel the deadly carbon-monoxide into the chambers, converting the clunky transports into execution chambers. In one hour, Three could kill two hundred political prisoners and Jews. Dragging dead bodies out of the stinking truck beds was awful, but not nearly as terrible as slamming lead slugs into countless skulls, feeling the blood and bone splatter onto your bare skin time and time again.
         The rumbling grew louder, rolling over the city like a thunderstorm about to release a torrential downpour. The evacuees quieted immediately with confusion and fright, unsure what the rumbling meant for their well-being.
         Wolfgang hurried over to the mass of people in the street with his MP-40 raised.
         “Line up!” he ordered in Polish. “Older children and men here, women there.”
         The mass shuffled in a contained chaos with people fighting to get to where they were supposed to be before the scowling man with the piercing blue eyes decided to mow them down with gunfire.
         “Move now!” he yelled, pumping three slugs into the air above the people.
         The first Opel Blitz turned the corner slowly with yellow head lights burning like a cougar’s eyes, a predator stalking its prey. It rumbled down the shambled street, pulled into a side alley and backed up to the mass of people. Two uniformed men jumped out of the truck’s cab both wearing the black SS uniform and steel combat helmet.
         No firearms for them, Wolfgang noted. No need.
         “Heil Hitler. Lieutenant, are we ready to go here?”
         “Yes. Where are you going from here?”
         “There’s a makeshift ghetto in Lodz that we’ll be taking the men and older children to before we cart them to Sachsenhausen. Have they been divided yet?”
         Wolfgang looked back at the mob filed neatly into two lines of able- and unable-bodied prisoners.
         “I believe they have.”
         “Good.” The two soldiers returned to the truck bed chamber to prepare for loading.
         “Attention,” Wolfgang began addressing the crowd. “The men and older children will be taken in this unit here to a work camp in Lodz. The women and elderly will be loaded into following units and taken to a ghetto in Poznan. All I ask is that you move swiftly and do not give me or my men any problems. If you oblige, we will all get along wonderfully. If not … well … you don’t want to find out.”
         The SS men chuckled lightly at the Lieutenant’s threat.
         “Alright let’s move.”
         The wooden ramp crashed onto the pavement and the mass of able-bodied prisoners ascended the ramp into the back of the truck. Most of the prisoners kept their heads humbly down, fixing their eyes on the ground.
         The MP-40 sat loosely in Wolfgang’s hands. He sighed, desperate for the few hours of sleep he’d get en route to the next town. No rest for the wicked.
         Thirty-two able-bodied prisoners fit snuggly into the truck chamber. With the help of Corporal Hauck, who had returned from the neighboring street to assist the evacuation, Wolfgang lifted the tail gate and latched it. The truck grumbled to life, spitting a heavy cloud of smoke out of the tail pipe. Wolfgang choked, tasting the meal the women and elderly would soon be eating. Exhaust continued to billow from the truck’s rear as it crawled down Barska Street into the night.
         “Lucky bastards,” Hauck said between coughs.
         Wolfgang only nodded in response.
         Three other mobile killing trucks were rolling into town, their headlights shining dimly as the first two drove past Barska for Dluga and Zilena Street. The third turned onto Barska Street.
         “Where are they taking these ones?” Hauck asked pointing to the fear-stricken women.
         “There’s a grove a few kilometers from town. They’ll dig the mass graves there.”
         “Big fuckin’ land fill, right Lieutenant?” Hauck chuckled lightly, always amused with himself.
         Wolfgang shot him a glare. He was on the verge of verbally tearing into the soldier, but the yellow headlights fell over them and he decided against it. The truck maneuvered itself into position, and Wolfgang and Hauck dropped the wooden platform with a loud slam.
         “Los geht’s! Los geht’s!” yelled Hauck, waving his MP-40 from side to side frantically. Do it you fucking pigs. Just one of you jump out of that line so I can pump a kilo of lead into your guts and watch you die in the moonlight. Do it!
         Wolfgang put his hand on the Corporal’s shoulder and squeezed tightly.
He whispered, “You better relax, Franz. Your fear is beginning to seep through. There’s no reason you should be more afraid than them.”
         Hauck looked back at his lieutenant. Damn, I’m sick and tired of this son of a bitch. This guy must think he’s the greatest soldier to walk the fuckin’ Earth. “Your fear is showing” – I’ll show you what fear looks like when I bash one of these old fucks across the head and smash its fuckin’ brains all over the pavement. Then we’ll see fear. Hauck backed away from the line of evacuees though.
         “Into the truck,” Wolfgang ordered, motioning to a gangly young woman in the front of the line with his unarmed hand.
         With sullen eyes, the woman trudged up the wood platform as if she could foretell her fate. Her dress was filthy and tattered at the bottom, and the fringes scraped along the splinters of the platform like fingers clawing for life.
         The next woman passed, an older woman with large hips and an equally large bust. Although the skin on her face was badly cratered and blemished, her eyes held a soft, soothing air that reminded Wolfgang so much of the adoring eyes he’d seen at Nazi parades in Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich; eyes of the submissive, obedient, unquestioning, and loyal; eyes of the pure hearted despite a world so tainted by evil and death.
         Elfriede’s face popped into Wolfgang’s mind, her large doe eyes so loving and her smile so welcoming. In the line of women walking to the makeshift gallows, Wolfgang saw the face of his love painted on every terrified, sullen face.
These are not animals. These are people. That word chimed through his head like an ever-present echo refusing to diminish.
         People. People. People.
         A person was a living creature that felt, thought, loved and believed. A person trusted. A person cared for those around them no matter what differences existed between them.
         What are we, Wolfgang wondered? We are beasts, savages, tyrants. We are not protectors of our families and country. We are destroyers of humanity. We are the evil ones.
         BANG! BANG! BANG!
         The shots rang out from down the street a few meters. People screamed and children cried. Chaos tore across the once sullen line of prisoners.
         “Move it! Los! Los!” a voiced barked from the shot’s source.
         Wolfgang motioned to the next woman in line to step into the truck. She did so faithfully.
         As Wolfgang walked down the line, he could hear whispered prayers in Polish and Russian, asking for God’s protection and forgiveness. The first, Wolfgang knew, was well out of God’s grasp and firmly in the clutches of the Nazis.
         Wolfgang saw the body in the moonlight, an old man well over seventy years old with a pool of black blood surrounding his lifeless corpse like a sheath. Standing next to him with smoking MP-40 in-hand was Corporal Hauck smiling menacingly like a serial murderer following a kill.
         Resentment and hatred flooded Wolfgang rapidly. If only German’s knew what was going on over here. If only they knew…
         “Corporal, what in God’s name happened? These people are scared enough as it is.”
         The line shuffled by the old corpse.
         “People? Sir, I don’t see any people here – just a bunch of filthy fuckin’ animals.”
         Wolfgang shot the soldier another deadly glare before returning to the back of the truck.
         Most of the women stood against the wood plank walls while the elderly and small children sat snuggly on the filth-ridden floor.
         Thankfully it’s dark outside. In the daylight, scratch marks were clearly visible in the wood walls from the fingernails of desperate victims trying to escape the carbon monoxide filling their lungs. Day time killings were the worst.
         The last person to climb aboard was a young girl with a small baby cradled in her arms. The baby was sound asleep, the peaceful image of the blissfully ignorant. As Wolfgang lifted the platform with the help of the truck’s driver, the mother turned and stared helplessly into his eyes. She was sturdy despite her knowledge of her and her baby’s fate. For a brief second, Wolfgang wanted to drop the platform and tell the people in the truck to return to the safety of their homes, that this really was an awful nightmare and it’d be over once they woke up.
         But he couldn’t. These people were sentenced to die by Adolf Hitler himself. Hitler’s wishes were Germany’s wishes. Hitler’s dirty work fell like fowl droppings on the shoulders of His fearfully faithful soldiers. Hitler wasn’t the symbol of pride and hope for Germany, He was the symbol of disgrace. And there was nothing Wolfgang Bremmer or any other German could do about it.
These innocent people in the back of this truck will die and I cannot stop it.
Evacuate all that resist – German citizens and Nazi soldiers included.
         As the woman’s face slowly disappeared behind the wooden platform, Wolfgang’s throat tightened and he swallowed his honor like a giant pill. The door banged shut and the driver threw the latch into place. Wolfgang stared into his face – sunken cheeks, grimy stubble on his chin and eyes so deeply sunken into his skull he looked more like a rotten apple than a living creature. The eyes were wide and fixed, almost maniacal; eyes that were too deprived of sleep and had seen far too many corpses.
         Just as their eyes were about to split away, the driver cracked a dirty smile.
         “Have a good evening, Lieutenant.”
         “You too.”
         The truck kicked into life, immediately coughing black exhaust into the chamber. As the people screamed and the babies cried, the truck pulled away into the darkness leaving Barska Street deathly silent.
         Wolfgang stood in the dark, empty street mesmerized by the screams of the suffocating prisoners.
         A hand fell heavily on his shoulder, jostling him out of his ruminative stupor. Wolfgang turned to see Corporal Hauck’s grinning face a meter from his own. The soldier’s breath stunk like rotten tobacco and gun powder, and hatred dripped from every one of Wolfgang’s pores. Quickly his nerves quivered and throbbed. His muscles responded, seizing his limbs with uncontrollable tremors.
         “Hell of a night, huh Lieutenant?”
         Wolfgang’s muscles contracted in a violent surge, sending the butt of his MP-40 like a lightning strike through the air against the bridge of the Corporal’s nose. The cartilage snapped like a twig and black blood poured in floods from the nostrils. Hauck crumbled to the ground in a limp heap, eyes crossed and star-filled.
         “Ahh! Goddammit!”
         Wolfgang pounced quickly, kneeling onto Hauck’s shoulder to pin him to the ground.
         “What the…”
SMASH!
         Wolfgang’s fist plowed into the bloody pulp that remained of Corporal Hauck’s nose. Hauck’s body went limp, but the rage-filled Lieutenant continued to strike his fist mightily into the Corporal’s face. Blood splattered in all directions, on Hauck’s collar, the pavement, and Wolfgang’s cheeks.
SMASH, SMASH, SMASH!
         Each punch was delivered deliberately and with striking force. The Corporal’s cheekbones turned to mush, his brow was dented into a cavern, and his jaw was nearly torn from his face.
         “SIR! SIR! STOP!”
         Sergeant Simon was the first of three soldiers to yank Wolfgang off the bloodied, lifeless body of Corporal Hauck. Wolfgang, face covered in splatters of blood, stared at the body and marveled at his power and efficiency. The other three looked at their C.O. with horror, certain he’d lost his mind once and for all.
Wolfgang smeared the blood on his cheek with the back of his hand.
         “Corporal Hauck was the victim of an unfortunate attack by some Polish resistors. When we found the savages trying to dismember him, we did what we could to save him. Sometimes effort isn’t enough.” Wolfgang looked up at the soldiers. “Understood?”
         “Yes, sir,” they replied simultaneously.
         “Let’s move out. Heil Hitler.”
         “Heil Hitler.”
         The Nazis walked away into the night, leaving Hauck’s corpse in the street to be devoured by the starving rats of Barska Street.