The Last Green Valley, Mark Sullivan [most read books in the world of all time .txt] 📗

been a member of the Selbstschutz, a militia group the Nazis formed after the German invasion in 1941. Recruits to the Selbstschutz had all come from the ethnic-German population in the region.

In the Romanian-controlled Governorate of Transnistria, one of the Selbstschutz missions was to protect the Volksdeutsche communities and colonies from marauding Romanian troops. But Emil also knew there was more to tell about those militias and the things they had done. Much more.

A good part of him wanted to leave right then, but instead, he said, “There was no call for Selbstschutz or that sort of thing in Friedenstal. It is a tiny place in a sea of grain fields. The Romanians never bothered us.”

Nikolas nodded but kept watching Emil, who felt the need to fill the silence.

“Were you Selbstschutz in Rastadt?” he asked.

“All of us,” Nikolas said, and raised his mug to the other men. “It’s how we showed we were good Germans worthy of being brought home to the Fatherland. With the documents to prove it. You have them, yes? These documents, Emil?”

Emil nodded. “Since the first days of the invasion. Proving it was not difficult. My mother had our family Bible going back generations all the way to Germany and all of our birth records from the church.”

“They didn’t draft you into the Wehrmacht?”

“They wanted to at first, but I told them that I was the last useful man left in my family, and I would be a better farmer to the Germans than a soldier. They told me to go back to our farm, start growing, and we did.”

“How lucky for you,” Nikolas said, but he didn’t sound satisfied.

Emil drank more of his wine and was offered a second cup and a third while the militiamen sang, got maudlin over the lives they were leaving behind, and anxious about a future away from the Soviets. Near the bottom of Emil’s third mug, one of the men called it a night.

Emil knew he should be getting back to his family. But then Nikolas poured him a little more. Last one, he promised himself as the other two men waved off Nikolas’s offer and announced that they, too, were going to sleep.

“We never know where life will take us,” Nikolas said when they were gone.

“I am trying to live life,” Emil said. “Not life living me. Not anymore.”

“You are drunk, my friend.”

“A little,” Emil said, raising his mug. “Thanks to you.”

Nikolas clinked his mug, and they drank and then lapsed into silence the way men are wont to do. Emil was pleasantly studying the glowing coals of the dying fire and thinking he really should go back or he was going to have a headache come morning, when Nikolas spoke.

“How many?”

Emil looked over to see the man staring at him. “How many what?”

Nikolas curled his hand into a gun shape, closed his left eye. “How many Jews did you have to shoot to get your land back and be on this trek?”

Emil felt as if he’d been punched and must have looked it.

Nikolas smiled and nodded. “Uh-huh. I thought so. You had to do something for them, the Germans. Everyone did. Otherwise they wouldn’t be taking you with them, protecting you and your wife and your sons. You were a shooter just like me, weren’t you, Emil?”

Emil had a vivid memory of himself staring at a Luger in his hand. His head swirled, and his stomach boiled. He’d had far too much wine.

“I knew it,” Nikolas said smugly. “I see it in your face, Emil. How many?”

Emil shook his head, but Nikolas was having none of it. He came closer, loomed over Emil. “How many stinking Bolshevik Jews did you have to shoot to get a spot on this trek?”

“None!”

Nikolas sneered at him. “Bullshit. Hell, I got no problem saying it, and neither should you. We did a good thing, a noble thing, wiping the earth free of those lice-ridden kikes. That’s how it started for us. The Romanians sent all their Jews to that farm at Bogdanovka, and the Yids started to die of typhus because of the lice crawling on them. Could have become an epidemic. Could have killed everyone for hundreds of kilometers—German, Russian, Ukrainian, everyone—if they didn’t keep it contained. The Nazis knew they had no choice, so we, the Rastadt Selbstschutz, had no choice. Took us eighteen days to shoot them all and twenty days more to boil or burn their clothes.”

Eighteen days shooting? Emil thought in horror, staring at the man’s newer clothes before he staggered a few feet to his right and vomited up Adeline’s bread and four mugs of wine.

“There you go,” Nikolas said. “We’ve all felt that way, one time or another, because of what we did. Get it out; you’ll feel better. And the way I see it, we had no choice, right?”

Emil turned, glared at him, acid burning the back of his throat as he said, “You had a choice. And I’ve never shot or killed anyone in my life. We’re on this trek because of an old Bible and because I’m a good farmer and smart with my hands. Thanks for the wine.”

He picked up his lantern and headed by dead reckoning back into the darkness with Nikolas yelling drunkenly after him, “Bullshit! I saw it in your face. It takes a man like me to know a man like you, Emil. You see them when you’re sleeping, don’t you? Hear them, too. All the lice-ridden rats you put down!”

At that, Emil began to run blindly, trying to put space between himself and Nikolas, and terrified that Adeline might somehow be hearing the ravings of a drunken killer. He tripped and almost went down but caught his balance and slowed. The shouting had stopped.

“I never . . . ,” Emil muttered shakily after he’d lit the lantern and found the road to the bridge. “Never.”

He passed his horses and scrambled down the embankment. Then he extinguished the light and crept toward the sleeping forms