JOSEF'S FORGE - 3
Copyright 2006 by Carl Mason with Ed Collins
All rights reserved. Other than downloading one copy for strictly personal enjoyment, no part of this story may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, except for reviews, without the written permission of the authors. However based on real events and places, "Josef's Forge" is strictly fictional. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. As in real life, however, the sexual themes unfold gradually.
If you would like to read other Mason-Collins stories, please turn to the listing at the end of this chapter. Comments on all stories are appreciated and may be addressed to the authors at carl_mason@comcast.net.
This story contains descriptions of sexual contact between males, both adults and teenagers. As such, it is homoerotic fiction designed for the personal enjoyment of legal, hopefully mature, adults. If you are not of legal age to read such material, if those in power and/or those whom you trust treat it as illegal, or if it would create unresolvable moral dilemmas in your life, please leave. Finally, remember that maturity generally demands that anything other than safe sex is sheer insanity!
CHAPTER 3
(Revisiting Chapter 2)
The weather was as foul as the guards' tempers. Cold rain poured down endlessly. It was as if they had reentered earliest spring, and they shivered as they hadn't since March in the holding camp. Needless to say, they were relieved as they came off the lower reaches of the Urals and immediately approached a great industrial city. Its furnaces belching endless clouds of pollutants into the air, Sverdlovsk [today known as Ekaterinburg, its pre-Bolshevik name, the city when Czar Nicholas and his family were executed early in the Revolution] was a major stop on the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific Coast. It was here that prison cars would take them deeper into the Siberian wilderness.
(Continuing Our Story - Sverdlovsk)
Avoiding the city center, the guards marched the long column through an industrial district on the southern side of town. There was little to be seen other than decrepit factories that were, nonetheless, in full operation. They were not allowed to pause until they reached a rail siding that evidently was used primarily for shipping supplies directly to the front. There, between an enormous industrial complex and the rails, they were herded into a roughly paved field surrounded by a high security fence. Sitting huddled together on the ground in a dark, misting rain, nearly 4900 men were given their first and only meal of the day, a small piece of khleb and a cup of thin vegetable-top soup made with foul-tasting water. Other than two of their number who were left behind, It wasn't long before the guards withdrew to an open shed some distance down an alleyway in the complex. One could see the glow from fires they had built in at least two barrels. The fence was electrified; no one was going anywhere.
Sometime during the night, Josef awoke from a light doze to see two men speaking with one of the guards who was patrolling the gate area. Something, probably money, changed hands. The rain had stopped, though it was still cold and raw. Simultaneously, the word was passed down from their older sergeants: "We are about to be attacked; get any sick/injured men to the center of the yard; sit shoulder to shoulder; resist, but don't break ranks for any reason until the guards reappear." Men were awakened soundlessly, some were helped into the center of the group, and the group tightly compacted. Josef and his buddies watched the two guards disappear, the gate open, and a large group of men slowly filter into the compound. They appeared to be young, powerful, and carrying knives, clubs, chains, and other weapons. Here were the "hoodlums" - the young men who had turned feral as parents were themselves in labor campus...or off to war...or working long hours in war plants. Feared by nearly everyone in Russia, they were sometimes used by one power group or another to do its dirty work. The NKVD guards, for instance, couldn't murder large numbers of the hated Germans with impunity, but hoodlums could...and often did.
With grunts and muffled yells, the first wave of invaders threw themselves onto the outer ranks of the German POWs. They made surprisingly little progress against the weakened men; indeed, several found their weapons, a leg, or an arm grabbed as they were dragged, flailing, into the German phalanx. Sharp, gurgling cries suggested that they weren't greeted as brothers. Quickly, their weapons were passed to the outer ranks. The hoodlums paused; the strong resistance hadn't been expected. On a signal from their leader, they attacked again en masse. POWs fell, but attackers were falling as they slowly penetrated the German ranks. Increasingly, they found their rough weapons turned against them from every direction, as well as knees that found their balls and hands that sought their throats.
Suddenly, wild bursts of automatic rifle fire exploded on two sides of the compound. As the guards reappeared, the hoodlums simply melted away into the darkness. The word came down from their sergeants: "Get rid of the weapons!" As clubs and chains were tossed onto the outer reaches of the yard, several knives found their way into the backs of fleeing men who had attacked them. The POWs resumed their tight, seated formation...silent, under discipline. It was over in minutes. As several searchlights were turned on, guards reentered the compound and searched the Germans. (Two who had kept their knives were shot.) Under guard, 49 bodies of German prisoners were stacked near the fence. Twenty-seven bodies of those who had attacked them were dragged outside the compound and loaded onto a truck. A furious NKVD commander summoned the senior German non-coms and marched them off. (The eight older sergeants never reappeared.)
As weak and tired as they were as they sat silently in the blood and gore of the battle, the adrenalin of Josef and his brothers was slow to dissipate. Few had slept as a watery sky brightened in the East and they saw long lines of red-painted cattle cars being pushed onto the railroad spur by a yard engine.
(Prisoners in Transit)
After being fed nothing more than small quantities of soup - so nauseating in its smell and texture that most of the men could barely force it down - the men were loaded onto the cattle cars. The cries of the guards were unremitting: "Stand closer...CLOSER, you bastards!" No sardine can had ever been packed so tightly! At least one hundred men were jammed upright into each car. As Josef's cheek pressed tightly into Gerd's stubble, the irreverent thought passed through his mind that the boy really ought to change his toothpaste - or at least use a mouthwash! Had he not been so dreadfully tired, he would have grinned! Finally, as the guards pushed against those closest to the car opening, the heavy gate was slammed shut and padlocked.
The car must have sat on the siding for at least three hours. Body heat alone soon had them sweating. The stench was something that they remembered as long as they lived. Other than a small hole in one corner of the car, there were no sanitary facilities. (Had there been, few would have been able to reach them so crowded was the car.) You just did what you had to do where you stood - and, for the young Germans, that was so very difficult to take. Wolf actually broke down as the urine poured down his legs and pooled on the rough floor. There was a fair amount of grunting and cursing as the boys rearranged themselves, but they all managed somehow to embrace Wolf and comfort him. Though the tears continued to stream down his crimson cheeks, he finally shook his head, whispered his thanks, and got it back together. He wasn't the last to give way before that damned train lurched off to the east, but in every case the mortified lad found that his buddies were there for him. Strange that pissing your pants was felt to be so degrading or that the bashful touches of your Kameraden [comrades or buddies] could mean so much, but that's the way it was.
In real terms, the journey to the East was rather short, only around 350 miles, but it turned out to be a nightmare. The two trains that transported the entire group of POWs spent more time on sidings than they did underway. Jammed together over towards the side of the car, the boys were able occasionally to peer through cracks and see long trains of troops and flat cars that carried tanks, artillery, and God knows what else on the their way west. They were concerned for their comrades still in the field, but, surely, the Wehrmacht would emerge victorious...wouldn't it? When they reached their camp and later had a chance to speak with older Soviet prisoners, they could scarcely believe the stories of journeys to camps that lasted four, five, and six weeks. Such trips were sometimes described as worse than the camps themselves. The crowded wagons were practically unheated in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer. Inadequate food and drinking water and sanitary arrangements caused great suffering and a high death rate.
The train guards, from the so-called convoy troops of the NKVD, were particularly brutal and negligent. During transport to the camps, the NKVD's regulation mania was not even formally observed when it came, for example, to rations. The rations gradually got smaller and smaller, and the guards started failing to distribute them at all. Even the water to be provided was often forgotten for a day or two. A Soviet woman writer complained of the suffering caused by the provision of only one mug of water a day for all purposes on the long run from Moscow to Vladivostok.
As the first day came to a close, the boys were suffering terribly from the heat, lack of sleep, and the crowding, as well as from the lack of food and water. Again, they found themselves on a siding - only this time the gate was opened. Several of the prisoners set up a cry, telling the guards that men had died. Almost reluctantly, the guards ordered the bodies to be passed forward. The emaciated forms were simply thrown onto the embankment.Twenty-one German soldiers in the boys' car had perished on the first day of the journey alone. Josef's squad was still alive, though Heinz was in bad shape. Some cold soup - evidently left over from the morning - was passed into the car. After forcing his own portion down, Josef managed to get most of the boy's portion into the slight redhead. Throughout the night, as long trains rumbled by headed west, one after another of the squad crouched down beside Heinz in the space vacated by those who had died and held him in his arms. Josef was not the only one to kiss him gently on the forehead and to wipe the sweat from his feverish face. By morning, Heinz had recovered considerably and even managed with Josef's help to stumble over to the hole in the wagon floor and relieve himself. On returning to the squad, Josef went to Gerd, Thomas, and Wolf in turn, laid his hand on his shoulder, and stared intently into his eyes. Each young man felt as if his sergeant had just awarded him the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross with oak leaves!
For the remainder of the four-day, 350 mile journey, the far end of the car was given to the seriously weak and/or ill. Different men took turns ministering to their needs. All, including the older men, acknowledged Josef's leadership in providing for their comrades and treated him as they would have treated their own trusted sergeants. The boys in the Squad looked upon him with great pride and affection - especially when he just continued to be...Josef. There wasn't anything that he - or anyone else - could do about the conditions or the food which deteriorated during the last two days. When the guards deigned to feed them, the fare was usually a sliver of bread and a small piece of salt-cured fish. The fish, of course, only made the prisoners' thirst that much greater. Unfortunately, they also knew that not eating it meant starvation and death.
Eventually, the journey had to come to its end. In this case, it did in late morning at a siding some miles east of Tyumen. The Trans-Siberian continued on its way to Omsk, a larger city that lay on the Irtysh, a major tributary of Western Siberia's great River Ob. Perhaps due to the fact that so many men had died in the cattle cars, especially during the previous two days, the men were minimally fed and watered before departing for their new camp. Strange as it may seem, the thin, hitherto unappetizing soup was almost a relief.
By late afternoon, a fleet of open trucks had been assembled at the beginning of a rough-hewn road built by prisoners that led north into the great taiga forests. While it didn't reach as far north as Tobolsk (also on the Irtysh, though far north of Omsk), it did allow access to the untouched forests lying west of the Irtysh. ("If logging this wilderness be our fate," an older German soldier muttered, "God have mercy on our souls. They call it dry execution' in these parts!") Again, they were packed into the open trucks as they had been packed into the cattle cars . Fortunately, though very humid and rather warm, it wasn't raining. Without stopping, they lurched north throughout the evening, the night, and into the afternoon of the next day. (Axils would have snapped like toothpicks had they tried to drive much more than 20 mph per hour at any point. In fact, they had to crawl at a much reduced speed in many sections where the spring run-off had turned the road into a thick, gelatinous mass that clutched at tires until it promised to suck them off their rims.)
Would that the circumstances had been different, Josef thought idly. The moon rising over the great forests, shining through the conifers, glinting on ponds, and turning the whole landscape into a fantasy in silver and midnight green was uniquely beautiful. He had never seen anything like it, even in the Alps. He sat with his arms around his buddies' shoulders, their heads occasionally resting on his chest. Heinz's head rested childlike on his thighs throughout most of the evening and the night. Occasionally, one of the youths would grunt, roughly curl a big hand around the back of his neck, and guide his head down upon their chest. He wasn't particularly "religious," but for a moment he felt like a priest whose calling it was to serve as a conduit for God's love and power. Had the circumstances only been different...
(Labor Camp 618-T)
It was already two o'clock when the trucks reached the camp. The camp? There WAS no camp! All that anyone could see was an immense, partially cleared area. A stake held a simple, roughly lettered sign..."Labor Camp 618-T". There wasn't even a fence or barbed wire! But, then,' Josef thought, who could walk out of this soggy green hell and live to tell about it? And when the short summer was over and the swirling snow covered the land in great drifts... and the temperature fell to -65 degrees Fahrenheit (-54 deg. C.)...what then?' For a moment, Josef's courage left him and he wanted nothing more than to drop down and bawl like a little three year-old. He was not alone.
The horror of the moment was interrupted by the convoy guards rousting the POWs out of the trucks and onto the floor of the "camp". On every hand they were confronted by yelling, swearing starshi (camp) guards who stared at them with death in their eyes and waved their Tommy guns menacingly. Many of the guards barely controlled snarling, straining dogs whose enormous fangs glinted in the afternoon sun. As far as Josef was concerned, they looked far more like wolves than any dogs he had ever seen. As one Russian later wrote, "We were spread out and formed into a big polygon all over the field, facing outward so that we shouldn't see each other. Then we were ordered down on our knees, and told to keep looking straight ahead in front on pain of death. Then the roll call, an endless, humiliating business going on for hours and hours, and all the time we were on our knees. Then we got up and two other groups were marched off in different directions, all except ours. We were told: Here you are. This is your camp.'"
Food that day came only as the light was fading from what they could see through the heavy tree cover. Perhaps it was best that they couldn't see it clearly, for all that was provided was raw rye flour, kneaded with water. At that point, the German sergeants and other noncoms took their devastated troops in hand and set them to digging pits in the muddy ground and covering them with branches and earth - branches that they had to break, and earth that they had to move, with their bare hands. Throughout the evening, the camp guards moved among the prisoners, beating them without rhyme or reason. One of the younger Germans, a beautiful blond kid from Wuppertal who had won the Iron Cross as the Sixth Army approached Stalingrad, could take no more. Hysterically, he cried out, "No! No! No!" as his buddy was being savaged. They stripped him, dragged him over to a small boulder, and spread his ample genitals out on the rock. Slowly, held fast by three husky guards, the guns of their fellows at ready, one of the guards crushed the boy's balls to mush under a heavy jackboot. The fear that spread over the field was as heavy as the billowing, acetic smoke that they had seen pouring from factory chimneys in Sverdlovsk. Dazed, the boys of the Squad spent their first night in Labor Camp 618-T huddled together in their pit, holding on to each other for dear life. No one slept much and when he did, it was a feverish, disturbed sleep that gave little rest. Sometime during the night, Heinz fell over on him and lay suckling on his thin uniform coat. Thomas noticed and nodded compassionately before he fell back asleep. Sobs punctuated their tossing and their turning as the screams of the young lad from Wuppertal echoed endlessly in their ears.
In the morning, they were again gathered in the cleared area. Following roll call, ringed by guards and wolf dogs, they faced the camp staff - a starshi Major, several Lieutenants, and another man who was clearly a political officer tasked with turning this Nazi scum into avid Communists. The Major's comments were brief and to the point: "Your heroic mission is to replace the building materials that you destroyed on your way across the Rodina. The wood you cut will replace that which was lost to fire and shell. Believe that other German swine will take the wood and use it to rebuild public buildings and homes. If you work, you will eat. If you don't work, you will be shot. Frankly, I don't care either way, for other prisoners will be arriving at this camp in droves, prisoners who will be glad to have a chance at life. Before the logging can begin, however, you must build the camp - the stockade [an enclosure made of posts and stakes, built more for psychological reasons and to keep wild animals out than to keep prisoners in], the barracks and other buildings, the punishment cells, and the watchtowers. Let hands that drip with the blood of our people be put to better use. There will be work quotas. Fall below them and you will not eat. Exceed the quotas and you will dine on more than rye flour. Rather, you will enjoy soup and bread...and you will live. The choice is yours. Within ten minutes, your sergeants will meet with Lieutenant Ivanov and receive building plans and locations. Those not so involved will be issued needed tools. DISMISSED!"
Within less than an hour, Josef had rejoined the Squad. It was already growing warm and the humidity hung heavy in the air. His boys - and several other groups - would be building the first of the barracks. With no little regret after the night past, he realized that it would be for the guards. There was no heavy equipment...not even horses. The men would go into the forest, cut down trees and trim them into logs with hand tools, and manhandle them back to the construction area. At every point, they were surrounded by cursing guards who slashed at them and demanded that they work harder and faster.
In some ways, the most vulnerable group was comprised of 20 year-olds who still retained some of their youthful strength. Invariably stripped to the waist and showing off what remained of their proud muscle - when the smoke from burning scrap wood kept the mosquitos at bay - they violently threw themselves into the work. They intended to have that soup and bread - and they received it: twice a day rations of one- third of a liter (11 oz.) of thin soup, and once a day about half a kilo (1 lb.) of bread. Nothing their sergeants or those older could say would convince most of them that they had to pace themselves. Josef had a terrible time restraining Gerd and Wolf who moaned and muttered as their peers slurped the soup and munched on the bread while they tried to force the dampened rye flour down their throats. Reluctantly, they finally accepted their sergeant's firm orders and maintained their discipline. It was just as well. After months of vicious combat, inadequate rations, and their experiences in the holding camp and on the way to the camp deep in the Siberian taiga, the youngsters' strength was illusory - more a memory than a reality. Within a week, they quickly weakened, fell ill, and died to a man. They were not alone. Before the basic elements of the camp were finished towards the end of the Siberian summer, fully one-third of the 1500 men in their camp had perished. The Major could have cared less. As the Wehrmacht weakened and retreated west before the growing strength of the Red Army, hundreds of additional prisoners arrived weekly up the broken road from the rail siding. As 1942 (and later years) progressed, Stalin delayed shipments to his troops at the front in order to insure that the hapless prisoners were transported to labor camps throughout the Soviet Union, but especially in Siberia. All were ready to assume their duties as lumberjacks within less time than the Major had been allotted to complete his troika of three labor camps.
Josef sprawled exhausted on a mattress full of heavy, hard-packed sawdust. He had barely had the strength to climb into the middle bunk in the dark, dank barracks. He saw clearly what Stalin ("Uncle Josef" himself, he thought wryly) was trying to do - and, thus far, with considerable success. Gathering up the raw materials of battle, he was attempting to forge the human debris into a mindless, terrified labor force that would work itself to death. Being hammered continuously, undergoing heating and reheating, the men were slowly losing all vestiges of their humanity. Uncle Josef's forge... Yeah...that was it.
What countermeasures were open to him? How could he forge a far different outcome? Even though the rations had finally improved, no one could change his or her physical strength overnight. Nor one could acquire a skill overnight, learn Russian immediately, or get used to the horrid Siberian climate. No one could be accepted in a support group such as the Squad without the process taking time. All of these factors would increase the chances for survival - but there was precious little time. One variable, however, COULD be developed: the will to survive. Those determined to survive, and willing to make all the needed adjustments through compromise and adaptation, had a chance to survive if all other factors - luck and skills - were also in their favor. How, Josef thought, could he forge a determination to survive in the four boys whose lives he had accepted as his responsibility?
(To Be Continued)
DATES OF LAST POSTING IN NIFTY
Archived in Gay/Historical Unless Otherwise Noted
OUT OF THE RUBBLE (32 Chapters): 10-22-04. CASTLE MARGARETHEN (9 Cs): 12-24-04. THE PRIEST & THE PAUPER (12 Cs): 3-10-05. HIGH PLAINS DOCTOR (12 Cs): 4-25-05. FOR GOD AND COUNTRY (9 Cs): 6-13-05. HOBO TEEN (12 Cs): 8-23-06. YOUNG JEREMY TAYLOR (9 Cs): 9-25-06 (posted in Sci-Fi/Fantasy). STREETS OF NEW YORK (10 Cs): 12-06-06. JOSEF'S FORGE (10 Cs): Posting.